Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  They’re friendly and easy to talk to, and they’re also, it turns out, picking up a guide with a Jeep in Khorog. He’ll take them through the Pamirs on the exact route I’m looking to follow. Our dates line up perfectly. I start laying on the charm.

  An hour later, we all have our names on the list to get plane tickets tomorrow, and they’ve given me their driver’s e-mail address, although not, unfortunately, an invitation to join their trip. We shake hands in the parking lot, and laugh about how strange this whole ticketing process has been.

  As soon as they’re gone, I’m alone again. I’m suddenly aware of how few opportunities I’ve had lately to talk to people in the only language I’ve mastered (English), and how wonderful human interaction can be. I kick myself for not inviting them to dinner. If I prowl the most popular foreign restaurants in the city, will I casually bump into them?

  I send an e-mail to their driver and wander off toward the world’s tallest flagpole, which is one of Dushanbe’s tourist attractions listed in my guidebook.

  Joanne and Maarten’s guide e-mails me back almost immediately. He tells me I can join a trip starting in two days with a French guy who “loves photography,” for the reasonable price of $1,000 U.S. I’m hesitant about dropping so much money to go on a ten-day road trip with a man I’ve never met. What if we hate each other? Also why the mention that the Frenchman “loves” photography? I tell the guide I’ll think about it.

  I stroll through gardens with rosebushes in full bloom. I stare enviously at couples walking hand in hand and groups of friends laughing on benches. I miss my friends in Shanghai, my friends in New York, my parents, my brother and sister. I think about the sun setting where they are.

  I check my phone and find four new e-mails from the guide. The first assures me that the Frenchman is a “kind” person. The next successively lowers the price, and implores me to leave Dushanbe in a shared taxi first thing in the morning. My response is noncommittal: I’m not eager to take a bumpy twenty-four-hour taxi ride, and plus we might get tickets for the flight.

  I finally find the tallest flagpole in the world. It’s not hard: it towers over everything around it. It’s easily the tallest flagpole I’ve ever seen, though it does occur to me that a country doesn’t build the world’s tallest flagpole by accident. Dictators love world records, and I imagine Tajikistan’s search for a practical, economical feat.

  “Biggest mall!” “Too expensive.” “Longest roller coaster!” “Too logistically challenging.” “Tallest flagpole?” “We could probably swing that!”

  My phone buzzes. I have two new e-mails, each insisting that this is the “final price.” The second is almost half of the original offer. I sigh. What’s the right price for a ten-day vacation with a stranger?

  At the Tajik Air office the next day, Joanne, Maarten, and I are third, fourth, and fifth on the list to buy tickets. We learn, miraculously, that tomorrow’s flight is tentatively good to go. But as we cluster around the ticket counter, I begin to fear that the list won’t be the final say.

  Each time the ticketing agent calls out the next name on the list, twenty people shove passports and cash under her nose. A phone beside her rings incessantly, and when she can ignore it no longer, she halts the whole ticketing process to answer it.

  I try to join the other customers in annoyingly foisting my passport and money on the overwhelmed ticketing agent, but Joanne and Maarten wait calmly off to the side. They appear resigned to our fate: either we’ll get the tickets, or we won’t, and they seem convinced that pushing and shoving won’t affect the outcome.

  A young man in a Tajik Air uniform appears behind the counter and starts talking to us in English.

  “You want to fly to Khorog?” he asks.

  We tell him we do.

  “Don’t do it,” he advises.

  “What?!” we exclaim.

  “I did that once.” He shakes his head. “Scariest flight of my life. You fly so close to the mountains, and the plane—have you seen it?” We’ve seen photos. “It’s so small, and so old, you wonder how it can even fly. I’ll never do it again.”

  Not a great sign when the airline’s own employees are too afraid to take the flight.

  “There’s a Dutch woman with a travel TV show,” Joanne says, “and she also took this flight. And she has done so many crazy, scary things—climbing mountains, and jumping off of high places—and she also says this is the worst thing she’s ever done.”

  Much of my conversation with Joanne and Maarten has been devoted to how much I’m dreading this flight. I’ve seen photos of a tiny prop plane that looks less like a photograph of aviation achievement and more like the backdrop for an inspirational quote about persevering against all odds. I’ve read accounts by people who swear the plane was about to crash. Now that I’ve spent twenty-four hours trying to get this ticket, I’m wondering if I even want it.

  “You can drive,” the guy offers. He frowns. “But actually, the roads are so bad. Cars crash all the time. You heard there was a huge mudslide recently?” I haven’t, but I nod knowingly. “I think driving might actually be more dangerous than flying.”

  Well, at least there’s that.

  But then he brightens. “Actually, there is one safe way to get to Khorog: ride a horse.”

  Miraculously, the ticket woman calls us over. She shoos away the other customers, who beseech her to skip us. Suddenly, we’re filling out endless forms, handing over cash, holding tickets in our hands.

  Outside, we exchange giddy high fives and congratulate ourselves on our good fortune. But then I look down at my ticket and see a problem.

  “My name is spelled wrong on the ticket,” I say.

  Maarten checks his. “So is mine.”

  “Me too,” Joanne chimes in.

  We debate: Do we go back inside? Will we risk losing our tickets? Maybe they’ll let us on the flight with minor misspellings?

  But I once booked flights for a vacation with Anton and forgot that on his passport, his name is written with Belarusian spelling instead of the Russian spelling he usually uses. When we got to the airport, the airline wouldn’t give him a boarding pass.

  Joanne, Maarten, and I go back inside and push our way back to the counter. The woman asks us how many mistakes we have on our tickets.

  How many mistakes? “I guess . . . two letters are wrong?” I say.

  The woman takes our tickets, stamps each twice, and then hands the tickets back, mistakes intact. She goes back to the swarm of would-be ticket buyers.

  “Wait!” Maarten exclaims. “Our names are still spelled wrong!”

  A guy standing next to us intervenes. “Each stamp means one mistake is okay,” he explains. “So, two stamps: two mistakes.”

  “But I also have two stamps,” Joanne adds, perplexed. “And I only have one mistake.”

  “Well,” he says, “you have an extra, just in case.”

  The next morning, Sayed knocks on my door at five forty-five. He hands me a pile of clothes that his mother hand-washed and line dried, and then drives me to the airport as the first streaks of pink spill over the horizon.

  Later, I will re-read my e-mails with Jafar and cringe when I see that my revelation in the Ukrainian restaurant didn’t result in immediate behavior modification on my part. Instead, I will re-watch myself happily taking Jafar up on each generous offer of hospitality—that would be great if your mom could hand-wash my clothes! well, if Sayed happens to be up at 5 a.m. and doesn’t mind swinging by the apartment!—when I should have politely declined.

  As I walk into the Dushanbe airport, a stray dog gallops past me, chased by two members of the Tajik army.

  The flight to Khorog leaves from a tiny terminal directly adjacent to a pancake stand, where I find Joanne and Maarten waiting, along with a large, graying Frenchman and his Tajik fixer—a local foreigner can hire to translate and help navigate foreign environments.

  The Frenchman wears a heavy-duty vest and serious sunglasses. He tells us h
e works for an NGO and that he’s taken this flight many times before.

  “Is it terrifying?” I ask.

  He shrugs with breezy indifference. “It’s worse on the way back,” he says, “because right after you take off, you have to make it over a very tall mountain. Sometimes, the pilot only clears it by a few centimeters.”

  We hear a loud bang. “Ah, well, they shot the dog,” he says.

  Joanne, Maarten, and I are horrified.

  “You saw the stray dog running around?” the fixer asks. We nod. “So, they killed him.”

  “But why?!” I ask.

  “It’s a big issue in Dushanbe right now,” the fixer explains, “what to do about stray dogs. Because we can bring them to shelters, but there are too many of them, and in Tajikistan, people don’t adopt animals. So they’re going to get killed anyway. Why not now?”

  I nudge the conversation toward another pressing concern: the renegade general.

  About a week ago, a high-level general learned he was about to be fired, so he rounded up some supporters, grabbed a bunch of weapons, and fled, supposedly to the Pamir Mountains, where we’re heading. On his way out of town, the general and his cohorts shot up an ATM in Dushanbe. Travel blogs have been warning tourists to stay out of the Pamirs, where he’s rumored to be hiding out. Should we be worried?

  “Yes,” the French guy says dryly. “Like you, this general is very lazy. So he’s also probably traveling through in the back of some guy’s Jeep.”

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s joking.

  We’re still not sure if the plane will fly—a slight change in the weather in Khorog could ground us at any moment—but a calm, clear sky hangs over Dushanbe, portending good fortune.

  The check-in process is slightly frazzling, and then my suitcase exceeds the weight allotment, which isn’t surprising, given that all it would take for my weight to drop below that of my suitcase would be a minor case of food poisoning, but then I have to pay a luggage fee to one specific guy, in U.S. dollars, which I don’t have, so I have to track down an ATM dispensing U.S. dollars in Tajikistan. I find one in another part of the airport and make my withdrawal quickly: the story of the general is still fresh in my mind.

  Joanne and Maarten’s guide, Januzak, texts me to say he’ll meet us at the airport in Khorog. I allow myself one last wistful moment of mourning for my would-be travel partner V, and then the Tajik Air staff announces that we can begin boarding.

  The French NGO guy raises his eyebrows. “Now,” he says, “the real adventure begins.”

  5

  A Ten-Day Road Trip Through Tajikistan

  My first glimpse of Januzak, the guide who will take me on a ten-day road trip through Tajikistan, is of a yellow Ukraine baseball cap bobbing up and down behind the concrete barrier surrounding the tiny airport in Khorog, Tajikistan.

  On particularly energetic bobs, the hat is accompanied by a man grinning and feverishly waving, seemingly at us.

  “I guess that’s Januzak,” Maarten says.

  This is where I’ll part ways with this lovely Dutch couple—in the two days since we met in a parking lot, they have come to feel like close friends. Joanne and Maarten will travel with one of Januzak’s employees and take a slightly different route through the Pamir Mountains; I’m going in Januzak’s Jeep with the Frenchman Januzak has described repeatedly and possibly two times too many as “kind.” Januzak is also bringing his assistant guide, a woman named Norgul, so I can “have a friend.”

  To be fair, my French travel companion does seem pretty kind. His name is Vianney, he sells champagne, and he insists that I sit in the front seat.

  “I was in the front all of yesterday, and the day before,” he says. “You should sit up front, to see the views.”

  “No, no!” I exclaim. I point out that he’s over six feet tall, while I, at five two, can barely see over the top of my rolling suitcase. I’m used to being tucked into small spaces; the long-limbed, on the other hand, are constantly being boxed in by vehicles and society.

  “Really,” he insists. “I’m almost tired of the view!”

  We agree to a compromise: Vianney will sit up front for now, but we’ll switch places this afternoon.

  I look up and see Januzak has been watching this whole exchange with a look of bewilderment. I sense that he shares the prevailing view toward seating arrangements in Central Asia: men in the front, women in the back.

  As we start driving, it becomes clear that Vianney is extremely prepared for this trip.

  “Is that Mount Something Something?” he asks Januzak, pointing to a peak in the distance. “No,” Januzak tells him, it’s “Mount Whatsitmacalled.” “Ahhh,” Vianney replies, “Mount Whatsitmacalled—the place where the animal thingamajigger comes from!” “Yes,” Januzak confirms.

  “Wow,” I venture. “You know a lot about this area.”

  Vianney demurs. “Oh, it’s just years of reading about it in books.”

  This area is called the Wakhan valley, and I have not spent years reading about it in books. I thought I would be okay with this, but Vianney’s almost childlike sense of wonder and unbridled enthusiasm for the landscape outside our windows kind of shames me, and again reminds me that you’re supposed to read the guidebook before you show up somewhere. I feel like the Idiot Abroad to Vianney’s Kofi Annan.

  What I do know is what I can see, which is that the landscape really is spectacularly beautiful. The Panj River beside us is a vibrant turquoise trickling between red rocky banks.

  A few trees and bushes form a thin strip of green that lines each side of the river. Beyond that, the desert swallows up the landscape, which rises into mountains on the far side of the water.

  We pass a group of tiny children dressed up like adults for school. They can’t be older than five, and they’re trying to hitchhike. (When we ask Januzak about this later, he seems confused by our question. “Is it safe for kids that young to take rides from strangers?” we ask. “Of course!” Januzak declares.) The girls wear white button-down blouses tucked into black skirts; the boys, doll-sized suits. They almost look like they’re headed to a baby networking event.

  “Salam alaikum,” Vianney calls through the open window. The kids shriek with laughter.

  “Is that correct?” Vianney asks, turning to Januzak. “Salam alaikum is how to say ‘hello’?”

  Januzak shrugs. “For a man, salam alaikum is nice, but if it’s just a woman, salam is okay.” Vianney and I flinch at “just a woman,” and the car fills with awkward silence.

  “I’m glad you’ll be spending the week with me and Audrey,” Vianney finally says smoothly. “By the end, hopefully, you will realize that men and women are equal.”

  Our journey begins in the Wakhan valley, a verdant oasis sprouting from the banks of the Panj River, and then we’ll climb up into the Pamir mountain range, and finally end in Kyrgyzstan at the foot of Peak Lenin, the highest point in the former Soviet Union.

  Each geographical feature serves as a kind of border. The Panj divides Tajikistan from a tiny strip of Afghanistan that juts in between Tajikistan and Pakistan. This nonsensical cartographical move comes from nineteenth-century tensions between the British and Russian empires, who had decided that they were best equipped to exploit the resources of Central and East Asia and were busy colonizing all the territory they could conquer. As each expanded toward the other’s holdings, an increasing number of public beheadings and military skirmishes threatened to lead to all-out war, so they carved out Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor in the name of peace. It served as a barrier between Russian Central Asia and British India. In typical colonialist fashion, they expended exactly zero energy worrying about the implications for people living there.

  The mountains surrounding the Wakhan valley are best known for killing the people who tried to cross them. On the Afghan side, there’s the Hindu Kush, whose name supposedly means “killer of Hindus.” The British hoped the Pamirs, on the Tajik side, would serve a similar purp
ose if the Russians tried to invade India.

  Januzak is small in stature, but outsized in personality and stores of energy, which he replenishes with disconcertingly frequent naps. We return from a mini-excursion or bathroom break to find Januzak in the throes of REM sleep. When we knock on the window, he leaps out of his seat. “Okay!” he exclaims. “Let’s go!”

  Norgul is much calmer and quieter. She’s the Melania to his Donald, silently absorbing the occasional bursts of casual misogyny from the back seat. She has long hair and a pretty smile, and, at least in English, she’s fairly shy, I suspect because she doesn’t feel as comfortable in it as she does in the four other languages she speaks (Tajik, Farsi, Kyrgyz, and Russian). Januzak is training Norgul to be a guide for his company, which I hope means that one day she’ll be driving and relegating men to the back seat.

  We make an odd foursome, the two guides, plus the ever-cheerful, seemingly unflappable Vianney, and then me, conversationally engaged but frequently carsick.

  Januzak and Norgul both come from Murghab, one of the poorest cities in Tajikistan, surrounded by one of the poorest provinces in Central Asia. The areas that we’re traveling through are unfortunately just as remarkable for their striking natural beauty as they are for their poverty. Eastern Tajikistan is isolated and remote, cut off from the rest of the country by mountains that can only be crossed by the terrifying flight or the only slightly less harrowing roads. It’s also been hard-hit by war: first the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, and then a five-year civil war that ravaged Tajikistan after independence.

  As in Kyrgyzstan, NGOs tried to combat poverty by introducing tourism. The NGOs arrived in the early 2000s, bringing training and resources, and tourists soon followed. Adventurers were drawn by the soaring, snowcapped peaks and moonscapes in between.

  Januzak’s first clients were a group of Swiss tourists with whom he could not communicate. He drove them through the mountains in a borrowed car, and by the end of the trip, he decided he’d found opportunity. He taught himself English however he could: impromptu lessons with his clients on long drives, the odd book, but, he’s quick to stress, no formal English-language schooling. He packs his English with jokes and expressive outbursts. He substitutes sound effects for words he doesn’t know and is eager to expand his vocabulary. “How do you say, when they take a man’s whooooop and cut off the chiup?” he asks us. We teach him the word circumcision. “Yes,” he says, shaking his head. “Very painful.”