Plane Transfer in Frankfurt

Natasha woke me for the plane transfer at the Frankfurt airport. It seemed that she hadn’t slept at all, was awake reading a copy of People magazine. In Frankfurt, we transferred to a plane to New York and I found that again, I had the questionable fortune of being seated next to Natasha. I took a sleeping pill that I bought in one of the pharmacies in Tashkent. One amazing thing in Tashkent was all of the pharmaceuticals that were available over-the-counter. I’d heard of my American compatriots stocking up on Viagra, on various painkillers, sleeping pills, and so forth. The pill put me out for the duration of the flight until the stewardess came over, asking me to put up my seat as we were 20 minutes to landing in JFK airport.

Natasha had never been to New York before, and though it was already dark outside, already evening in New York, she wanted to look out my window seat thinking that circling over Queens we might be able to see the Empire State Building ,the Statue of Liberty. I insisted “we’re not in Manhattan; we won’t be able to see any of these things…”

But she said she’d flown over JFK airport and had seen them before. She reached over me to look out the window, seeing the lit up buildings below.

“Look,” I tried to reason with her, “I’ve flown into JFK more than 100 times in my life. You can’t see these things from the plane. If you don’t believe me, just ask the stewardesses, ask anyone.”

“You’re spoiled,” she said angrily, even outraged. “You don’t appreciate your country. You take it all for granted.”

I resignedly looked at her, raising my hands, not wanting a conflict. She wouldn’t know that I had too many other things on my mind. Coming back to the US felt stressful to me. Had everything changed? Had the things that were bad not changed at all? Had they gotten worse? “Why don’t we switch seats,” I proposed. “You can look out my window to the Empire State Building.”

We switched seats and like a child, she pressed her face to the window, looking down on Queens below. “I can see the Empire State Building,” she squealed. I knew that it is not possible to see the Empire State Building from the airplane, but I figured, let Natasha live with her illusions, her happiness, her washer-dryer, dishwasher, and Wall-Mart.  ¶ 10:46 PM 0 Comments

  Natasha Continues Talking....

I put on my headsets to try and watch the movie that they had just begun to show. But it seemed that nonetheless, Natasha continued to carry on her conversation with me. “I don’t believe you that there are such men in the capital that can take care of themselves, as you say. Our men, they all drink. They run around.”

Sure there were stereotypes that the men drank. Perhaps this was what Natasha was programmed to say. I’d seen it on the mail order bride sites why the local beauties prefer foreign men as husbands, because foreign men didn’t drink and whore like the local men. Yes, there were such stereotypes. Like all stereotypes, there was some truth to them. But I recalled in my head how little my friends and colleagues drank.

“You know, maybe where you are from they drink, but in the capital, many men don’t drink. They take care of themselves. Most of my friends don’t drink much,” I said. “Some not at all.”

“You are being a stupid, naïve American,” she said to me condescendingly. “They all drink. The ones you know, who don’t drink, don’t drink because they have been through the hypnosis.”

“The hypnosis?” I asked.

“Yes, “she said confidently. “They had the hypnosis, but they won’t tell you about it, because it is a very shameful thing.”

Perhaps there was such a thing. In all the time I’d been in Uzbekistan, with all the people I had spoken to or met, I had heard of many crazy things, like using urine to cure sprains and how cold water gives you a sore throat or how a yeast infection was like the vagina having a cold, or how you needed sex because it provided vitamins and other such things. But never had I heard of the hypnosis to cure alcoholism.

She continued rambling on about Uzbekistan as being full of bad and silly people, of Uzbeks being wild, primitive people, of the Russians who hadn’t managed to leave yet were either losers or sitting on their suitcases, ready to leave, and with their departure, the country was certain to have no future. Though I couldn’t keep up with her ramblings, I got the gist that she felt that people had no taste, didn’t know what was good, real, quality. And when I started to nod off to sleep, she began a story that she couldn’t seem to tell, interrupted by fits of laughter, about how several years ago, when a group of American missionary children came to visit her small town – and they were greeted by one of the richest families in the town, the family of the mob boss, in their piss-fancy refurbished apartment, done in a cheap formika “European style.” The gracious, earnest Americans, not realizing that what they were seeing was the absolute best that the town had to offer, the pride of its mob boss, the mob boss not realizing how shabby it might have looked to a foreigner…they said “we understand, we were poor once too. But don’t worry, you won’t be poor forever.”

I closed my eyes trying to shut her out. Perhaps she was right. There were a lot of things I had seen that struck me as petty or silly or venal, but I couldn’t understand it all –I didn’t grow up in this culture, under the Soviet system. To look down on it all would be very superior, snobbish.
Maybe this was a terrible country. There were times where I thought it, too. I didn’t understand peoples’ obsession with material goods, with America’s consumer culture, which for me was so refreshing to be so far away from. But then again, I hadn’t experienced what these people had experienced – poor and deprived of goods for so long, subject to economic crisis after crisis.

For the most part, I liked it here. I didn’t know why. I felt comfortable here, no pressure to be anything more than a simple person, living in a simple apartment, wearing simple clothes. No pressures to live up to the expectations of family and friends at home. In fact, a feeling of very ittle expected of me besides doing my job, and perhaps waking myself up in the morning and feeding myself. Strangely, in this country which straightjacketed me by its conservative culture, forced me to behave in ways that were not immediately natural to me, I felt a certain kind of freedom inside, a calm, a quiet, but really this was only when I was in the privacy of my home, or in the privacy of my own thoughts. Perhaps it was just the way living here allowed me to easily forget myself, the way it was easy to lose yourself in another language, in the alien culture, in the massive soviet architecture, in the intense heat of the summer. I could forget myself and really begin living my life; or I felt I could.

But Natasha continued talking, now about her town’s new supermarket, which her friends just showed her. It was a new kind, a tawdry imitation of American style supermarkets…not the old soviet kinds, where everything is behind glass and you have to ask for it. “Everything was out on open shelves,” she said and laughed. “But they don’t sell anything there…just vodka, cooking oil and condiments, rows and rows of the same. No choices.” Her friends were so proud of their pathetic supermarket. But Natasha explained that the supermarket was dehumanizing, there was always someone following you, watching you suspiciously. “You don’t even feel like a person,” she said. “And my friends, they just don’t understand this at all. Can you imagine how I felt the first time I walked into a Wal-Mart in the US – a store where they have everything you can possibly imagine in the world, a whole aisle is just of food for your pets. And you just put whatever you want into your basket, as you wish, no one follows you around, watches you. In America, you feel like a person.”

I could somehow understand Natasha’s idea of feeling like a person, of having a respite from the powers that follow you, watch you observe you, tell you what to do. Perhaps that was her idea of freedom. Mine was being away from my family – in fact, I realized that being around my family was often downright degrading, even dehumanizing, in its own way, as dehumanizing as living in an erratic dictatorship where the rules of the game kept changing. I remembered my anxiousness about seeing family members in particular. I wondered about things back home possibly all changing. I wondered about the things that were bad before I left, were they worse?

So, I finally fell asleep, while Natasha was talking. It was no use arguing with her, as she had a lovely fixed idea in her head that she was now in a better place than the place she had just left. It was likely true, and I didn’t want to shatter her idyllic happiness. Peoples’ happiness should be respected, be it a washer-dryer, a dishwasher, a nice supermarket. So long as it helps you feel like a person. Natasha started a new life for herself and had no doubts that she had made a good choice, a correct choice. Her return visits to her homeland only confirmed this for her.  ¶ 12:24 AM 0 Comments

  Only a few days in New York, I was sure, would change me. Maybe a few days in New York would make me fall out of love with Tashkent, forget it so, that I might never want to return. In New York, I would forget that solitude and alienation that I’d feel being around a lot of people that you don’t think like, those hours sitting alone in the kitchen, with a bottle of beer and a cigarette looking out at the stars. In fact, in New York, you couldn’t see the stars in the sky and the people were people who I felt a part of. And in retrospect, when I had had anxieties about whether Yulia would not be acceptable to my friends and family -- that was really beside the point. The point was that she was unacceptable to me.

I thought the plane would give me some time to think things through, to think about the big issues, big issues like who I was and where I stood in relation to these two places – the place I was born into and the place that I had adopted and lived in and never quite fit into.

But the plane ride afforded me no such time for reflection. Instead, there was Natasha sitting in the seat next to me. I thought I had been fortunate to get one of the only seats on the plane with an empty neighboring seat. But unfortunately, Natasha approached. I couldn’t place her at first – her appearance had these curious contradictions -- the undoubtedly Russian bottle blonde hair – and yet, she had full figure, flat shoes and suburban American bland, but tasteful jeans and sweater. Perhaps, I wondered, she was an American who had lived for a while in the region .But as the expatriate community was so small, it struck me as unlikely that I would never have seen her before. Or, she might be a local Russian who had spent a lot of time around foreigners or living abroad. It was difficult to say, but then again, I could imagine that the same could be said about me. I pretty much had her pegged for one of those women who work for American companies and therefore spend time around foreigners and scoff at the self-imposed discomforts her compatriot women put themselves through, such as walking through the pitted sidewalks of Tashkent in three inch stiletto heels. When she addressed me, she asked in both Russian and accented English if I knew whether we would have to get off the plane in Frankfurt and board a different craft. I didn’t know.

I’m not in the habit of talking to people on planes, but Natasha was pretty forward. She had many questions for me, who I was, where I was from, what I was doing in her country. How was it possible that I could like her country, which, I quickly understood, she hated. I responded laconically, clearly not to her satisfaction, that I liked Uzbekistan. I learned that Natasha had left a province of Uzbekistan three years ago to marry an American man. I supposed that she was probably younger and thinner then and probably like one of the girls who Yulia provided services to. I’d seen some of these websites full of photographs of tidy, proper looking women, often past the very young age that is considered in Uzbekistan a woman’s prime. Natasha was clearly one of them. I suppose she just expected that I would understand, that I could read between the lines, but she would not outright say. Instead, she volunteered much information just short of that, for example, of how she had arrived in the US three years earlier, not speaking a word of English, to a town in rural Nebraska, with a population of three thousand, where everyone smiled at you on the streets, that she had a son from a previous marriage to a man who drank.

Now, Natasha was a year short of receiving her US citizenship, living in Orlando, Florida and loving her new life, loving America, hating returning to her native country, to her native town. She had come home for three weeks, the second visit back to Uzbekistan since she left, and like the last time, three weeks seemed to last forever.

“This is a miserable place,” she said. And now that she lived in Orlando Florida, where there was no winter, she brought all her winter clothes back to her native town and gave them away to her friends, who would need them for the coming winter, another winter, as always in which there wouldn’t be enough gas to heat the house or even boil a pot of water for tea..

For Natasha, what was most disturbing was how I could possibly enjoy living in her country. I said that I didn’t live in her small town, but that I lived in the capital. And the capital, Tashkent, was different. In the capital, there usually was enough heat in the winter. And in those winters, I never had a problem boiling a kettle of water for tea. Natasha said she didn’t really know the capital. She had been there three or four times as a child on class trips, and then once again when her husband-to-be came to meet her and she took him around the country. Life in the capital, she said was nice, that is, if you had the money to be able to afford it.

She asked me, of course, about my age and if I was married. And the first thing she asked when I told her that I was single was, “but who does your cooking and cleaning? “

“I do it,” I said.

“I would think you would find yourself a nice girl here, who will cook and clean for you.”

I didn’t even know how to respond to that. I thought about shocking her and telling her that I was gay. But she was provincial, from provinces in Uzbekistan, to provinces in the US. I was almost sure that she wouldn’t take well to the gay thing.

“I can do it all myself.”

“You know how to cook and clean?” She asked, with genuine astonishment.

“Of course I do. And most of my friends do too. In fact,” I said kind of making this up, “that’s the way people live in the capital. And frankly, I think that there are a lot of girls in the capital who don’t really want to have anything to do with housework.”

“And you wash your own clothes?”

“I do,” I said. “I have a washing machine.”

“Ok,” she said, almost as if throwing down a gauntlet. “You may have a washing machine, but do you have a dryer?”

“No,” I said, she had defeated me. “I hang up my clothes to dry on the balcony, just like everyone else.”

“But you see,” she said, “people have dryers – I have a dryer.”

“I’m sure there are people here with dryers, in fact, I think I may know them.”

“Ok, but do they have dishwashers? I have a dishwasher.”

I admitted that I did not know of anyone with a dishwasher. In fact, at the one nice supermarket with western products, I don’t ever recall seeing a box of dishwasher detergent. So, I kept silent. Natasha’s company and conversation was grating on me. She had, I felt, stated her position and made her point.  ¶ 1:17 AM 0 Comments

  When we said goodbye the next morning. I knew that we wouldn’t be back together again.  ¶ 11:15 PM 0 Comments

  We walked across the street to Lucky Strikes with Robert and Gulya. Yulia and I didn’t have a moment alone; I didn’t even have a chance to tell her that I was going home on Monday. At the bar, Lena was waiting for us with her silent, dour Serbian boyfriend and his two Serbian friends, including the older bearded one who led the toasts at Yulia’s birthday, several months earlier. Not yet lubricated by alcohol, he was silent and grim, looking into his beer mug. The greetings were lukewarm and it was clear to me, as always, that Lena didn’t like me at all. It would not be much of a fun evening. The dance floor was empty.

Lena looked at me in such a way as though everything about me was suspect. Several days earlier, I ran into her on the street on my way back from a small street market where I had bought fruits and vegetables. Even before greeting me, she asked me was where I was coming from in such a way as though I was coming back from some evil deed, for example, a tryst with a lover, perhaps a male lover. Perhaps it was just in my head, but regardless, I knew that Lena’s big problem with me was that I was gay and she knew it. Perhaps she had a clearer vision about it than Yulia did – since she wasn’t sleeping with me.

On the other hand, I didn’t even so much as look at men any more; if I did, it was probably much the same way that straight men looked at other women who weren’t their wife or girlfriend. Lena and Yulia were whispering into each others ears. I was wishing I wasn’t there. I was willing to talk to anyone to escape the boredom, but Yulia and Lena and the Serbs seemed grim and cold, but perhaps it was just the residue of the day’s hangover.

But I wasn’t hung over – I found myself really wanting to talk to someone, even James, the loutish Brit, who worked as a teacher at the international school, who drunkenly came up to me at the bar and pulled me aside. It was a subdued, unexciting night at the club, we agreed. Then he said that he’d once had sex with Yulia and that I should be careful with a girl like her and then he disappeared off with a girl called Natasha, before I could ask what he meant. Regardless, it didn’t sit easy with me since I had so many other misgivings about Yulia.

She came looking for me, looking a bit worried. She asked what James had said and I responded, “nothing.” She said she hated him, that he was garbage and said that she would have him killed if he so much as came close to her. Something came over her and I recalled from that moment on and even to this day, that when she said that, she meant business and it frightened me. So many things about her frightened me besides the frightening allure of her sex, but her contact with all kinds of shady characters, like the Serbians, with Denis, the Russian guy we all suspected was involved in trafficking girls overseas under the cover of a “modeling agency,” or her friendship with Irina, whose husband was Vanya, who would say he had a position in the city government working in child welfare services, but was, in fact, the right hand man of a major local mob boss.

These were the people who you met when you went out at night in Tashkent, and everyone in this Europeanized circle seemed to know each other. As someone relatively new to the scene –not even two years in Tashkent, I didn’t really know peoples’ real stories and histories. Apparently, I had just missed the big boom – when money was flooding the country from foreign investors, when the mafia was more active and out of control. Now, the mafia was under the firm hand of the government or was in the government and most of the foreign investors had fled. And I heard stories about a much bigger and wilder nighttime scene in Tashkent. But people had left and few were left and it struck me that maybe many of the people who knew the real stories had left and those who remained were complicit in hushing up whatever compromising stories remained, with naïve arrivals like me.

I felt uncomfortable there and wanted to leave. Yulia sensed my coldness. She asked me to take her home. I would have preferred to go home to my own place to be alone, but I decided to do the honorable thing. I was a bit nervous, though – I’d never been to her home. I didn’t even know how she really lived. And tonight I would see it. When we got into a taxi, I told her that I’d just booked a ticket home and was leaving after the weekend for a few days.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” She asked looking hurt.

“I just decided to do it yesterday,” I said coldly. “There are things that I need to take care of there.”

The taxi took us to a part of the city I’d never seen before, beyond the city airport. Like all soviet apartment complexes outside of the center, they looked the same to me and I could barely distinguish a good neighborhood from a bad one, a safe one from a dangerous one. All appearing to me equally decrepit, untaken-care of, abandoned, save for a few broken people sitting around drinking, barefoot children standing in circles sniffing glue out of plastic bags. It was in Yulia’s neighborhood, it was in my neighborhood – which was considered one of the best neighborhoods in the city. It occurred to me that I didn’t know at all how Yulia really lived – a single young woman, an orphan, in Tashkent – where people were most likely to consider a woman living alone, unmarried, to be a prostitute.

I made a point to not talk to the taxi driver, not to ignite any more of the latent tensions between me and Yulia. Walked up in silence into her apartment, which was large – much larger than mine. It was sparsely furnished, grey, bland; not particularly feminine. “I’m in the middle of redecorating,” she said. Had things not grown so complicated between us, I’d have asked her how it is that she’s redecorating her apartment if she is planning to leave the country. But I decided that it would be best to stay silent, to keep things calm and even between me and Yulia until I boarded that plane to leave.

So I walked around her large apartment where she lived alone and wondered who took care of her. She offered me a drink and I saw that her refrigerator was packed with bowls full of mayonnaise doused Russian salads, a couple of bottles of beer. I wondered who made those salads. It was hard for me to imagine Yulia standing in the kitchen cutting up vegetables or doing other mundane things like going to the market. My most vivid images are of her sitting in the restaurant that time I went to meet her, reading her detective novel and dragging on her cigarette.

In the sparsely furnished living room, in the corner, was her computer and desk, I assumed, where she did all of her work, matching up local girls with the men who would take them overseas to a better life far from here. I walked around, surveyed things as she moved around in the kitchen. On the desk, there was a photograph of her on the beach, probably in Thailand, her hair strawberry blond, she’s running through the waves. In the other room, an open closet with probably 30 pairs of blue jeans hanging from the rack, probably not a single skirt or dress there.

I turned around and caught her watching me looking at her in the kitchen, picking at a salad, picking up a cigarette and taking a slow drag, her head arched so slightly back. I thought that I caught a melancholy, solitary side of her that I’d never seen before, that maybe no one had ever seen before. It touched me and made me felt bad, that I would probably not see her again. I recognized that look of hers in myself – thinking of those meditative moments I had looking out the window in my kitchen, blowing smoke rings at the pane, wanting something more out there. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I went to her bedroom, lay down and fell fast asleep, only to wake up with her beside me, both of us fully dressed.  ¶ 5:31 PM 0 Comments

  Another Saturday Night

That Saturday night, Yulia and I agreed to meet up at the Soccer Bar for a drink before going to Lucky’s across the street for the usual Saturday night clubbing. Just when I arrived at the bar, she phoned and said she’d be running late. I sat down at a table by myself and ordered a beer, thinking how I would tell Yulia that I was leaving the country for home for a week or two. I didn’t know why, or maybe I did know why, a million reasons why, I knew it would be awkward and uncomfortable telling her.

The bar was quiet. It was early, only 10:00 and few tables were occupied with a few couples. I looked up and saw across the room Robert, an American I was friendly with and his Uzbek wife, Gulya. They beckoned me over to join them. “Don’t drink alone,” Gulya said.

I went over to them. “I’m waiting for a friend,” I said saying ‘friend’ much in the way that gay men have always used to describe a lover, when they are being cagey about the gender of the person and the nature of the relationship. “My friend is running a little late, but I’ll join you until my friend shows up, if that’s ok.”

Robert smiled but didn’t press for details about the friend – who he would see soon enough. We talked about work, about his recent trip back to the US, what the US was like after September 11, how there was a lot more airport security, and whether life would ever be the same. I admitted that I was a little afraid to fly again, and hadn’t yet since September 11.

I quickly turned to the door to the bar which had just swung open and in entered Yulia. “My friend is here,” I told Robert and Gulya and I could see them look at each other in mild surprise, likely over the fact that my ‘friend,’ indeed was this very beautiful woman. When Yulia caught my gaze, she came over to us, we embraced and I introduced her to Robert and Gulia and she seemed eager to sit with them, rather than us sit alone.

Robert and Gulya were very interested in Gulya and had many questions for her, asking her about her work, asking her things even I had been too careful to ask her, for example, about her work. Gulya found the work to be fascinating. She wanted to know all about the kind of men who searched for mail-order brides from Uzbekistan.

“Some of them are nice – big shot guys with lots of money to spend.” she said. “But usually, they’re blue collar guys from small towns where there are not enough women to marry, I guess.”

“Do you ever follow up with the girls, keep in touch with them,” Robert asked.

“Never,” Yulia said and excused herself to go to the bathroom.

“She’s very lovely,” Robert and Gulya said, like approving parents meeting a fiancée.

“I know,” I said.  ¶ 1:41 AM 0 Comments