Sunday, August 8, 2010

Moonlight-paved Streets

The  other day while walking through the back streets (read: where all the locals live, Far From the Maddening Crowd,) of Samarkand I had the distinct feeling of my right hand suddenly dropping off and for a moment I seemed to be endowed with a phantom limb.
Uzbekistan, for the most part, has been surreal in this wise. We drove in from the border in a miniature marshutka, piloted by Elliot. To ride in a vehicle, driven by a fellow Peace Corps volunteer was an odd and liberating experience. It bespoke, with a certain finality, the absolute end of our careers as volunteers in Armenia, as driving there had been the most forbidden of off-limits activities. Even as we rollicked over the narrow streets I felt sure that we would be caught and deported, dishonorably discharged from service.
We arrived later that day in Bukhara, a quaint little Tamerlane-era burgh that seems to positively hum with the discussions and peregrinations of its myriad tourists; there are markets and mosques and medressas but all of them serve as a backdrop, there’s something almost unreal about them.  I think, perhaps my disorientation results from the fact that Uzbekistan is not the Central Asian panoply I expected. In planning this trip I had envisioned Elliot and myself walking through the narrow streets of citadels, the staccato rhythm of our footsteps accompanied by the brassy wail of the afternoon call to prayer through the siesta, and old men stretched out, asleep, on courtyard couches, like cats in the sun. I had the typical vision of dusty turbans, scimitars being raised in the bazaar and large black eyes, quiescent, yet intimating from the folds of a saffron yellow veil. In a way, I have found these things. The costumes of the women here and in Turkmenistan are beautiful, like vibrant blowing colors, and I have seen quite a few old men sporting finely clipped mustaches over dingy yellow beards that come down to the middle of their chests. Likewise, the institutions are all here, the azure and turquoise and beige, the desert infolded in the bluest sky, the silence of the mosque in the early morning, the sound of your breath echoing from the mihrab (the niche that faces Mecca) and the constant flight of pigeons, up from the street, from the minarets, like a storm of beating wings. But these things seem almost anachronistic amongst the gift shops and the supermarkets (though most of these latter are quite empty and the goods spaced widely on the altogether too-long shelves) and the entry prices and cameras.
I have no compliant. I do not feel at all let down, but these two realities, in stark contrast to each other, tend to exhaust the senses. In a place where one goes from an air-conditioned train station with scrolling electric marquees to an adobe goat kennel tended by an old man with baggy pants and a prayer cap in a span of five minutes, things tend to get a little jumbled and it’s not surprising that fatigue and heat and flies conspire with this environment to produce the feeling of limbs dropping off, unprovoked.  

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