Uzbekistan Blues
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
My first Friday back in Tashkent, and there was no disco to look forward to. There were people who I had hoped I would see and probably wouldn't see. I didn't even know where or when I would see them again. There would be no music. There would be no dancing. There would be no flirtation. Instead, I would accompany Henrietta to the party that we had been invited to at Alyssa's house, which would most likely be full of middle-aged expatriates, the ones who lived in the nice houses, ordered imported food and wines from the Peter Justesen catalog, and always astounded me that they had traveled so far to far flung parts of the world and still managed to recreate a piece of Ohio or Kentucky, or wherever it was they were from in the US in their living rooms. For all my complaints about them being a bit boring, they were good people; Alyssa had even called me at my office that morning to make sure that I hadn't forgotten about her party, which was a bit surprising, since I wasn't a close friend of hers, had never spent much time with her, and wasn't very much a part of the social circle that she moved in. Mostly we just saw each other at the Tata hotel pool, where Americans living in Tashkent happened to congregate on hot summer weekends.
I sat in an outdoor cafe near my office waiting for Henrietta, while the sun set. Henrietta was the one of the main reasons for me going to this party. She had called me several times a day over the past week to make certain that I would be going. I didn't question her persistency which was bordering on irritating, but simply understood that she probably needed time out of her house and away from her husband.
There was no one else at the cafe but me. Tashkent was full of these makeshift cafes of plastic tables with umbrellas that advertised Coca-Cola and a plethora of fake flowers, usually roses, garlanding this territory, usually set in the middle of a weedy park or yard. There was always a blasting sound system playing Russian or Uzbek pop music, no kitchen nearby, perhaps a grill and a kiosk set up like a bar with three or four people manning the place and more often than not, fewer customers than that. The service was terrible, and to get a cup of coffee, which was inevitably Nescafe, without milk -- they never had milk, took an extraordinarily long time, much longer than it would have taken for me to boil water myself, put in a spoon of instant coffee grinds, stir, and bring it to myself.
While there was still light, I leafed through a copy of a book of Paul Bowles' stories, which I had found in my father's house in New York and I decided to take with me. I didn't realize just how much it would reflect so much of what I would see in the community of expatriates, which I was so prepared to dislike, in particular, as I was mentally preparing myself to go to this party. Bowles, who lived as an expatriate in Morocco took a pretty critical perspective of the American travelers he had seen passing through his town.
He could be merciless in the way he poked fun at their attempts at adventurousness, of their yearnings to break out of their American good sense, and lose themselves in the alien landscape. His Americans were earnest and naive with a propensity to getting cheated, if not extremely paranoid that they would get cheated, by the locals. They included the shy, undersexed American men who succumbed to the charms of local women who would take them for a ride, or the sexually repressed and often forgotten women. They included intellectuals, well meaning liberals, and sometimes condescending types. All of the characters reminded me of someone I had met here. Of course, his characters were either writers, would-be-writers or people of leisure, living off some small, usually inherited fortune, and running away from life at home. But here, most of the people here were do-gooders. They worked for charitable organizations, non-government organizations, diplomatic missions and since September 11, military and probably some spooks among them. Regardless of their employ, life here was cheap enough that a decadent lifestyle was accessible to all of them, everyone was far away enough from home to feel that they were at a safe enough distance to get away with things we might not be able to get away with at home.
And everyone drank a lot. In fact, I hadn't seen so much drinking in my life -- between the Uzbeks and the Americans who lived here. The drunkenness was not often so attractive, in particular, among the older among the set, who might confess to you things that you wouldn't necessarily want to hear from someone the same age as your father or mother, telling you something rather intimate; or among the women -- as a rule, single, often lonely, sometimes angry. There was no one here for them; it was hard for them to be with a local man -- who usually wanted younger, and the foreigners were all going for the young, available local women. So, on top of that, they were often frustrated. And when drunk, the loneliness, the singleness, the horniness, the frustration was quite evident.
I sat in an outdoor cafe near my office waiting for Henrietta, while the sun set. Henrietta was the one of the main reasons for me going to this party. She had called me several times a day over the past week to make certain that I would be going. I didn't question her persistency which was bordering on irritating, but simply understood that she probably needed time out of her house and away from her husband.
There was no one else at the cafe but me. Tashkent was full of these makeshift cafes of plastic tables with umbrellas that advertised Coca-Cola and a plethora of fake flowers, usually roses, garlanding this territory, usually set in the middle of a weedy park or yard. There was always a blasting sound system playing Russian or Uzbek pop music, no kitchen nearby, perhaps a grill and a kiosk set up like a bar with three or four people manning the place and more often than not, fewer customers than that. The service was terrible, and to get a cup of coffee, which was inevitably Nescafe, without milk -- they never had milk, took an extraordinarily long time, much longer than it would have taken for me to boil water myself, put in a spoon of instant coffee grinds, stir, and bring it to myself.
While there was still light, I leafed through a copy of a book of Paul Bowles' stories, which I had found in my father's house in New York and I decided to take with me. I didn't realize just how much it would reflect so much of what I would see in the community of expatriates, which I was so prepared to dislike, in particular, as I was mentally preparing myself to go to this party. Bowles, who lived as an expatriate in Morocco took a pretty critical perspective of the American travelers he had seen passing through his town.
He could be merciless in the way he poked fun at their attempts at adventurousness, of their yearnings to break out of their American good sense, and lose themselves in the alien landscape. His Americans were earnest and naive with a propensity to getting cheated, if not extremely paranoid that they would get cheated, by the locals. They included the shy, undersexed American men who succumbed to the charms of local women who would take them for a ride, or the sexually repressed and often forgotten women. They included intellectuals, well meaning liberals, and sometimes condescending types. All of the characters reminded me of someone I had met here. Of course, his characters were either writers, would-be-writers or people of leisure, living off some small, usually inherited fortune, and running away from life at home. But here, most of the people here were do-gooders. They worked for charitable organizations, non-government organizations, diplomatic missions and since September 11, military and probably some spooks among them. Regardless of their employ, life here was cheap enough that a decadent lifestyle was accessible to all of them, everyone was far away enough from home to feel that they were at a safe enough distance to get away with things we might not be able to get away with at home.
And everyone drank a lot. In fact, I hadn't seen so much drinking in my life -- between the Uzbeks and the Americans who lived here. The drunkenness was not often so attractive, in particular, among the older among the set, who might confess to you things that you wouldn't necessarily want to hear from someone the same age as your father or mother, telling you something rather intimate; or among the women -- as a rule, single, often lonely, sometimes angry. There was no one here for them; it was hard for them to be with a local man -- who usually wanted younger, and the foreigners were all going for the young, available local women. So, on top of that, they were often frustrated. And when drunk, the loneliness, the singleness, the horniness, the frustration was quite evident.
Labels: Going to an expatriate party
¶ 3:57 PM 3 Comments
