Surrounded by a high wall with a big gate made of metal rods forming a beautiful pattern, it looks like a medieval fortress. There are always crowds at the gate and the walls. Who are they? A caravan has just arrived. It has traveled across the desert for a long time. Tired travelers unload their bundles and sacks from camels – I prefer not to notice that some of the goods are piled up in parked vans. Now, after fortifying themselves with food and taking a rest in the shade of the city walls, the caravan travelers go through their goods, talk to the locals, discuss prices… And a city guard wearing an armband and holding a batch of tickets in his hands charges payment for entering the town with goods, to be precise, for the right to sell at the bazaar.
When you walk through the gate, you step from a relatively calm and leisurely environment into an environment that brings to mind a cauldron of boiling soup.
People scurry and swarm, forming crowds. The rumble of many voices hangs in the air above the crowd. It’s a huge choir with many participants – some of them stand behind cement counters urging buyers to look at their goods and praising them in ringing melodious voices. Others crowd around the counters and bargain, straining their vocal cords.
Now, in the fall, the counters are piled with the riches of everything that grew in the local fertile soil during Asian summer. Apples sparkled and shone as if they were still lit by the sun. Juice almost burst from pears. Transparent bunches of grapes were either dark, fragrant with a thin whitish coating or sparkling like gems… Scarlet cherries, bluish plums… and peaches! And mountains of watermelons! And oblong melons enveloped in a cloud of delicate aroma! Vegetables were just as picturesque.
“Sweet carrots! Djuda shirin!” sang an old man with a beard and an orange skull cap on his head that looked as if it had been made from his carrots. He looked like my Grandpa Yoskhaim very much. Just like other sellers, this old Uzbek praised his goods in Russian since almost everyone spoke Russian in Chirchik. This Russian was sometimes distorted, and it was always distorted by sellers at the bazaar – the endings of words were changed, genders and cases confused. It had become a sort of a pidgin.
We stopped. “Here it is, try it, my dear,” the old man extended a peeled carrot to Father. “It’s like sugar. You can find it only in my garden.” Such a treat didn’t create any obligation. On the contrary, a buyer was expected to honor a seller by performing this ritual before opening his wallet.
Father took a bite of the carrot with the air of an experienced taster, nodding his head. “Yahshi?” the old man asked. A seller who shared a counter with him was already offering Father one of his carrots, “Try my carrot. My soil is better.” “Hey, amak! Let him finish chewing!” the old man who looked like Grandpa Yoskhaim waved his hands.
Please, don’t think that it was the beginning of a squabble that could end up as a quarrel. No, such haggling over buyers was an old and generally accepted tradition.
Father paid no heed to the competitor’s call, and he bought some carrots from the old man. Naturally, he bargained a bit; otherwise it wouldn’t have been a proper purchase.
Almost all the sellers were Uzbek kolkhoz (collective farm) members. What they sold had been grown with their own hands in their private gardens. And what did they grow on the kolkhoz’s fields? What did kolkhozes sell at the bazaar?
There was a kolkhoz booth not far from the entrance. The stench of rotten potatoes coming from the booth was so strong that no one wanted to enter it. The shelves in the booth were always half-empty. “That’s how the government takes care of the people,” folks would say, for they had forgotten that kolkhozes were not government enterprises, but collective farms, in other words, the collective property of the people. However, it was easy to forget that…
The meat counters came next. Piles of meat lay on the counters and hung on hooks. Nobody paid attention to the swarms of flies. They flew away every time a butcher picked up another piece of meat.
At last we passed the grocery counters and approached the flowers. That was a special corner of the bazaar. There was neither a crush of people nor noise nor sellers haranguing buyers there. Obviously, the owners of these goods had a different attitude about their trade and a different feeling of self-respect. We walked among gladioli, lilies, daisies and roses for a long time before Father stopped in front of one of the sellers. A nice-looking Russian girl who spoke clearly and melodiously, to whom I listened with pleasure after the bazaar’s garish vernacular, helped Father pick out roses. “She’s received an order? How nice,” she said going through the long stems with their tight buds. “This one is very nice… and this one too…”
As we were leaving the bazaar, we walked along the outer rows, which weren’t crowded. A group of babais – that was how we jokingly called elderly Uzbeks and Kazakhs – had made themselves comfortable in the shade of an apple tree near the fence. They sat cross-legged on a mat and talked unhurriedly and calmly as if there had not been a noisy city bazaar around them but rather meadows surrounded by mountains. Yes, they were shepherds, which was clear from their appearance – they all had moustaches and beards, with shaggy hats on their heads, dressed in long chapans, which covered their boots. There was a teapot on the mat in front of them, and each of them held in his hands a bowl with steam rising from it. Some of them sipped tea, other enjoyed nasvayem, chewing tobacco that one placed under the tongue. And, of course, there were horse-hide containers nearby filled with kumis.
“Oh, it’s kumis… Let’s have some,” Father suggested.
I kept quiet. Kumis was sour mare’s milk. What’s good about it? But Father had already asked the sellers:
“Two bowls, amak,” and he squatted near the shepherds.
I had to take a bowl in my hands.
“It’s delightful,” Father said after taking a sip. “It’s tasty, and it’s also medicinal. Pour more, amak.”
“Yes,” one of the elderly men said. “Of course, it’s a curative drink. It gives so much energy… Many people simply don’t know about it.”
I was surprised – looking at the babai dressed in ethnic attire, I would never have thought that his Russia would be so good. And Father joined in the conversation on this subject, which interested him.
“Yes, yes, I’ve been drinking kumis for only three weeks, and my blood test results are much better… I haven’t brought a jar. Please, give me a liter in yours. I’ll take it with me.”
We were back home by eight. The clinking of dishes could be heard from the kitchen, and the aroma of something very tasty hung in the air.
“Well, congratulate her,” Father gave me the bouquet.
At that moment, Mama came out of the kitchen. As usual, she was wearing her housedress and apron.
“Oy! Is this for me?” Mama clapped her hands, took the bouquet and began examining the roses, repeating “And I couldn’t figure out where you had gone so early in the morning.”
It seemed to me she was very happy about the roses. It was an unusual treat for her. Father didn’t pamper her.
“Papesh, papesh!” Mama opened her arms and hugged Father. They kissed.
If I ever noticed any display of affection and respect in the relations between Mama and Papa, they emanated from her. He either didn’t know how to show it or didn’t want to. It was more likely both. So why was he so happy and tender on that day? Did he understand and feel something? Was he beginning to be proud of his wife?
Yes, he was proud, but not for her. His wife, the wife of Amnun Yuabov, had become the holder of the order. Everybody would read about it in the newspapers today. Practically the whole town would talk about Ester, and all the teachers at his school would certainly know about it. He would hear so many congratulations. His prestige would rise; he would partake of his wife’s fame.