Fish- a History of One Migration

by Peter Aleshkovsky

  The jack kept screaming, but did not move. An appalling pipe protruded from his gut and bit into the earth like a fifth leg. Wild donkeys inspire fear even in mares: the donkey penis exceeds any imaginable size and their lust is proverbial. Once he smells a ripe mare or a jenny, the donkey male will chase after her until he can copulate and pour out his passion. Mares are sometimes saved by their long legs, but the little animal’s stamina is boundless, and he is known to chase his unfortunate mate for hours until she surrenders in exhaustion.

  The donkey is a symbol of hard-work and stubbornness, but also of lust. One of the frescoes we found depicted a jack with an erect penis and a Soghdian beauty dancing before him. Akó Boria, a big fan of dirty tales, told us an ancient legend about a lascivious queen, her black slaves, a mountain jack, and a wise king who eventually had the loose woman publicly executed.

  I continued to stand there at the edge of the gorge: the sight both attracted and appalled me. It was the first time that I had seen that, and for some reason I felt more sympathy for the desperate jack than for the hysterical jenny thrashing about on her chain. The jack seemed to be about to die right before my eyes: he had strained his voice and could only groan hoarsely, all in a lather, his legs trembling like flour in a sieve. Finally he sobbed, his fifth leg went limp as a piece of intestine and was sucked back into his belly. The monster was instantly transformed into an endearing pet. The little donkey stood—his legs collected back together in resignation—like a senior citizen waiting in line for his single bottle of cotton oil. Twitches and spasms still roamed about his body, spit dripped slowly from his lips, and his ears hung limp, like bug-eaten cabbage leaves, but he was humble and spent. The jenny, as if someone had whispered “Freeze!”, instantly calmed down and returned to nibbling on her grass. She did not give the gorge another glance.

  The old man returned from contemplating the mysteries of nothingness, expelled his processed weed and black spittle, wiped his mouth with the corner of his robe, and creakily stood up. He piled the saddlebags back onto the donkey’s back, hoisted himself onto the saddle, stuck out his right foot and toe-tapped the beast on the neck, directly under his right ear. The donkey took a step, then another, and was on his way to the market. I watched them for a while, and then turned around to face the digs. Akó Ahror was standing on the mound of excavated dirt; he appeared to have been there for quite a while, restrained by his natural tact from coming down to me. He was grinning like a boy.

  “Vera, come here.”

  I climbed the dirt. He touched me on the shoulder lightly with his hand, pointing the direction in which he wanted me to go, but on impulse I clung to him, hugged him around the waist, and pressed myself against his chest. He patted my head and said, “Vera, you are like a daughter to me; I loved your dad.”

  I felt good and peaceful, and I laughed happily, and he laughed too.

  . 6 .

  When I got home that evening, we had guests: Mom’s brother and his wife, Uncle Kostya and Aunt Raya, had come to visit from Kurgan-Tyube.[12] Uncle Kostya was a construction engineer; he first worked on the Karakum Hydroelectric Station, and later moved to Kurgan-Tyube to build a dam on the Vakhsh River and stayed there. Uncle Kostya was a member of the Party and held a middle management position, and Aunt Raya worked as an accountant at a concrete plant. They came to see us, as Uncle Kostya announced, on the occasion of my mom’s birthday, even though it had been a month before. On the table stood bottles of cognac and champagne, Aunt Raya brought all kinds of candy, Mom had baked a cabbage pie, and everyone was making shashlyk[13] in the yard.

  The day stuck in my memory because such feasts happened very rarely, only when Mom’s brothers came to visit. Her other brother, Uncle Styopa, lived in Dushanbe, and could not come that time; he served in the Border Guard Command and it was very difficult for him to get leave, even for his sister’s birthday. We feasted outside under the apple tree, and then Uncle Kostya produced an old Radiola and we played records. I devoured Aunt’s candy, and she could not tear herself away from Mom’s quince jelly; she must have eaten two pints of it at least, and Mom later sent a gallon jar home with them. It was fun; the grown-ups drank a little but it was not a custom in our family to get drunk, and the half-empty bottle of cognac would be shut in a kitchen cabinet for a long time and then disappear altogether, I don’t remember where, I only remember that the glass was completely covered in dust by then.

  The following day was Saturday; we went to swim in Zaravshan, lay in the water, splashed, and Aunt Raya waded in the shallows looking for gemstones. She wanted to find a real agate, but she never did. Uncle Kostya and Aunt Raya collected rocks. I had never been at their place, but just heard about their collection, which included rare amethyst and crystal geodes. The collection was lost in ‘92 when we all had to flee together from Tajikistan; Vovka, their son, could not save it.

  At the lake, Uncle Kostya recalled how after every expedition my dad would send him interesting samples.

  “Most of my collection and its best specimens came from your dad,” he told me.

  He spoke of my dad easily and joyfully; Mom did not even tear up. When they were young, they roomed together for a while, and they had a lot of shared memories.

  Then I asked about akó Ahror, since he had said he was Dad’s friend, and Mom responded with surprising praise. Ahror Djurayev used to work as a driver for the geological exploration group, but when his wife fell ill he had to look for work in Panjakent. Dad helped him, and his group gave Ahror their decommissioned little truck. Ahror restored the car himself and now it fed his entire family: the Djurayevs had five children.

  “Our nurses visit Mukhibá Djurayeva every other day, give her injections, but it is a sad case,” Mom said and added that Ahror cares deeply for his wife and children, runs home during his lunch break to check on them, and tends the chickens after work.

  Meanwhile, the girl from Petersburg somehow gained Lidiya Grigoriyevna’s trust and went to work in the conservation lab, in my old job. Ahror, being a true gentleman, did not say anything to Lidiya. The girl began to pursue Ahror, found pretexts to be alone with him, bathed naked in the haús, making sure that he would see her when everyone had gone to the dig and the base camp was deserted. Lidiya Grigoriyevna was not aware of any of this. The little bitch sucked up to her, and then went off seducing her beloved behind her back.

  Ahror could not stand it anymore, went to akó Boria and asked him to send the girl to the dig. She was called into the boss’s tent. There she said that Ahror raped her in the orchard and that she thought she was pregnant. This spelled real trouble. Akó Boria conferred with his wife api Valiya: in those days, a thing like that could be catastrophic for an expedition. Students from Moscow and Leningrad paraded around the base camp in bikinis and swimming trunks, and the Tajiks, unaccustomed to such frivolity, had long been spreading rumors that the archaeologists were running a whorehouse and even asked akó Boria to have his female students for the weekend, “to go for a ride,” and offered good money for them.

  The girl was transferred to the dig. In the morning, as everyone was loading into the truck, Ahror gallantly offered her his hand to help her climb in. She swung around to slap him on the cheek and screeched:

  “Go back to your Lidka! I don’t want to see you anymore, you lusty jackass!”

  Ahror froze. Silently he climbed into his driver’s seat, waited for the last person to load up, and took everyone to the dig.

  Lidiya Grigoriyevna immediately got a report of what happened. At night, I accidentally witnessed their conversation: Ahror stood with a stony expression while Lidiya Grigoriyevna passionately talked at him. Suddenly she threw up her hands, and I heard the word “why?” repeated many times. At first he did not react at all, just stood there like a concrete pylon, then turned and walked to his car. Lidiya Grigoriyevna leaned against the wall of her lab, and followed him with her gaze; her eyes, filled with tears, shone with adoration. He walked straight ahead, calmly, and did not onc
e look back.

  The girl caught a bad case of dysentery a couple days later, after eating too many peaches from the ground. I am sure she did not wash the fruit, even though we were reminded to do so almost every day. First they took her to our hospital, but when it became clear that her diarrhea was not responding and she needed stronger antibiotics, she was put on a plane from Samarkand to Leningrad.

  Akó Ahror was the one to take her from Panjakent to Samarkand. With the same stoicism as when he fasted, he accepted the task, lifted the blanket-wrapped girl into the cab, threw her suitcase into the bed, and drove off. The little truck took several hours in the heat to get there, and they were alone, the two of them in the tiny cab. The girl was very ill, running a fever, and they must have had to pull over many times.

  The next morning he was standing there by the truck, polishing it with his rag. They got to the airport without trouble; once on the plane, the stewardesses took care of the girl, laid her on unfolded seats, but it was still Ahror who carried her up the steps to the plane. He answered all the questions with his soft Tajik pronunciation, but there was metal in his voice, metal of that special tempering that makes black Chust[14] knives.

  I always got a smile from him, even that day, and I wanted to ask him about Dad and the truck, but was scared. I never asked.

  That night at dinner I could not hold it all inside anymore and told my Mom everything about Lidiya Grigoriyevna, akó Ahror, and the girl from Leningrad.

  “You are growing up, Vera,” Mom said. “Women don’t just walk away from men like Ahror.”

  . 7 .

  Akó Ahror became my first love. It was a strange love. When my classmates shared their own love stories I only half-listened. Their kisses and walks home, looks and dances at the Culture Center did not interest me. Boys tried courting me, one even walked me home from school, but we had nothing to talk about, so he walked with me for a while and then stopped. Once I overheard them calling me “Fish.” I do not know why, but the name did not seem insulting; let it be fish, especially since it also happened to be my zodiac sign. I made a note of it and that was all; I had no idea that I would yet hear that name many times. I existed outside of my peers’ social circle and did not go to their parties.

  At the dig, among students and researchers, I was curious and motivated, and they treated me as an equal, did not make advances, and left me alone as Ahror and Lidiya’s friend. I did not feel jealous. I saw him every day, and that was enough. He would nod at me, say something trivial, I would smile in return, and he would melt into a smile too; what I dreamed of when I was alone was private, and my dreams were enough for me. Curiously, I also fell in love with Lidiya Grigoriyevna. She could feel it and returned my affection; she was always kind to me, and, I suspect, knew my secret, but still I did not have it in me to go back to working in her lab.

  In September I became friends with Galya Dolzhanskaya, an archaeologist from Petersburg. Galya was twenty-five; a small, skinny woman, she could swing a pick-axe at clumps of packed earth for an hour or two non-stop. The four of us—Galya, Asya Rakhimzhakova, a fourth-year Leningrad University student on field-practice, Nar, an Ossetian boy thrown in to dilute the female company, and myself—began work at the Kul-Tepe burial mound, a kilometer from the main dig. Ahror would first drop people off at the shahristan , and then take us and little

  Karim- boi , Galya’s son, to the mound. Karim’s name was Karen in his regular life; he was five, and the locals refashioned his Armenian name to suit their taste. Galya was divorced and had no choice but to bring her son along on the expedition.

  Karim messed around in the dug-up dirt, made caves, dragged a tin truck about on a string, and never, never got in anyone’s way. At ten, when the sun would begin to get hot, Nar boiled a kettle of tea over an open fire and beat on an empty bucket with a spoon to summon us for a tea break. We drank green tea with flatbreads; Karim-boi went to take a nap in the shadow of a canvas lean-to, and we worked for two more hours until the lunch-break, the worst two hours, when the heat was intolerable. At noon, Ahror would come to drive us back to the base camp, where we were supposed to eat, but the heat was such that food held no appeal, and instead we drank more tea with flatbreads and slept through the worst of the day. I did not go home for lunch; Mom was on duty at the hospital anyway.

  Just as often, we stayed at our dig: in the heat, one is inclined to languor, and a bumpy truck ride to the base camp seemed like torture, so we just collapsed onto the mats under the canvas next to Karim-boi , who was accustomed to sleeping during the day, and fell asleep ourselves. If we had any energy left, we walked to the closest irrigation canal, about half a kilometer away, and temporarily washed the dust off ourselves with warm water poured from a ladle. Our bodies dried off instantly. We came back to the blessed shade of the overhang completely dry, with no memory of the joy of washing, but with a bonus: the endless field that stretched to the foothills was planted with grapes, and we never missed a chance to half-fill a bucket with dark red moscato grapes or the long, brownish-green “lady’s fingers.” We lay in the shade, mashing the fruit with our tongues, and often that was enough for our lunch. Our faces and hands got sticky. We lined up by the water cistern, washed again, and crawled back to the shade to toss and turn on the hard mats and wait for the heat to subside. We lay around in our swimsuits, which gradually crusted over with salt, and every day after work I rinsed mine out; it dried during the night and greeted me in the morning from the clothesline on the balcony—my uniform. I only put on a dress in town; I got so used to walking around mostly naked that I hated putting it on; it seemed unnecessary in our field life.

  Nar and Asya quickly became friends. Of course, the initiative came from the older Asya. Obsessed with sex, she had seen a lot in her twenty short years. Her father, a famous Orientalist, was a very old man, in his eighties. Asya said that people called him “Muallim” (Teacher). In the Soviet years, protected by his degrees and publications, he was essentially a spiritual leader, observed Fridays and the Quran, shaved his head, went to a mosque, but remained loyal and unthreatening to the regime and thus was left in peace. Their home was always filled with young men who had come to absorb Muallim’s scholarly words. Asya, his belated and beloved daughter, could do as she pleased.

  “Dad is like a little donkey,” she would say. “He’s kind and harmless, and only cares about his theology books.”

  She loved him, but still manipulated him; at home she behaved perfectly, so that she could let loose at the university or on expeditions. Men flocked to her: unattractive, but extraordinary lively and spirited, Asya surrendered without a fight. She had just emerged from an affair with a Leningrad-based osteologist, Nikolai, who went back to his family when his stint with the expedition ended. Akó Boria, who accepted the inevitable field affairs as an unavoidable evil, had no romantic inclinations of his own. He could tell an indecent joke, always peppered his porch lectures with erotic details of ancient eras, but did not stray from the path of virtue. Instead he watched his troops and tried to keep them within the boundaries of decency, a task at which he, naturally, failed.

  Following her affair, Asya was exiled to Kul-Tepe. Nar, attached to the all-female team, had not been considered as seriously as he ought to have been. This fifteen-year-old Ossetian from Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Street, a son of his mother and an unknown father, had dropped out of school, fell in with a band of thieves and was on the brink of landing in the juvenile reform system. His mother, in the hopes of cutting him off from his dangerous friends, had begged him to take a laborer’s job with the expedition. And her plan worked. Nar found a home. He had been working with us since April and shuddered at the thought of the researchers moving back to Leningrad for the winter. He was eager, stronger than an average boy his age, did any work gladly, and earned the expedition’s respect.

  Asya wound him right around her little finger. Proud of his victory, Nar threw himself into the romance head over heels, moved to the base camp and became such an eag
er adjutant for Asya, that akó Boria had a confidential conversation with her, which, of course, solved nothing. Asya put on her good-girl face, lowered her little eyes, and said in her tiny voice, “ Akó Boria, we’re just friends, and as to the fact that he spends the nights here—well, you know that this is the only place where he is safe from his old gang. I think we must take care of him.”

  In her mind, she had already worked out a plan to lure the boy to Leningrad and get him admitted to a technical college there;[15] it was a romantic plan, a magical plan, but nonetheless, it warmed their hearts. They were left alone. They were consumed with each other, so I talked mostly with Galya and especially Karim-boi . This suited Galya, who worked a lot and, at night, in addition to keeping our records, wrote a dissertation whose strange title I have held in my memory all my life, like the lyrics to a song: “Problems of Migration: The Formation of Cultural Space in the Panjakent Valley in the Early Muslim Period.” It was imperative that she defend it and receive the associated pay raise: her ex did not acknowledge Karim and refused to pay her any child support.

  I became the baby sitter: I fed the child, put him to bed, gave him baths, played his “war” and “truck” games with him when I could, caught grasshoppers for him. I felt good around him, he clung to me and said in his low baby voice, “Vera, you are my favorite baby sitter, and in Leningrad you will sleep in an armchair by my bed.”