Nigora was unconvinced by this. For she was not sentimental. However much they tempted her, and moved her, she could not believe in the fantasy of the endings. She still, after all, had some pride.
According to Nigora, romantic comedy was the most morally complex of all the filmic genres. It dramatised the essential moral problem of everybody’s life. It represented the gap between desire and fulfilment.
This was the theory she developed as she lay beside her husband; as he caressed the curve of her forehead; as his hands went up and down the floral print of her acrylic night-gown. The flora were daisies, they were cornflowers. Nigorajonim, he said. Nigorajonim. He told his wife that he loved her. And she told him that she loved him; and she was lying, thought Nigora. She was lying to her Lazizjon.
And yet: Nigora was not lying, not quite.
There was a secret to Laziz’s moustache. It was a private joke between him and Nigora. The joke was that Laziz’s moustache was not real. From time to time, Laziz applied this drooping line of glutinous plastic to his upper lip. Before he went out, Nigora would take polaroids of him: as he saluted, glaring at the camera; as he leered and pouted like a matinée idol. They loved these photographs. They showed them to their closest friends, as they drank a coffee, with jagged squares of milk chocolate. And no one else found Laziz’s moustache funny. It was not, perhaps, that they found it positively unfunny; it was just that they could not see its humour. This humour was reserved for the privacy of Laziz and his Nigora.
The night before they left Uzbekistan, in 2002, Nigora met her friend Faizullo in the park. There was a man selling candyfloss, and a man selling bananas. They held hands and kissed as if they were in love. In this way, Nigora hoped she might not be endangering her friend. They would simply resemble an everyday, humdrum affair. It was nothing to do with alliances, or politics. They sat on a climbing-frame printed with blurred reproductions of Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny, and talked about the other singers in the opera house, maliciously. Faizullo was an opera singer. This was Nigora’s implicit way of talking about their friendship. And then they walked away and Nigora kissed him on the cheek, lightly, absent-mindedly – as though she were about to see him again in the morning.
Yes, Nigora knew about suffering.
That was the last time she saw him. And, unbeknown to Nigora, she had stayed in Faizullo’s memory accompanied by a pigeon, which had drifted behind her as she turned to say goodbye.
Three years later, Faizullo had disappeared. It was rumoured that he had been killed; then it was rumoured he had been imprisoned. And Nigora did not know which of these she preferred: for, although her instinct clung to the life of Faizullo, she also could not allow herself the pain of imagining Faizullo with a number stitched on his breast, ragged, like a raffle ticket.
On her last morning in Uzbekistan, Nigora had seen a pregnant dachshund being driven in the front seat of a hatchback, which Nigora first saw through the car-window beside her and then through the rear window behind her, as she twisted round, entranced.
Nigora could not worry about the humans; the humans were too much for her. But she could worry about the dogs instead. For the dogs were innocent. The dogs were the genuine bystanders; they had nothing to do with revolutions, or beliefs.
If Nigora were asked about the suffering in her own marriage, she would not have been able to talk about it. All her suffering was elsewhere – in the realm of remembered facts.
There was a snobbishness in her suffering, a reserve. It would not countenance comparison.
And yet, and yet: Laziz would go down underneath the covers, in the nights. And he would say to her, ‘Never leave me, never leave me.’ And how could she? she would reply. Everything she loved was Laziz. And he would say to her, ‘Never leave me, never leave me.’ Or he would say, ‘Tell me I’m not ugly.’ For Laziz believed that he was ugly; he believed that he was the ugliest and weakest child. And Nigora, sadly, continued to reassure him; she kissed the galumph of his nose, the crooked line of his mouth, and she said to him, ‘You’re not ugly. Of course you’re not. I love you, you’re beautiful,’ until Laziz managed to calm down.
The coverlet had been given to her by her grandmother. And underneath the coverlet she felt safe.
She did not believe in her own suffering, Nigora. All her ideas of suffering were reserved for the gone, the missing, the dead.
Somewhere, everywhere, a girl is taking her clothes off. This much was true. Nigora could agree with this. But something else, she thought, was also true. Somewhere, everywhere, a girl was being raped. And the question was: how far away? How far away did something have to happen before it stopped being your responsibility? How far away did a rape need to be? Two streets? A country? A separate universe?
In this rational hysteria lived Nigora, who loved her husband, Laziz – a taxi driver and former businessman. She loved him, and wanted to leave him.
Some Day-time Dialogue between Nigora and Laziz
L When you’re young you can go anywhere but when you’re old you can’t go everywhere. It’s true.
N It’s true.
L It’s true? It’s true. Yes. Did I tell you this joke about the rake?
N The rake, no.
L Two men are walking down a road.
N OK.
L And there’s a rake in between them.
N That’s it? It isn’t funny.
L No, it isn’t funny, is it? This guy told me it and he laughed so I thought it must be funny.
N It isn’t funny.
On the sofa which they had bought after a year in their new country, Nigora and Laziz watched The Philadelphia Story. Or: Nigora watched, and Laziz slept beside her, his head back, his mouth open. This film was dubbed into Russian, with one male and bass actor doing all the voices. And this made her sad; it created a gap between Nigora and the storyline.
As Nigora watched this film again, she considered that its plot was all about timing: everything had got out of kilter, and yet somehow things would restore themselves. Timing would be restored. Because the couple who move apart are still the same couple. The beauty (thought Nigora) of The Philadelphia Story is the fact that the film is about Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and yet all along it looks like it is about Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. But Jimmy Stewart is just there to prove a sad truth of timing: that the affair one is having is never the affair one is having. There is always someone else.
The cake she had bought lay crumbling on its paper box in front of them.
She stroked Laziz under his rough chin. She gently extricated his moustache from its precarious angle on his upper lip. Happy anniversary, she said, gently, to herself.
Laziz would be picturesque, and she would be distressed. That was the image of their marriage.
She was not sure if the vocabulary for everything really existed. She was not convinced by everyone’s assumption of linguistic comprehensiveness. The feeling she got, for instance, when watching The Philadelphia Story, was not quite sadness; it was not quite melancholy. It was more to do with a sensation of size, of overwhelming size.
More and more, she was beginning to believe that feelings were not complicated. They were not split into infinite constituent elements. Instead, often, the words were not all there. For Nigora was pragmatic. She had no time for souls with soul. No, Nigora did not believe in the indefinable. She believed that everything had a definition, if only the words could be found.
She remembered her father coming into the empty kitchen, letting his keys splay on the table. She remembered him biting the cap off a biro, as he made notes on a pile of manuscript. She remembered the first boy she ever slept with, Shuhrat, who used to swim while she lay and read on the grass by the river. He got out and lay beside her. She remembered his arms, the hair springing awry as it dried. But now she could not quite remember his face. She remembered his eyes were brown, but she could not remember his eyes. She only remembered that she knew they were brown.