Dancer from Khiva, The Page 8

“Congratulations. If you have time now, tell me your address, I’ll write to you.”

  I gave him the information, and he promised to come. After that call I felt very happy somehow. I didn’t know why. But afterward I thought: What will he come for, just for a visit, or with some serious intention that he didn’t have before? I didn’t know what that might mean. Perhaps he would come just to see his uncle?

  I finished the first year. Studying was sometimes easy and sometimes difficult. We had classical dance and ballet as subjects. And I found time to write stories too.

  The Story of My Stories

  I began writing stories when I was still in school, probably in about the sixth grade. When I showed them to my father, he said:

  “Very weak, write more.”

  But my mother said it would be better if I helped out around the house, and she beat me with the broom for my laziness. I liked to read books: Alexandre Dumas, Chingiz Aitmatov, Valentin Katayev, the Mahabarata, Aziz Nesin, Veniamin Kaverin, Maxim Gorky, all the volumes of The Thousand and One Nights. I read all these books in the Uzbek language.

  My mother was angry, she said a book wasn’t bread, it wouldn’t feed you, and she forced me to do the housework. Because in our kishlaks mothers prepare the girls for marriage: they teach them to cook, to wash and clean. So that the future relatives won’t say: “Her mother didn’t teach her anything!”

  In Central Asia the moon shines brightly at night. You can read by it. And so I made use of this moonlight and enjoyed reading various different books when everyone was sleeping. My mother scolded me again and said I could damage my eyes like that.

  Once I took the stories that I had written in college to show to our teacher of Uzbek literature. He was surprised and said:

  “You write stories, and I write poems! Leave me your story, and I’ll read it at home.”

  Soon he brought back my story with corrections, invited me to the literature department, and said:

  “I phoned a friend of mine, he’s a writer, and he’s published several books. I told him about you. Go to see him tomorrow with your story in the Union of Writers at five o’clock. And today I invite you to go for a walk with me.”

  I was upset by this announcement. I didn’t know how to answer, because I hadn’t expected anything like that from him. He sensed that and he said:

  “We’ll go to a certain place not far from here. All right?”

  I was tormented by doubt: where was he planning to take me? Perhaps he invited all the girl students on walks? I didn’t know what to do. But then I thought: All right, here goes—and I agreed.

  He met me after classes and we set off. He told me where he was from and how he had gone to study in the teachers training college, he told me that he wrote poems and presented a program about literature on the television. He said he had six children, and his wife didn’t work.

  We walked on like that, and I was wondering where he was taking me. But he kept telling me about his poems and about different writers.

  And then we came to something like a park. A place surrounded by a wall. Inside there was a long road, and at the end of it I could see some kind of building. When we came close, I saw a terrace with lots and lots of beds on it. And I saw toys dangling from the ceiling on strings.

  I didn’t understand anything at all. There were children of different ages. Some of them were lying on the beds, and some were sitting up.

  My teacher said:

  “Hadjar, why have you stopped? Let’s go closer to the children, don’t be afraid, they’re not infectious.”

  And he said hello to the children and the women in white coats. Then he sat on one boy’s bed and asked:

  “How are you, little one, getting better? Do your mom and dad come to see you?”

  I looked around. Some of the children were playing with the dangling toys. Some were lying there indifferently. They didn’t feel like laughing.

  We stayed there for a while and then walked to the door.

  On the way back he said to me:

  “Some of these children are paralyzed, some have various diseases of the bones. Some of them are beyond any help by medicine. They’ll never be able to walk. Now you have seen them, Hadjar. So thank God that you walk across the ground on your own feet and always feel them supporting you. What is our grief in comparison with theirs?”

  I felt so ashamed of my bad thoughts about my teacher!

  The next day at five o’clock I was already at the Union of Writers. I found the office where the man my teacher had told me about was sitting. He asked me:

  “Have you been writing for long?”

  “Since sixth grade.”

  “What exactly?”

  “Stories.”

  “What about?”

  “About life. About childhood.”

  “All right, show me.”

  I took two ordinary exercise books out of my bag and showed them to him. He leafed through one and read a bit, a very little bit, then said:

  “Well, what can I tell you? I agreed to see you, because someone I respect a lot asked me to. But your stories don’t follow any rules. So don’t be offended, but there’s nothing I can do to help you.”

  I came back from seeing him as desolated and shattered as if someone in my family had died. When my teacher heard that they hadn’t taken my stories, he said:

  “Don’t stop, write anyway. I’ll have a word with the head of a literary studio so that you can go to the classes there.”

  “But I was told quite clearly that I don’t know any of the rules about how to write!”

  “Well, you’ll learn that from him.”

  But I didn’t go to those classes. Although I did go back to writing, but only much later.

  One day I got a letter from Ikram. He asked if I had got married and asked me to write to him about it. I was very surprised: did he want to get married then? Oh, if he did, that was good! I answered that I was studying and I hadn’t got married yet. That soon I was going to transfer to the extramural department and study to be a teaching methods specialist. And I also wrote that I was going to go home to Khiva and get a job, and I told him when the exam session for extramural students would start and gave him my home address so that he could write me a letter there later.

  I went back home to my kishlak and got a job as the leader of the club in the collective farm. I organized dance circles and knitting circles. The pay was pitiful. Several times I tried to organize a show, but apart from a few school students, no one came to the club, and their parents forbade them to come to the dance circle. And so for days on end I had nothing to do at work: I mostly felt tired because of the heat, I used to lock the door of my office from the inside and sleep all the time, there was nothing else for me to do.

  Our people don’t like to go to clubs. After working in the cotton fields, they’re tired. They come home and there are six or seven children there, they have to cook the food and do the washing by hand, clean the house and look after their husbands, listen to the reproaches from their fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law. And do a whole load of other things as well. In short, they don’t really have much time to amuse themselves. And so I didn’t have anything to do. The East, as they say, is a “subtle business.” I used to lock myself in the club, turn on the music, and dance on the stage alone. Completely alone!

  After a while the exam session began. I went away to Tashkent and phoned Ikram from there. He said that he would come to see me.

  I got a telegram from him. I met him at the airport, and we went to the hostel. We had a meal together, and then we talked and remembered. Then we went for a walk to the park. And he asked me to go to Turkmenia with him to meet his parents. I didn’t agree: what was this all about? He said he had decided to marry me. I told him that in our parts we weren’t allowed to show ourselves to the groom’s parents and relatives before the wedding. He replied that his family was European and cultured: “Just say yes, I’ll only introduce you to them.” He tried to persuade me fo
r so long that in the end I finally agreed.

  I passed the exams and two days later we went to Turkmenia and arrived in Tashauz. We walked up to their house and rang the bell. The gate was opened by a beautiful woman with blue eyes, his mother. She said hello and hugged me. We went into the house. In the hall there was a man sitting at a table, my future father-in-law: a nice-looking man with curly hair and long eyelashes: no wonder his nickname was Pushkin, from the Russian word for “fluffy”—pushisty. He said hello to me as well.

  Their lounge was very beautiful, there were large, expensive Turkmen carpets on the floor and the walls. There were fruits lying on a large crystal tray on the table: pomegranates, apples, tangerines, grapes. To this day I still remember the way Ikram’s parents looked me over from head to foot. But I just looked at the fruit and wondered when they would go to bed.

  Then my father-in-law said:

  “She’s come straight from the train, after all. Raya, show her the bathroom and everything else.”

  His mother showed me to the bathroom. While I was getting washed, it turned out that Ikram’s father asked him when, where, and under what circumstances we had met, who I was and where I was from. It was a good thing we’d agreed in the train what to say if they asked.

  Ikram went to get washed after me. And while he did, his father asked me questions. I told him everything just the way it was, apart from the intimate details, because I couldn’t tell him about that. Finally Ikram’s parents went to bed. As soon as they’d gone, I threw myself on the fruit and ate almost all of it in an instant. Afterward I felt ashamed of behaving like a ragamuffin. But what do you think—I was a student, I wasn’t paid much, and before that, my mother had a lot of children, where would we get tangerines? I’d never even dreamed of having any.

  Early in the morning Ikram’s father said he wanted to invite all his relatives and consult with them about me, that is, tell them that his son had brought a girl home. He began phoning them all and arranging a meeting at eight o’clock in the evening. Ikram noticed that I was nervous and he reassured me:

  “Just don’t you worry, I’m with you, everything will be all right.”

  Aunty Raya made pilaf. At eight o’clock in the evening all the relatives came and we had supper together. The relatives looked me over from head to toe as well. One woman said:

  “How can she do that—turn up here at the house before the wedding, if my daughters did that, I’d rip their heads off! Don’t you have any parents?” she asked me.

  I didn’t answer. What could I say? I was in the wrong. Then another woman joined in:

  “How shameless!”

  But a third one answered them:

  “Let’s not make the situation any worse. Let’s talk about what we’re going to do now.”

  Ikram’s father said to me:

  “Daughter, you stay here for now, and Ikram’s mother will go to your home in Uzbekistan to see your parents and tell them that you’re here.”

  Then one of the women came up to me and said:

  “Since you came here on your own two feet, there won’t be any wedding! So don’t even dream about it! What nerve.”

  After that attack I was really upset, and I wondered why I’d listened to Ikram and gone there . . .

  But then I took a grip on myself and answered:

  “I beg your pardon, of course, but in the first place Ikram brought me here to introduce me to his parents, and I’m not the one asking him to marry me. In the second place, my parents think that I’m still in Tashkent, at the exam session. In the third place, if I stay here without getting married, the rumors will spread in my village that I’ve run away from home, and because of me my younger sisters won’t be able to get married, because people will blame me and say: ‘If their sister ran away from home to God knows where, what can you expect from the younger sisters?’ And so I had better go back to Tashkent. Pleased to meet you, good-bye.” And I tried to leave.

  Ikram’s father stopped me and said to them:

  “What did I ask you all to come here for? Let’s decide what we’re going to do.”

  The relatives said:

  “You should ask your son what to do. He’s the one who brought her into the house.”

  Then they all crowded round Ikram:

  “Do you love her?”

  He answered calmly:

  “Yes, I love her, and she’s the only one I’ll marry.”

  Then one of the women said:

  “All right, if that’s how it is, it’s fate. Now we have to go to the kishlak with her. We’ll ask the neighbors there about her parents, who they are and what their daughter’s like. If it turns out that everything is all right, we’ll make a match and hold a wedding. If they say she’s not from a respectable family, then we’ll come back here. We don’t need a bride like that. And you, my dear, don’t stay here, go home. On Saturday we’ll come to make the match.”

  In short, my first meeting with them ended with them coming to the conclusion that they would only hold a wedding if I turned out to be from a respectable family.

  They gave me money for my journey, and I went home. When my parents saw me, they wondered where I could have come from. I told them I had passed the tests and the exams, that the exam session was over and everything was all right. After that there were no more questions.

  The long-awaited Saturday arrived. I was waiting for the match-makers, but for some reason they were late. I waited in the morning, until dinner, then until supper. I was worried, I thought it was all over, they wouldn’t come now. But just then a car stopped in front of our house. I was so happy I jumped up and down and shouted so everyone in the house could hear:

  “They’re here! They’re here! Hooray!”

  My brother looked at me in surprise and asked:

  “Who’s here?”

  Then I realized what a mess I’d made and said I didn’t know. I was frightened in case my parents found out that I hadn’t just been in Tashkent at the exam session . . .

  The matchmakers came into the house. The custom in our parts is that when the matchmakers come in, the girl has to hide. Even though I’d already seen them all, I followed the custom and hid in the room. My parents weren’t home, they were at a wedding. We had to send my brother to get them. An hour later my mother and father arrived and saw strangers in their home. They introduced themselves to each other and began talking.

  My father said:

  “She’s still studying.”

  The matchmakers answered:

  “What of it, she can carry on with her studies after the wedding too. Let’s hold the wedding soon, we’ll do everything in two weeks.”

  “Why such a hurry? I’m not ready yet. I have to buy a few things, there’s no chest, no cupboard, no carpet, no divan. I can’t do everything in such a short time. And then, you know yourself—you probably have grown-up children too, you have daughters who are married and daughters-in-law—according to the rules you have to come another two or three times to discuss everything: the bride price, the expenses, and so on.”

  But they replied:

  “We live very far away and we all have jobs, we don’t have the time to come here again. If we lived nearby, that would be a different matter. And as for all the rest: the cupboard, the carpet, the divan, the money—that will be taken care of. We have all that at home.”

  My father said:

  “I don’t doubt that you have everything, but my daughter is not a widow, to be leaving the house with nothing. According to our custom—you must understand me—she has to leave the house with all these things, and everybody must see it, because everybody does that, those are our rituals.”

  The matchmakers agreed to bring everything, including the bride price. And they also said that Ikram loved me. It was a good thing they didn’t give me away and say I’d been at their house. And it was good they didn’t know that I danced! Or else there wouldn’t have been any matchmaking.

  Thirteen days later my wedding took pl
ace.

  Just as they’d promised, the matchmakers brought everything: the trunk, the divan, the cupboard, four mattresses covered with expensive material, four cushions, two sheep, thirty-six liters of cottonseed oil, forty kilograms of rice, forty bread cakes, forty kilograms of apples, one crate of candy, two crates of vodka, two crates of champagne, two crates of lemonade, two seventy-five-kilogram sacks of flour, four different pieces of cotton cloth, each ten meters long, a suit for my father and one each for my brothers, an expensive shawl for my mother, and material for dresses for my sisters. And there were clothes and shoes for me too, four gold rings, a chain, earrings, and a bracelet.

  A bride price had been paid for my mother in her time, too. They drove her and all her girlfriends on a tractor pushing along a trailer with all her dowry lying in it. The tractor rattled as it drove along—trrr-trrr-trrr!

  The Story of How Weddings

  Are Celebrated in Our Parts

  In general, in our parts a wedding is a complicated ritual. In the towns now everything is simpler, of course. But before, the customs used to be strictly observed, the way they still are in the kishlaks. The groom’s parents used to bring the bride price: rice, flour, cottonseed oil, candy, the bride’s clothes, pieces of cloth for dresses, satin, brocade, crepe de chine, shawls. They used to bring pieces of cloth for kurpachkas (padded mattress covers), for mattresses, cushions and blankets, quilts.

  When my parents got married, there was no cotton wadding to stuff the cushions, the mattress, and the quilt. In their spare time the women all sat in their houses picking the bits out of the cotton and making wadding, even though it was forbidden, all the cotton had to be given to the state.

  The old women from the kishlak came to sew the dowry for the bride. First they beat up the wadding with two sticks to make it fluffy. Then they laid out the material with the reverse side upward, spread the wadding over it evenly, covered it with cloth, and stitched it across. They sewed a blouse out of white cotton material for the first wedding night. After the work all the women were treated to a meal.