Despite the quiet that I felt around me in Tashkent, there was always a fear gnawing in the back of my mind about my safety. I’d heard about brutal murders in apartment building entrances. The front door to my building had a lock that had long been broken like all the other apartment buildings in the neighborhood, which was a fine neighborhood as far as neighborhoods went in Tashkent. I always entered stealthily, looking carefully all around me to be sure that no one was there lurking in ambush in the entryway or in the bushes outside. I would hesitate once inside, listening closely to hear the echoes of footsteps or breathing that would continue after mine. I would soundlessly press the elevator button. Even as the elevator doors opened, I feared that someone might jump out ready to attack.

The building was always quiet, though every now and then, there were the signs that someone had been around. They left fresh urine on the floor. Or a bag with an empty vodka bottle. Once, I saw a little pile of excrement – I assumed human, since I’d never heard a dog around the building.. Sometimes on a rainy night or on a weekend, I‘d see lying on the stairwell, some filthy man would lie passed out on the landing between the floors, probably after a night of heavy drinking. And if they didn’t snore, I couldn’t be sure if they were dead or alive. But my greatest fear was walking in and finding someone there about to attack me. And if I was attacked, would anyone rescue me or hear my cries. I imagined that just at the time I would need it, my voice would fail me, my mouth opening to let out only silent breaths.

Attacks in entranceways were rare in my neighborhood. Every other year in Tashkent, stories circulated of some kind of lurid murder of a foreigner. There was the one about the gay Fulbright scholar, or the American businesswoman who was in the textbook business who was chopped into pieces, which were stuffed into her living room sofa. More often, you just heard of nothing more than small-time robberies, a pocket picked in the bazaar, a turkey drop, or men getting ripped off at a strip joint that I would read about in the US Embassy’s security warden emails. They sent warnings that often seemed over the top, warning US citizens to steer clear of crowds on holidays because of rumors of attacks by cells of Islamic fundamentalist groups, rumors which always seemed to be proven false, that put most of us into a state of complacency, brushing off all these warnings, musing, how dangerous could this place be – a city of two million with 20,000 uniformed policemen on the streets, not to mention the non-uniform military, security services, and others. Then again, law enforcement here had other agendas. And despite the seeming warmth and legendary hospitality of its people, Uzbekistan had a cruel and violent underside.

Uzbek culture was keen on keeping nice appearances, so being a foreigner offered you some protections, among them, from police brutality. They could occasionally stop you on the street and menacingly do a document check, but none of them wanted to make the proverbial “international scandal.” Foreigners would share among each other little tales of the dumb policeman who couldn’t read the passport or who would try to scare them, and we’d laugh and say that he was probably so excited to see a foreigner and a foreign passport, that he’d probably go home that night to tell his family the exciting news over dinner.

But an upsetting document check was really only the tip of the iceberg; if you were local, it was different, and the horror stories you could hear were enough to unsettle you from complacency. The everyday violence they grew accustomed to through their own run-ins with the police or through a horrifying incident of a neighbor or close relative made one realize that the police were frightening and that you were to bribe, to beg, to give anything to avoid getting too engaged with them, otherwise, worse comes to worst, risk being dragged to the basement of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, a you’d never return from the same, if you’re lucky to leave alive. Those who survive talk of having fingernails and toenails extracted with pliers, people being suffocated with plastic bags, electric shocks to the genitals, being raped with bottles or even getting boiled alive. Just the thoughts of these brought me shivers, and the sight of a policeman on the street brought about a warning in my head to walk the other way, or walk around him. Avoid the Tashkent policeman at all costs.

And, so this was my fear in Tashkent, this fear of the things that routinely went on in the shadows, and which were so much a part of this system. People, in spite of it, in spite of poverty, walked the streets with smiles on their faces. Torture happened systematically in prisons or police basements. It was never reported in the local papers or on the local TV. But everyone knew about it and everyone knew to be afraid. For me, perhaps, it was my work that put me in contact with it, when I met with the human rights defenders or the families of someone who died in custody who took the risk to speak out, and who only got foreign correspondents to listen. I imagine that people stumbled upon these things by accident as well, just as I had.

I had only been living in Tashkent a short time when my digital camera broke. So I used my film camera as a back up. I’d bring in photos I’d take on the weekends of various historical sites, of friends, of parties, of evenings out in the clubs for developing at a little Kodak developing shop near my home. When you dropped off film for developing, unlike in the US, they don’t just print out your entire roll of film. They hand you back the developed spool of film in a wax paper bag, and you fill out a form with the numbers of the exposures which you would like printed. And then you come back later for the printed exposures, which would come in a little envelope. So, getting photographs developed was something of a production, and I would try and do this once a month with several rolls of film.

There was a sweet Russian kid working at the Kodak shop named Dima, who ran the entire shop by himself, and who was trying to learn English, which he'd always painfully try to use to communicate with me. Usually, the shop was quiet, and because he’d see all the photographs I’d taken, and I was certain that he looked at my photographs and probably knew a whole lot about me and would always strike up a conversation. Whenever he saw an attractive girl in the photographs he would always ask if it was my girlfriend, or a girlfriend, as little Dima would say that he assumed that I had many girlfriends.

When Dima wasn’t working, his ditzy younger sister Natasha would mind the shop. Usually she would be talking on the telephone the whole time you were there, taking brief pauses from her phone conversations to help you out. And, generally, when Natasha was working, there'd be little mix ups. She'd give you the wrong amount of change. She was lucky that I was honest -- that I would point out when she'd given me too much change. Or sometimes I'd find someone else's photographs mixed in with my own. One weekend, I remember coming in to pick up some photographs that I’d taken after a weekend where there had been many parties. There were photographs of me and my friends in various stages of intoxication, in discos, laughing. And then there was a shot of a newborn baby. I thought it was amusing the seeming inappropriateness of the photograph of the baby – like it were some kind of a message to me, the same message that all the other Uzbeks seemed to voluntarily advise me when I had never asked – that I was too old to be carrying on the way I was and that it was time to settle down and have babies, for if one doesn’t have babies, after you die, you leave nothing behind...so they said. At times, I thought it was so philosophical, that the people here were really teaching me something about life, and in those occasional insecure moments, it would cross my mind that I could be wasting my life away. Other times, I thought that it was a load of crap and that when we die, we all just leave a pile of dust, children or no children and that it was plain silly to have children just to give your life meaning. Sometimes I wondered if my photographs got mixed up with other peoples'. Perhaps a person saddled down with children from an early marriage, as they tended to marry very young here. And they would see the photographs of me and my friends having fun mixed among their photographs of their children, and they would think for a moment how nice it would be to have a carefree life without the responsibilities of family and children.

Another time, I came to the store and found both Natasha and Dima working. In fact, the store was quite busy and I had to wait a few minutes while both of them were working with customers, several of which were policemen, probably just coming from the Ministry of Internal Affairs nearby. I had come to pick up photographs from a trip to Samarkand where I had managed to do a bit of sightseeing of the old madrassahs and mosques after meeting with the local human rights defenders. Though I didn't hear the whole conversation, I imagined that the policemen regularly came to Dima's shop to get their photographs developed and that they probably expected all services to be rendered free of charge, they had that manner about them as policemen in Uzbekistan do, that they own the place. I could see by the change in his voice and the look in his face, after they left the shop, that something wasn't right. When addressing them, Dima was his usual charming self, flattering, friendly. They too were smiling, laughing. But as soon as the policemen left, the soft kind look on his face changed to what struck me as an honest face, betraying a grudge, possibly a tear that he was holding back. He politely excused himself, speaking to me in Russian, not the way he always struggled to speak with me in English and disappeared behind a door in the back of the shop. Natasha handed me my envelope of photographs, took my money, and ran after Dima. I was alone, and though I thought that perhaps I should stick around to find out what had happened that made Dima so upset -- as though Dima was a friend, after all, all these little transactions and interactions in my days here were the small things that made my life feel so interesting or exotic. But there was something menacing about this, menacing in the way that policemen are in Uzbekistan, that I felt that perhaps I would be treading into territories that perhaps I had no business. Much like how I'd often feel uncomfortable in my work, when I'd interview people and have to ask them incredibly personal questions, and when I'd felt that I'd really crossed the line. So I left the shop and decided to walk home, just a few blocks away, and look at my new photographs. I tore open the envelope and looked at the large open air bazaar. The empty courtyard of the madrassah covered with brilliant mosaics, with little entryways that led into what was now little shops. There weren't many tourists there, just shopkeepers, who, at first sight, I thought were tourists just like me, sitting in the shade and enjoying the aura of the place. But when they saw me walk by, jolted to life, beckoning me to enter their shop and look at their goods, rugs, ceramics, woodcarvings, figurines, fabrics, tapestries.

And then I saw a photo that clearly accidentally found its way into my pile. And I cannot describe the horrible image that I saw except for that it made me sick to my stomach, almost as if someone had knocked the wind out of me, leaving me unable to utter a sound. The photo must have belonged to the policemen, it was a photo of pain and it was the first time I'd seen, rather than heard, as I'd heard many times through my work, of the pain that people had suffered. I couldn't sleep that night and nights after. Since then, the sight of the police evokes this image.

Labels: The photograph

  ¶ 2:45 AM