Losing Touch


I’d see Sherzod on the weekends. He would call me on my mobile during the week, I never gave him my office number or my home number – since I didn’t know it myself, and then we would make a plan to meet. Our meetings all depended on his very reliable phone calls, usually in the middle of the week, to confirm a plan for the weekend. I had no number at which to reach him, so it all depended on him.

Sometimes I wonder if it were up to me, if I had a number for him, would I have made those calls? I doubted it, either because I’m not as dependable or because in the end, I started to question whether I really wanted to be with someone at all, that I’m simply one of those types of people built to be alone. Or perhaps Sherzod wasn’t the right person for me to be with and that I thought it better to be alone that with the wrong person.

The weekends with Sherzod would seem dull in comparison to my lively and active weeks, where I’d taken up drinking and smoking again. I’d be traveling the country, finding stories, drinking and talking late into the nights with my fellow journalists who had flown in to catch the story of the moment that hadn’t yet happened, and never would.

When the Taliban fell, they were just waiting around for the Uzbek government to open the bridge into Afghanistan so that they could get the real story of post-Taliban Afghanistan. Some simply left and relocated to Kabul, traveling from there to reach northern points like Mazar-e-Sharif.

It was already several weeks, and the interest in Uzbekistan had begun to wane. The Americans had agreed to set up their airbase in the south of the country, but had closed it off to journalists from the rest of the country, leaving us only to rummage through the rubbish bins outside, as did the poor Uzbeks foraging for something salvageable to eat or wear. There were fewer high-level delegations and official visits. The Japanese journalists arrived in Tashkent, and usually they were the very last of the press corps to come, the indicator that a story was over. So, the world and its journalists turned their backs on Uzbekistan, returning back to their various bureaus and my nights grew quieter and solitary as my circle of drinking buddies shrank.

And as they left, all the young fixers, drivers and translators that were working for them found themselves now out of work. Somehow, they got a hold of my mobile phone number and called me looking for work. Unfortunately, I had none to offer, but was inundated with calls with persistent callers. One driver I knew had spent all the money he had made buying two new jeeps. Now he would have to sell one if he didn’t find more work. Others would tell me similar details of their plight, to the point in which I would feel that it was my personal responsibility to find them employment or even hire them myself.

When Sherzod would call, I’d be in another part of the country. I would travel the country following up on stories that I’d covered long before and I would forget Sherzod for stretches of time until he phoned. I didn’t appreciate him as much as I probably should have. I know that because I did miss him when I eventually lost him, and the way I lost him was in the most mundane way, the way you lose umbrellas, small change, socks. It was complete negligence on my part.

He called once when I was following up on an old story on the Tajik-Uzbek border which had long-been mined by the Uzbeks. An artist acquaintance of mine had put up an installation of paintings each one in memory of each child, chicken or cow that perished accidentally stumbling upon a mine – children, chicken and cows couldn’t read the signs that the Uzbek border police had put up. The installation was immediately ordered to be removed by the local government, which hadn’t authorized it and as I watched the emissaries of the government make a scene with my painter-acquaintance, possibly restraining themselves in the presence of foreign journalists, my phone began ringing again and again, though I didn’t take the call. There had already been several calls from newly unemployed translators already that day and I was growing impatient. When I finally picked up, ready to shout into the phone I realized it was Sherzod who was calling. He had big news – he was planning on Friday to replace his golden teeth with ivory white ones. He seemed very excited about this.

I tried to share his happiness over the phone while paying attention to the squabble between the local authorities and the painter that was going on in Uzbek. I thought how I’d grown so used to his teeth, I didn’t even notice them any longer, didn’t find them exotic or strange. And it’s amazing how a person can get used to anything. I told him I was happy for him; I told him that he is so handsome now that he can only now look more so. He would have the procedure done on Friday and would call me afterwards to arrange a time to meet.

I came back to Tashkent that Thursday. One fixer whom I’d told several days earlier asking for work, “I’ll keep you in mind,” called me back to check in and when I said I hadn’t found anything for him yet, he said almost hysterically, “but, you promised me a job.” I immediately asked Dildora to change my mobile phone number.

It wasn’t until Friday, when it seemed that the last foreign journalist had left town, that it would be a quiet weekend ahead, and my weekend would revolve around seeing Sherzod and his new white teeth, that I realized one huge problem. I had changed my number and notified my friends of the change, but there was no way of contacting Sherzod about that change. There was no way he could contact me now as I had broken that one way we kept in touch. I wanted to see his new porcelain teeth, I wanted to see him smile and talk without keeping his upper lip pressed against his golden upper rack. I told Henrietta about my situation, she told me not to worry. “Tashkent it small,” she said. “You’ll run into each other.”

Theoretically, he could find me. I stayed in waiting at home the weekend, hoping he’d show up at my door, hoping he’d simply appear. He didn’t. I’d lost him and didn’t know how to find him. I had no idea where he lived, who his friends were. On Sunday, I went to the bazaar in Chirchik, the town where he lived with his relatives, but I couldn’t find him there among the sea of people, I didn’t see his face among them. Every time I passed a tall man, I looked up, wondering if it might be him. I didn’t find him. How crazy this was, living in the 21st century without telephones; it's like living in the time of the bible.

It was the beginning of an early spring. I was alone and felt sad. I realized how used to him I’d gotten and that I genuinely missed him and I wanted to see him without his golden teeth. I lost him, just like that, by accident. I supposed that if he was really meant for me, he would show.

Valentines Day was the following week. I kept flowers in the house in case he showed. And that morning of Valentines Day, there was a ring at the door and I hoped it would be him, not the district police, which would have been more likely, for a routine document check. In the end, it was Stanislav. I was not happy to see him at all and I told him I was rushing to get to work. He said he brought me a gift for Valentines Day, handing me a large manila envelope. I thanked him and said goodbye. The envelope had an 8 x 11 portrait of a Spanish Jesus.  ¶ 7:37 PM 1 Comments

  For now it was fine...

The thing about Sherzod was that I just didn’t feel strongly enough about him being around me those days. I felt that given a choice, say, between spending time with him or with the foreign correspondents, I would prefer to be with the correspondents. If he came over, for dinner and sex and then left, as he always did, the moment he was out the door, I was on the phone trying to locate the correspondents to join them at some happening noisy club.

Either this was a perfect relationship, or it just the opposite. The beauty of it was that I seemed to have these two parts of my life completely separate and not interfering with each other, and both contradicting each other in their own ways.

With Sherzod, it was the reality of Uzbek life that I got a taste of. The lethargy, the depression, the inactivity. I could understand how people really lived here, their attitudes, the feelings of hopelessness, the lack of opportunity, the not-quite poverty, but certainly not extravagant lifestyle. On the other hand, he had absolutely no consciousness of the world outside of Uzbekistan. Certainly life was tough and why think about what was going on outside, but still, it was so much so that it simply reinforced their isolation. Whenever I switched the TV to the BBC, he switched it back to music videos or entertainment shows.

With the journalists, there was constant awareness and discussion, always full of animation and laughter and often heavy drinking; it almost seemed like a contradiction to the surroundings – a sort of extravagance in the poverty around us, like eating a rich pastry, a profiterole for example, in Uzbekistan, a desert that cost as much as what a street sweeper earned in one month.

It was difficult to be torn between the two worlds and I found myself fortunate, somewhat able to straddle both. Neither world was one that was complete or sustainable. The Uzbek world, I only saw the surface of, and one day I would leave. The journalists would only be here for a short time, that is, until the story for them ended and the next one began.

I never told Sherzod much about my other life, my friends, my work. He’d had a taste of it when I took him to The Café, and though I was sure he was impressed, he never asked to return there. And he didn’t ask about my friends. He felt awkward with this whole part of my life that he didn’t understand, have access to, perhaps feared. I told Henrietta about it and she said that more and more it seemed like the way her husband felt about me. There was no need for him to feel jealous or threatened by a gay man. But I seemed to occupy a place in his wife’s mind that he seemingly couldn’t access or so we supposed; it was like a cultural divide.

At this time, I felt that I needed all the distractions I could have, rather than sit at home and watch CNN and the apocalyptic images and stories about al-Qaeda obtaining crop dusters to spread biological weapons around America, which was something that made me nervous. In this respect, it was better to surround myself with the Uzbeks who didn’t know about what was going on in the world and were fine with it. Even though there was a war just across the border in Afghanistan, they were fine, they continued to hold their weddings, drink on the weekends, go to the bazaars, and show singing and dancing all morning on the television.

I heard from friends at home in New York that even for months after 9/11, and even if they hadn’t lost anyone, they would find themselves spontaneously begin worrying even crying. Relative to that, I felt like I was in the safest pace in the world. The only thing I was afraid of at this time was flying. I couldn’t imagine getting on a plane and I even decided to postpone my month-long home leave, which I was supposed to take in January. I would stay put for a while, I decided. I wasn’t missing home too much at this time. My life, my work, my friends, apartment, were all here for now. At home, while I missed the familiar there, I had a crazy family and I worried that friends might not understand me anymore, that the would turn to strangers by now, as I lived a life I felt was hard to justify, let alone explain, describe.

Sure, initially there were some concerns about the tensions in Afghanistan spilling over into Uzbekistan, and that this would mean that I would be evacuated. Some foreigners had already left, and I wondered whether it would become so dangerous that I would have to leave myself. And each day, I felt I had to cherish the moment as though tomorrow I could be leaving. All I owned could easily be put into 2 suitcases in the event of a quick evacuation. It would be sad if it came down to that.

If I left, I wondered what would become of Sherzod. Would I miss him? I could never bring him with me to the US -- that was a crazy idea. What would he do there? Sit on the sofa and watch TV? That’s all I really ever saw him do here, that, eat, and have sex with me. I would probably wind up having to support him. He wouldn’t understand American life, the work ethic, the culture, the food, that a man doesn’t have a mother or a sister in law to look after him, wash his clothes, cook his meals. He wasn’t ready for America. Unfortunately, there really wasn’t much of a future for us together. But for now it was fine.  ¶ 7:11 PM 0 Comments

  Autumn

To be honest, having sex again was exciting, but the company, though pleasant wasn’t thrilling, not terribly intellectually stimulating. I was learning a bit more about Uzbek culture, though.

I never thought that there was a great future for me and Sherzod. I thought about my relationship with him much like I thought about Uzbekistan: it was interesting to live there, but I knew I wouldn’t live there forever. But for now, it was interesting enough, it was quiet, exotic.

My profession took me to some interesting places -- as a correspondent of a leading news agency, I was supposed to be an expert on the situation in the country, but regardless, the country struck me as opaque and ungraspable. Embassy officials, humanitarian assistance workers, World Bank officers, UN officers, human rights defenders might cozy up to me with various scoops and rumors or insider information, nonetheless, I always felt that I in the dark. No government official would talk to me, take my calls, or return my calls, save for those seeking political asylum overseas and then, whatever they said was likely to be tinged with their vengeful agendas. The country was opaque and it was nearly impossible to make news.

Then September 11th happened. I was in a taxi on my way home from dinner when my phone began ringing off the hook with colleagues and friends, hysterically crying into the phone in incomprehensible Russian about some great catastrophe that happened in New York.

I couldn’t understand a word and my taxi driver, whose car was running out of gas, needed to stop at the gas station and he had no idea, nor did he have a radio in his car. My phone battery running out, I called Henrietta, whose cable TV was on the fritz and all she could see on TV was the State TV station with an endless official three-hour speech by the president which wasn’t being interrupted for any news updates. We agreed to meet at my house and watch the news on CNN. We were crying and had no idea what would happen next, whether we would be evacuated from the country, whether our families were alive and well at home, who we couldn't reach because all the phone lines were tied.

Similarly, friends and family in the US were panicked for my safety. But it was as quiet as ever in Tashkent, though there was a war raging to the south of us. In Tashkent, ordinary citizens, like Sherzod had little concept of what was going on in the world outside, even in neighboring Afghanistan. The local TV stations didn’t give much information and the lucky few with satellite dishes or cable TV watched CNN or the Russian stations and had some idea of the attacks on the US and the US’ military engagement in Afghanistan. But this wasn’t too important to most Uzbeks; they were still poor and struggling to get by, though it seemed that more planes flew overhead. The streets on Sundays were quiet as usual, leaving the town with that desert ghost-town feeling. Sherzod and I saw a bit less of each other since I threw myself into my work to stop myself from thinking too much about the hysterical CNN reports about Al-Qaeda’s plot to use a crop-duster to spray biological weapons over America and other dangers in the world.

It seemed like the world’s attention for a moment was focused on Uzbekistan. The US was going to retaliate against the Taliban by attacking Afghanistan. The Uzbeks agreed to be a part of the US coalition against terrorism after 10 days of intense negotiations with the US and with Russia, and finally gave the US an airbase for search and rescue and humanitarian missions. Soon, the military contractors, the US troops would be coming in and the country opened up ever so slightly.

Whereas at first, no one knew if Uzbekistan would allow the US to use their airbase, and neither the Uzbek nor the US government were forthcoming with information, I and my journalist colleagues would make night-time trips to the Tuzel airbase outside the city to follow up on rumors we’d heard by nearby residents of sightings of US Hercules carriers. Only several days later did the government officially acknowledge this and the US and Uzbekistan were officially partners in a warm relationship that has since disintegrated.

Several weeks later, after the Taliban fell, the entire international press corps descended on Tashkent and then down to the southern border with Afghanistan, waiting for the Uzbek-Afghan bridge to open and give access to journalists covering post-Taliban Northern Afghanistan as well as the humanitarian relief efforts. Now, Uzbek officials were willing to talk and give press conferences to the big press delegations. US officials, Congressional delegations, State Department Delegations would come to town and we’d sit around waiting for the preciously scarce information. We’d make excursions through the country to interview the somewhat-mad human rights defender, to travel to the Fergana Valley, to find the supposed hotbed of radical Islamic activity, to the border town near Afghanistan where veterans spoke of their memories of the war in the 1980’s.

In the end, these were all places and stories I’d covered long before, never of much interest to the world news cycle then, when attentions were turned elsewhere. Nothing these days had changed in the country, but suddenly, the world was interested in this mysterious country that was just being discovered. Journalists wrote of its charms and contradictions – the Muslim country where girls walked around the capital in miniskirts, where men could be quoted for saying they were grateful that they lived in peaceful Uzbekistan rather than war-torn Afghanistan; after all, they would say, here you could drink vodka and commit adultery without the fear of a public stoning.  ¶ 1:21 AM 1 Comments

  More Jesus at my door

Meanwhile, Stanislav would occasionally call on me, ringing my doorbell, dropping in unannounced. Through the peephole, I’d see him standing there in the corridor. I would be mystified as to why he was so persistent in coming to see me. I didn’t answer the door, but I could always expect that the next day or after several days, he’d be back.

Finally, out of curiosity, I let him in. As always, I had plenty of evenings alone now, unless Sherzod visited, which was usually on the weekends. I let Stanislav in, prepared tea and set it out on my living room coffee table. He produced a folder with texts in Polish and was proud to have found Hebrew translations for me. He would read the Polish to me for a few minutes, while I sat there trying not to register my boredom and discomfort, wondering how ever did I get stuck in this absurd situation. Then he would ask me to read the Hebrew. Though my Hebrew was rusty, I'd scan the page and could tell that this was religious liturgy. “I’m sorry,” I told Stanislav, “I can’t do this.”

"Please," he would beg. I wanted to shake him and yell at him and tell him that his religion was so beside the point. But that seemed a little harsh on my part. I didn't have to say much, he sensed my irritation. He reached over to me and put his hands on my head, as though he was blessing me, closing his eyes tightly registering a deep pain, as though he was going to cry.

I would sigh and let my body grow limp. Though I really wanted him to leave at that moment. I wondered if I made the slightest suggestive move, would I open the floodgates to having sex with him? Actually, more than sex itself, I just wanted to be rid of him. I said that I needed for him to leave, that it was time for me to go to sleep. It was only nine o’clock.  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 Comments

  At the Bazaar

Over time, during the silences, in my growing sobriety, I got to know Sherzod. I learned a bit more about his family, which was provincial elite, but still, provincial elite from a depressed province, which meant that your children considered the option of working as labor migrants overseas. He lived in the living room of his uncle’s apartment in Chirchik, which was a small industrial town right outside Tashkent. He didn’t have any ambitions of note, no serious plans for the future save for the idea of going to the United Arab Emirates to work. And yet, this lack of ambition, lack of a plan was not terribly uncommon here. People were just trying to get by and dreaming of something else, something better.

The more time I spent around him, I began to drink less and sometimes drank not at all. And I grew more aware of my surroundings, now that there was someone to explain it all. I made an effort to learn the Uzbek language, bought a textbook, memorized survival words and phrases – how to greet people, give directions to a taxi driver, haggle down the price of tomatoes in the bazaar, already so cheap.

I ventured into parts of the city that I’d been scared of before, like the bazaars, full of Uzbeks from the provinces who struck me as wild and rude. They shouted loudly, moved about abruptly, squatted on the side of the streets, loitering spitting sunflower seed shells out of their mouths or chewing nosavoi – opiate laced tobacco. They seemed such a world apart from the refined urban Uzbeks, like Sherzod. This was the place where most Uzbeks made their livelihood. They sold, they farmed, they shuttle-traded, they sold their services at the labor bazaar. There was even word that among the laborers, there were women willing to sell their babies.

“Can you believe that?” I’d ask Sherzod.

“What else are people supposed to do?” he said, throwing up his hands. But wandering through the bazaar, and determined to find those women, we never found them; perhaps it was just a myth out there existing solely to make others like Sherzod complain less and think --you were in pretty good shape if you had a home and weren’t starving and not in the position to have to sell the children.

I would go to the bazaar to do my marketing now, instead of taking all my meals at restaurants. Sherzod would come, helping me buy the raw products I needed to make my favorite foods, foods you wouldn’t find in the supermarkets in Tashkent, or in the restaurants, like pesto sauce, spinach pie, chocolate brownies, lemon-honey chicken breasts... At the bazaar I’d have the chance to practice my Uzbek, when I haggled the prices of the goods. “You don’t bargain well,” Sherzod would say. “They don’t give you good prices because you are an American.” And then after he would tell me that I paid too much, even though the difference would be pennies, and even though, for me, everything was so cheap to begin with. Sometimes he would patronizingly intervene and insist on doing the bargaining himself.

When he did that, it was interesting – a complete transformation in Sherzod from the way he spoke with me in his gentlemanly and measured English, with the way he spoke Uzbek with the sellers. It was crude sounding, much like the way I’d heard Uzbek spoken on the street – with its heavy guttural sounds, harsh intonations and grunting interjections. He was like a completely different person that I felt as though I didn’t know, but was excited by.

At home, I would cook while he watched TV. When I’d put out the meal, he’d eye my unfamiliar creations and move them around silently on his plate. “Just try it. You don’t have to eat it,” I’d say. “We can go to the golubiye kupola down the street for a pilaf.”

In the end, he’d take a little taste, enjoy the meal, scarf it down and then ask for more. The delight I had in that was just more incentive to cook more and become this angel in the house. I didn’t drink with my meals anymore, didn’t smoke in the house, as Sherzod didn’t like the smell of smoke. We didn’t go out much, save to the bazaar sometimes to get the food that I would cook. Mostly, we stayed around the house, keeping our affair pretty quiet and domestic. Only one time when he was over, there was someone knocking at the door. Though I never answered the door, I looked through the peephole and only saw Stanislav, who knew where I lived, and for whom I didn’t open the door.

In bed, I would ask Sherzod to speak to me in Uzbek during sex. He said he didn’t feel comfortable doing it. “But you say things in English,” I said. And he would say these things to me in bed in English, that practically made me laugh out loud, such as “darling,” or “oh my darling,” or “you drive me crazy.”

I begged and pleaded and at first he refused. But I persisted, and finally he agreed. He would moan “jonim,” a term of endearment, during sex and said some other things I didn’t understand at all. Sometimes the tone was rough, like the way the tomato sellers spoke it when you bargained with them. Needless to say, it turned me on so much and I never had to ask him to speak Uzbek to me in bed after that, he just did, because the sex was just so much better. And my vocabulary grew.  ¶ 7:30 AM 0 Comments