Amanat, page 8
Amangeldy, sitting at the head of the table, was across from me, and every time I raised my eyes, I met his gaze. Suddenly a tiny space opened inside my tortured heart, and every glance from his laughing brown eyes injected something exciting into that space, as if at the end of an endless, dull corridor, a door had unexpectedly swung open, and I couldn’t wait to get a good look inside.
After breakfast I washed the dishes. The women talked in the bedroom, and the men were off somewhere by themselves. The colonel’s face stared at me from the bottom of every bowl, but Yulduz, in her garish getup, kept grabbing him away.
My aunt came in to stew some horse meat.
I got up my courage.
“Where did those two meet?”
“They’ve known each other since they were children. They grew up playing in the same courtyard. When Aman was serving in Germany, his mother was afraid he’d bring home a German girl. He came back on leave once, and she married him right off to her best friend’s daughter.”
“That’s terrible!” I said before I could stop myself. “How could he agree to that?”
My aunt smiled. “I can tell you don’t like her. But we’re used to her. She’s a good woman. And her mother, Auntie Zulfia, is so kind, she’d share her last crumb with anyone.”
She left the meat with me and went out shopping with Yulduz.
The men had turned on the fan and were setting up a card game.
“Want to keep us company, Raihan?” asked Amangeldy when I walked in, meaning to dust an already sparkling-clean cabinet.
His eyes expressed nothing in particular. This was just an ordinary invitation.
But I was still embarrassed and shook my head. “No, no! I don’t know how to play!”
The two men laughed.
“Why so frightened?” asked the colonel with a smile. Then he sniffed. “Mmm, what a heavenly smell! It’s been a hundred years since I ate horse meat.”
“Bring us some beer, Raihan?” my uncle asked.
“Sure.” I hurried out and spent a long time searching the refrigerator for beer.
I found it in the bathtub, bottles of Zhigulis lying in a row in the cold water. Some of them had already shed their labels.
I was equally torn between the living room, where the men were playing cards and kept bursting into laughter, and the bathroom mirror. I gave my haggard face a critical look, then carefully went over my eyebrows with some tweezers and put on a little eyeliner. I didn’t feel brave enough for anything bolder. But that was enough to make me feel victorious over the colonel’s awkward wife. I turned on the radio in the kitchen. They were playing “Bésame Mucho,” and the tune added a punch to my already romantic mood.
I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I mixed up some dough for noodles, to make beshbarmak. My aunt seemed happy about that when she and Yulduz returned, laden with shopping bags. They called me into the bedroom to show me what they had bought. Yulduz had found a mink manteau from which I could barely tear my eyes. It had a dark brown sheen reminiscent of some other life, one dashing with expensive automobiles, rivers of champagne, gentlemen going down on one knee before ladies to kiss their hands. Though as far as I could tell, Yulduz didn’t fit into that picture at all.
“I found this at Beryozka!” she said, modeling for us. “And we got your auntie some nice shoes. Come on, try them on!”
My aunt slipped into some fall shoes from Czechoslovakia, with buckles.
“They’re so comfortable!” she smiled. “Like my feet can sleep! Thank you, Zhuldyz.”
“How many times are you going to thank me?” The colonel’s wife laughed and slapped herself on the hips. “Your state department store’s pretty worthless, isn’t it?” she added, disappointed. “In Tashkent they’re better equipped.”
Then she showed off gifts for her hosts’ daughters, bright summer dresses, each prettier than the last.
With every minute I was feeling more like the poor relation, looking wistfully at the lives of the benefactors who had taken her in. There was something childish about that feeling. I missed my home unbearably, and my mother, and the delicious layered bread she made in the cast-iron qazan, which you could tear off in big clumps and soak in cream. I missed the smoky aroma of tea from the samovar and the clucking chickens in the yard. And that sweet moment when my mother would suddenly exchange a look with my father and say, “Listen, daughter, we’ve bought you something new. Here, try it on!” My eyes clouded over, and afraid I’d start to cry, I hopped up and hurried to the door.
“Where are you off to?”
I turned at the question. Yulduz was handing me some sort of package.
“What is it?” I asked, trying not to be caught looking.
“Open it up!” my aunt said, and smiled.
I unwrapped the paper package. Inside was a sarafan with broad shoulder straps and three big buttons on the bodice, stitched in my favorite style, à la Natasha Rostova. Pink tulips that would never fade were strewn across a field of milky white. The cool, sturdy cotton caressed my hands, and the label had the magical inscription “Made in Hungary.”
“What are you waiting for? Try it on!” said my aunt.
“Is this . . . for me?”
“Of course it’s for you, girl!” said Yulduz, and she laughed her hoarse laugh.
“But I can’t.” I was upset. “I don’t have any money right now . . .”
“Money? It’s a present, I’m telling you!”
“Put it on!” my aunt said encouragingly.
“Thank you,” I stammered, feeling my heart fill with an uninvited love for this woman in the monstrous pantsuit.
When I had dressed myself in that sarafan, before me in the mirror stood not the poor relation, beset by insecurity, but a slender, confident young woman with gleaming eyes.
“Wow! Gorgeous!” exclaimed Yulduz with a click of her tongue, giving me a thumbs up.
“Yes, it’s just perfect for you,” my aunt agreed, and added proudly: “I’m the one who picked it out. With your darker skin, that color lights you up.”
“Well! Wear it in good health!” said Yulduz, waving a hand and chuckling.
Just then, Amangeldy appeared in the doorway. His eyes swept the room and stopped on each one of us, lingering just a little extra on me.
“I’d call this painting The Four Seasons. Only I can’t find spring.”
We looked at ourselves and laughed.
“That’s true! The four seasons!” Yulduz giggled like a little girl. “I’m winter, you’re summer, and your auntie is fall.”
“There’s spring, too,” said my aunt, winking at her guest. “Where are those shirts you brought?”
Yulduz slapped her hips again and rifled through a big bag. She pulled out two men’s shirts.
Then there was a lavish lunch with slices of zhaya that melted in my mouth and amber links of sausage atop the thinnest slices of square noodles. I sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and my aunt opened her last jar of preserved summer squash.
And again I found myself sitting across from the colonel, but this time I was wearing my magical sarafan. When they offered me red wine, I did not refuse.
Logically, this sarafan should have been an impenetrable wall between me and our male visitor, extinguishing the sparks of my wayward feelings. By giving me the dress, Yulduz had in a way paid me off, putting me in her debt. It was clear as day that she had bestowed this luxury upon me purely out of generosity and her own expansiveness of spirit. She probably had not an inkling of the threat I posed to her. But that didn’t change anything. The only way I could escape this danger zone would be to refuse the gift. But that would have been awkward, and I didn’t have the heart to do it. I was simply enamored of the quality and beauty of that dress. In that swampy expanse of the Stagnation, an item like that could only be gotten illicitly or on the last day of the month, if you stood in a kilometer-long line. And then only if you were lucky.
In other words, logic was obliged to retreat, knitting its brow.
And everything, wondrously, changed.
All my priorities had shifted, and now Yulduz was not my competitor, and I did not suffer constant jabs of jealousy and envy toward her. Now she was my kind relative, and I no longer noticed her shortcomings, the same way I wouldn’t notice them in a sister. What’s more, her connection to her lawfully wedded spouse seemed somehow completely insignificant, or erroneous, as if she were still just his old childhood friend, a girl with whom he had played hide and seek or stolen apples from the neighbor’s tree. That allowed me to receive those scintillating looks from Amangeldy as something that rightfully belonged to me.
After our filling feast, the guests wanted to lie down for a rest. Their nighttime bus ride had worn them out, too. My aunt and uncle put them in the bedroom at the end of the hallway and also went to nap in their own room. Soon I could hear my uncle’s loud snoring.
I flitted about in my sarafan, clearing the table, hauling the dirty dishes to the kitchen. That glass of wine wasn’t making me sleepy. Instead, it had woken me up, and filled every part of my body with a bubbling energy. And my heart! Something was singing in my heart, a liquid melody, full of sparks. It was the only melody I needed. I could sense the sleeping colonel, very close by, just a dozen or so paces away, and I felt ready to protect his sleep—so that later, when he awoke, I could bring him a glass of cold beer. And bathe myself in his gentle brown eyes and listen to his laughing voice. And Yulduz . . . Yulduz was simply a well-meaning star who shone on us all with a motherly love. Even their two children, who were off at a Soviet summer camp just then, were young stars, barely twinkling in the vast starscape of life.
Soon all the dishes were washed and drying on the table. I sat down on a kitchen stool and looked outside. Ordinary summer life was underway out there in the city, where at this time of year, there are two kinds of people: those who have already finished their vacations on the beach at Issyk-Kul or Kapchagay or the Black Sea, and those who were eagerly looking forward to them. The nightmarish word propiska, which was usually present everywhere, like a watermark, had vanished.
My aunt walked in, holding her stomach. She settled heavily on the stool across from me, poured herself some water from the pitcher, and started to sip.
“You should take off your sarafan. You’ll get it dirty.”
I shook my head, frightened. “No!”
I thought that if I took it off, I’d lose this magical power over life.
My aunt smiled. “You’re like a little girl. One time we bought some little sandals for Bakhytka. She wouldn’t even take them off to go to bed.”
I laughed, feeling solidarity with little Bakhytka. Neither of us spoke for a while.
“We’re out of tomatoes and cucumbers,” I said.
“Would you go shopping?” my aunt asked. “It’s the evening bazaar. You can get everything cheaper. Grab a kilo of grapes, too. And don’t forget lettuce.”
All the merchants at the bazaar wanted to serve me and offered me laughably low prices. I made my way home feeling like an intoxicating Little Red Riding Hood, bringing treats to her granny. The resemblance was reinforced by the basket I carried, where a gigantic cluster of Muscat grapes lay like a still life over green leaves, cucumbers, and tomatoes from the local dachas. And just like that naive girl from the woods, I had not the slightest idea of what lay ahead for me. On top of that, I could barely recognize the city! Previously arrogant and aloof, now it was friendly again and smiled at me gently from every shop window, showered me with droplets from its fountains, winked craftily from its traffic lights. I felt like singing. So I did—the love song, “Black Eyes,” only I made them brown.
Amangeldy opened the door for me. I was surprised and stopped in the doorway, stunned by the sight of him.
“Who’s this? A forest sprite?” he asked, quietly.
I said nothing, but my heart spoke eloquently for me, pounding away in my chest under the sarafan.
“Oh, no—you’re a fairy from the melon fields,” he said, as softly as before. He tore off a grape and popped it in his mouth.
“That hasn’t been washed!” I said, looking up at him.
“So? Are you afraid I’ll be poisoned?”
I nodded, then shook my head. I was confused. Something was whispering a warning in my ear, that this was a practiced routine by a habitual flirt. But I . . . I was willing to listen to him forever.
“Who’s there, Aman?” My aunt walked out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Your assistant!” Aman announced, loudly now, and he took the basket from me and went into the kitchen.
“Did you get everything?” my aunt asked in her everyday voice, which clashed horribly with what had been happening just a minute before.
I nodded without speaking and slipped away into the girls’ bedroom. From the mirror, an unbelievably gorgeous young woman looked out at me, with crimson cheeks and radiant eyes. I was completely enraptured by her when that warning voice hissed in my ear again. “Shameless! All your feelings are right there on your face for everyone to see. Get control of yourself!” But nothing could make me obey that voice.
I held the bunch of grapes under the faucet and turned the fat, juicy fruit in my fingers, seeds glowing through the soft pulp, until all the dirt had been rinsed from the surface. Then I carefully rinsed them again, this time under icy cold water. Usually I’m not as careful with jobs like washing fruit. Now I felt conscientious as a saint. And my whole ritual was for the sake of one person. Yes, I was afraid he’d be poisoned, get sick, even die, God forbid. At that moment, that man was the center of the world, my everything. A concentration of all the most wonderful things I had ever known about life, my savior, the one who had pried me from the talons of failure and despair.
At dinner, it was just the colonel and me. All that was missing were the candles. Unexpectedly he turned down vodka and decided to drink wine with me . . .
At dinner, everyone was there except me and the colonel. My uncle and Yulduz drank vodka, and my aunt drank mineral water . . .
I felt like singing. I felt like dancing. With him. But they sent me into the kitchen to wash the dishes. The rest of them sat out there, playing cards.
But, as I dealt with the endless dishes, I sang anyway and danced. With him. Then I turned off the light, sat by the window, and looked outside. The streetlights and headlights glowed brightly, so it was light in the room.
The door opened, and Aman walked in. He sat down across from me at the table.
“Would the lady mind if I smoked?” he asked, in that same confidential tone that had twisted my heart around before.
I nodded permission, stood on my tiptoes, and opened the ventilation window.
“Where is everyone?” I asked, listening to the silence.
“They’re asleep,” he said, and he held his arms wide.
“Asleep?” I didn’t believe it, and I turned to look at the door.
“Yes. I put them to sleep,” he said with a shrug.
“What?!”
“It was easy. I slipped some sleeping potion into the tea.”
I laughed. It was so funny.
“So now what will we do?” I asked, not the least astonished by my own boldness.
“This,” he said. He put out his cigarette and, bending over the small table, reached for my face and kissed me on the lips . . .
“Raihan!” It was my aunt’s voice. “Go and lie down in bed.”
I blinked and looked around, dully. My neck was aching from its uncomfortable position on the table.
Yulduz walked in, laughing.
“What did you do, girl, fall asleep? You’re tired, I can see it. Go and sleep.” She yawned. “We’re going to bed too.”
“Ugh, I’m so swollen everywhere!” said my aunt with a sigh, examining her feet. “The sooner this baby comes . . .”
Yulduz said something in response, but I was no longer listening. I wanted to get back to that interrupted dream. To bring that dream to life, at that moment, I would have given the most valuable thing I had: the gold earrings my parents had given me for my twentieth birthday. But I didn’t know who to go to with the sacrifice. And all night I lay there with my eyes open, listening to the muffled noises in the sleeping apartment. My cheek still remembered the warmth of his hand. My lips still felt the gentle touch of his lips. Sometimes, in a dream, everything is brighter and more distinct that in real life. And worse torture. I only fell asleep as morning approached.
“Get up, it’s eleven o’clock,” said my aunt when she peeked into my room.
The apartment felt dead. Something in it had changed, and that change spawned a vague worry inside me.
“It’s like that sarafan has attached itself to you!” my aunt laughed as she poured me some tea. “They called Chingis into work. They won’t leave him in peace.”
“And where are . . . your guests?” I asked, sitting at the kitchen table and trying to make my question sound casual. “Have they left?”
“No. Zhuldyzka dragged Aman to the park for a walk. They’re leaving tomorrow.”
Tomorrow! They were leaving tomorrow! The news made my heart ache, filling me with pain. She was dragging him—away from me!
“Maira called,” my aunt reported, taking a bite of candy. Maira was my other uncle’s wife. “They’re flying to Sochi tomorrow for their vacation. They asked you to come and stay with the kids and their grandmother. Oh, and I almost forgot! She said your uncle found you a propiska!”
A propiska . . . Three days ago, I would have been jumping for joy, kissing my aunt, and galloping around the room like a wolf. But instead, the first piece of news overshadowed the whole rest of the world. It knocked at my temples, beat at my diaphragm, and made my whole body feel weak.
“What’s wrong, aren’t you happy?” My aunt was surprised.
