Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  “They could look at the ramp,” Farhod explains, “and know exactly what time it was.” He walks up to the observation platform and yells at a group of middle-aged tourists until they move away. “See?”

  “Ohhh,” I say, trying to sound like I do.

  “Ulugh Beg also found mistakes in other maps of the stars,” he says, “and Samarkand was too far away to know that!”

  “Wow,” I say, nodding knowingly but thinking that doesn’t quite make sense.

  “I think you don’t understand,” Farhod snaps. But he doesn’t explain anything further.

  In an adjacent history museum, Farhod walks me through a brief overview of the Timurid Empire, under which the aforementioned Timur united much of Central Asia and the predecessor of modern Uzbekistan. The Uzbeks claim Timur because he came from Samarkand and because he makes a good hero, as long as you end the story after he handily captures most of the Middle East and before he heads off to China to die of a cold.

  Farhod leaves me to wander around the compound. Wedding parties line up to take photos outside of the museum. In Central Asia, people take wedding portraits in front of local tourist attractions. On the day of the wedding, the couple rents a limo and heads out with the wedding party and a photographer, and stops at each famous site. Many brides have taken to wearing white wedding dresses, often with what looks like forty pounds of tulle and sequins, instead of the colorful traditional Uzbek gowns. Outside of the observatory, I find a solitary acrylic fingernail on the ground. I think of the bride, wandering around Samarkand on the most important day of her life, trying to conceal one finger in her wedding photographs. Or maybe her friend brought spares? Or maybe the fingernail belonged to her friend? Or maybe losing a fingernail is good luck at an Uzbek wedding?

  Farhod and I visit tombs and madrases and the Registan, an iconic plaza of buildings dating back hundreds of years and Samarkand’s main tourist attraction today. Farhod delivers more rousing lectures on Uzbek culture and history and then, with almost psychopathic abruptness, goes back to messaging someone on his phone with his screen tilted away from me.

  The buildings are stunning. They’re elongated two- and three-story structures of sand brick with arched windows and ornate entrances made to seem larger with a series of inlaid arches. Turquoise cupolas and columns extend from the façade, which is the real draw. The façades are covered in tiles every shade of blue and turquoise imaginable, which come together to form intricate patterns and designs that punctuate the architectural undulating shapes.

  Farhod soon abandons any pretext of likability. He begins quizzing me on names he mentioned earlier and, when I can’t remember them, declares that he won’t read my book. If I appear anything less than blown away by each detail he tells me, he overexplains it until I feign shock and awe.

  “The pomegranate symbolizes fertility,” he says, gesturing to a piece of embroidery.

  “Oh,” I say.

  He stares. “You knew that already?”

  I tell him I didn’t.

  “A pomegranate has many seeds,” he continues. “So it’s like fertility.”

  “Ohhhhh,” I reply, mimicking the way my Chinese teacher taught me to vocalize the hardest rising and falling third tone. “Pretend that someone has just explained something to you that you never understood,” she would say.

  “See?” Farhod asks.

  “Yeah. Wow!”

  “You didn’t understand at first.”

  Farhod asks me if I’m married, and I decide to tell him the truth. I’m not exactly sure why. I guess I’m getting tired of lying about having a fiancé, though part of me is sad to see him go. I’ve built up quite a backstory about my fiancé, Alex, or sometimes Mikhail, whom I met in college, or followed to Tajikistan, or caught in a candid moment while he was crossing the street in Almaty. Before the copy shop incident, we always plan to marry on my birthday, and he’s from Ukraine, or sometimes Belarus. Often he’s just Anton or Oleg with a few details changed, or not.

  Unless there’s a visa on the line, I don’t really enjoy or excel at lying. My fiancé only opens the door for more lies, when people follow with polite questions like what’s his name, how old is he, can I see a picture? This last one has left me scrambling to pull out my phone and pull up the first picture of a male I stumble on, which is often Vianney or Januzak, and sometimes a stranger in the background of a picture I was taking. “Yes,” I say, “we like doing this thing where he walks by a Lenin statue while I stand across the street taking a picture of the statue and trying not to catch him in the frame.”

  “No,” I tell Farhod. “I’m not married.”

  “Boyfriend?” he asks.

  Again, I opt for honesty. “Nope.”

  “And you’re twenty-eight?” Farhod exhales sharply and shakes his head. “You need to get married soon.”

  I shrug. “Maybe.”

  “You need to start having children soon,” he implores.

  Sometimes I wonder if firefighters evacuating a woman from a burning building in Central Asia would run into a room and yell, “THE BUILDING IS ON FIRE! By the way, do you have a husband?”

  Most of the time, people here ask if I’m married in the same way people back home ask what I do for a living. They’re just trying to find something to talk about. I wonder if they ask if I’m married because they assume I don’t have a career, and if men get asked about their job.

  I’m more uncomfortable when a man asks me about my marital status. I sometimes worry he’s doing preliminary research before proposing. Or worse.

  But I’ve started to doubt a made-up fiancé would save me from serious harm. If someone wants to harass or hurt me, would he stop if he believed I was betrothed? People who engage in predatory behavior aren’t known for making sure potential victims are single. I’ve never heard a catcaller yell, “BEFORE I TELL YOU HOW GOOD YOUR ASS LOOKS IN THOSE SWEATPANTS, LET ME CHECK TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE EMOTIONALLY AVAILABLE.”

  I reason I can just as easily ward off unwanted advances by standing up for myself. But Farhod’s unwanted advances aren’t romantic overtures, they’re pep talks from the 1950s.

  “Why aren’t you married?” he asks.

  “Because I haven’t met anyone I wanted to marry,” I say honestly.

  “Do you want children?”

  “Maybe someday.”

  This line of questioning continues throughout the tour of Samarkand’s extraordinary turquoise-tiled tombs and its ancient Jewish cemetery.

  “If you don’t have children, who will take care of you when you’re old?” he asks as he leads me through the graveyards.

  Who will take care of you if all of your children die? I want to ask. At first, these inane inquiries roll off my back, because I could not care less what Farhod thinks of my future plans, but over the course of the day, his questions close in on the nerve he’s trying to hit.

  It’s not that Farhod is the first to suggest there’s a bomb strapped to my chest, counting down to the moment I hit menopause. There’s nothing he can say that I haven’t freaked out about a thousand times. In leaving for this trip, I felt I had made as much peace with these questions as two decades of internalized patriarchal notions would allow.

  But there’s something about being alone and having to explain deeply personal things to strangers that’s making me question everything again. I understand that in Uzbekistan, these questions don’t sound like an interrogation, and they’re not intended to function as the relationship equivalent of graphic health warnings on cigarette packs. But from an American perspective, they make me feel deeply flawed and irredeemably unlovable.

  I try to steer the conversation toward Samarkand, Uzbek history, or anything else, but I sense resistance.

  “Look!” Farhod finally explodes. “You’re twenty-eight. If you wanna have kids, you have ten, maybe eleven good years left!”

  This unsolicited advice is probably not medically sound and also one of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me.
<
br />   In the movie version I’ve played out in my head countless times since this day, this is the moment when I demand that Farhod pull the car over, get out without paying him, and walk off while describing, in very vivid languages, the numerous and varied ways in which he can go fuck himself. I’m vulgar and defiant in every way that he thinks a woman should never be.

  In reality, I force myself to sound cheerful. “If it happens,” I tell him, or I don’t know, maybe myself, “it’ll happen.”

  The train to Samarkand had opened me to the possibility of falling in love with the iron horse; on the overnight train back to Tashkent, this romance comes to a screeching halt.

  The first train charmed me with its old-fashioned comforts: the compartments and carpets and tablecloths. I expected the overnight train to resemble a miniature apartment on rails, like the flights to Dubai with personal showers.

  Instead, I find four bunk beds crammed into a tiny compartment filled with three large men. This is not the gender ratio of the slumber party I’d envisioned.

  The first thing that becomes clear is that there’s no space for my suitcase, which is as bulky and easy to maneuver as a rolling fourth grader. But the men gamely lift it over their heads and attempt to shove it into some unseen bulkhead, while I fret that they’ll drop it on their heads and get concussions and/or ruin their hats.

  They try to tell me something in Russian, which is probably, You have eighty pounds of crap in a suitcase with the buoyancy of a stack of folding chairs, but I don’t understand. I look around helplessly. I realize that I had been right about trains: they’re horrible, inefficient modes of transportation that trap you inside scary compartments with too many men and not enough room for your beauty products. I wonder if it’s too late to hitchhike back to Tashkent.

  A young boy pokes his head into the hallway. “Do you speak English?” he asks.

  “Yes!” I cry. He has kind eyes and a soccer jersey, and he is here to save me.

  The boy’s name is Husein, and he’s traveling to Tashkent to take the IELTS exam with his identical twin, Hasan. To me, they look nothing alike.

  “You’re twins?!” I ask.

  They look surprised. “You didn’t notice?” Hasan asks.

  The boys have arranged for me to swap spots with a random man in their cabin, so now, instead of spending the night with three Uzbek men, I’m spending it with two Uzbek teenagers, and their managed chaperone.

  Husein jumps down from the top bunk and stands next to Hasan so that I can verify their twinness. Husein is more solidly built than his brother, who still has a child’s long, bony limbs and soft torso.

  “You’re not . . . fraternal?” I ask delicately. “Fraternal means . . .” I try to look up the word in my dictionary, but Hasan cuts me off.

  “I know,” he says. I nod. This bodes well for his IELTS.

  IELTS stands for International English Language Testing System and is pronounced, nonintuitively, i-elts. Knowing this is often an indication of direct personal experience with the exam, which is administered to some 2.5 million test takers each year.

  IELTS is supposed to measure a nonnative speaker’s English language proficiency, and foreign students applying to most schools in the UK, Canada, and Australia are required to submit an IELTS score. In theory, it should be the kind of exam you can’t study for, but in practice, a sufficiently motivated student will study for a Rorschach test.

  Husein and Hasan are taking the IELTS because they want to apply to a British university that recently opened a satellite campus in Tashkent.

  They’re in luck, because the one skill people regularly pay me for is teaching kids how to take standardized tests.

  I spent most of my twenties eking a living out of teaching, a job that I often performed begrudgingly and for an entire month each spring, under the influence of allergy medication that was not nondrowsy.

  A friend originally told me to move to China because he said I’d be able to make a living teaching English part-time, leaving me plenty of time to write.

  “But I don’t know how to teach English,” I said.

  He rolled his eyes. “It’s the easiest job in the world. You just talk to people.”

  Ten minutes into my first lesson, I realize he has been very mistaken.

  Talking to someone for two hours is the easiest job in the world if that someone is a friend, a lover, or famed linguist named John McWhorter. When the someone is an eight-year-old girl, keeping up a conversation for two straight hours becomes a Herculean task.

  “But wait!” you say. “My niece is in second grade, and when I hang out with her, the whole day flies by.”

  To that I say, yes, but her mother isn’t hovering in the next room with the expectation that your conversation will be vaguely academic. You can’t color. You can’t pull up a YouTube video. You can’t gossip about your brother or furtively pump her for family secrets. If you tried to make one hundred and twenty minutes of uninterrupted small talk, unaided by a parent or a snack or even a comfortable pause in the conversation, you, too, would begin SAT tutoring.

  Like most IELTS takers, the twins are nervous about the speaking section. In it, they’ll have to sit across from an IELTS examiner and speak for a full minute in response to such inspired questions as “What is your favorite animal?” and “Can you describe one of your neighbors?”

  I offer to help them practice, and Hasan eagerly accepts, handing me a book of questions. Husein, I sense, would be just as happy if the helpless American girl he rescued from a compartment of strange men didn’t return the favor by giving him homework.

  Through their practice responses, I learn that both twins dream of celebrating New Year’s under the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I learn that Husein’s hero is Cristiano Ronaldo, and Hasan’s is his father, because he worked hard and gave has family a good life. Hasan asks me if I’ve tried plov, and I tell him I have, and he asks me if I ate it with my hands, which I didn’t.

  “You should eat it with your hands,” he tells me. “Because it’s a different taste than eating it with a spoon, and it makes you full faster.”

  Hasan and Husein have been sent to Tashkent with their father’s friend, a quiet man in his twenties who’s brought along two liters of beer to entertain himself and an equal amount of Pepsi for the boys. He speaks a little English but is shy to use it.

  When we take a break from studying, the chaperone asks me, through the boys, if I’d like a drink. I gratefully accept, assuming he’ll pour some beer into a plastic cup. Instead, he reaches for the Pepsi.

  It’s a weird moment, and it shouldn’t be a big deal, but for some reason it feels like I’ve been, perhaps not slapped in the face, but pinched lightly by a cooped-up sibling. I realize that it would never occur to him to offer me beer, because I’m a woman.

  I’d seen our carriage as divided into two worlds: the adults (the chaperone and me) and the kids (Hasan and Husein). But I realize that, while the other three see a divide, they’d lumped me in with the children. I’d seen the chaperone as my equal; he probably hadn’t seen me as his. I look at his freshly pocked face and naked wedding finger and realize I might be older.

  And I know, I know, I know, that he didn’t mean any harm, and that it’s a cultural difference, but for a brief moment, I’m so, so glad that I get to walk out of this world at the end.

  The twins are quadrilingual: they speak Tajik, which they use at home; Uzbek, which they learned when they got to school; Russian, which they studied later; and English, which came most recently.

  Their school offered two tracks: one in Russian, the other in Uzbek. Both boys started out in Uzbek, but Hasan switched to the Russian program in middle school.

  “And you could understand everything, right from the start?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. Both boys strike me as fairly serious, but Hasan more so. Each word he uses feels so measured and carefully chosen that I feel like I’m talking to a forty-five-year-old who has aspirations of one day running for
public office, and not an Uzbek teenager.

  “At first, it was very hard,” he tells me.

  “So how did you take your classes?”

  “Many of the students speak Uzbek, so they helped me,” he says. “But it was very hard.”

  I take a sip of my Pepsi.

  They ask me what I’m doing in Uzbekistan, and I tell them that I’m traveling through the former Soviet Union, studying Russian, writing about it, the whole spiel, minus the Russian boyfriends.

  Hasan stares at me thoughtfully. “What are your interesting stories?” he asks.

  Wow. That’s a damn good question, and I do not have a good answer.

  “Umm . . .” I try to think. “I did a comedy show in Kazakhstan? Opening for a meditative drum circle?”

  Blank stares. “A meditative drum circle is like . . .” I think. “Do you want to see pictures?”

  I fumble for my computer and feel deeply disturbed by the fact that the whole point of this trip is to generate and tell interesting stories, and I’ve utterly disappointed my first audience.

  “Whoops, my computer’s dead.”

  Hasan looks taken aback. “In English, if something has no electricity, you say, it is dead?” he asks.

  I think back to my days as an English teacher, when students would ask me questions about aspects of grammar no native speaker ever considers, like the difference between the simple present and the present continuous. I’d run through examples in my head, trying to tease out a pattern, or say something like, “That’s a good question. Class, can anyone give her an answer?”

  I test a few sentences to see if they sound okay: the calculator is dead, the phone is dead. “I guess so,” I say finally. The fan is dead. No, I think, that doesn’t sound right. “Well, if, it’s, like, something that holds a charge . . .”

  Hasan’s face is blank.

  “Like, something you can plug in?” I try again, but no, a fan also plugs in. “Yeah, I guess, sure,” I conclude, giving up.