He carried a gun and ordered us out of the taxi with all our bags. We struggled into the guard’s cabin. It was sparsely furnished with two narrow beds and one small side table. Sand swirled in through the doorway as we moved. No traffic passed by now. I doubted that any would for several hours.
“Sit,” the guard ordered. I obeyed and sat on one bed. Charlotte sat on the other. I felt very afraid. I did not like the sight of beds. We had left no paper trail behind for the borders that we crossed. No one knew where we were. We could easily disappear in this desert. The only witness would be the taxi driver, who was a stranger. I did not even know if he was still waiting for us. The guard might have ordered him to leave. Two of us faced one guard, but he had a gun and we did not.
For once, Charlotte and I did not talk. We remained quiet and compliant. I thought through questions the guard might ask and how best to answer them. I felt comforted by the thought of that agent who had followed us through Tashkent hotels and tailed us all the way to our colleague’s house. The security services must by now know who we were and where we went and know that we posed no threat.
The door slammed; the guard entered the room again.
“Documents,” he ordered. We gave him our passports.
“Visas.” We gave him papers for Kiev. I included my accreditation card. I hoped official status there would help in some way here. I could not judge the character of this guard. His monosyllabic orders left no opening for conversation, no way to strike up a rapport with him.
Hours passed. Still Charlotte and I barely talked. I felt calmer now. The guard left and did not lock the door, though where could we really run in this desert where there was still no traffic on the road?
Toward dusk the guard returned. He questioned us briefly. Where had we been? Why were we here? I told him the truth and hoped he would believe me. I emphasized shopping. I downplayed our trip south to Qurgonteppa. The guard left. He returned about an hour later.
“Go,” he said. He had not asked for a bribe.
We saw the taxi parked by the post. The driver sat inside. Had he stayed out of loyalty to us or had he been ordered to do so? We did not know and did not ask. We were just grateful for a ride to Samarkand.
The receptionist at the Intourist hotel in Samarkand did not ask us any questions. We received a big room with a view and no hassle. We spread our shopping across one bed and admired it. Charlotte wrapped a recently purchased scarf around her head, put on her coat and gloves, opened the window and held my shortwave radio out so that we could listen to a BBC news broadcast. Cold air swirled into the room. The newsreader spoke of pitched battles, lives lost in Tajikistan. I thought of our driver from the market and his relatives in Qurgonteppa, as well as the fighters with clarinet guns; some must be dead, and the country was in such a mess.
Charlotte switched the radio off. We shut the window. The room warmed up quickly. We thought of home. I would soon leave for London. Friends in Kiev had arranged a goodbye party for me and had stockpiled wine and food for the occasion. Would we make it back on time?
Exhausted from our travels, we slept. In the morning we went to the airport to inquire about flights. Tickets remained cheap — about four dollars to fly across eleven time zones. We purchased two for every Kiev-bound flight over the next three days. The Aeroflot agent warned us of the likelihood that none would actually fly.
The first flight was scheduled for 3 a.m. the next day. At midnight we checked out of our hotel. By 4 a.m. we sat in a taxi heading back to the hotel as the flight had been cancelled. Large, fluffy flakes of snow fell from the sky, and blanketed the road ahead. The taxi driver lost control of the car on the slippery road and smashed into a car in front of us. Unhurt but dazed, we took our luggage from the trunk and walked the rest of the way to the hotel. We paused to rest several times. Snow soon covered our coats and bags.
When we got to the hotel, the receptionist said that the room was still ours and gave us the key. We opened the door, flicked on the light and saw lumps in the beds. We recognized two women from the hotel staff. They sat up, surprised to see us. They were annoyed that they had to vacate the room, but they eventually left.
“They’ve stolen my tampons,” Charlotte said. She had accidentally left a pack behind and had looked forward to reclaiming them.
The next morning we returned to the airport with our luggage. We hoped the morning flight might fly. The Aeroflot agent allowed us to hand in our tickets.
“So the flight’s actually leaving,” I asked.
“Of course,” the agent said, no mention of fuel or cancelled flights. We sat in the departure lounge, feeling skeptical that the flight would leave. Then we heard a boarding call. We passed through security. A guard pulled us aside. He would not let us leave with so much shopping. He wanted a bribe. I fought and negotiated. I pointed out that everyone else was allowed through with a flotilla of suitcases and live poultry. Eventually I gave in and paid. I did not want to loose this rare chance to leave. The guard let us through to board the plane. Our flight went smoothly and we landed in Kiev on time.
Bill hosted my goodbye party at his apartment. I looked around the room filled with friends I had made over the past two years, the bonds so strong; I would not have survived without these people and would miss so many of them. Newcomers came as well. We met for the first and last time. Wine flowed, music played, smokers clustered on the balcony, a chill in the October air.
At noon the next day, my Lada so fully loaded that I could barely see, I waved goodbye to Charlotte, who remained behind, and Stephen, who would move into my flat. I drove down Khreshchatyk, remembering my first drive along it with Mary when police officers had stopped us on every block. They had asked why our husbands let us out in the car alone, wanted to know how I had learned to drive and also asked for bribes. No one stopped me now. I took the highway west. Lviv and Hungary lay ahead.
Now that I was no longer focused on work, I could appreciate the landscape for its beauty. The Carpathian Mountains were ablaze in autumn colours. At the Ukrainian-Hungarian border, guards searched the car. One saw a coin that he said I could not take out of the country. Unaware of this, I handed him the coin, but he refused to take it and said, “If anyone asks, just say you threw it in a field.”
I did not know that I felt stressed until I picked my way across the final kilometre of potholed Ukrainian roads and crossed safely into Hungary. I loved Ukraine and my friends there, but it was still enough of an arbitrary and unpredictable place that nothing, not even the right to leave, could be taken for granted. When I heard my first Jó napot kívánok [good day], a Hungarian greeting on Hungarian soil, I felt set loose, free.
A few kilometres inside Hungary I saw a brightly lit service station. It seemed like such a novelty to drive up to a pump in the middle of nowhere and fill up. I opened my trunk, took out four metal gasoline tins and a funnel. I thought that I should fill the tins, even though I realized that I no longer needed to. I left the tins, which had been such important survival tools these past two years, by the pump, and looked back, feeling anxious without them.
I walked back and forth through the entrance to the service station store a dozen times, mesmerized by the automatic doors that opened and closed with a swoosh each time. I stood in front of the store wall decked with windshield wipers, pressure gauges and all sorts of automobile paraphernalia in packages that hung from hooks. I stared and wondered what to buy, then realized that I needed nothing. Roadside service existed here. But hoarding is a hard habit to break. I ended up taking windshield wipers and a timing belt to the cash. Before the attendant rung them in, I stopped her and placed the items back on their hooks.