“Vitenka, I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Fate.”
He took a sip of his coffee and began talking about his institute and his dissertation; he even made me laugh with a joke. He walked me to my apartment building. We walked silently through the surprisingly warm winter night. I remembered Nar, someone who had also walked me home and who also destroyed many dreams with a single word.
At the door, Viktor gave me a piece of paper with his phone numbers, work and home; I noted that he had to have prepared it in advance. I felt sorry for him. I kissed him on the cheek and dove into the building. I stopped on the second floor landing and looked out; the window pane had frosted over. I breathed on it to peek out. Viktor was standing by the sandbox, looking at my windows. Then he turned around and marched away.
The apartment was quiet as I slipped into the kitchen. I still had the headache and needed to take something for it. Gennady stood silently at the window. He turned to face me slowly, and I realized right away that he had seen it all.
“That was Vitya Bzhania; he came to bury his mother.”
“Go to bed. It’s late,” he said, and without another word, went to his room.
I swallowed a pill, sat down on a stool and held my head with my hands. I badly wanted to cry, but could not. I do not know how long I sat like that, but the headache eventually retreated. I went down the hallway, slowly, as if to the gallows, counting my steps. At my husband’s door, I stopped. Put my hand on the brass handle. The metal was cold and heavy. Everything was quiet; the children were asleep. I did not open his door, even though I was sure he was awake; I just stood there a moment and then retreated, stumbled into the nursery. I lay down in my own bed and stared at the ceiling as it stirred with the shadows from the nightlight.
The silence was so deep, deeper than at any time in my life, but for when I was very little, and my Mom, having tucked me in, would kiss my forehead, make the sign of the cross over it, as if salting the breading for the cutlets, and say, “Sleep, Vera, God will shelter you.” I strained to hear God—not even His words, just a breath—but everything was swaddled in silence, like in a thick blanket. I thought about the strange word “shelter,” and in my mind a big God walked over the world, like Santa Claus, and built shelters around people’s houses. These shelters were made of dense clouds, and God would knead them with his hands, stretch them and toss them like they slap wet pahsa at aging duvals. And these cloudy walls would instantly harden into the same incredible shapes their kin had in the sky. When God was in a good mood, the walls were funny, and if he were tired after a sleepless night, the walls came out lopsided and misshapen, like the doodles of a small child who had only just discovered crayons and paper.
Why do I have to be afraid of something invisible, non-existent, something from a different dimension? In my mind, all the horrors were here, around us, on Earth. The silence surrounding me was lulling me to sleep, relaxing me, filling my body with pleasant warmth. I even uttered my own simple prayer: “Father-God, help my unfortunate husband, my children Valerka and Pavlik, and all the people I love, especially Vitya Bzhania, and do with me as you see fit. Amen of Holy Spirit.”
. 13 .
Should i have opened that door? Rationally, I realized that Gennady, like me, hoped to turn back the clock. That night, at the window, he was his old self, the one who captivated me with his strength while lying in a hospital bed, his leg in a cast, helpless. Then, he was someone who knew how to conquer his own weaknesses and did. Now, he had fits of jealousy about my imagined lovers, but when a real competitor came around, Gennady was quiet. I, in turn, was lost and kept expecting him to act.
I told myself that I was trying to keep things together for the sake of the children; I lied to myself; I still expected something better. Vitya Bzhania, with whom I could have probably had a peaceful and sheltered life, remained my friend, selfless and loyal; Gennady was my husband. The wall between our rooms kept us apart; the door had not opened.
In the morning he was glum, refused to eat slightly burned, “carcinogenic” eggs, and, in front of the children, unable to control himself any longer, spewed out everything he thought about me: I was again a heartless cuckoo that abandons her children, a cold, self-absorbed fish.
I floated away to work with a twist of my tail, deaf to his hysteria, and spent my day with the patients. In the evening, the emergency crew brought in a jolly old man, a gnome with critical asthma. I volunteered for the night shift and stayed with the old man until morning, sleepless, cutting short his coughing fits and stroking his small, wrinkled face, which resembled a dried-up pumpkin. I bowed to him from my stool like a little wooden cuckoo from its perch on top of the clock, counting the hours—not years—that he had left to live. The gnome wrinkled his nose comically, much like Pavlik used to do when I nursed him.
Naturally, the antagonism at home had its effect on the children. Valerka seemed to have been bred by cuckoos—he hardly lived at home, spending all his time first at the plane-modeling club and later with his motocross buddies. I did not really want to know exactly how and what he rode, and he never bragged about his victories, instead locking up his trophies and medals in a cabinet. He was out late at friends’ garages and showed up dirty and exhausted, but if I were prepared to listen, he would share with me important news about how they increased the torque on Andrei Grin’s “Yava” or what kind of carburetor they installed for Dimka Moskvitin. He was attracted to nuts, bolts, springs and patched up mufflers, all of which were quickly filling up his room. Gennady’s lessons, icons, prayers and conversations about the purity of the soul bounced off him like gravel off the belly of retired colonel Didenko’s jeep, which they had covered with three layers of protective goo.
Pavlik was a different matter altogether. His father told him stories from the Bible, in his own interpretation, and from the booklets supplied to him by his new healer-friends. Under his influence, Pavlik even tried to become a vegetarian, but lasted only a week. I hoped that the boy’s interest in the occult would dissipate by itself, but Gennady had him thoroughly confused and intimidated.
One day I could not stand it any more. They were sitting in the kitchen and discussing something that had to do with seals and a trumpeting angel, and Pavlik’s voice trembled with fear.
“That’s enough. You have got the kid’s head full of the Apocalypse. Look how frightened he is—that’s a great bedtime story. Are you trying to turn him into the same sort of Jesus freak you’ve become?”
A chair flew back with a thud. Gennady was on his feet, eyes charged.
“You, woman, vessel of evil! What do you know with your chicken brain?!”
“What I know with my chicken brain is that this child is too young to think about these things and you ought to be committed, which I will do if you don’t stop traumatizing my son.”
I am pretty sure he would have gone after me—his jaw was clenched—but Pavlik jumped up and stood between us.
“How dare you insult mama, stop!”
Large tears rolled down the boy’s cheeks. He gave each one of us a long, probing look. Gennady shut the Bible and went to his room. Pavlik fell into my arms.
“Mom, he doesn’t mean harm; he was just trying to explain it to me about the end of the world. Do you believe it?”
“As far as I know, the end of the world is not coming for a long, long time. It is silly to fear it and to keep trying to predict exactly when it will happen. One should live, go to school and enjoy life. It seems that your father has forgotten how to do that.”
I put the boy to bed and stayed with him, stroking his head for a long time. He kept wanting to tell me about those damn seals and what would happen when they fell open. It made my head spin. When he finally fell asleep, I quietly stole the Bible that was under his bed—his father had given it to him for his thirteenth birthday—and tried to read it, but did not understand much. I could sense that my son was very scared and had no words to articulate his fear.
/> “Let’s go to church, and you can talk to a priest there.”
“We can’t, mom. Dad doesn’t want me to, and I don’t want to upset him.”
Something had to be done. It felt as if my youngest had been infected with the insanity bug and I was on the verge of taking him to a psychiatrist, when Pavlik, as if sensing danger, lost interest in the Scripture for a while and went back to reading books that I was more than happy to talk about.
The boy grew older, and I hoped that he no longer needed to cling to his father’s nonsense. But they still spent time together, and Gennady did not abandon his dream of converting his son. The Bible took up residence under the bed again for some time, and then quietly disappeared. So it all went, up and down, in waves, until the end of the world came. For a long time I was determined not to acknowledge its approach, but eventually I had no choice—it had arrived.
. 14 .
Things began changing in Tajikistan immediately after the military withdrew from Afghanistan. Officially over, the war had merely moved a thousand kilometers deeper into the USSR and swallowed Tajikistan.
“The first principle is: don’t enter. And the second: once you’re in, don’t leave,” Uncle Styopa said.
He had seen action and was lightly wounded, then went back to his unit, was wounded again and after that decommissioned for good. By the time he retired, he received the “People’s Friendship” medal and colonel’s stars. He solemnly flushed both down the toilet. The war had changed him; he now hated with a vengeance everything that he used to love.
He was the first to declare about the events, “Time to flee to Russia. They won’t leave us be here.”
Riots and violence in the streets in February of 1990 scared the whole city, but we still believed that things would be alright. Aunt Katya was promoted and worked now for Mahkamov, the Party’s first secretary. She did not refer to her husband’s prognostications other than as “defeatist,” and they fought constantly. Thank God Sasha by then had left Dushanbe to study at the Krasnodar Polytechnic. In her very first year she fell in love and, without asking her parents’ permission, married a local. She still lives in Krasnodar, has two kids and is doing just fine.
Tajikistan’s first president, Nabiev, elected in ’91, swept Mahkamov’s people out of every office, and Aunt Katya barely found a job in a neighborhood library. Instantly, she too was filled with defeatism and the family entered an era of peace and harmony. Together, they cursed and blamed everyone else, and I tried to stay away from their home, all the more so because Uncle Styopa’s brother from Kurgan-Tube was staying with them. Uncle Kostya and Aunt Raya escaped the front lines only by a miracle and were hoping to sit out the worst in Dushanbe. Of course they had to leave behind their things—their apartment and the famous gem collections—there was no way it could all fit into Volodya’s dorm room.
The Opposition and the People’s Front divided the country; the Leninabad and Hodjent groups (that initially came out on top) found themselves under attack by the Kuliab contingent, united and hungry for power. A civil war erupted. Nabiev abdicated the Presidency.
The streets were no longer safe. Militia fighters grabbed young men and sent them to the front in Kurgan-Tube. Students were holding demonstrations and protests. Food prices rose. The new Tajik rubl seemed a mere parody of the old Soviet ruble. The hospital began seeing people hurt in street fights. Everyone was involved: Tajiks went after Tajiks, settling old clan scores. The Exodus began.
Gennady acted as if he did not notice what was going on around us. He rarely left the apartment, where he prayed and fasted. We fasted, too, but not for reasons of faith. To buy bread one had to venture out before the curfew and navigate through checkpoints at a crawl. We queued up and still did not get the bread—sacks would be tossed over our heads, people taking care of their own. For a while, we were able to draw upon our pantry and ate pasta and cereals.
Farshidá and Sirojiddin disapproved of the unrest and tried to keep their kids off the streets, but their eldest, Afi, joined the militia and was almost never home. Farshidá prayed to Allah for his safety, just as she did for my children. During that calamitous year, we became very close and even Gennady stopped treating her like an enemy. He had one simple reaction to all my fears: “If you want to run—run, I won’t stop you.” Fear, doubt, anger and distrust took root in people’s hearts. Every day, trains of containers filled with household belongings left for Russia.
Uncle Styopa developed the plan for our retreat. He procured from somewhere a decommissioned diesel Ural truck and, together with Vovka and Valerka, they went over it, bolt by bolt. They re-painted it, built a cabin over its bed out of particle board, and welded and installed a primitive stove in it. Jokingly, I christened the truck “Noah’s Ark.”
I was afraid just like everyone else, but kept working. As long as I was paid, no matter how little, I had to work. Pavlik kept going to school, too, but Valerka dropped out and hung out in Uncle Styopa’s garage. I worried about him more, since he, at seventeen, could be forced to go to war. But the trouble found Pavlik instead. He was ambushed outside of the school.
I was at home when he returned. His face, shirt and pants were covered in blood. There were four Tajiks. They sliced his shoulder with a knife, and with a sharp metal rod pierced his cheek, gum and tongue. He could not speak, only cried and moaned, dark red spit bubbling and dripping from his mouth. His classmates rushed to his defense, and the Tajiks ran off, but the boys were too scared to chase after them.
I called the ambulance. The shoulder wound was not deep—doctors closed it easily and then cleaned up his cheek. In the evening, Farshidá came to visit, and brought Afghan mumije. In five days, Pavlik could speak again. Gennady came home late that day, looked over the sleeping boy and suddenly said firmly, “Vera, you are right. Pack up, we’re going to Volochok.”
I went to the hospital to pick up my paperwork and say my goodbyes. When many people cried, it took me by surprise, and I started sobbing myself. Old Karimov hugged me like a father.
Sirojiddin gave us the money to rent a railroad container; he and Farshidá promised to look after our apartment. I am sure they are still looking after it, and I would be happy if it became theirs. Many people sold their apartments for pennies; even more just abandoned theirs, and I sort of gave mine away as a present. Without the mullah’s money, we would not have made it: Gennady refused to sell the apartment—he believed we would come back.
Time took off at a gallop: two weeks were taken up by packing the books, the pots and pans, the furniture. Then there was waiting at the cargo station, bribes, nights spent in the lines of people waiting to send their things away. Finally, our container was shipped off. Uncle Styopa set the date for our departure. We were still of two minds: we wanted to fly and were saving up for plane tickets. And then Aunt Raya died. It was instantaneous, a cardiac failure; she went to sleep and did not wake up. We buried her in the Dushanbe cemetery: Uncle Kostya, Volodya, Uncle Styopa, Aunt Katya, Gennady, Pavlik, Valerka and I. The wake was held in her luxurious party apartment, which the war had stripped bare and turned into a refugee camp. In three days, the new owners were supposed to move in: Uncle Styopa had sold the place for two thousand dollars, which at the time was considered very fortunate.
“So, my dear,” Uncle Styopa said, “I give you one more day to finish packing; we leave the day after tomorrow.”
There were no tickets at the Aeroflot ticket office; we got on the waiting list. Someone had introduced me to a speculator—for three times the face value of the ticket we could fly out the same day. We did not have that kind of money, and that was that.
On an early March morning, the diesel “Noah’s Ark” loaded with three families left Dushanbe. Uncle Styopa drove; nestled behind his seat was the carbine with the optical sight, a present from a general who had visited in happier times.
What I did not know, a fact carefully concealed from us women, was that the men had also hidden a sub-machine gun in the truck. Th
ey equipped themselves for the worst, and it turned out they were right.
The rabid March sun shone brightly, the air was cool and clean, and a flock of wild pigeons raced ahead of us towards the mountains, like the Biblical doves. We hated those mountains—they had taken everything we had given them. And we dreamt instead of the Russian steppes, of the unknown greenness of the woods, of the earth not dried by the sun, and of people who did not shave their heads. We fled under the bright spring sun, but the fear had not yet left our hearts. The plastic windows of the living quarters were open; I stood by one of them, and Pavlik took the other. The truck shuddered over potholes: tanks and heavy artillery had ground down the old Soviet asphalt.
three
. 1 .
The sky in Tajikistan is endless. The higher in the mountains you climb, the higher its dome rises over your head. When you think about it, the indifference of the blue is no less threatening than pitch-black darkness. Silvery-grey and black—together, they make a mirror, the amalgam and the base. Only the mirror of the sky is not like common mirrors: it absorbs instead of reflecting, and watches instead of showing. Clear air, sparkling snow, melting ice caps. A human fleeing from point A to point B. The night’s silence and the day’s silence in the mountains had witnessed this thousands of times. I stood by the window gazing upwards, as if looking for a sign, a prediction of how our journey would go, but did not see anything. I accepted the inevitable with my heart—the mirror of the soul, as the Muslims call it, and grew more relaxed; I could then focus on other things, on the strained roar of the truck’s engine as it climbed the serpentine road. The Ural continued to move towards the distant point B that lay under a different sky.
The country was in the throes of a civil war. The Ural crawled from one pass to the next on mountain roads. Few cars came in the opposite direction. We were stopped twice at checkpoints, but each time the former colonel of the Border Guards quickly reached an understanding with the soldier who could have been one of his own. The truck’s paperwork was in order—uncle Styopa paid well at the Dushanbe motor vehicle bureau, and we passed without further bribes.
Fish- a History of One Migration Page 12