As we drew close to Alyssa's house, you could see the second story of the house rising from the high compound walls, a few of the lights in the windows burning. Several range-rovers were parked on the street bearing either red diplomatic plates or the yellow plates that ordinary foreigners had; nowhere in sight were the plain white plates of ordinary citizens; nor were cars any of the ordinary models that locals drove -- the reliable Russian relics from the Soviet Union, beat up Ladas, Volgas, Zhigulis that looked like they had once seen better days, or the shiny new Uzbek-Korean produced Tico, Damas, or the more respectable Nexia, which despite their shiny newness were of shoddy manufacture and required chronic repair. Some of the cars had drivers waiting inside of them, the doors ajar, cigarette smoke floating from them, the occasional bored face of a driver bobbed up as we arrived, and sunk back down as we stood before the elaborately carved wooden door to ring the bell. On this side of the compound walls, everything was quiet and still, save for the rhythmical blinking of the red light on the security camera above the door; but when we were buzzed in to the garden, we could hear the faint buzz of conversations, air conditioners running at full blast, strains of music that sounded like Cole Porter, coming from the house.

At the door, we were greeted by Linda, an attractive corporate lawyer from Chicago who I was never sure what she was doing in Tashkent. I would see her at the pool, at various gatherings where there were expatriates, she seemed to know everyone and looked like great fun; I knew that she had problems getting up in the morning, likely due to her somewhat public binge drinking, and hired an Uzbek girl -- a cousin of one of my staff -- to pull her out of bed in the morning, help her get showered and dressed, so that she could make it to her work, whatever it was, which she apparently was chronically late to. Here she looked perfectly at home and comfortable with her shoes off and a bottle of Uzbek vodka in hand, but disoriented, as though she had forgotten where she was going with it and her blank stare broke into a welcoming smile and perfunctory kiss, and both Henrietta and I were at a loss for words to make small talk. This was the kind of party where people drank prodigiously, but tended to be boring nonetheless.

A small bar counter by the parlour seemed to be dry, littered with empty bottles. I turned one over into a plastic cup. "Seems we missed the party," I whispered.

"Maybe we should have brought something," Henrietta whispered back, filling her cup with orange juice. She looked up and smiled across a populated room at an Uzbek man, the economist, I assumed. He was not particularly distinctive looking, though dressed very much like an American. A preppy American.

"Come meet Ulugbek," she said.

"I'll join you in a few minutes," I said. "I'm going to find something to drink," and set off to wander from room to room in Alyssa's palatial house. It was one of those over-the-top, high ceilinged, balustraded, chandeliered homes that many foreigners rented from well heeled Uzbek landlords, often government officials, Uzbeks living abroad, shady businessmen, the only people with enough money to build such homes in this poor country where no honest person could earn that kind of money. Often a single, well meaning foreigner, working on foreign assistance projects, working at an embassy, or even rarer, a maverick foreign entrepreneur who'd sold his soul to the devil would occupy these sprawling multi-bedroomed homes with bathrooms the size of my bedroom.

Why keep so much space for just one person, I wondered; I supposed for Friday nights like these, the parlours full of small circles of expatriates, sitting on furniture, on the floors, standing against walls, leaning against kitchen counters, many of whom looked familiar, most of whom I knew by name, had been introduced to at least once before, had seen at the swimming pool or at other parties just like this one. It seemed like everyone knew each other, spent all their Friday nights like this, in large houses.

I settled into the kitchen amongst a group that was complaining about the country -- a usual pastime for foreigners, but the conversation took a turn in which they spoke as though living through some great adventure; they spoke of how any and all of their phone calls would be cut off precisely after 50 minutes; this was likely because the "listening boys" only had cassettes that had 50 minutes on each side, and they needed to turn over the cassette. They spoke of the KGB, now known as the SNB, and traded anecdotes expressing firm beliefs that they were being followed and observed.

Linda, guarding her bottle, claimed that she knew something was up when she found a tablespoon in her bed, under the bedsheets. "Who would do such a thing?" she mused, tipsily. "Clearly, the work of the SNB to send a message," which she pronounced as if she spoke Russian, saying each letter as it would sound in Russian, the "B" spoken as "bay." It was hard to tell, given her glassy eyed look whether she was serious or not; I wondered if perhaps she was straight-facedly poking fun of the earnestness of the others. She let go the grip of her bottle, that she placed on a counter, and I filled my cup with a hearty 200 grams of vodka, as she continued, of another time in which she came home one evening to find her medicine cabinet tampered with. All the bottles (how many medicine bottles did she have?) had been turned around so that the labels were facing inside. Perhaps inappropriately, I found her story to be so amusing and I belched out a laugh which I successfuly disguised as though I had choked on my vodka, resisting the laugh and throwing out a few perfunctory coughs.

Another woman who seemed quite sober, began to tell how she came home after work earlier in the week to find the pump to her inflatable mattress broken. The next day, she asked her cleaning lady if she had broken it. But the cleaning lady said that she hadn't, that she didn't know anything about it. "I'm sure it was one of them," she said, referring to the KGB.

"Could it have been your landlord," another chimed in, I recognized her as one of the correspondents with a British publication, who had only recently arrived in town. She had a long, pale face, small glasses, and naturally, a proper British accent. She spoke with a serious modulated tone in her voice, though the empathy registered in the expression on her face.

"I asked him and he said he didn't know anything about it," the sober one said triumphantly -- as though she had demonstrated the danger of the situation and her bravery in the face of it.

It was a bit bemusing to think that any of us were important enough to warrant the scruitiny of the Uzbek authorities; even arrogant. On the other hand, you couldn't conclusively dismiss the possibility that any of us were under some form of surveillance. There weren't that many foreigners to keep tabs on and it was pretty characteristic of dictatorships to overreact to anything. Nonetheless, it was amusing to see how seriously people took themselves.

"I had a weird experience like that," I interjected, in that drunken way that one does believing you are about to say something incredibly witty. "But, I'm really careful of jumping to any conclusions..."

"Really?" the Britsh correspondent said. After all, the journalists were known here to undisputedly be under scruitiny, with cases that one could only look at conspiratorially, of electicity being shut off, phone service gone dead, menacing phone calls in the middle of the night, knocks on the door, etc., even of a case years earlier in which a correspondent, the night after filing some critical reporting, was called in the middle of the night and informed that she had until the morning to pack her bags and prepare for the next flight out of the country home. The government made no secret of its distaste for foreign journalists, the subject of many a televised statement by government officials, or the president, for that matter.

"Yes," I said, spilling a bit of drink on myself. "One morning a few weeks ago, I put my clothes in the washing machine before I left the house for work, I put in the laundry detergent, switched the machine on, and then left. I even left a note for myself by the door to take the wash out as soon as I came in and hang it to dry." I paused to scan the eyes in the room rapt by my story, which I continued to make up as I went along. "And it was so strange, when I came back home in the evening and I found that all the clothing that I had put into the washing machine that morning was hanging to dry on the drying rack."

"Are you serious?" Linda asked. I held my poker face, and truly wanted to break out into laughter and tell everyone that I had made it up. I had no intention of misleading people in a lie, but then my phone rang and Yulia's phone number registered and I nervously excused myself to the corridor outside the kitchen.

The phone, its ringing gradually growing louder and louder felt like a bomb in my hand about to explode until I found the button that muted the ringer and when I silenced it, I stood there feeling my heart pounding. I didn't want to talk to her. not now. It seemed too difficult, too complicated and I just wanted her to go away. If I were to talk to her, I would have to see her, and then, I would have to break up with her. And coming up with a reason for breaking up would only bring on more trouble. What else could I say except that I was gay, and she would probably spitefully tell everyone else, which could lead to problems for me. I thought of all the people I would see in the club, which was now closed, and my "social death." I thought of her SNB uncle and I thought of even worse.

I took a deep breath, my vodka buzz killed, looked around at the middle aged, middle American surroundings and thought about leaving. I looked into a room where I spotted Henrietta chatting with a retired DA from Southern California working on a judicial reform project who loved to talk endlessly about his work installing digital recording equipment into courtrooms so that the procedings could be recorded and archived;"to keep the system honest," he had once told me. I had my doubts about it, that digital audio could be tampered with, go missing, or even that most buildings in the country had regular power disruptions. And when I inquired a few months later, after he had left the country, most of the equipment wasn't being used in the first place and was returned by the Ministry of Justice.

She gestured with her hand to come over to me, but I walked past, glancing into marble floored rooms behind carved wooden doors. Alyssa had filled up these rooms with the things tourists acquired, antique carpets from Bukhara, black ceramic plates with simple line drawings from the Tashkent master and colorful ceramic tea services from the Rishton masters. Dyed silks from Margilon. Souzanays that perhaps had once hung at someone's wedding, and had little stains on them, later to be sold for a few dollars at the bazaar outside Samarkand. Hand-carved wooden tables from Horezm. One of the rooms had an echo when I opened the door was completely empty save for two large suitcases. I tried to push open a set of double doors next to it, which seemed to have the lights on behind them, but they were locked shut.

Just as I was walking away, the locked doors opened and a tall, handsome man emerged, smiled, said hi, as he walked past me. I had no idea who he was. I hadn't seen many attractive male foreigners here.  ¶ 11:21 AM 1 Comments