Uzbekistan Blues
Thursday, August 16, 2007
 
The years of persecution as retold by my mother is a litany of the men who have insulted her, done wrong by her. She began to relate the episodes, short scenes, backwards in time, and I imagined that if she spoke long enough, ultimately, she would return to the story of her marriage to my father. The episodes are familiar, like an old folk song. Though some episodes are new, they don't seem new, they are all similar, just variations on a theme.

She began with a new one, not much different than the others, with a doctor who sat beside her at a dinner party talking to the other guests about emphysema. At some point she interjected something, challenging him, something which she had just read in that week's Science Times section of the New York Times, which she reads religiously daily, and he retorted, "what do you know about medicine."

Another, which I'd recalled her telling me on the phone a few months earlier, was a very religious man who in his very religious way seemed to be wooing her with a sabbath meal, which he carried up eight floors to her apartment, regaling her with a several course meal, full of sabbath song, until late in the night, longer than she wished to entertain a guest, sitting and singing more sabbath songs, when she would have rather been sleeping.

There was one she retold, which I remembered from years back, about an artist she was interviewing for an article she was working on, who she suspected was interested in her. And one of the days she spent simply observing him working in his studio, when he ordered in Chinese food for lunch and didn't even offer any to her.

And she went on, while I peeled carrots in her kitchen, feeling exhausted and hot, finding myself growing depressed, that depression that comes from unmet expectations; I had been excited to come back home, but not to this. She too seemed to grow embittered in her tone as she droned on, the words I had long stopped paying attention to. "What does this all have to do with anything?" I asked.

"Well," she mused aloud in her same thoughtful tone of voice. "What all these men have in common, is that they are all men who somehow passed through my life, and they were all just full of bullshit."

Predictably, if I let this continue, the stories would be about my father. I opened the kitchen cabinet where I knew she kept aspirin, and took out a bottle. "What are you doing," she asked as I had clearly intruded, since beside the aspirin were the brown medicine bottles which held her anti-depressants.

"I have a headache and I need to lie down." I went to my old bedroom and lay on the bed. I realized I’d only been at my mother’s house for an hour, but it had already seemed too long, impossible to stay longer, and I needed to leave. Leave not just her house, but this family, this history, this past, to stop listening to these old stories which just repeated themselves like a broken record driving everyone crazy. I wanted to go back to my place in Tashkent and I concentrated on the peace, the quiet there and the pounding in my head subsided, I felt a cool breeze coming in through the open window and I felt myself drifting into sleep.

Before long, mother started calling my name from the kitchen. And I closed my eyes, pretending I couldn't hear. The thing is, everytime I would come to her home, she would shout across rooms, usually just to ask you to do something like clear the table or take out the garbage, and she would call and call until you responded. It had gotten to the point that I'd even just imagine her calling across rooms, like an aural hallucination, and I'd gotten into the habit of not coming, but surely enough, she would come to the door of wherever it was I was ignoring her call.

"While you're here, can you clean out your closet? There's too much stuff in in it. When I open it, things fall out.” I responded weakly in the sweetest voice I could muster, "do you mind if I rest for a while? I've had a long flight over and I'm tired." I thought, maybe I could take advantage of the time at my mother's, where there really was nothing to do, to get some rest and be fresh for the evening, when I'd see my sister and some friends at some exciting restaurant downtown.

"Look at this closet," she openned the door of a closet, piled with boxes and bags of proably old homeworks and diaries and term-papers from ages ago. "Your things are in it, your brother's things are in it and it's a complete mess."

"Sure, mom, I just need to rest a bit. Could you please let me rest."

"You can't just leave a mess here like this and then run around the world as you please. I have to live with this mess that you leave behind..." she began to raise her voice. "I could just as easily throw it out."

"Then throw it out, if that will make you happy," I said and even with my eyes closed I could feel her still standing at the door glowering.

"You should show some respect," she said perfectly calmly in that calm before the storm voice, and I was beginning to feel like I was yet another character in one of her stories. Surely enough, she reverted to a shrill tone, "I dealt with your father's disrespect for years, with him shitting on me for years. I don't tolerate that from anyone anymore."

Finally, I sat up, uncertain. There was not going to be a discussion here. I had no option but to clean out the closet in order to get some peace in this house -- and there was no rest to be had here. "You're acting so strange," I said. "Why must you make such a big deal of this -- I came off a plane yesterday, is it disrespectful to want to rest a bit?"

"No, I think you're acting strangely. I think you're a little touched. Maybe being over there for so long has affected you." She definitely knew how to touch a chord, because in my mother's house I felt that perhaps I was crazy. I felt like Alice in wonderland, growing big, growing small, being an adult and then being a child again. I walked past my mother standing in the doorway of the bedroom, to the front door of the apartment, where my knapsack and my sneakers were. From behind me, I could hear her ranting, "I'm not taking this kind of disrespect anymore, from now on," and "Where do you think you're going?"

I picked up my shoes, didn't even put them on, just figured I'd put them on once in the elevator or in the staiwell, opened the locks on the door and walked out. I could hear her continued shouting while I walked away, thinking of how many times over the years, the same conversations, the same demands to do housework, and how I always did it, since childhood. But as a child, there was never any place really to run; you could storm out of the house and, at the end of the day, return back for dinner, despite whatever might have transpired. That was where you had your meals, so you had to go back. And your parents could always expect you back.

But things had changed. I didn't live here, I didn't eat here, not in this apartment, not in this country. Perhaps my mother had forgotten that, forgotten that I'd grown up. And I didn't know when I would see my mother next. I wondered if I had made an irreversible mistake. Maybe she was right, maybe I had become a little crazy living overseas.

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Sunday, August 12, 2007
 
The Muslims

I suppose my mother wanted me around because it probably got very lonely. She seemed to have the habit of always keeping a talk radio station on, perhaps to simulate conversation and human interaction. She never any music around the house. The time of my parents' divorce, was the big transition from plastic albums to CDs, and my father had taken much of the music collection, which was an impressive opera collection on plastic. What remained were a few scratched plastic albums that might have belonged to my mother before my birth -- two Mamas and the Papas albums, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and perhaps a few I had left from my teenage years. She didn't bother turning down the talk-radio as I peeled carrots in the kitchen and she stirred a boiling pot on the stove. I was dripping in sweat.

"Aren't Uzbekistanis anti-semitic," she mused, apropos of nothing. It was probably one of those burning issues eating at her. One of the injustices in the world that she felt quite personally about and which from her perch in New York City, she could speak out against, thousands of years of real persecution that somehow legitimated her claim to victimhood, though she lived in a large, comfortable apartment, mostly around other jews, rarely having to interact with anyone who wasn't jewish. And probably, it was about time for her to express how she really felt about my being in Uzbekistan. I hadn't thought of it, but most likely, she hated the idea of me living there and needed to express her disapprobation. Or perhaps that is my very typical hyper-sensitive adolescent response to anything that even gives the slightest whiff of criticism. "Says who?" I asked snottily.

"Well, they're Muslims," she responded."First of all," I said trying to restrain myself from calling my mother stupid, "the term Uzbekistanis refers to citizens of Uzbekistan -- and that includes its sizable population of Jews and Russian Orthodox, not to mention athiests, Buddhists, some Catholics, and probably others. You probably are referring to the Uzbeks, who culturally are Muslim. Second, not all Muslims hate Jews." I said. "They're moderate in their faith." I thought of the clever quote I cited in a profile about Uzbekistan from a local man who lived near the airbase that the US was stationing its forces in, something to the effect of, 'yes, we're Muslims, but not like the ones in Afghanistan -- We like to drink vodka and sleep with women.'

"But what about those radical Muslims?" It was that aggressive adolescent in me that detected that she was probably trying to pick a fight. I almost wished that it were possible to have a civilized discussion with my mother, but often, I just gave up, she was set in her ways. And when you get to issues of religion, just as if you were to try to have a reasoned conversation with a Muslim fundamentalist, emotions just get too high for any reasonable exchange; early on needs to realize that one must agree to disagree. So, I just rebuffed her. "What do you know? You've never been there." I said. It was probably something she heard on one of her talk radio programs, since she didn't get out much.

On the other hand, living in Uzbekistan, much was made of these dangerous underground movements in Uzbekistan. Everyone had heard a story of a friend of a friend who had woken up in the morning only to find at their doorstep the infamous leaflets distributed by the radical Muslims, calling for the overthrow of the government, for the expulsion of the American troops from the K2 airbase, which they were supposedly using for search and rescue missions in Afghanistan, claiming that President Karimov was a Jew. I'd tried to follow these rumor trails -- track down the "friends of friends" who had received them, and I never found anyone who'd actually claimed to have seen these leaflets, or someone who saved a copy. But knowledge of these leaflets was widespread.

Then again, Uzbekistan was a place where you never knew the truth, and where it was impossible to get to the bottom of things. For all we knew, the threat of an underground radical Islamic movement could have been a conspiracy manufactured by the government that was conveniently conjured to justify crackdowns and campaigns against critics of the regime, thousands of whom languished in the country's prisons. After all, what enemy was more heinous in this post-911 world than an Islamic fundamentalist. Throwing out a few leaflets could also be a way to scare into submission a population grateful that they lived in peace, even if their government was far from perfect, rather than living under the Taliban like in Afghanistan right across the border, as well as do whatever they wanted in the name of peace from this enemy with the approval of the international community.

Of course there were fundamentalists operating in the shadows, underground, and certainly, there were sympathizers. But devout Islam, like anti-semitism, wasn't something that you encountered much on the Tashkent street. At least I hadn't, though indeed it is something I am sensitive to -- but I never saw it among my friends, probably few of which new I was Jewish, as it had grown unimportant to me now. When the topic of jews came up, often you heard people lamenting the mass exodus of the jews after the collapse of the Soviet Union -- and subsequently, the loss of all the brilliant doctors, teachers, professors, lawyers. Often I'd heard about the Jews and their golden minds. And often friends would begin talking, as if boasting of all their friends and classmates who had emigrated to Israel. Another thing jewish that they all seemed to be obsessed with was Sholom Aleichem. They loved Sholom Aleichem, the Yiddish writer, who apparently was considered a classic writer in the Soviet canon of literature. This was a writer who I hadn't read, nor did I know anyone who'd read him, we only knew "Fiddler on the Roof."

I recalled an incident with Yulia, when I invited her to see the Tashkent Youth Theater's production of "Tevye the Milkman," which apparently was the Russian translation of "Fiddler on the Roof." She asked me what the piece was about, and I told her that it was an American musical based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem. " "A musical?!" She cried aghast. "A musical!" She glared. "Only in America," she declaimed, "could they take masterpieces of literature and turn them into musicals," she said enunciating the word 'musical' with disgust, expressing, as she always did ,her distaste for America, Uzbekistan, me, musicals, all at once in her defense of the great Sholom Aleichem. I ended up going to see the show. The entire cast was Uzbek, save for the Russian Cossack that the second daughter, Hodel, falls in love with. He was played by a strapping, long-haired blond Russian.

Mother continued to talk, and I barely paid attention, my mind dwelling on recent memories of my life in Tashkent, which almost feels like they are from long ago. I console myself that my stay with my mother is short and that within a few days, I will be back in Uzbekistan, where the heat is dry, where people turn on the airconditioner in their home. And I am relieved to know that she drops the topic of Uzbekistan, of her perception of anti-semitism there, and moves on to another topic which I have long been familiar with in the days before I left -- it is of the persecution she herself has endured, one I know intimately well as I know of the history of the jews.

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Dispatches from Tashkent

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Location: Uzbekistan

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