Dancer from Khiva, The

by Bibish

  The father of the bride used to buy a decorated chest for the dowry from the craftsmen at the bazaar. When a bride is preparing for her wedding, the groom’s parents come to the house to find out what is needed for the celebration. The bride must not show herself to the groom’s parents, she sits in a different room at this time. If she needs something, she gets someone to tell the groom’s parents about it. They brought my mother a plush coat as well (she wore it for twenty more years!) and black maskhi (the kind of boots you put galoshes on).

  Before she goes away to someone else’s home, the bride holds a party for her girlfriends. Two of her close friends go round the kishlak, inviting everybody. They come with presents: either little headscarves with lace sewn round the edges, or soap, or scent. The bride accepts the presents and hands them to a close female relative, who puts them all together in one place.

  The girls sit on the floor in a room and talk. They talk to each other about their dreams, marriage, their work in the collective farm fields, and all sorts of other things. After a meal they dance. Then the bride brings the big bundle and unwraps it in the middle of the room. Everybody gathers round and looks at the presents from the groom’s family and discusses the presents, saying if they like them or not. One says:

  “When I have my wedding, I’ll ask for that as well.”

  Another says:

  “But I’d rather ask for this,” and she points to something that is regarded as fashionable in the kishlak. It’s not surprising that all the women in the kishlak dress the same, like incubator chickens.

  The girls stay for the night. One of the bride’s friends sprinkles henna into a deep cup, asks for a little bit of eau de cologne, and dilutes it with warm water. Then they wind cotton wool onto a matchstick and start writing the initials of the man they love on the backs or palms of their hands or on their breasts. They write: “I love you! You are my only one.” Or: “Where are you, my beloved?” And they sit there until the morning, waiting until the henna dries.

  The bride is prepared for her wedding night by a close female relative. This girl has to be beside the bride at all times. The bride heats water and washes her body, she shaves the hairs under her arms and below her stomach.

  A special person prepares pilaf for dinner. The bride sits in the room with her friends. This is when the older women come in and bring the wedding dress. Then everyone else except the bride has to leave. The women say:

  “Little daughter, it’s time already, take off your clothes and put this on.”

  When she hears these words, the bride starts to cry and runs away into another room, the women follow her, saying:

  “Don’t cry, little daughter, it’s the same fate for everyone.”

  Another says:

  “Be glad that someone has taken you. Some have to sit and wait for their happiness.”

  They help her to take her clothes off and put the wedding dress on her. The girls weave the bride’s hair into braids—sometimes two, sometimes forty, but never one. The women put an embroidered skullcap on the bride’s head, cover her forehead with a special white headscarf, and say:

  “Oh, Allah, now she will come out like the bright moon! Save her from sorrows!”

  The reason for the headscarf is this: On the wedding night the bride and the groom sleep together, and then the groom demands that the bride must prove her virginity. Then the bride takes the white headscarf off and wipes herself with it. If the headscarf is stained red with blood, her virginity is proven.

  After dressing the bride, they feed her to keep up her strength. Although at that moment she is so excited that she doesn’t want to eat at all.

  The people sit in the house and wait for the bride to come out, then they set off to take her to the groom. At this time everyone is eating the pilaf.

  When the bride appears, her girlfriends surround her, throw a big bedspread over her quickly, and lead her out into the street, where a crowd of people is waiting. Everybody asks the father to bless his daughter.

  Then they take the bride to the groom.

  They stop the car not far from the groom’s house. One of the groom’s relatives makes a small fire, and the car has to drive through it. This is an ancient custom from pagan times, now with automobiles instead of horses. And they won’t let anybody cross the road in front of the car—that’s a sign that there won’t be any children.

  They help the bride to walk, because she can’t see anything under the bedspread. Someone from the groom’s side stands at the door and speaks the names of his relatives. The bride has to bow in honor of each of them. After this ceremony they say to the bride:

  “Step into the house with your right foot!”

  And the bride steps across the threshold with her right foot. This custom is passed on from generation to generation.

  After the wedding, if everything is all right in the house, they say:

  “Good, the bride stepped into the house with her right foot!”

  If something unpleasant happens, they reproach her and say:

  “You stepped into the house with the wrong foot!”

  I was married in the same way as all our women. This ritual is handed down with only small changes from one generation to another.

  By midday on the day of the wedding, the older women had put my white dress on me and tied the white headscarf—the sign of virginity—on my head. They covered me with a big bedspread and told me to cry. But at that moment I couldn’t cry, and that was all there was to it. My neighbor tugged on my arm and said:

  “Cry, cry, or else people will talk—they’ll say she’s leaving her own home and didn’t shed a tear.”

  “I can’t cry,” I answered.

  She pinched me. “You fool, who’s going to see, you fool! Just yell, that’s all, at least pretend.”

  I had to pretend I was crying, although under the bedspread I was really happy that I was getting married.

  Before I got into the car, my father blessed me. And then we set off in seven cars and one truck with the cupboard, the divan, and the carpets. We crossed the border and arrived in the town of Tashauz. They were waiting for us there. We slaughtered a sheep and held the wedding.

  The guests didn’t sleep that night. They were waiting for the result from us two. In the morning my husband had to demonstrate my virginity to them. That was when I started crying for real. My husband tried to calm me down. We both wondered how we could get out of this situation, what we could do. Suddenly Ikram said:

  “That’s it, I’ve got it! Bibish, don’t you worry, everything’s going to be all right. I’ll be right back. You lie here and wait for me, all right?”

  Ten minutes later he came back with a paper bundle. He locked the door from the inside and then unwrapped the newspaper, and I saw a piece of fresh meat. He took the white headscarf off my head and began rubbing the meat on it. It made a bloody stain.

  Early in the morning all the relatives gathered in the yard. Ikram came out with the headscarf that he had rubbed the meat on and showed it to them. They praised him and said: Well done, well done. Then they all went home. Thank God, everything went off all right. Nobody suspected anything. So thanks to my husband I was saved, otherwise his family would have driven me out and sent me back to my village like a dog.

  After the wedding, some of the relatives stayed to clean up the house and wash the dishes. They told me that when they were on the way to make my match, before they reached our house they asked people what I was like, was I married or not, whether I came from a good family or a bad one. Fortunately, almost everyone had said: “She’s always studying,” “Her father’s a teacher, a simple, good man,” and some had simply said: “How should we know what she’s like?”

  It was a good thing they didn’t meet any bad people, the kind who like to spread rumors everywhere.

  So now my eternal suffering was over, I thought, although I didn’t know yet what was waiting in store for me.

  But first I want to tell you about the house I
found myself in after our poverty at home. Ikram’s parents had a very big house, with every convenience. The yard was surrounded by a brick wall, and it had two terraces and a vegetable garden of five hundred square meters. There were various types of grapes growing in the garden. The early ones ripened in May and June, and the autumn ones were still good until November: they hung there in big bunches. A lot of vegetables and very beautiful flowers were growing there.

  For the winter my father-in-law used to hang the grapes up in a special room, with the bunches a little distance away from each other so that the air could circulate. In winter the temperature in this room never changed. They stored the grapes there and ate them until the next harvest.

  They used to store melons too. They made special nets out of reeds and put each melon in a separate one, then hung them up.

  There were ten rooms in the house: a huge entrance hall, four bedrooms, a nursery, three drawing rooms, and a study with books. There was also a big kitchen and a corridor. The toilet, bathroom, and garage were in the yard. Their car was a Zhiguli. All the rooms had carpets lying on the floor and hanging on the walls and Romanian furniture.

  I couldn’t keep up with cleaning all the rooms, but on the weekends my mother-in-law helped me.

  After the wedding my mother-in-law came into our room and said:

  “Daughter, from tomorrow we’ll go back to work. In our house there’s always a routine: breakfast at eight fifteen, lunch at one fifteen, dinner at six fifteen. My husband likes cleanliness and order. We have a lot of guests. You must always be on time and try to be neat, do you understand?”

  I only nodded in reply, because in our parts it is forbidden to talk to your mother-in-law and father-in-law for a whole year, for a whole year you can’t say anything, only nod your head and explain yourself with gestures, as if you were deaf and dumb. That’s the custom, all the young brides in our parts follow this rule. But since Ikram’s mother was Russian, she didn’t want me to walk around without saying anything all the time. She said with a smile:

  “You can talk to me. In our home we don’t have any little children to translate your gestures, so say what you want to say, otherwise you can go crazy saying nothing for a year.”

  And I used to talk to my mother-in-law, but not my father-in-law, for about a year and a half I observed the rule and said nothing to him.

  The next morning I got up and brewed green tea for myself. We had breakfast together. While we were sitting at the table, my father-in-law took an apple, showed it to me, and said:

  “Look, I’m holding an apple. It doesn’t matter if it’s big or small.” He divided the apple into four parts with a knife. Then he gave one to each of us and said: “You always do the same thing, you mustn’t think only of yourself. Whatever comes into your hands, share everything with the people close to you. I hope you understand now that we are one family.”

  My mother-in-law worked as a senior economist in a trading depot, and my father-in-law was the deputy head of a materials and equipment supply office. My husband worked as a welder and automobile mechanic, he didn’t have a standard working day. As she went off to work, my mother-in-law said to me:

  “Bibish, I tell you what: we’ll be back from work for lunch, because we work nearby. You make us some thick rice pudding.”

  Then they both went off to work, and Ikram stayed with me.

  I said to him:

  “Do you happen to know how to make rice pudding with milk?”

  “How should I know? You ought to have asked my mother.”

  “I’m shy.”

  “You’ve no need to be shy.” And he went off to sleep.

  And like a fool, I walked backward and forward between our room and the kitchen a hundred times. I thought that first you poured water into the pan, then put in the rice and added milk. I put the pan on the gas. I waited. Nothing was happening. I threw in a lot of salt. I turned the gas right up and the rice stuck and burned. I began to cry. It was already almost one o’clock. God only knew what it was I’d made.

  I wanted to make tea and went out into the yard to throw out the old brew, and just then the gate opened and my father-in-law came in. Wearing a suit and tie and hat. When I saw him I was so nervous I caught the spout of the teapot on the door. While he was in the toilet I found some newspapers, wrapped the broken teapot in them, and threw it in the garbage, then quickly made the tea in something else. Before I got used to him coming home, I broke the spouts off seven teapots.

  My mother-in-law came, looked at me, and asked:

  “Why have you been crying, have you had a quarrel with Ikram?”

  I didn’t answer.

  At one fifteen I put lunch on the table. My father-in-law ate one spoonful and said:

  “Thank you, daughter, it’s very good.” And he immediately pushed his plate away. I tried it as well and found I’d oversalted it.

  My mother-in-law realized everything, stood up, went into the kitchen, and three minutes later she brought him an omelette. As she was leaving to go back to work, she said:

  “Bibish, let me write down the recipe for the simplest dish for you: meat broth.”

  She took a piece of paper and wrote: “Pour cold water into a saucepan and put the meat into it. When the water begins to boil, put in onions and carrots and add potatoes about half an hour later, or they will be overcooked.”

  “Take the recipe and make it for supper.”

  When they left to go to work, I started wandering round the rooms. They had a huge house, ten large rooms: you could get lost in it. Naturally—my father-in-law used to be the director of a brick factory. He built the house himself.

  The furniture was good, there were seventeen expensive carpets and crystal, everything was clean and tidy. I checked the little cupboards and tried to sort out the postcards and some papers and documents. I cleaned the medicine cupboard and threw out the medicines that were no good because they were out of date. I remember my mother-in-law was annoyed after that and said to me:

  “I can’t find the addresses and the documents I want. Bibish, you shouldn’t have touched them, they were lying in the same place for thirty years, and now I have to search to find them!”

  As well as that, I found an entire crate of condensed milk and drank down a whole can—glug-glug-glug—straightaway. I wanted to open another can, but I stopped myself. I’d have plenty of time to do that. So I swallowed one can every day, and soon there wasn’t a single can left in the crate. When my husband saw the empty crate, he laughed:

  “It’s good you drank it or else it would have just laid there, as if it was on exhibition.”

  But let’s get back to the recipe.

  As it got closer to six o’clock I started making the meat broth for dinner. I poured cold water into the saucepan, just as the recipe said. When the water started to boil, I put in the meat, and then the onion and carrot straightaway. I saw the scum had already stuck to the meat, it was terrible, oh, what was I supposed to do? I turned off the gas, poured out the boiled water together with the scum, and washed each piece of meat under the tap, but the scum was so stuck to the meat that it just wouldn’t come off. In short, all the tasty, fatty water went down the drain. I’d spoiled everything again. I was really upset again and I cried. The time was already six o’clock. Ikram’s parents came home from work. I laid the table. My mother-in-law immediately sensed that I’d done something wrong. She quickly boiled some potatoes and put them on the table.

  The next morning, my mother-in-law was hurrying to get to work. As she was going, she left me a recipe for a sauce. This time I made the sauce exactly the way it said in the recipe. When it seemed to be ready and smelled good, all I still had to do was to salt it. There were lots of little boxes in the cupboard on the wall in the kitchen. Out of curiosity I opened every one of them. Tea, sugar, spices, and in one of them I saw a fine white powder. I thought: Oh, who would have thought salt could be as fine as that? I took a tablespoonful of the “fine salt” and put it in t
he cauldron. The sauce in the cauldron started to froth. I tried it and it tasted disgusting! If only you knew what I’d gone and done! That “fine salt” turned out to be household soda!

  Without even waiting for my mother-in-law to arrive, I poured out all the sauce into the rubbish bucket and then began waiting, terrified, for the evening, when everybody would come back from work. I was thinking: Now they’ll come home and scold me. Nothing was ready to eat, everything had gone into the garbage. But no, I was wrong, nobody scolded me because of that. When my mother-in-law came into the kitchen, I was so ashamed I almost fell through the floor and I cried again. She said:

  “Something’s happened again, why are you crying?”

  Ikram answered her for me:

  “Mom, it turns out she doesn’t know how to cook at all, and that’s why she’s crying.”

  “Never mind,” said my mother-in-law. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You’ll learn. To avoid all our wages just being thrown in the garbage every day, I’ll do the cooking now, like before, Bibish, and you you’re going to help me, all right?”

  After that incident my mother-in-law always prepared more food for dinner in the evening and put what was left in the refrigerator so that lunch for the next day was ready.

  And that was how she cooked for a whole twelve years, until we moved to Russia. My father-in-law used to reproach her for it:

  “Who’s the daughter-in-law in our house, you or her? Raya, you’re really spoiling her!”

  The relatives used to rebuke her too:

  “All the housework should be done by the daughter-in-law, you paid her parents a bride price for her!”

  But my mother-in-law never scolded me or tormented me the way mothers-in-law in my native parts do. The two of us got on very well and arguments happened only rarely, but you know yourself that always happens in a family: there are joys and sorrows—everything together. My mother-in-law mostly spoke Russian, and she spoke Uzbek with an accent.