2003 Jeff Percifield

 Santa Monica Review 2003

 

 

UZBEK DIARY

an american in muslim asia

 

 

Day 1.  On the plane from Istanbul to Samarqand – twin pillars of empire – I read about Phylloxites islamicus, the woolly paladin caterpillar I’m to study for its potential to biodegrade caffeine. 

          “…and here,” my department chairwoman indicated, “so if you’re taken hostage, you can’t sue us.”  Presumably if they slit my throat I won’t be in a litigious mood, but I dutifully signed the dotted line.  All cultures have rituals.

          We pass over Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the map below fragmenting geome­trical­ly like a kaleidoscope.  The peaks of Chechnya are home to a spider, Derma­cen­tor magog, whose jaws secrete a potent morning-after abortifacient, but it is not a district amenable to scientific speculation.  Neither will I be visiting the Euphrates delta, where the dung of the Scarabeaus triceratops beetle reduced the appearance of wrinkles in double-blind studies, or Kashmir, where the nodding tea plants are visited by the peacock moth, Porthetria darjeeeling, its wings dusted with a powdery fungus that significantly prolonged the erections of laboratory mice. 

          “…respect for otherness,” said my department chairwoman, which struck me as ironic, given as the region’s worldview is frankly hostile to multiculturalism, that curious Western invention whereby people who loathe each other live side by side and sometimes even work together.

Off the plane, soldiers fingering submachine guns. I drop to the tarmac and put my face to the ground, not in obeisance, but to examine a rare Scoriator orientalis, the snowflake centipede, thrumming across the runway.  My guide from the univer­sity, a young woman with one eyebrow and an orange headscarf, watches me.  I pick up the specimen with bare fingers and drop it into a plastic pouch. It bites me in the process and I shake my finger. 

          My guide stoically delivers me to an obsolete, wheezing Volga automobile and drops me off at the Hotel Zafar, a peeling green and orange bunker done up in Soviet Dirge, now owned by an Indonesian conglomerate.  In Chicago, it might pass for a well-weathered housing project. The elevators are out and I take the stairs to a dank room with a long window that won’t  At the end of the hall there’s a bathroom with no hot water where I use my tweezers – my finger has a red blister now – to pick up a tiny black Centuroides khazarus scorpion.  I am on a grant to study Central Asian entomo­pharma­cology, for which I may not have to leave the Hotel Zafar.

*

          Day 2.  A haze of history hangs over the city, or perhaps it’s the phosphate and potash factories. Enormous cranes loom above tiled domes of snowy blue or greenish oxidized copper.  Bejeweled mosques primp like matrons beside Soviet wallflowers, and tessellated surfaces splinter the light into atoms. Blue-veiled women stroll beneath a peeling billboard of a bikini-clad, Pumping Iron-era Arnold Schwarzenegger, a splash of Arabic script across it in red paint, like drops of blood. In the square, the statue of Lenin has been replaced with one of Tamer­lane, the Mongol warlord who once ruled half the known world, a fact the city now seems embarrassed by, like a woman with a racy past.

It is a city of primary colors. Doors are painted red and blue and green.  A café with yellow chairs and party-colored tablecloths.  In the market, bins of lemons, cherries, melons variegated as Jovian moons. The locals favor a conservative, old-fashioned dress given to startling touches: a sky-blue vest, a red fez, a yellow sash. I trade my Cubs cap for a dopy, the ubiquitous four-sided skullcap, to hide my blond stubble.

          Today my guide wears a green scarf. This is not a theocracy; she chooses to cover her head, just as a Western woman might hesitate to go outside without lipstick.  I peer closely; she’s penciled in the space between her eyebrows so they meet. She does not smile.  Perhaps it’s not proper to speak to American men; perhaps she doesn’t like me. 

          A taxi drive into the countryside, cradle of algebra (<Ar al-jabr), now a blasted bowl the Soviets sprinkled with salt and tossed with chemicals. The day is balmy, but the sun fans an intense white light which, combined with the jet lag, disorients me, no pun intended.  For some reason, all my muscles ache, as though I’ve worked out after a long hiatus. I poke around a mulberry grove, favorite food of Phylloxites as well as the domes­ti­cated Bombyx mori, source of the region’s gorgeous handcrafted silks.  (The intrepid Japanese have bred Bombyx with firefly genes to produce luminous silk.)

 I sit down next to a rangy bouquet of Papaver somniferam, papery scarlet petals blowing in the dirt.  The locals say cows fed on poppy fodder produce the best milk for yogurt. I take out my Swiss Army knife and cut into one of the swollen green seedpods; a milky latex oozes out, and I lick the bitter paste off the blade.  In the distant Hindu Kush, where the red blossoms swarm, the latex is collected by hand, dried into a resinous gum, then rendered and exported to Christendom as heroin.  (Alchemy, < Ar al-kimaya, the transmutation.)

          In my airless room at the hotel, someone has gone through my things.  Wisely, I had my cash with me and it seems all the thief got away with was a Walkman, blue jeans, and a box of condoms, worse luck. I flip on the black and white TV box to what appears to be an old Love Boat dubbed into Uzbek.  I lie on the bed, home to Cimex lecturlalias, and poke at my blister, which exudes a clear fluid when pricked.  This carbuncle is the point of intersection between organisms of different hemispheres; I will smuggle the toxin back to the States in my bloodstream. Ecosystem: the intercon­nection of a community of organisms.

Evening.  In the hotel bar, I run into Wortham, whom I recognize from school. He’s work­ing for Monsanto, splicing rattlesnake genes into Asiatic kudzu; the patented mongrel takes up radioactive isotopes from the soil and renders them inert.

          “What does it render the honeybees that visit it?” I ask, and he orders us another round.

*

          Day 3.   Hangover.  On the news, two Dutch tourists have been kid­napped in Tashkent, their bullet-riddled bodies found in a ditch.  Today my guide sits grimly at the wheel of a decrepit Jeep.  She wears a purple scarf; her eyes dare me to get in. She pilots this clattertrap with calm intensity down a four-lane highway across which donkey carts, bearded camels, and children stroll with impunity.  Onto a dirt road, where she stops at one point to bandy with a holstered youth standing alone on the side of the road; they both glance at me.  We drive to a wide salt flat speckled with ruins.  Atop a phallic monument rests an enormous and long-abandoned stork’s nest. My guide sits reading in the Jeep, ignoring me. 

P.M.  I’m on the ground, watching the long shadow of an assassin bug (<ML assassini < Ar hashshashin, eaters of hashish), a species of bloodsucker which the khans kept in pits to torture prisoners. A group of boys passes by, all wearing turbans. They look at me darkly.  In truth, they can’t do anything else, allowing for their brown eyes and dusky features, but I wonder if they’re going to behead or possibly flay me; the fundies did try a coup a couple of years back.  One of them shouts.

          “Le stylo est sur la table?” I gulp, in an offhand way.  “Je suis Quebeçois. Du CA-NA-DA.”   Never have so many Canadians been abroad.

          I try to visit a couple of museums but they’re closed.   I buy a faded postcard outside a 17^th Century mosque I’m not allowed to enter.  I gaze at the tomb of Tamerlane, which is covered with scaffolding and birdshit.  Islam is a reliquary of vanquished glory.

          Children shriek at us in the bazaar where I buy gold and silver embroidery.  The vendors seem confused when I hand over the asking price; finally my companion can stand it no more. She marches over, rips the fabric out of my hand, and furiously haggles with the vendor.  A shouting match ensues.  A flock of birds settles on a turquoise dome while I try to look nondescript and vaguely Semitic.

*

Rado Watch Amazon

          Day 4.  My guide wears a red scarf. I wonder if it is some sort of signal hidden in plain sight.  I spend the day looking over my shoulder among apricot groves and blowing petals, idly drawing Phylloxites cocoons and collecting specimens. When I get back to the Jeep, she is sound asleep, snoring loudly.  In her lap is a textbook next to a magazine with Keanu Reeves on the cover.  I am hallucinating from jet lag, and wander across the road, past fields of squash vines mottled with sogdiana virus, and soon find myself in a lovely plot of Cannabis indica tossing in the breeze.  I run my fingers along the graceful, serrated leaves, inhale the spicy resin.  I twirl through the field like Julie Andrews in a reefer Sound of Music, then lie down and gaze up at the spinning indica, the translucent sky that remembers Alexander and Marco Polo.

Later.  To the strains of folk music, I quaff red wine in a café – alcohol is plentiful here, despite Islam’s admonishing frown – and dine on pilaf, gristly kebabs, boiled mutton, and rounds of soft, flat bread. I don’t know what happens to the lovely vegetables in the market.  I order caviar, but they’re out.

A group of men with bristle-brush beards watches me.  One of them, wearing a green-ribboned skullcap, comes over.  We have a stilted conversation, with much check­ing of my guidebook, until we understand one another. It is not cheap. We go to the Hotel Zafar.  He taps the glass jars on the table, where Phylloxites are spinning cocoons amid leafy sprigs and bloodstained mulberries.  Metamorphosis: the curious biological alchemy by which rapacious caterpillars become harmless moths, and helpless larvae become wasps.

He has a heady smell, like humanity and history and the hashish he rolls for us.  His fingernails are stained from the resin, and I watch as he breaks a dark wafer into his palm, waves a match over the crumbs to warm them, then rolls a cigarette.  We pass it back and forth. 

          “…representing your country,” my department chairwoman said sternly, and gave me a disapproving look.

          His mustache is wiry against my lips, his body dark and bristling with hairs like those on the Myrmex moschus ant, which secretes a viable pheromone although studies are inconclusive, human sexuality being driven by not just instinct, but also feelings.  He has a long foreskin, the smell of which is as dizzying as the hashish; I lather him up with sunscreen as lubricant, and we form another point of intersection.

          A city is a collection of lives. I stand at the window after he’s gone, smoking a cigarette.  The setting sun hits a tiled minaret that flames like a lighthouse, of the spiritual variety.  A wasp, perhaps Eumenes fraternus, bats against the glass like a virulent humming­bird, then buzzes off to its own paper city.  In the coppery dusk, the city turns to sepia, and distant windows burn like the campfires of a forgotten army, Homo sapiens, most delicate of predators.