We drove along the wide boulevard from the hotel, past the Tata hotel, past city hall. There were no cars, no pedestrians on the sidewalks. We drove past the box-shaped art museum, turned right on a dirt side street that left a cloud of dust behind us, and slowed as we pulled up to the swimming pool building, where some young Russian children stood holding their towels. One loutish teenage boy rolled up his towel into a rat’s tail, which he whipped towards a young blonde girl in tight short shorts and a halter top, who let out a little squeal as a lash just missed her.

Jason parked his range rover on the side of the building, and activity seemed to stop as he turned off the ignition, children gawking at this rarely seen and monumental marvel of technology, keeping a respectful distance as Jason and I disembarked and walked into the building.

The pool had a particularly Soviet way of doing things. First you went to the cashier, where you bought your entry ticket, which was a small brown piece of paper of such unsubstantiability that it almost felt like it would zip out of my hand if touched by the slightest breeze, like the fan on the cashier’s desk, which she had greedily pointed only at her.

The cashier, as always, was a matronly Russian woman, with a head of heavily bleached hair piled precisely atop her head in the shape of something like a protective helmet that didn’t move despite the fan blowing. Her face, harsh as though drained of warmth or blood and had a stony cold expression, as though the only thing that could escape it were orders shouted at unruly children or an arbitrary and flat refusal to sell you a ticket, simply because she could, this being the only power in the world that she wielded.

She looked at Jason and me disapprovingly, with a look I imagined that rued the end of the cold war, and the better days Tashkent once saw that preceded it. But she sold us a ticket, which we brought to a desk not even two meters away, where another such Russian matron, sitting behind a fan, took our tickets, examined them and their fine print through her spectacles, and allowed us to pass through a turnstile, looking suspiciously up at us through her spectacles. She said that only the indoor pool was open today. It was a “sanitary” day for the outdoor pool, whatever that meant.

We carried on down a corridor with a soundproof window looking into the indoor pool, which looked mobbed and boisterous, full of splashing, and with children running around and mothers running after them, people jumping into the water and others climbing out. Everyone inside the greenhouse-like swimming pool looked Russian; there didn’t seem to be any Uzbeks. Uzbeks would swim in public fountains or in the shallow Anhor River. In there, it was like another country, or like a little Russian hothouse in Uzbekistan.

Down a hall, we walked into a locker room full of wooden lockers, attended by two more of these Russian matrons. Around them, boys, men, stripped down to their bathing suits, the women unmoved with that look on their faces like they'd seen it all before; much in contrast to Jason, who looked around him with some interest. I no longer worried about taking him here – which was sort of like slumming it in comparison to the Sheraton Hotel swimming pool – he seemed quite content.

"Lady," a twenty-something Russian boy limply called out at one of the attendants, "open my locker." And the woman came with a master key she produced from an apron pocket to open up the locker door. Stowing away your belongings here operated on something of an honor code, and I was slightly concerned about stashing away my passport and documents in lockers that could essentially be unlocked by anyone who wanted.

Jason and I changed next to each other. I turned my back to him, to the attendants, and quickly stripped down, slid up my bathing suit and resisted looking over at Jason, who took his time changing, folding his jeans neatly, and standing for a moment naked and looking down at his toned frame. I sat on the bench and stared at the floor. When I sensed that he finished, I looked up and called for the attendant in the same way the young man had. "Lady," I called, and she seemed to cringe at my accent, which was clearly American; she probably already could detect the American-ness by the bathing suit – I didn’t wear the skin tight Speedos worn by all men here, regardless of age, shape or size. Jason and I wore modest American swim trunks that betrayed little of the shape or contour of the bottom in the front or back.

We next walked to another small room with a line of shower stalls, where we showered next to a hunky guy who quickly doused himself with water before stealing off through the exit to the pool. One of the ladies shouted over at him for not showering long enough. He came back and stood under the water, smiling mischievously at us.

We finished showering and walked through the exit into the pool area, which sounded just as noisy as it had looked when we looked through the window in the hallway at the entrance. The air inside was thick and dense. On the side there was an elevation where Jason and I lay down our towels. He sat down and said he'd sit and watch for a bit, while I said I would go into the water and try to swim laps around the children floating around in inner tubes, teens in water fights, and young men and women doggy paddling in the water and flirting, their bodies close and barely visible under the greenish water.

The water was ice cold. I jumped in and tried to warm myself swimming some laps, but found myself freezing, trying to warm myself up by swimming faster. I swam deep under the water, near the floor where all was silent. The surface of the floor was covered with a film of some kind of sandy sediment. Someone had swum here earlier and drew a happy face in the sand with their finger.

After a few laps, I was exhausted. I climbed out shivering and on a nearby bench saw a familiar face looking at me. It took me a few minutes to recall the face -- Stas the monk. I hadn't recognized him in this context, so different from the contexts in which I'd seen him before, and it had been quite some time since I saw him last -- Valentine’s Day this year, or a year back bearing the gift of a portrait of Jesus. He hadn’t called; I had changed my phone number several times since. And he had long stopped turning up at my doorstep. He sat sheepishly with his arms huddled around his knees, in just a bathing suit and gold cross, about as naked as I would ever see him, I thought, since he was such a helplessly complicated case.

I said hello and he spoke to me in his abysmal English, a little standoffish. "You here with friend?" he asked, and I had no idea what meaning he attached to the term friend. For a grown man of my age, he was like a child with his linguistic skills.

"Yes," I answered. He had probably seen me come in earlier with Jason.

"Everything OK?" I asked shallowly preparing to take my leave, and he nodded and seemed awkward and uncomfortable, as though he had just been caught doing something wrong -- perhaps looking at men's bodies, just as Jason was probably doing at this moment on the other side of the pool, but shamelessly.

Perhaps this scene brought back memories of the beach in Poland when he had oral sex that one time – the incident that he had told me about over and over, which had marked his fall from grace, and which so tormented him. The pool had this summer romance feel about it, like a beach in a 1950’s movie.

"I'll see you around," I said and walked away to the other side where Jason sat. He was watching a well built young man playing with a pretty bikini clad girl, threatening to push her into the icy water.

"Who was that you were talking to," he asked, surprising me, as he barely seemed to notice that I approached.

"Ah, nobody, just a neighbor," I said, taking my towel and drying myself off.  ¶ 1:37 PM