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For fifty centuries people have been visiting an oasis in the desert. I wager longer but can't prove it. I have no evidence. But water sounds fine after a long journey in the desert no matter what year it is. 2018 in our case.
Bukhara as a city was only founded twenty-five centuries ago. It's not as old as Rome, but it does smell a lot better. Even an occasional whiff of gas can't kill it. The locals have a ton of natural gas and they use it. It's all the lamb.
The scent of open water in an otherwise dry desert means life. Rest. Music. Hookers. Shade. Food. In whatever order sounds best to exhausted travelers tired of a complacent desert serving up the same old, tired mirages.
Bukhara is most definitely not tired. When I asked how old the city really was, I got a joke. More of a parable.
A museum curator was asked how old a spear on display was. She said, “4,060 years.” When pressed on how she could know such a specific age, she replied, “When I started here, I was told it was 4,030 years old.”
One gets the sense stories and parables have been told here for a very long time.
Stories are a kind of currency. Bukhara has more than a few. An oasis for millennia and caravanserai for centuries, travelers tried to outdo each other with yarns before risking death again on the Silk Road. My kind of town.
Tales were traded. More than stories, money and games. Both transcend language. I don't need to understand Tajik to know the old man I sharked at chess was upset over being conned. What mattered was he paid up.
He was a beautiful old man. His weathered face, those angry blues, his open wallet. His money charmed my pants off and I'd never seen anyone furiously suck on a hookah like that before. We exchanged culture.
That's life in the souq around an oasis in the desert. Market stalls, fine rugs, and The Old Man of Bukhara, who sucked at chess. I mean, who hasn't heard of en pessants? What a newb, right? Or he just hated the French.
We pulled into Bukhara butts-a-bumped after hours levitating on Uzbek roads. At the edge of the Old City, I rolled out of the bus like a cross-legged tumbleweed and flaneured a block or two to the Amelia Hotel.
This is my favorite hotel in the world. If you go to Bukhara, please stay there. Do this for me. I would like to help them however I can through whatever I can. Try to make it up to them a little. Inshallah.
Every day, we walked from the Amelia to the nearby dance studio. This was ostensibly why we were all here. But after two minutes of watching the ladies dance and the men play music, I realized I had exactly zero talent.
Uzbekistan has gender roles of a sort. Usually, the women dance. The men can dance or play music for dancers. This demarcation of the sexes is justified by the fact it’s pretty great to be a man there.
In the US, women are expected to be engineers, writers, doctors, and professors. Anything but happy. Men are expected to be violent criminals in need of a nose bopping via rolled-up newspapers written by women. It’s just science. Done by women.
The good news is rather than change our minds about gender roles, we have an option to change our genitals. It's just easier.
Megan spent hours every day learning traditional dances from professional dancers. The men had to figure out how to play these tambourines called doira. They’re drums, too. You smack it while shaking it and sound comes out.
I couldn't make one work. The infernal things defy every physical law. I could only conjure a whimper no matter how badly I abused one. Eventually, the professionals reluctantly caved and suggested I should pursue writing.
So, I pissed off. While everyone else worked hard at developing a talent, I had Bukhara all to myself. I wandered through markets, read Quran and Hadith at mosques, and visited the local synagogue to chat with the Rabbi.
Straight away, I made friends with a beggar.
I gave the fellow a couple thousand sum - maybe five US dollars - and he pressed his palms together and bowed. I placed my palm to my chest and bowed in return. He hugged me and ran off.
After making sure he hadn't stolen my wallet, I realized he confused me for a Buddhist. I was touched.
My head was shaved at the time as it has been most my life. Not a common hairstyle there. I suppose I was also meditating by a hayuz earlier. In the US, people see my haircut and confuse me for a Nazi.
It's happened a few times. Most recently when sharing side effects experienced from a COVID-19 vaccine. I know to not do that now. Please don't cancel me! I’m complying! Pfizer uber alles!
Bukhara was Buddhist once upon a time. Before the Caliphates of Islam, the Timurid Empire, or the Khans of Mongolia. It has changed hands many times over the years. The most recent takers being the red-handed Soviets.
When I asked about the Soviet conquest, I was told another parable.
Stalin sent an assessor to the city to decide if twenty-four centuries should be eradicated and replaced with bread lines. The unlucky assessor, after visiting, claimed it was too beautiful to destroy. Stalin had him killed.
He then sent another who returned with a lie meant to save his life. But around the same time, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Uncle Joe suddenly had millions of Germans crawling all over. So, the whole thing was forgotten.
There is a madrasa in Bukhara - an Islamic school - called the Chor Minor. It's small. A few rooms and four towers. On each is a different symbol representing a different religion. Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism.
It predates those coexist bumper stickers by a long time. And it wasn't built by an atheist or carelessly slapped on the back of a Corolla. It was dangerous to build. It has meaning beyond platitude. There's a risk involved.
You can't just peel it off or pull it out when the in-laws visit or if you want to bone a hot Republican. Stalin would have destroyed it if he'd known about it. Communists hate religion. They can't tolerate competition.
The Chor Minor made me smile. It is my favorite building in Bukhara, competing with the Twenty Pillars Mosque. That's the one with ten pillars. It makes sense viewed from the reflecting pool.
Tolerance is as old as hate and for every evil, one can find an ancient good. It just doesn't poll as well or make for a gripping historical narrative unless people die. There's only one story in life, though. The oldest. Light vs Dark.
To quote a great American philosopher, “All right, all right, all right.” Wait. No. Same guy, different line. “It was like pistol-whipping a blind kid.” Damn it. No! It's, “Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light's winning.”
That's the one.
Bukhara has canals. Not what I expected out in the desert. They rise and fall with the time. I'm not sure why. But if you sneak out early enough in the morning you can explore their bottom. Don't, though. Nothing down there.
All I ever found creeping through that mud in the moments before sunrise was an old lamp. I still have it. We use it as a bong. We've never cleaned it as long as we've had it. Maybe after I finish this book I'll take the time to polish it.
It's so dirty and pot-smoke abused you can almost hear it screaming when you suck on it.
One day after I emerged from the Bukharan underworld, our most excellent tour guide took me to an internet cafe. The PS3 sign out front did give it away. But that was its only marking feature from the outside I could see.
Two dozen teenaged boy heads swiveled to stare straight at me. My guide announced something I didn't understand. I assumed, “Just a white man. It's fine.” But their eyes lit up. The kids didn't get it either I guess.
He admitted to telling them another tale. He claimed I was with Valve Software visiting to make sure Counterstrike worked. But I wasn't. Hah! I've never actually touched that game. The kids seemed to love it, though.
Unlike Too Human. Sigh. I mean, we planned that game as a trilogy but couldn't sell the first one. I swear it got good by the fourth. You see, Odin was the villain behind it all as an evil AI and you know what nevermind.
Our most excellent guide asked why I wasn't sweating in a dance studio with the women. I told him I leave dancing and work to the attractive people. My talents are better spent lying to kids, cops, and TSA agents.
“Sometimes,” he said. “It is good to be a man.” And we hugged on the spot, laughing until we both cried and peed a little. But just a little. A single manly, noble trickle down the leg. Just the right amount of emotion. I was touched.
Then we grabbed tea and always available Folgers Classic Roast Instant Coffee Crystals and made fun of England. Weirdly, I appeared to have lost my wallet somewhere. Probably the canals. But he paid and found it later.
After, we went back to collect the ladies from the dance studio. One of Megan's friends, a local dancer who had obviously been drinking, said I looked like James Bond. She was probably exhausted from dancing all day.
With my sunglasses on and a half gallon of vodka in the observer, it is plausible. As long as Bond wears sandals and is short and ugly. So, I taught her how to dance to ska music.
She was able to pick it up in five minutes. We call it skanking. Because when we do it, we think about your mom. There are a couple versions and I showed her all of them. She is now equipped for the pit.
She hugged me. After ensuring she hadn't stolen my wallet, I was touched. I didn't think I had anything to teach anyone before then. Not positively, anyway. I, Cautionary Tale.
I've made a habit of dodging bullets in my life with some small success. But that's not important here. What's important is though I skipped every rehearsal, I still had to perform a routine and song I didn't know.
I didn't know this at the time. Megan did. Gods damned fox lady tricked me again. As laughing dancers and musicians handed me a traditional Bukharan robe and doira, my life flashed before my eyes. I worry I defiled the robe.
It suddenly made sense why people were interested in what I did all day. It was a setup. They were all in on it. She cackled as I donned my burial shroud and failed again to conjure anything but a cry for mercy from my doira.
As we trotted out the backroom into the madrasa courtyard, two hundred heads swiveled towards me. Four hundred eyes. I'm told I screamed the wordless shriek of the damned before collapsing like a Soviet Union.
The ladies danced as angels and the men played as demons invested in making angels dance. I cried and curled into a fetal position on stage to watch Megan better. She really is a graceful fox. Cruel and clever and beautiful.
She laughed and laughed and spun as if the punchline hadn't even arrived yet.
Mercifully, our performance did end. I’m told I was scraped off stage to a courteous if confused applause and awoke to a teapot of water splashing on my face. The teapot was then replaced with a news camera.
I couldn’t quite understand what the reporter was saying, so I went with what I knew. I can fluff a man, or a woman, or an entire nation-state with the greatest of ease. I just imagine what I'd like said about myself, then say the opposite.
“I have traveled quite a bit. I have seen things. I have allegedly tasted things. But I have never, ever in my life, been to such a welcoming and hospitable city as Bukhara. If Bukhara were a man, it would be James Bond. I will be back. Please look forward to it.”
I’m told this honesty landed me on the news, right after an emergency broadcast tone. I had to take their word for it. I don’t much care for the idea of being caught red-handed and honest out in the open like that.
We had to leave eventually, after hundreds of rahmats. That means thank you. I had the time of my life. No joke. The city is fantastic.
There is no place in the world which made me feel more welcome than Bukhara did. Even the old ladies burning sage in the wee hours of the morning after seeing me slouch from the canals only screamed and peed a little.
I suppose, in retrospect, they believed their morning rituals warding off the evil eye would apply to me, too. But it won’t. Because for the last time, ladies, I'm not a subterranean evil. I'm just really, really, deeply and truly stupid.
I'm also still hopelessly in love with Bukhara. So, I didn’t write about it as much as the others. I don’t want you filthy animals screwing it up with a mass migration and your demands for bloody Starbucks.
NEXT ENTRY
One of your best. Thanks for all the words. Many of them make sense ( which generally is not tolerated in this world) keep on trucking...