“You’re awake!” I said.
“I waited for you,” Eric said.
We stumbled into the bedroom. In my dream, the poor ward was trying to move Jane Fairfax’s piano. “Emma! Emma!” shouted the ward, but the piano was still falling down the stairs, falling and continuing to fall, making a terrible racket. Gulya was rapping on the window. “Emma!” she called. “Em-ma!” I staggered out of bed and fumbled with the window latch. The sky outside was a deep, liquid blue. “Emma, dinner!” Gulya said. She was standing outside the window, just below eye level. Her features looked exaggerated, the heavily penciled eyes and eyebrows, the cartoonishly mouth-shaped mouth.
“Thank you very much,” I said, “but I think we need to sleep some more. I think we need to sleep until the morning.”
We had a long conversation then, about the dinner Gulya had cooked for us, and how angry my “husband” would be to wake up in the night and learn that I had kept it a secret from him. “Wake him up,” Gulya suggested with steely playfulness. “Go on, Emma, wake him up.”
Eric gazed at me with sleep-clouded eyes. “I think the easiest thing to do would be to just go eat dinner,” he said.
Clutching each other’s hands, we trudged across the courtyard to the annex kitchen where we were to eat all our meals: a narrow room with gas burners, a long table, a row of cabinets, and a refrigerator. The refrigerator was kept unplugged all night, to save electricity. Gulya handed us two enormous bowls of borscht, redolent of mutton, covered by a thin film of orange grease.
“This looks great,” Eric said in a woolly, gentle voice. He was the kind of person who could eat anything at any time, and once ate one thousand dumplings in one week, just to make some kind of point.
I ate a piece of Samarkand bread and drank cup after cup of bitter green tea, while fielding Gulya’s questions about our fictional wedding. We had been instructed to tell her that we were married. Conveniently, we already owned platinum wedding bands, purchased two years earlier as engagement rings, using the savings cleverly invested by Eric in Irish banks and especially in some Mexican corn-processing plants, whose stock had skyrocketed because of an unexpected U.S. subsidy for ethanol production. I had stopped wearing my ring after a few months, when it started giving me a rash. Having determined through online research that platinum was the world’s most hypoallergenic metal, I interpreted this rash as a hysterical symptom, although it later turned out to have been caused by soap getting trapped under the ring, which was slightly too big. Meanwhile time had passed and although, in certain respects, nothing had changed—we never called off the engagement in so many words—things had, in other, almost imperceptible ways, changed a great deal, so that our old plans had gradually come to seem unreal, unrealizable, ill-advised.
We were wearing the rings again now. Eric had already finished his borscht, whereas I had managed only a few spoonfuls.
“You don’t have to eat it, dear thing,” he told me. When Gulya wasn’t looking, we traded bowls and he ate all of my borscht, too.
Gulya wanted to know when and where the wedding had taken place, how many guests had attended, what kind of hat I had worn. I told her that we had had a small wedding, one and a half years ago, on a boat, in Canada.
“Where did you spend your honeymoon?” Gulya asked.
“On the boat,” I said.
After dinner we rushed back to bed. Too jumpy to fall asleep, I started to read. Gradually I became aware of Eric rolling and kicking beside me. He suddenly opened his eyes and said, “Black king to e-seven.” Closing his eyes, he added, “Black knight to j-four.”
I put down my novel and picked up the book of chess problems that lay next to his pillow. “There is no j-four,” I said, worried. “It only goes up to h.”
“Oh, I’m really sorry,” Eric said. Eyes still closed, he furrowed his brow and looked really sorry. “I thought it was one of those times when the knight goes outside, like to Kazakhstan.”
I touched his forehead. It was cold and clammy. “Are you feeling OK?”
“Oh no, my friend,” he said apologetically. “I’m really sick.” A moment later he sat up, put on his sweatpants, and shuffled out the door and into the courtyard.
He came back a few minutes later and climbed into bed. His skin was an indescribable color. My heart began to pound. Why had I let him eat that borscht? What if his mother found out? She already disliked me, Eric’s mother. In my head I heard the voice of the professor from Berkeley: “Four thousand dollars for the body bag to send you home.” Pulling on some shorts, I went out into the courtyard to look for Gulya.
Gulya said it was nothing to worry about. Foreigners always got sick. “Why aren’t you sick?” she asked, looking suspicious.
She put some water to boil, brewed a pot of tea, and brought out a tin box, from which she produced mysterious items: a resinous amber log and a pink glassy rock. With a sharp knife, she shaved off pieces of these presumably medicinal objects and dissolved them in the tea.
Back in our room, Eric had fallen asleep. I struggled to lift him to a sitting position. His T-shirt was soaked through. It was like trying to pull a bear cub out of a river.
“If we ever have children,” he announced, “they can say that their father was a methodical man.”
“Oh—great,” I said. I got him to take a sip of tea, and dragged off his wet T-shirt, a giveaway from a software company. Printed on the back was the slogan “No Whiners, No Crybabies, No Prima Donnas.”
“What will they say about their mother?” I asked, pulling a fresh shirt over his head.
Eric fell back onto his pillow. “She was serious and lively.”
I opened the screen door and stepped outside. The flagstones were cool under my feet. The moon had risen and a slight breeze rippled the greenish water in the pool. A phrase suddenly came to my mind: the amber lozenge. For the first time in many years, I found myself remembering a rainy afternoon in college when my friend Sanja appeared at my door, streaming wet, to notify me of the two simple keys that were necessary for a perfect understanding of the poet Osip Mandelstam.
“The first thing is ‘as I come to you from the rubble of Petersburg, take a little honey from the palms of my hands.’ ” As she spoke these words, Sanja stared into my face with a deranged, wide-eyed expression, holding her cupped hands outstretched. “Second,” she continued, “ ‘Psyche is slow to hand Charon the amber lozenge.’ ” She looked at me meaningfully. “The amber lozenge,” she repeated.
Later, when I happened myself to be reading Mandelstam, I discovered that the amber lozenge was actually a copper lozenge—literally, one of the coins Psyche carried in her mouth to pay Charon when she went to Hades to look for Persephone. Mandelstam’s phrase was mednaya lepyoshka, the same word for the delicious bread of Samarkand.
I had seen it in Gulya’s box, beside the glassy rock: the amber lozenge. I had given it to Eric myself; I had put it in his mouth with my own hands. Where had he gone? Whom was he seeing there?
I went back inside and fell into an uneasy sleep, troubled by distorted phrases and images from the past forty-eight hours.In our nation’s capital I partook of the deathly government salads. Handing Charon the amber lozenge, I passed to the other side. Dry laments surrounded me like a fine rain. I saw a white pawn become a queen, and the spirits of Sophocles and Euripides embattled in a fatal spelling bee.
In the morning, Eric was completely recovered. He didn’t remember anything at all.
All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion. The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) was established in 1925. Tajikistan became its own Soviet Socialist Republic in 1929. Samarkand, a predominantly Tajik city, remained in Uzbekistan.