Of all the circumstances that contributed to my ending up in Samarkand, this ultimatum was the most unexpected. Go to Uzbekistan now . . . or you will never get departmental funding ever again? My first instinct was to tell them exactly what they could do with their departmental funding. But three things changed my mind. First, departmental funding and departmental goodwill are really, in the cold light of reason, nothing to sneeze at. Second, I was at that time greatly under the sway of The Portrait of a Lady, a book in which one finds the following line: “Afterwards, however, she always remembered that one should never regret a generous error.” As a result I was constantly rethinking all my conservative decisions and amending them in favor of “generous errors,” a category which surely included going to Samarkand to learn the great Uzbek language. Third, I was unhappy in love and wanted to get some distance.
The plan backfired somewhat because one of the people I wanted to get some distance from, my college boyfriend Eric, insisted on coming with me, for his own set of reasons (concern for my safety; his belief—accurate, as it turned out—that it would give us things to talk about later; and some obscure geopolitical ambitions that entailed a quest for total world knowledge). Despite myself, I was moved. I said I would ask what it would entail for him to come with me. As it turned out, it entailed almost nothing at all. Just a couple of hundred dollars added your significant other to your homestay arrangement, and even to your accidental death and dismemberment policy, which I received in the mail a few weeks later:
LIFE: $25,000
TWO OR MORE MEMBERS: $25,000
ONE MEMBER: $25,000
THUMB AND INDEX FINGER: $6,250
COMBINED MAXIMUM OF $50,000 FOR EMERGENCY OR MEDICAL REPATRIATION, OR REPATRIATION OF REMAINS.
REPATRIATION OF REMAINS: COVERED SERVICES INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, EXPENSES FOR EMBALMING, CREMATION, MINIMALLY NECESSARY CASKET FOR TRANSPORT AND TRANSPORTATION.
“Orientation” took place in Washington, D.C., at a midrange hotel decorated completely in mauve. There were thirty-five students in the Russian Language and Area Studies program, thirty-three of them going to Russia.
At dinner the first night—“spring vegetable pasta” served at mauve tables in a mauve ballroom—we listened to an address by a linguistics professor who had invented a system of rating second-language proficiency. The genius of this system rested on the concept of rating second-language proficiency on a scale from one to four.
It occurred to me that nobody was actually forcing me to stay in this room. Surely it would be more constructive to go buy a sun hat. (I have black hair and Uzbekistan is very sunny: along with Liechtenstein, it is one of only two double-landlocked countries in the world.) The speaker either affected not to notice or did not notice my departure from the mauve ballroom. In the lobby I asked the concierge, whose name tag said ALBRECHT, where I could buy a sun hat. Albrecht suggested that I might like to look for a hat in nearby Georgetown. “So we’re here . . . ,” he said, poising his hotel pen over a map. But the pen just hovered there, like a helicopter. Albrecht couldn’t locate our hotel on the map. “This is very embarrassing,” he said. His sincerity left a strong impression on me.
In the humid evening, fireflies hovered at eye level over little brick streets. Somehow I ended up in an Urban Outfitters. All around me, girls were buying absolutely unwearable-looking clothes: sheer dresses with V-necks down to the navel; jeans measuring literally two inches from waist to crotch; rhinestone-encrusted G-strings with no elasticity whatsoever. I found a hideous white ill-fitting sun hat, bought it, and fled to Barnes & Noble.
There was one other student in the program going to Uzbekistan: Dan, a Tashkent-bound political science major who was indescribably average in both appearance and demeanor, like some kind of composite sketch. On the plane, Dan managed to befriend a group of twelve Uzbek and Ukrainian exchange students. During the layover in Frankfurt, we all sat in two rows of seats in a waiting area, looking at a photo album belonging to a young Uzbek called Muratbek. Muratbek was very tan, with bleached hair and a fixed grin. To his every utterance in every language, he appended the exclamation: “Awesome!” “Turkcha gapirasizmi?” he asked me. “Do you speak Turkish? Awesome!”
Having extinguished two hours of my youth in this way, I went to meet Eric, who had skipped the orientation and was flying to Frankfurt directly from San Francisco. His plane arrived in another, larger terminal. A BMW sedan, the grand prize for something, was parked in the middle of a vast atrium. On the other side of a glass panel, an open cart piled high with suitcases glided along the runway, against the pale early-morning sky. A wall-size television screen was broadcasting a World Cup match: Turkey versus Japan. A small group of Turkish janitors was gathered in front of the screen. At tense moments, they would drop their mop handles and grip one another’s arms, shouting at the players in German.
Eric came out of the plane wearing a white T-shirt and a backpack, looking, with his gentle blinking Chinese eyes, as philosophical and good-humored as Snoopy. Because Eric was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve (part of his geopolitical ambitions), we ended up in some kind of a military lounge. It had free Internet and bran muffins, and a tiny television broadcasting the Japan-Turkey game. Turkey won, 1–0. Even inside the military lounge, we could hear the janitors cheering.
It was late at night when we got to Tashkent. The baggage claim area felt like a room in a dream, a room in someone’s house. A breeze was blowing through an open window. We passed through customs and filed into a parking lot, where Dan’s Tashkent host family came to pick him up: three teenage boys with hangdog expressions, and their mother, Marjuda, an overweight woman with gold teeth and a bright red dress. Marjuda greeted us all warmly; she wrote her phone number on a piece of paper and told me and Eric to visit her in Tashkent. Then she gestured to Dan to come to their car. Dan turned to me. “So you’re going to stay with us tonight, right?” he said urgently, as though I were his closest friend.
“Ah, no, in a hotel,” I said. They were sending a driver to take us to Samarkand the next day.
“But she just invited you!”
In a haze of sleep, Eric and I got into the car of an ACTR officer, who was taking us to our hotel. Propaganda slogans were printed in enormous letters on walls and billboards—I could recognize HALQIM, “my people,” and VATANIM, “my country”—signed by Islom Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan since the fall of the Iron Curtain. His last reelection had been in 2000, when he won 91.9 percent of the vote against his sole opponent: a professor of Marxist philosophy, who later admitted that he himself had voted for Karimov.
In the morning, a tiny Korean car, buzzing with the vibrations of a poor-quality stereo, picked us up at a street corner. The driver, an inscrutable Tajik, turned off the stereo when we got into the car. Once we reached the main road, the sun blazed down and it was unbearably hot. The driver periodically made tiny adjustments to the temperature. He turned the air conditioner between “lo” and “off”; opened and closed the vents; rolled down the window a crack, then closed it again. No matter what he did, it was unbearably hot.
After an hour of silence, the driver turned to me and said, in Russian:
“So you didn’t bring any cassette tapes with you?”
We hadn’t, I said, but maybe we could listen to some of his tapes.
The driver remained silent for a moment. “What if you don’t like my music?” he asked finally.