The Café

Sherzod called again and I invited him out to dinner to one of my favorite places which was called The Café. The place was difficult to find and no one was ever sure of the name of the place, but it actually was called just that --The Café and was located on streets that were called Chekov and Shevchenko, street names that hadn't changed since the Soviet times.

Hidden away on these quiet streets, the Café was likely one of the most expensive places to eat in Tashkent, which meant that a dinner for two could come to as much as $30, which is the average monthly salary of an Uzbek citizen. The Cafe was filled with expatriates from the diplomatic, business and humanitarian assistance crowds, and sometimes you would find mafia types and their personal bodyguards/drivers, would would sit separately at one of the round tables by the entrance.

This was one of the few places guaranteed to have soap and toilet paper in the bathroom, which was not always to be expected in Tashkent. There was always an attendant by the bathroom to personally hand you soap and a hand towel when you washed your hands. The hygienic aspect was comforting. Furthermore, they had a full-stocked bar with a selection of alcohol that was difficult to come by in Tashkent outside the airport duty free shop.

Funny, the whisky, scotch, tequila I drank there, these were things I never even tried in the US, but here seemed so essential to my survival, crutches to help me forget the reality of my surroundings, my past, my loneliness, family issues at home. And it seemed like everyone else here seemed to do the same. Had I carried on in such a way in New York, it is likely that my friends and family might have pegged me for an alcoholic; in Uzbekistan, my drinking was not excessive, relative to the others, and with my friends here it was borne of a love of forgetfulness and escape. A hangover here was as understood and expected as common colds in winter, and Saturday nights was a little more subdued than Friday nights, with everyone a little bit weaker, a bit redder in the eye, and puffier underneath, and nursing themselves with a bit more alcohol.

The Cafe, when I entered with Sherzod was loud and noisy, the buzz of conversations in several different languages fought with the piano, the violins playing the habanera. Sherzod looked around him as though having landed suddenly from the silent, grim, poorly lit Tashkent street into a foreign country of light and music. Never in his life, not in Uzbekistan had he seen such a place, known of such a place; such places existed for him, perhaps only on the TV set when they showed other countries, but not Uzbekistan.

Few Uzbeks came there. I suppose that was a detail that I hadn’t paid too much attention to before; this was a place I felt comfortable, where people didn’t stare at me and I could eat a meal in peace. But for Sherzod, this was the first thing he noticed.

“All the men are foreign. All the women are Russian,” he pointed out. I thought that that might be a generalization, but looking around me, I realized it was fact.

The kind of women that accompanied foreign men here were labelled prostitutes by the Uzbeks. Were the women actually prostitutes? By a foreigner's account, no. But in a broad definition of the term, and in the Uzbek sense -- yes. Uzbeks had a very definite opinion of a proper woman’s role, and a prostitute could be any girl who wasn’t a virgin, who wasn’t married, and who wasn’t a chaste spinster. These women likely spoke English, worked with foreigners, were lovely, and probably saw an opportunity for a better life with these usually older foreign men, who often left their wives and families for them. It wasn’t the same with Uzbek women, who tended to be tied to the home, married off at young ages.

“Is that OK?” I asked.

He shrugged. And the waiter came to take our orders. I wondered if in these pairings throughout the café, of foreign men with Russian women, he saw something mirroring us, and as a result, putting him in the place of the Russian girl of questional moral standing. He seemed sullen, barely looking into the menu. When the waiter came, he simply ordered what I ordered. If I ordered the steak, he ordered the steak. If I ordered the onion soup, he ordered the onion soup. If I ordered the ice tea, he ordered the ice tea.

It was a pity, really. I loved going to The Cafe, and I wondered whether Sherzod would always feel uncomfortable in the places where I felt comfortable. And inevitably, one of us would probably always feel uncomfortable. If we went to a place that Sherzod liked, that was full of Uzbeks, I would be the one feeling self-conscious and stared at. Wherever we were to go, one of us was bound to feel like he was sticking out.

There was an awkward silence and I couldn't tell whether it was because of Sherzod's discomfort or simply because there wasn’t much in common or if it was because of the language barrier, the limits of his English, the limits of his Russian. It was boring to sit in silence...Nothing was worth that. Not even sex.

When the food came, I was happy to have some activity to break the silence. He mentioned wanting to go to the United Arab Emirates. “To do what?” I asked.

“To work”

“What kind of work?”

“I don’t know. Maybe in a hotel.”

I didn’t know how to respond. So I kept quiet, not out of disinterest, but just because I didn’t know what to say. And he offered little more. Uzbeks were living all over the world as labor migrants, doing all kinds of things. But to move someplace you didn’t know anything about, I thought was strange. Then again, that’s how I wound up in Tashkent.

“Is that what you want to do?”

He shrugged. “There is no work here,” he said.

It was not unusual for me to see this resigned attitude. All Uzbeks seemed to throw up their hands; it was a national characteristic I’d seen so many times before. Who was I to argue with him over what he should do with his life. I had a job. I had a comfortable life. People around me didn't have that. There was something I often came back to and alcohol helped me forget.

I ordered a shot of whiskey and asked Sherzod if he'd join me. He said he didn’t drink at all. When the waiter asked what we might like for desert, I ordered the profiteroles. Sherzod ordered the same, not saying the word profiteroles. Did he know what they were? No. They were not indigenous to here. When they arrived, he moved them around on his plate for a few minutes before trying them. And he seemed to like them. But he didn't finish them.  ¶ 6:30 PM 0 Comments

  Mr. Golden Teeth

Tashkent was small enough that someone I would know would be in the theater that night and would tell Henrietta the next day that I was spotted with Ariel and with a tall, handsome Uzbek man with golden teeth.

“And who is Mr. Golden Teeth? She asked. We were the only people sitting in an outdoor café, smoking cigarettes, drinking what passed for coffee. Having just taken Ariel to the airport, I realized that I didn’t have anyone, save Henrietta, in whom I could confide. She was the only person there close to my age. ” And why haven’t you told me about him. I thought I was your main biddy.

One of the only other Americans close to my age there, she was without a doubt my best friend in Tashkent. We spent so much time together that most local people likely thought we were sleeping together; in a way it served as the perfect cover for my being gay as rarely did one see a man and woman keeping company together as we did, without arousing suspicions of something else going on.

This was a bit complicated since she was married to an Uzbek. “Does your husband mind you being my main biddy?” I asked. Her marriage to an Uzbek provided for enough drama to spice up our conversations and for her to need a sympathetic ear every once in a while, at any hour of the day. When we first met, she had been dating Rustam, and they moved in together, happily, but to the dismay of his parents. But once they married, the parents made peace with the relationship and with her, though seeming to be on a mission to turn her into a perfect Uzbek housewife, cooking and cleaning after she came home from work. It was a bit of a challenge considering that she was the principal breadwinner in the family and at night, when she had the strength, she would study for her GREs and write her graduate school applications. Lately, there was pressure from the in laws, ad then from Rustam to have babies.

“I don’t want babies yet,” she said between nervous puffs of the cigarettes that she would smoke in chains, and blow smoke rings. Every day it was something new and she would come to my office at the end of the work day, stocked with her cigarettes, and we’d go for coffee and smoke and she would tell me of the latest incident at home. This time, though, she had a host of questions about Sherzod. I was at a loss for words, with not much to say about him, simply because I didn’t know much about him. Nonetheless, Henrietta saw this as a monumental event for me, finally meeting someone. “Well, he’s got a rack of golden teeth,” I began.

“Well, yes….So I heard. How old is he?” she asked and we went through the routine.

“27,” I responded, knowing the next question.

“Married?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He says no, so I guess not. I don’t know what to think,” I said.

She squinted an eye as she concentrated on lighting her next cigarette, “do you love Mr. Golden Teeth?” which it seemed was the name by which she would refer to him from then on.

“Honey,” I said rolling my eyes in my worldly wise manner, blowing smoke rings to the side, “I just met him. It’s a flirtation, at this point. He’s Uzbek; he lives in the old city, and I don’t know much about him. He doesn’t have a phone – a complete man of mystery. And he has gold teeth!!! In short,” I said emphatically,” he has gold teeth. We are worlds apart.”

“Sure,” she said. “It’s hard enough for a man and a woman in an intercultural relationship. I can’t imagine for when it’s gay, what with this society’s attitudes towards gays.”

“At least with gays, it’s private. You don’t have to deal with parental pressures. Certainly no pressures to have babies. But, I wonder who is expected to do the cooking and cleaning.”

“You are,” Henrietta said laughing. “Because Uzbek boys don’t ever earn how to do these things. Their mothers do it for them, and then the mothers pass them on to the wives to continue doing it. So, get used to it, babe!”

I mused aloud to her about what kind of prospects this relationship could have. Probably, eventually his parents would force him into marriage, not that marriage necessarily ends romances here, from what I’d heard; many people were forced into arranged marriages and continued affairs with the person they loved. Also, I wasn’t planning to live in Uzbekistan forever. And as much as an Uzbek man might want it, it’s just not possible for me to marry and Uzbek man and get him a green card to live in America.

Henrietta’s phone rang and she looked at the number and mouthed “what does he want,” and in a deadpan voice talked into the phone, “I’m having coffee…yes…with him….I have dinner ready in the fridge.” She rolled her eyes.

“Rustam?” I asked. “What’s his problem?”

“The usual,” she shrugged.

“What’s his problem with me?” I asked. Once we all used to get along, hang out together. But in the last few months after their wedding, he began behaving like a jealous husband, sometimes phoning me looking for Henrietta, even when she was just working late at the office.

“He’s jealous of our friendship. Anyway, don’t you worry about it. He needs to get over it.”

“Uzbek men are jealous, aren’t they?” I wondered about since Sherzod expressed some suspicions over the nature of Ariel’s and my relationship.

“They’re spoiled, I think that’s it. They’ve got it so sweet; they’re treated like royalty all their lives by their mothers, and they leave home to live with their wives who are expected to take over where the mother left off.” Henrietta put out her cigarette and looked down at her empty coffee cup. “This coffee is shit.”

“It’s not coffee,” I reminded her, “it’s Nescafe.”

“Why can’t they have real coffee in this country?” She looked up to the sky. “What’s so hard about it?”

“Why can’t they ever have milk, at least, to put in the Nescafe, to drown out the taste” I mused. “Places never seem to have both coffee and milk. It’s either one or the other or neither.” Though we’d had over a year to get used to Nescafe, we saw we were starting one of those bitch sessions about Uzbekistan typical of the pastimes of the other expatriates who we looked down upon. “Ok, time out! Enough bitching,” I said.

“Let’s just order beers,” she said, her phone ringing again. She closed her eyes.

“How about vodka?”

“Nah, it’s a weeknight, can’t. Anyway, we’ll order Baltica number nines; they’re practically the same proof as vodka. “

I ordered beers and another pack of cigarettes. Funny, before Uzbekistan, I didn’t drink or smoke. But here, it just seemed as natural as eating or breathing, just another thing necessary to get by.  ¶ 10:06 PM 4 Comments

  White White Black Stork, Again

I wondered if a relationship with Sherzod was like a marriage of convenience. Here I was about as desperate for something as I had ever been since adolescence. And there he was, very attractive, sweet, kind, gentle; and yet there was something substantively missing. We didn’t have very much to talk about and he truly was a world apart from me. He even lived in that part of Tashkent, in what they called the "Old City" -- the traditional district that for me felt like looking through the glass of the displays at the Museum of Natural History. I could see the costumes, the furniture, the ritual, but I could never truly understand what was going on inside.

I knew that there was something to Sherzod, experiences, feelings, as there are in all of us. But I had no idea how to access them. His face truly was like a mask, only sometimes betraying a feeling that I could understand. Perhaps I just didn't read the signals correctly. Sometimes though, I felt that I did, but it was accidental and paltry, leaving me dissatisfied and hoping for a bit more. I knew that there might be a whole landscape in there for me to discover, but he didn’t seem to let me get very close.

My friend Ariel happened to be passing through Tashkent that week. Now, it is not often that people “pass through” Tashkent and none of my friends from home ever came to visit me. They had almost no concept of where I was, and few had even left the island of Manhattan in the last decade. Ariel was an exception, a documentary filmmaker, who had just spent a month in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban and covering the emerging music scene there. He decided that he’d drop in on me, see what my life was like, since he was in the neighborhood.

When he came, he was surprised that Tashkent had cars and high rise buildings and girls in miniskirts and disco music blaring on the promenades, alcohol available everywhere. It was no backwater like Afghanistan, it was no cosmopolitan city like New York – it was neither, but a bit of both, something unexplainable and in-between. like the streets riddled by the occasional donkey cart riding alongside our taxi in rush-hour traffic. For him, it was fascinating and after Afghanistan, significantly more comfortable. Now he would blow my cover to my friends back home, shatter the myth that I traveled to work by camel through sandy desert paths, covered in a yashmak. However, he did understand one of the hardships of Tashkent -- what we called Tamerlane's revenge -- intestinal distress.

I decided to take him out to see my favorite play “White White Black Stork” at the theater, which I had seen so many times, but never tired of watching. The actor who played the hero was someone who I had drank with at Lucky's, a handsome, dreamy boy like the character he played, whom I at one time had a crush on.

Sherzod happened to call me that evening, asking if I was free, and I invited him to join us at the theater. I suppose it was like a first date for us; had I his phone number, perhaps I would have organized things differently.

He met us at the theater, and though he was bashful before and friendly to Ariel, I could notice him eyeing him suspiciously. Ariel saw him as fascinating as he did everything in Tashkent, and handsome too, which he said. But he did not say, but I did observe it that he was puzzled by the golden teeth.

I translated the play for Ariel, though it wasn’t entirely necessary. The play was so universal and switched between Russian and Uzbek languages, that though I didn’t even understand every Uzbek word, like anyone else watching, I could feel everything that was happening on the stage.

During the intermission, we went to the bar and Ariel and I utilized the free moment, as we had with all the free moments we saw each other in Tashkent to catch up intensely, to gossip about people in New York, including my ex-boyfriend who had gained a lot of weight, to tell me about his trip in Afghanistan, or the developments in his private life. Sherzod sat with us the whole time, and I sensed that either he didn’t catch everything we were saying, as we spoke a fast and slangy English, and about things so remote or far from his life.

When Ariel went to the rest room, he mentioned that Ariel was very handsome. “Is he your boyfriend?” he asked.

“No,” I responded. I even added, “Ariel is straight.”

“Is he staying at your apartment?”

“Yes,” I told him. He remained silent, moody.

After the intermission, we watched unforld the story of the scandalized boy, forced into marriage, unable to consummate his marriage on the wedding night and the three following nights, as the elderly women of the family sat outside the door of the marital bedroom, waiting to inspect the sheets. We watched the family of the bride, later going to the Russian occupation’s court house, taking back their daughter from the defective groom and insistin they keep the dowry and damages, for the shame the groom and his family brought upon them. And we watched the groom returning back to his beloved tree, to find it burned down and his poems and drawings hidden in its branches, ashes, save for the verses of his poem of the white white black stork.

We sat in our seats for a little while in silence as the lights went up. Ariel went to the bathroom again. Sherzod and I sat alone in the theater for a moment. He looked as though he was fighting a tear from falling from his eye. I could only imagine that the play had hit close to home for him. I had seen the play so many times that I was no longer as teary at the end as I had been the first time. “Did you enjoy it?” I asked.

"Yes, very much," he said.

“The same thing happens today, no?”

And with a knowing look in his eye, he nodded. And then his face returned into that stony mask.

For a moment, I did feel like I saw a little more of him, a little bit more of what it was like to be him, to be an Uzbek gay man from the provinces who lived somewhere in the old city among the traditional Uzbeks.  ¶ 8:00 AM 0 Comments

  What is it like to kiss a mouth full of golden teeth?

Frustrated by the surprise of my secret admirer turning out to be a monk, I decided to further explore the idea of finding Sherzod, the boy with the golden teeth that I had been told about at the Piyonerskaya banya. I wasn’t sure how I would find him, but I decided that I would simply have to go to the banya again. It was a Sunday and Saturday night at Lucky Strikes wasn’t too eventful – I came home early with barely a buzz and woke up Sunday morning feeling rested and healthy and miserable of the prospect of having to figure out how to manage an entire Sunday. The banya was one of those forbidden places, and it seemed so shameful that I didn’t even tell Henrietta about it. Apparently, I had not seen the entire space – the dark rooms with little peepholes through which Shukhrat, the attendant, watched men have sex – violating article #120 of the criminal code. Shukhrat, I was certain had seen a lot; perhaps he was in the employ of the secret services. It was probably not wise for me to go there, but I did nonetheless.

As always, I dreaded my Sundays. There was no work to do – and it seemed that work was my only reason for being here. Sundays reminded me that I was alone, had no family, had no responsibilities really save for getting myself up in the mornings, feeding myself, going to work, going to bed. On Sundays, the city was dead. Probably there were others like me who recovered from hangovers, but for the most part, people sat at home with their families, did their weekly groceries at the bazaar. Streets were dead, hardly a soul to be seen. If I went into a restaurant to eat my lunch, I was often the only one there. There were hardly any cars on the street and so when I went to hail a car, I waited so long just until one came by, and I was determined not to bargain for a fare. The custom in Uzbekistan was to haggle – the Uzbek people were always historically traders along the silk route and the tradition continued on until this day. Why haggle, I would ask my Uzbek acquaintances or colleagues and they would say “because it makes life more interesting.” And perhaps it was true – it was some way of engaging, more so than reading a price tag or a taxi-meter. It was like a little game: before getting into a car, you’d name your destination and ask how much. The first price they would offer often would be absurdly high and I’d throw back a line like, “Come off it. Dream on,” and then the back-and-forth began. And if they wouldn’t budge on the price, you’d let them go with the wave of a hand and say, “go on, then.”

Uncertain when the next car would pass me, I told the driver that I wanted to be taken to the ptsitsi magasin or the bird store and I accepted the first price the driver offered, it was higher than it should have been, but after all, it was only one dollar. This time, I took the back seat.

“The bird store – near the banya?” he asked. The bird store was actually not a bird store, perhaps in Soviet times it was and even though it was now just a dingy, empty shop like so many others around the city with cottonseed oil, bread, sugar, when sugar was to be had, and some canned good. I remembered Kirill telling me that the banya was near the bird store; that was how you asked to get somewhere in Tashkent, because no one knew the names of the streets, which were always changing, so no one knew where they were going. Instead, you would ask for something recognizable such as the fourteen-story building, or the Anhor Bridge, the earthquake memorial statue, or the Chorsu bazaar, even if that wasn’t exactly where you were going, but just to orient your driver. Besides, I felt more comfortable asking for the bird store than for the banya. I wondered if people knew that this banya was where the gay underground of Tashkent met; or did they think it as banya #4, its official name, and as no different from banya #1, #2, or #3.

My driver was silent and he dropped me off at the bird store, which was right across from the banya. I waited until he drove off, until the street was completely devoid of people, of cars, until the trolleybus had passed, and then crossed the street to the banya. I paid my 200 soums to the old man in the booth and went up the stairs, greeting Shukhrat, the attendant, who seemed pleased to see me.

“Finally, you’ve shown up. We were waiting for you,” he said. The always said that they were waiting for you and it made you feel like people were waiting all the time. Sure, it was just the way the language translated – waiting, expecting take the same verb in Russian and in the even less linguistically rich Uzbek language. “Stay here!” he commanded, leaving me alone in the changing area with a group of young men, their shapeless bodies wrapped in towels at the waist, dancing around a soviet era tape recorder listening to the music that I recognized as Yulduz Usmanova. They sang along and spun their wrists and waved their fingers as Uzbek women dance, casting ensnaring glances my way as I stood there fully dressed and feeling naked at the same time.

Shukhrat returned, leading me through several doorposts covered with curtains, to a cool, windowless room where Sherzod sat, like a colonial gentleman out of place in wild surroundings in his cream colored suit, beside a table set with tea and biscuits. He stood up, tall and stiff to shake my and to offer a chair for me to sit beside him.

He was strikingly handsome, probably could even be a GQ model were it not for the rack of golden teeth. When he spoke, it seemed like he was trying to hide them, the upper lip either immobile or stretched to cover them. His face, though handsome and kind, had the mask-like expressionless quality that I sometimes saw in Uzbek faces, with the narrow almond-shaped eyes that seemed to veil emotion.

“You have come,” he said in English in a very formal manner.

“Yes,” Shukhrat added saucily, reciting the few words of schoolboy English he knew before leaving us alone. “Good morning teacher!”

“It is good that you came,” he said with a somewhat charming and stilted British English accent that sounded as though it came off of one of those old language-learning tapes, with the very deliberate punctuation of sentences, the awkward phrases. I offered to speak with him in Russian, if it made him more comfortable, but he said that he didn’t speak very good Russian. It struck me that he must be from one of the provinces and I asked him where he was from.

He came from a small provincial town called Shakhirzabz, located in a valley in the foothills of the Pamir mountains. I told him that I had visited it once and had very vivid memories; the town is the birthplace of Tamerlane, Central Asia’s foremost conqueror, who built up the town with grand palaces, some of which remain to this day.

I found myself interested in and inquisitive with Sherzod in the same way Uzbeks were with me. I had to know how old he was. He was 27. I looked at his hands and saw no rings. “Are you married?” He was not. I wanted to ask the next question of the sequence, which was “why not?” And I stopped myself. What I meant was, how, how does one break with the traditions in this highly traditional society. Everyone cares what the neighbors say and everyone follows the rules at least for show. I imagined that it took a strong character to not play that game, to follow the beat of a different drum. This was not a culture of individualism; individualism was subversive and something you kept well hidden. Even I played at that game, so that I didn’t stand out, though it was not necessary, as I was a foreigner -- someone who could pick up get on a plane tomorrow and leave. “We have to live here” I’d heard so many times an Uzbek say when you ask them why not challenge the existing order, be it in politics or in one’s personal life. “A bowed head doesn’t get chopped off.” There is no arguing with that. Then again, without those few over the centuries who risked their heads out of a belief in something they saw much bigger than themselves, we might not be say, have conceived of the world as being round.

He said that he didn’t want to get married and said no more. I was sure he faced strong pressures at home, and I asked about it. He moved to Tashkent to get away from those pressures and to live with relatives; he was, however, in Tashkent illegally. To live in the capital, you needed to have proper registration documentation, which was difficult to obtain. Those who migrated from the provinces, seeking a better life in the capital, paid huge bribes to the OVIR – the residential registration authorities, to the officers who did random document checks on the streets, expecting you to provide a passport or document with proof of legal residency, and to the local police departments, which kept tabs on who is living in a neighborhood, sometimes stopping door to door checking on people. Sometimes they came to my door, but I would never open; in fact, I made it a policy never to even answer any knocks on door by unexpected callers. There were police everywhere in Tashkent and Sherzod was paying out bribes left and right until he could get the documents he needed.

And as he was living in Tashkent illegally, I figured, he also couldn’t work. I asked him what he did. He had just finished his Master’s degree at the economic institute in Samarkand and had been teaching there. “But now, I do nothing. I am a lazy boy.”

I was struck by the unappealing economic ramifications of this and I thought of my discomfort with the possibility of being seen as a potential sugar daddy and my general mistrust of Uzbeks, which was so hard for me to let go of. But quickly, I dropped the thought when he asked if we could go somewhere else and I was going to suggest to my home. “I don’t like this place,” he said.

“Ok,” I said, “but don’t you come here often?”

“Not often,” he said.

“But Shukhrat knows you,” I said and he looked at me with that conspiratorial look that Uzbeks sometimes have when I say something betraying my naiveté about the country.

“He knows you too, but I know you have only come here once. Shukhrat makes it his business to know everybody and to know everything about everybody. And my neighbor, who you met, comes here on Saturdays,” he said, referring to the man who I remembered had worked as a gas-station attendant in New Jersey. “I only have come these days because I wanted to meet you,” he said and added dramatically in something that sounded either from an old movie or from an English language learning tape, “how I waited for you…”

There was something so appealing about his wooden manner that made me a tad nervous, even put me at a loss for words. In such cases, I often just say the first stupid thing that comes to my head, so I asked him about his golden teeth, as I was thinking about what it might be like to kiss someone with a mouth full of golden teeth, imagining that it felt cold or that there was a metallic flavor in the mouth.

His parents had given golden teeth when he was 17, after he’d cracked and lost some of his upper teeth in a fight. “But I hate them,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. I had grown quite used to seeing golden teeth around Tashkent, though when I first arrived, I was shocked and amazed that people had them because they actually thought they looked nice.

“I don’t like the way they look. I will change them,” he said. I wondered if he really didn’t like them, or perhaps at some point someone had told him that outside of this isolated country, the aesthetic of golden teeth was, at best, not understood.

We left the small alcove where we sat, through the quiet changing area. I expected to see Shukhrat there waiting for us, but he and the other boys who not long ago had been dancing to Yulduz Usmanova, crowded around the dilapidated door of one of the massage rooms, peeking through the slit where the door didn’t run flush with the doorpost, not turning their attentions to us. We slipped out unnoticed and without saying goodbye, in the American style – Americans were known for leaving without saying goodbye, whereas it was locals who were known for saying goodbye but never actually leaving.

Outside, the street was quiet and a trolleybus approached. “Let’s ride the trolleybus,” I suggested, “I’ve never been on one.” Actually, I had never ridden on any public transportation at all in Tashkent since I never needed it, I had a driver and gypsy taxis were cheap and in abundance. The trolleybuses were 100 years old and when they passed, you could feel the street quake underfoot like a small earthquake, a not uncommon feeling for this city built on a faultline that often had earthquakes. Gradually, tracks were being removed and the routes of the trolley cut and I thought that perhaps one day, there would be no trolley left. I’m sure no one gave it much thought here – it was simply transport for the people, not the exotica it was for me. And when we got on, there were just a few sad looking men with heavy heads and old babushkas carrying sacks of vegetables they must have bought at the bazaar.

Sherzod paid for us when the attendant came to collect our fares. The attendant was a middle-aged bleached blonde Russian woman dressed sloppily in a pair of faded jeans and a creased brown blouse. It seemed that paying for public transportation was done on something just short of an honor system, the attendant collecting your fare after you had taken your seat and then giving you a small coupon. I didn’t even know how much it cost to ride on public transportation. It didn’t cost much – only 50 soums per person, which was something like ten cents. I always felt a little ashamed when someone here paid for me, as though I should be the one paying, since the money meant so little to me, no matter how small the amount was. But it was in the nature of this very generous and hospitable people to outdo even their own finances in honor of their guests.

“Did you know there are many gays on the trolley,” Sherzod whispered to me, to which I responded back with a skeptical look. “Yes, during rush hours -- trolleys, buses, and the metro. And they all stand in the back. And they do such things…” he said as though referring to the unspeakable and furtively making that little gesture of an open palm over a closed fist which was used to indicate sex. I made a mental note that I might want to observe this at some time. It seemed too unbelievable to be true.

On the way to my house, the trolley stopped in the middle of its tracks and from the window, I could see an eruption of sparks from above, like fireworks exploding. I had seen this happen before, from the street, when the trolley poles dislocate from the overhead cables, releasing a burst of electric currents; then the attendant gets out of the car and using what looked like a broomstick, props up the poles and realigns them onto the cable track. The system was falling apart. It was, after all, 100 years old.

When we got off near my house, I invited him up to my apartment. He said that he couldn’t stay for too long. We entered my building and stood close and in silence in the small elevator. I thought to reach over to him, to kiss him, but held back. The doors opened soon enough to my floor. We entered the apartment and he removed his shoes and walked around, surveying the large and rather minimally furnished space, eyes wide open, “you live in this alone?”

“I do,” I said with a bit of a guilty feeling. It was a three bedroom apartment, and in Tashkent, I knew sometimes six person families or larger lived in fewer rooms than this. I lead him to the kitchen where I offered him tea and sat beside him, in silence watching the mask-like expression on his face soften into a childish smile and his voice grow delicate and shy. “I think you have many boyfriends,” he said.

“What makes you think that?” I asked, puzzled. Besides the fact that I hadn’t had a boyfriend since I left the US, I wondered what constituted many boyfriends in this seemingly big village that they call Tashkent - probably not many. “I don’t even have one,” I said watching him, thinking how much I wanted to touch him, to kiss him, as though I could not say anything more until after I had accomplished this. And so he drank his tea until his cup was empty and, according to the tradition, I refilled his cup. But he looked at his watch and said he needed to leave.

“But I would really like to see you again,” he said.

“Ok,” I said, “give me your phone number.”

He didn’t have a phone. Actually, this was one of those common things that always amazed me about Tashkent. In the 20th century, people were still very much living as though they lived in the time of the bible. “But I can take your number and I will call you when I am at a telephone.”

So, I scribbled down my number, realizing that the ball was now in his court. But I was reassured that he would call me, when I walked him to the front door and he bent down, surprisingly, impulsively to kiss me. And then, I finally found the answer to my musings as to what it felt like to kiss someone with a mouth full of gold teeth. Not that I’d remembered what it felt like to kiss someone, but as far as I could recall, it was a kiss like any other wonderful kiss.  ¶ 5:10 AM 0 Comments