Anna and Ziba-- Memories of my encounter with two women of Samarkand
by: Dr. Haideh Salehi-Esfahani
When I got to the dusty bus station in Samarkand on a cold sunny day in April of 1996, Ziba was waiting for me. I later realized that my first encounter with an Uzbek woman was with one who looked different from all. Ziba, as her name implies in Persian, is very beautiful: perfect face with high cheek bones and a well preserved body for a woman with a child, as most women in that part of the world fail to keep the figure of their early youth. Ziba also walked like she was on a Paris catwalk! There were two men with her, one a young Russian student who became my interpreter for the course I was teaching and another, the chairman of the department of economics at Samarkand State University, where I was destined to teach.
I had gone to Samarkand, an ancient city on the silk route, on a Fulbright scholarship to teach a couple of economics courses, familiarizing the young generation there to the ways of the "free" markets and economic transformation.
The Registan of Samarkand
The noblest public square in the world
Ziba did not speak much English, so we communicated in a few English sentences and then some in Tajik, a language sharing its roots with my mother tongue, Persian. We drove in the old car of the department chairman to an apartment block with a leafy garden and knocked on the door of a first floor apartment. The lady who was to be my host was a heavy set, very white looking Russian woman with a friendly grin on her face. Her name is Anna. The apartment was tidy but over furnished with the red colored carpets from Caucuses hanging on walls. The porch was full of flowerpots and was engulfed in sunshine. I soon realized a couple of facts: one that she spoke not one word of English or Tajik--the only languages I could understand and speak, and two, that I had to share her bedroom with her. There were two beds one on each side of a small room each adjacent to a large red carpet covering the wall. There was another tiny room with an even tinier desk and hardly any light--the desk lamp didn't work--all set up for me to work on my lectures. Her living room had some old but tidy furniture with an ancient TV, on top of which a picture of a sharp looking Uzbek man was laid with a black ribbon covering the edges. I figured this was the picture of her deceased husband.
After Ziba and her party left, Anna cooked some food for me and we went through a long hour of using our hands and faces, even our body language to communicate with each other·.the whole hour for me to explain to her that I needed to take a shower! She would later complain to Ziba --who acted as an interpreter of issues a-few-days-old between Anna and me whenever she came over to our place--about the bad habit of Americans who take a shower every day! In the usual clichˇ of explanations about hazards of taking a shower every day, she would tell Ziba that it dries up the body, the hair·not to speak of the fact that it uses gas to heat up the water, and then she would mention she needed more money for my room and board!
I did not object. I was paying equivalent of only $30 a month for room and board and I soon found out that my payment had nearly tripled her income. In dollar equivalent, she was earning $18 a month as a nurse in a nearby clinic. In a day or so of touring the bazaar and checking out the prices of meat and fruits, it was obvious to me why she did not include any meat in her cooking. At $1 a pound, she couldn't afford any meat except for the fat, which was sold very cheap, nearly free.
She would complain bitterly about her economic situation and that of all her associates at work, malnourished and hungry babies that came to clinic everyday and how she could not help them, because "no one has any money anymore". More accurately, the purchasing power of her income and that of every salaried person around her had dropped drastically, all due to apparent government actions to make the system open to markets and competition, in a part of the world where generations had gone by with little notion of competition and free markets. Inflation was rampant, and she couldn't afford fruits, coffee, or any type of clothing, shoes, etc., and would only buy the cheapest bread available. All I could make out from her fast, angry tone in Russian was that she hated Yeltsin and, Karimov, the Uzbek President. She would curse at them every time they appeared on TV news at night.
After a few days, to supplement my own diet and hers, I started to buy food from the market, especially meat which made her break into a big, approving smile when she opened the door of her ancient fridge. Soon I appeared to have taken the place of the daughter she never had--she had two sons and rarely saw one of them. She'd wait for me to come back from work and have dinner with her, stroll by the long leafy boulevard near university and her apartment while holding my arm and telling stories of the bravery of a Russian army general who built the boulevard and after whom the street is named. I, of course, had no idea what she was talking about for a great majority of time, but having heard story of the boulevard before, I could relate to Anna's proud pronunciations in Russian.
I started to teach at the university a few days after my arrival in Samarkand. The experience was one of shock, a shock that lasted throughout the months I spent there. It didn't help that I could not teach in Russian and that one of the interpreters for one of my classes needed a long way to go before he could claim he knew any English! Ziba, the unusual looking Uzbek woman-- who literally looked like she came from another planet, or at least from another country where beauty and voluptuousness were the order of female life--taught as a graduate student in management. She was even poorer than Anna, as she was paid about $15 a month, but you could have never guessed it from her appearance. She really looked like a million bucks, a fact that made me very curious about her life and sources of income! On our first day of acquaintance, she had already poured her heart out to me--though leaving some important details of her life out for me to find out about later. In Tajik, she explained that she had had a divorce from her husband to whom she was forced to marry and whom she never loved and apparently the man was not faithful to her. She had a daughter from him who was being taken care of by Ziba's sister in a nearby town: she was hiding her daughter from her former husband as the father "was a bad influence on her child". Not surprisingly, Ziba had many suitors some of who were her own students. I knew this when I discovered that she was able to conduct all kinds of seemingly illegal money transactions for my sake (for example she'd help me change money with a high, free market, yet illegal exchange rate) at all odd hours of the day or night wherever a man was in charge. Once she opened the doors of an otherwise closed bank to help me change dollars into local currency. The bank manager, a middle aged man, invited me inside and said in broken English how charming and disarming Ziba was. Among the males, charm was her weapon and she used it with much mastery to get things done. One night, I arrived at Ziba's place to find her very depressed. While she was cleaning the floor of her one room apartment, she explained to me that some of the neighbors had come by in the morning and had asked her to vacate the place. The night before, one of her male students had come by her window drunk and had sung love songs to her loud by her and her neighbors' windows. The neighbors were spooked and did not want a single, attractive and in their words, "loose" woman living next to them.
In the third week of my stay, Ziba announced to me she was going on a market-training mission to an institute at the World Bank in Washington D.C. for one month. It was all a big surprise to me but I was happy for her. She had never been to the U.S.; her daughter was to be kept at her sister's house till she returned. A month passed by during which I missed her helping hand with all kinds of matters regarding my life there, from travel plans to dealing with the security force of the city of Samarkand who kept a tab on foreigners, etc. When Ziba returned, she was in great emotional pain. It turned out she had been gone to D.C. with an Uzbek man who is the contact for the World Bank in Tashkent. He is married with two kids and he is in love with her. This was a way for him to be alone with Ziba for a while, away from it all. He wanted her as his second wife, since his youngest child was a 6-month-old baby and he could not bear to leave his kids and marry Ziba. He was well to do, a charmer of a man, and Ziba was lonely and taken over with emotional trauma of the decisions he had asked her to make. The saga of long distance phone calls between Tashkent and Samarkand, their endless talks on the phone and Ziba's dilemma of love, financial difficulties, and loneliness went on to the last minute I was with her and, beyond, I am sure.
The man from Tashkent wasn't her only eligible suitor, not to count her love sick, drunken students from the University! She also told me the story of a policeman who had loved her for 10 years--Ziba was 28 then. The policeman had never married anyone but had waited for her, all these years. Then there was the Italian architect or businessman-I forget which- who had asked to take Ziba and her little girl with him to Italy and make a new life there. He was in love with her and wanted to marry her. She had really cared for him and wanted to go, but her brothers didn't allow it. What was a Moslem woman doing in Italy, away from her culture and tradition? So the Italian left her behind and went back home.
Anna was lonely too. Her husband, the love of her life had died of heart disease just two years ago. Every other night, in the house, she'd bring her homemade bottle of wine and pour two glasses and insist that I join her in a toast. Then it was all crying and telling me stories of her beloved husband--not a word of which I understood. I could only make out the relevance of the story as she pointed to the picture with the black ribbon around it on top of the TV set. And, she'd bring pictures of her youth and her early days of courtship with her husband. Little by little, as I learned a few words and a couple of sentences in Russian, and I listened to her describe some of her male friends, I realized that she was looking for love and companionship. By now, she'd take me around to houses of friends, some of whom were single, possibly widowed men. At the end of each visit she would make a funny gesture about how she thought the host was not suitable for marriage. I had become her confidant, her daughter, and her companion, at least for a while. All this when we could not even communicate in any spoken language!
One day, towards the end of my stay with her, she took me to the house of her son and his family. They lived in an apartment block in an area just outside of Samarkand. The apartment block was a dreary looking block of cement with a lot of garbage on the grounds around it. It looked like an inner city housing project in Chicago. Inside, the paints were peeling off the walls and there was a strange smell of boiling tar coming from the stairs that led to a dark basement one level below the staircase. The apartment was on the sixth floor, no elevators. It had two tiny rooms--a very small bedroom and one other larger room that was both a bedroom and a living room. Both rooms had been carefully furnished with the most essential furniture, to save on space. Anna's son, his wife, and their two young sons lived in this space. I knew that her son was a communications engineer and I soon found out that the wife was a physician. She was a Korean whose father had emigrated to Uzbekistan in the 1950s. I wondered if he had come from North Korea, a socialist state as was Uzbekistan then part of the Soviet state. Throughout our dinner, which was served with much grace and kindness, I was thinking how her faith might have been different if her father had instead emigrated to the U.S. How not just her economic situation, but her total life experience would have been different if she had become a doctor in the U.S. and married an engineer in this country. She had not been outside of Uzbekistan and had no idea how a doctor lives in other more economically developed parts of the world.
After five weeks of stay at Anna's I decided to move out of her place and find a bit more autonomy on my own. Anna was very disappointed to hear my story, the reasons why I had to leave, all of which were just a bunch of lies. She would not have understood my need for having some space and some solitude for the rest of my stay in Samarkand. So I lied to her to protect her feelings.
I moved out in search of some independence, an effort which proved in vain as in that part of the world the culture and life experience of women does not render itself to autonomy and independence, and worse, I was a foreign woman and had to be of good standing while teaching at the university and so I had to go to another family's house. I rented the ground floor of a lovely house with a yard filled with roses and a small pond in the middle. I did not find solitude or autonomy there either. This was the house of an Iranian-Armenian man with a story of an incredible past; he lived with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grand daughter in the top floor of the house. The last six weeks of my stay in Samarkand were spent in that house, with the man and his family; those times are the material of another story.