Thursday, June 5, 2008

5/1/08

The Engagement Party
The table is set. Forks and spoons of different sizes and shapes are hurriedly left on the right side of each plate. Thick cups above cheap china wear and shot glasses, 10 minutes before ceremony, clenched in men’s hands. Roasted chicken, dolma, stalichni salad, bosboscht, plov and greens swell under the giant, heat-entrapped tarp. Small boys I haven’t seen in the fit of days preceding, relay Coke and Fanta bottles to each table. Each second, like a quarter of real time, ascends as the clock ticks to.
Will the guests leave happy? Will people dance and eat? Will they tell others that they had a good time, or will it just be a front, a momentary acquisition of kindness because of this special day?
This is like being on the set of The Hours, Azerbaijani time. Gizbast Teacher loiters in my face as panic moves her closer to the engagement party of her first-born daughter.
“Sasha, please help Nisa.”
“With what? Where is she?”
“Sasha, I don’t know.”
The night prior we lugged boiled potatoes, carrots, jarred peas, mayonnaise, steamed beef and onions to Grandpa’s house to cut into retardedly tiny pieces for stalichni salad, a Russian side served at all Azerbaijani events. For nearly 150 people, the dish was prepared in just under four hours. It was a teaser to the day ahead.
Three hours to, I watch the khanams, in the moist, oppressive outside kitchen, slice tomatoes and cucumbers and arrange them diagonally on one of several shades of white plates.
“What’s wrong?” or “What’s up?” or “What are you doing?” asks a curly-haired lady.
“Nothing. Can I help you?” I try, though I think I ask if she can help me.
“Take the chicken. One for each table,” she repeats five times.
“I understand, I understand, I understand.”
I grab three plates of the roasted chicken. Before I swing waitress style around to the dining area, a white-haired old hag with a three golden teeth asks me for tea. I light a match on the burner since my hand will catch on fire if I try the popular pull-away method with a lighter. I balance the porcelain tea pot with the kettle on the circular steel plate.
As I leave the preparation area, the sun shocks my senses. I determine today am a full-fledged member of the party staff, not a World Heritage site as I’m commonly perceived.
The chicken gets distributed so I glide upstairs like Cinderella to locate sugar and candy. There wait stacks of kielbasa to be cut, but no nasty Russian chocolates.
Hoping the khanams have gone the five feet to serve themselves, I flip to the other side of the room to serve a loaded dish.
“Take these greens,” she says without looking up. “Take these greens,” she repeats as my hands jerk the plate from her next cucumber. “I understand.”
“Sasha, why you not wash these?” Nisa asks about the silverware as I set down the first round of veges. Nisa is Gizbast’s niece and an undergraduate of international relations at one Baku’s top universities. She has been learning Arabic, Russian and English and dreams of working as a foreign policy advisor. I like her when she’s not assistant to wedding parties.
“Please help, Sasha.” I give in, clearly having not been of use in past hours.
“You need to tell me which ones to wash.”
“Ok Sasha, wash these.” I wipe four forks before she carts away the wet box of silverware.
“We must have, get drinks.”
Young boys rush out with soft drinks as if Nisa snapped her fingers and wrinkled her nose.
I turn to help when I realize Brent is sitting at a table for five alone.
“Hey Brent, how ya doin’?”
“All right.”
“Are you havin’ an all right time?”
“Yeah, just talking to these guys.” He points to the men sucking down hydrogen peroxide, which passes as vodka in Azerbaijan.
Brent is a lanky Oklahoman who lives 25 minutes south-west of me. He’s a quiet guy and doesn’t travel much. He enjoys the comforts of community and still lives with his host family, eating Azeri meals and speaking the language near-proficiency. Unfortunately this leads Volunteers to ask me more about my boyfriend in America than about my site mate, one of their coworkers and friends. Like so many PCVs do, I have forgotten about him in the frenzy of affairs.
“Hey, I’m going to try to find some juice to put in the fridge.”
“That’s a great idea.”
He seems content, if bored. That’s an honorable mood at an event like this.
Teachers and shop owners file in. This is a great group, I think to myself. I know people, they’re smiling, laughing, this could work.
“Sasha, why you not help her?” Who? Mrs. Dalloway insists I pick up more greens as a centerpiece to the tables. On my way to hear instructions five times over, I notice a bitter woman without tea. She looks at me like I had masterminded the Soviet takeover of her country.
I pour her and her younger friend a cup of hour-old tea. On the way to her chair, half the Beta black spills on my foot. Why would she put me in charge of this? No doubt to see if an American girl is capable of simultaneous matronly chores. Now she understands I’m not. That’s not bad information to pass along.
Boxed juice is found in the back cellar with pickled vegetables for winter. I seize a cherry juice and ignoring curious faces, run to the kitchen to stash it next to the refrigerated kielbasa.
In the room over is the bride-to-be. After three hours of plastering on a powder-cover up combo the thickness and shade of her wedding dress, she now has a deep black pencil cocked to her eye. Her pupils are dilated in the light and her eyes against her dress seem evermore bloodshot. She spots me from around the corner. “This is nice, Sasha?” You look like a vampire, I want to tell her. “Gesheng giz.” Beautiful girl, I say.
Her younger sister, on the other hand, is worth antagonizing. I instruct Altunay to come help.
The bride's eyes remain on the mirror while she dramatizes her sister’s carelessness. “She is lazy bones,” she says.
Watching Al Jazeera on Gizbast’s satellite would be like a quick across-the-bay vacation, but I advance down stairs to the engagement party for exactly what I left in San Francisco— except this time, it’s with a grace of no-pay.
Already guests are demanding refills and more stalichni salad. I object of the grueling work to my counterpart for 30 seconds before the commencement begins.
I look back and the tent has filled. Women are split to the front side of the room, most in thick, cotton jackets with bushy flowers or beaded designs on lapels. Most two-piece suits here look as if Azerbaijani women had acquired Bedazzled sets.
“Sasha, sit down. Please sit down.” Gizbast busts her way through the crowd, leaving few self-assured, drunken men standing.
The crowd ingests the call for silence. Except for the leader of the pack and her accomplice, the party staff sits still and hushes.
Close friends and family, in red tailor-made power suits and blazers with sleeves an inch too long, dance a trail of crimson cloth leading to the stage. Big bouncing baskets full of the most expensive chocolates and lotions for the bride are delivered to her bouquet of gifts.
And by way of her, in the shape of Liberty Bell, Farida eloquently unites the segregated room.


5/27/08

Graduation Day
She chases him wildly, swooping around the chairs three times, and without hesitation turns back to chalk “VIb!!!” on the black board. Using her whole forearm, Sonay’s class number is scribbled large and proud.
We all have favorite doodles, and for Azerbaijani students their class number is one of them. Ten years of the same students, first to fifth period, neighbors and cousins, marriages and workmates, till death do they part.
Friday is the last day of school. 11th form students will run off to university in Baku, or stick to a village job in a big shop on the roadside. Either way, they will bring along one or two friends whom they will value for the rest of their life.
My counterpart Gizbast has known her neighbors for 55 years. 55 YEARS. What does that number even mean? Through two wars and Azerbaijan’s independence, unjustified deaths and the births of children, they have been friends and political enemies, and by this time in this country, they’re sure to be relatives.
I am 24 years old, and if not for that website we all hate to love, MySpace, I would have kept in contact with exactly three friends from high school.
Still, I remember thinking at my high school graduation I wouldn’t be all sad that the “era,” as everyone called it, had come to an end. Let’s face it, I was a terribly awkward and wasn’t at all popular. Everyone knew the name: Sasha Kinney, but when placed with a face it was like learning the definition of word you thought you knew. “Oh, that’s who Sasha is.”
I won’t beat on about it, but the point is, as Azerbaijanis say, I thought, “I will not miss.” And the day came. And I was I ok till grad night when preparing for the bounce house run, a friend I had known since grade school approached me. He looked at me with the same two eyes which had once donned medium-sized, metallic-rimmed glasses, but which in middle school had matured into handsome, sophisticated contacts. He said to the then-basketball superstar standing beside him, “This is my buddy, Sasha. We’ve known been going to school together since kindergarten.” His hug was tremendous, and I have a photo with his arm around me to prove it. I knew he’d miss me, and I shed and concealed a tear. High school, as it does, had forced us to realize our differing economic statuses and therefore divided us. But under the green and yellow banner that read, “The class of 2002,” I was suffocated into the understanding that our era had come to an end.
Though three years ago this friend wouldn’t add me to his MySpace list because of a spitfire political cyberspace debate between the two of us, he will always be part of summer holidays, camp, football on muddy days and over-the-fence weekend chats, till death do us part—at least in memory.
With that, I can’t imagine how this group of teens will be separated. Even though most of them will eventually return to this village, it will never be the same: no gossip halls or canteen tea breaks, no more chalk board sketches declaring love for their classmates.
This Saturday the secondary school where I teach will have what my host sister has called The Last Bell. Seniors will present gifts and wishes to incoming first-form students and young ones will sing national hymns praising the outgoing generation. It will be interesting to witness this culture’s display of graduation, what moving on means to them and how they will deal with the absence, even if brief, of the people who have shaped them.

6/3/07

“Mua mua mua mua. Mua mua mua. Mua. I’m selling fish. Mua mua mua mua.”
“No, thank you, I don’t want to buy fish today.” I answer what I can from a language I still misinterpret as one I have yet to learn.
“No. Honey.”
Ah, yes, bal vs. balig. I’m sure locals make this mistake too. “How much?”
“Six manat.”
“Great, I’d like to try.”
“It is very good,” declares the man. His teeth are a testament to its syrupy appeal. From his blue satchel displaying a half-naked woman, he lifts a “Boronbaker’s tomato paste” jar to the sun.
With the tip of a spoon I extract a dab of golden thickness. “Mmm, yes, this is very good.” He hands me the jar as if that confirmed the buy.
I carry the stickiness to my kitchen when I set the honey down and make for my room to grab a 20.
“Do you have change?” I walk down the hall asking.
Now’s his chance: “Mua mua mua mua mua. Two for 10 manat. For your children.”
“I don’t have children.”
“For your husband.”
“I don’t have a husband.”
“For your children.”
“No, there are no children here. I have no children.”
“Then who lives here?” Surely not just her.
“Just me.”
“Mama? Dada?”
“No, just me.”
He pauses, considering, much like his first 10 seconds with me, the possibility that I don’t speak his language.
He attempts Russian.
“No, no. I’m American. I don’t know Russian. I speak English.”
“Yes, England. You are alone here? Why?”
“I have lessons at that school.” I point beyond the pharmacy to the Soviet eyesore where I teach.
“Yes, good, good. But why do you live alone?”
“Because Americans like to be alone. In America many people live alone.”
As if shifting to his own fairytale (mine is too perverse, a world in which people, particularly women, live alone), “England is nice,” he says.
Given Azerbaijan’s historical background, with elderly I let the geographical perplexity of where the Promised Land is withstand. But in the near dark of my stairwell with this short, balding honey vendor, I feel a brief North American geography lesson is only appropriate.
“America and England are different countries. I’m American. I’m from America. It’s south of (can’t think of the word for Canada in Azeri) and north of (don’t know the word for Mexico).” I drop the powerless dialogue and draw the shape of America on my door, in between what I hope is ketchup and a mud smear. Apparently the U.S. outline is not as impressionable as the rhinoceros shape of the continent of Africa.
Now he looks more alone than I, in bewilderment, and out into some world he doesn’t know. And like that, his decaying teeth shown, I’m alerted a perfect smile.
“Where are you from?”
“Ganja.”
“You came from Ganja to sell honey?” I don’t mean to sound shocked but this is like traveling from Reno to San Francisco to sell apples. Though I suppose one would if it was his trade.
“Mua mua mua mua. You are here alone?”
I know it was time to shut the door, not because, like I do in America, think that he is going to assault or rape me, but because I have given him all the information I can (or can express) about my world. And I have gotten a fish or whatever out of the deal.
“All right, pal.” (That was in English.) His budding face shuts in toward the door till I fashion the door to the frame.
I watch him from my balcony saunter on to sell sweetness to my neighbors, and probably to further speculate about the lone English woman living in apartment number nine.