Ester

"Here, Esya, we have no future," Edem’s mother Emma explained to my mother. "We’re just living out our lives. That’s it. Life has become quite dreadful."

She was sitting with her arms crossed over her chest. Her once jet-black hair had become gray, and neither cream nor powder could freshen her face. Emma was an energetic woman. Once she had the belyash shop (large meat dumplings) in the market place. She did very well. Her belyashes were great – fat and juicy. When Mama reminisced about it, Emma just waved her hand.

"Oh, Esya, no more bellyaches. We’ve been driven away from the market."

“Why?" I wondered to myself. "Who could be bothered by juicy belyashes? Was that what they called perestroika?"

Edem also complained. He worked at the construction company, just as his father before him. After he had finished a big job, he wouldn't get paid.

"That’s the common practice today," he explained to me. "Now, everything’s on credit. We have to wait."

None of them had good news. Plans for the future were very indefinite. Some of them dreamed about going back to their homeland, to the Crimea. Others wanted to move closer to their children, to Russia. And they all unanimously brushed away our questions – there’s nothing good to tell you about, we’re just living out our lives – and were eager to learn about our life in America. They were surprised by the most common things that we took for granted. And none of them, not a single person could understand why we had dragged ourselves to the edge of the earth to visit a local healer. America must have everything imaginable.

I was sad. I was ashamed, as if it were me and not the local government that were responsible for my friends’ awful life and lack of hope of improvement. Besides, I understood that that was not all that had changed.

Many years ago, I was the son of a simple seamstress and a teacher. We were poor. I often envied other boys who could afford much more than I – a book subscription, a bicycle or a hockey stick. I envied them and I dreamed. Now we had traded roles. But the gap between dreams and reality had become immeasurable.

I approached the window of the veranda. From there, from the third floor, a whole panorama opened up, the whole area where I had walked time and again in my childhood. The vegetable garden… The arik where we formed our balls of clay… The corner of the building with its garbage bins… I peered and peered into that space, trying to picture everyone I knew in the past in those places. I tried to envision the boys kicking a soccer ball here, the adults on the bench near the entrance discussing the day's events, the noisy construction next door… but in vain. The colors had faded, familiar faces were not coming back, their voices couldn’t be heard… Perhaps all that did not surface in my imagination because everyone and everything had changed in this reality that had become different, faded. I experienced a very strange feeling as I was standing at the veranda window. Something was gone for good, had disappeared, had stopped beckoning to me.

At the time, I didn’t yet understand that my nostalgia, my yearning for childhood, for the settlement of Yubileyny were disappearing for good along with that strange feeling.

Chapter 8. “And here there used to live…”

Time flew by. We had been in Tashkent for almost two weeks, but the healer still hadn’t appeared in Namangan. And no one knew when he would be back. Tension was mounting; a sense of alarm was growing. Sometimes I panicked –what if we never got to see him? Our friends did everything possible to make our agonizing wait easier. They invited guests to entertain us; they took us out.

One day we visited Yakov’s countryside cottage. I climbed out of the car and gasped, “Oh, my God, how long I’ve been dreaming about this! Right by the gate there were two sour cherry trees. They were short, young, and dotted with dark-red, shiny cherries. They were not just shiny, but they sparkled with reflections of light like little stars in the night sky. They stuck out on all sides of the branches on their strong little green stems as if on the needles of a hedgehog. I rushed over to those beauties and, like a little boy, stuffed my mouth with juicy fragrant cherries.

“Just imagine… there are no such cherries in America! No, cherries there are absolutely tasteless,” I explained to the laughing Yakov.

I also remember another trip. Yakov Gavrilovich decided to show me the factory where he worked. It manufactured reinforced concrete plates for construction of residential buildings. We wandered through half-empty workshops where big machines, forklifts and elevators could be seen. Most of them were not working. The workshops’ capacity was only partially used. When I asked why, Yakov answered, “You see, we used to be a link in the chain. We received raw materials, made plates and delivered them to construction companies. Now, the chain has fallen apart, as the country has fallen apart. That’s why we don’t work to full capacity."

Obviously, these sad circumstances hadn’t affected the life of the local bosses. We arrived at the factory on Friday, and Friday was the so-called “let’s detox” day for local bosses. For that purpose, the management of the factory had had a special complex built – a sauna with a steam room and swimming pool, a gym, a billiard room, and many other things just as pleasing. But, naturally, the most important part of “detox” was “a feast.” About 30 people could fit around the table in the dining room. After taking a sauna and swim, they usually had their feast.

And that’s what happened that day. We were among the invited guests. I was “served” as an American guest, an exotic fruit from overseas, so to speak. My head was spinning from the noise, laughter, guitar strumming, endless toasts, and thick cigarette smoke.

"Well, will you come back? Will you?" one of the bosses asked from the other end of the table. The noise died away. Everyone waited for my answer.

"I’ll come for a visit," I answered somewhat hesitantly. The whole table burst into thunderous laughter.

"That’s my man! To our guest!" the boss toasted and emptied his small glass in one gulp. It must have been his tenth drink.

I wandered around the city alone in the mornings visiting street markets and once-familiar streets. I stopped at my dear Teachers Training Institute. It looked horrible. Two fires had ravaged it since I left. The second one was particularly devastating. The institute was disfigured and half-destroyed. I couldn’t look at the charred columns of the main entrance without pain. Though the building was under renovation, classes were being held in the adjoining annexes. Entrance exams were underway in the music department. Students scurried back and forth talking… I tried to get a closer look at them as if expecting to see familiar faces. I listened to their voices when I caught Russian spoken. No, even though everything was familiar, I didn’t know anyone there. And the Russian language was not considered official any longer. The inscriptions on all the plaques on the doors of the dean’s office and various divisions, shiny and black, the same as in my time, were now in Uzbek. They didn’t want anything Russian there.

Once, returning home after a walk, I decided not to wait for a bus and instead flagged down a private Moskvich car. The driver was an elderly man with thick graying hair and strong hands who held the wheel firmly. He kept his car very clean. In short, the man – his name was Volodya – was nice and of few words. He drove me, taking short cuts through narrow alleys with old one-story houses made of clay and brick. I had surely been there before but recognized nothing.

After we had entered those dense quarters, Volodya grew sad and even began to sigh. I didn’t feel comfortable asking him what was wrong. I didn’t want to. I didn’t dare. But suddenly he said, without looking at me, "Can you see those houses? The Germans used to live there, many Germans."

I was silent. I wasn’t yet sure why he was telling me about it. We rounded a corner. Volodya sighed once again and slowed down. "And the Tatars lived here… remember?"

I kept silent. Is it his business whether I remember or not? I didn’t want to tell him where I was visiting from.

"And here…" We were driving very slowly. Volodya was viewing the alley with mournful attention, as if he had come here for the purpose of paying tribute to the abodes of deceased relatives. "This was a Jewish alley… here, here and there… The Jews still lived here not so long ago, just ten years ago."

He wasn’t looking at me, and it appeared that he was talking to himself. At that point I couldn’t keep silent any longer. "So, was it good or bad?"

Volodya turned his head and looked at me with disdainful amazement. "What do you mean, good or bad? What can be good about it? All the teachers, engineers left… shoemakers, tailors, butchers… all of them real masters of their trades… Such great people were forced to leave!"

And then he began to tell me about himself, and I learned that Volodya was an engineer and that many of his friends who used to work with him at the same factory had left Uzbekistan. "And today in the republic…" He grunted again and grew silent.

Then we were both thinking about the past, about the things that had been lost for good. But perhaps for me who had left 15 years before it was not as painful as for Volodya. I had acquired something to replace it. But he… he continued to lose. He had been losing something all those years. And now it seemed he had lost hope.

Chapter 9. The Healer from Namangan

The day was breaking. Our Zhiguli rattled down a concrete road. The healer had come back at last. Yakov had arranged our visit, and we set out for Namangan immediately. I mean, we rushed there… we were flying along as if we had wings. But that would be an exaggeration since we had been driving for over an hour and were still within the city limits. The suburbs had flashed by. Now there were fields, mostly cotton fields on both sides of the highway, or meadows with cows grazing here and there. There were also gardens and orchards. Even though the soil here was clay, it was, as they said, rich, very fertile. The republic was famous for that. Out of all the people who had settled on this land, only the Uzbeks, a very industrious people, truly enjoyed its fertility. Love for the land was fostered from generation to generation. Everyone, from children to adults, worked on the land from sunrise to sunset. Bent over with hoes or shovels, old and young worked in the fields or in their gardens, digging up the beds, turning up soil, sowing, planting seedlings… I saw them toiling, those hard-working people, many times as a child. It seemed that they didn’t get tired. Being able to grow things was the main joy of their lives.

The road climbed, and we were in the mountains. We were driving directly to Namangan – via Angren and then over the Kamchik and Pungam Mountain passes in the spurs of the Tian Shan, then down into the Fergana Valley. It was an almost five-hour drive, longer if anything happened. The road over the mountain pass had never been easy, and now, in this time of troubles, this era of collapse, general mistrust, feuds among the republics and growing terrorism, it was even more difficult. Who knew what might be in store for us there? Explaining why we were going there to border guards and passport controls would be all right. But what if we bumped into bandits? People said that extortion of gas had become a normal practice. We had prepared as well as possible for such unexpected encounters. The second car followed us. We preferred to travel as a group. Yakov, our patron, sat next to the driver and supervised the itinerary. So far, everything had gone fine. Even the road, contrary to my expectations, was in good shape – not too many holes and bumps.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the window. For me, a city boy who had grown up in Tashkent and Chirchik, this was the first time I had seen the Tian Shan, except when I attended the institute at the Husman Sport Camp. I had to cross the ocean to visit my native mountains. How beautiful they were. The mountain spurs could be seen far ahead for many miles; they seemed to go on endlessly. The narrow road wound around like a huge snake. Now it was hiding behind a sharp turn, now it was plunging down abruptly, now it was becoming wider, only to narrow again beyond the next hill, and it seemed that heavy rocks would squish the sides of the car. Now and then, the road would suddenly become almost vertical, like a rearing horse, and our straining engine would rage and roar. It was a hard and beautiful road, carved through the mountains as early as the 1920s, making this land accessible to people. The road would become blocked around the passes only during bad snowstorms.

I was looking through the window without a break, eagerly, with a feeling of sweet pain. Mama sat next to me in the car since we were on our way to see the healer in Namangan, and our misfortune was riding along with us. Still, this road and these mountains were doing something for my soul with every passing second, every passing hour. One could say that they distracted me from my somber thoughts. No, that's the wrong way to put it. They didn’t distract me – the pain was inside me – they filled me with something else. And the road was streaming, whirling, falling, hiking rapidly up and up, now almost running into a rock, now heading for the river bubbling among the boulders, now receding from it and reappearing somewhere far down below, at a bend or in the valley, so calm and peaceful, somewhere in the endless expanse, beyond the haze of the hills.

One of those little valleys, green and inviting, appeared in our path, and we stopped for a short rest. It was time for Mama to take a break, and we also needed to fill the tanks with gas from the extra fuel can. Here, we naturally wouldn’t find any of those gas stations we were so used to on the highways in America. Even if we came across a gas station, gas there was worth its weight in gold. Though we could see other things, fondly remembered and cherished from childhood. Trees, as tall and slender as ship masts grew on the sides of the road. A row of half a dozen stands could be seen in their shade. It was a small roadside market, a pleasure for travelers when they reached the pass. Here one could quench one’s thirst with kumis (mare’s milk), buy fragrant honey and freshly toasted sunflower seeds, feast on kurt

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