The Book of Other People (15 page)

Laziz sat in the traffic and looked at the smog on the river. Like Nigora, his thoughts were nostalgic. Unlike Nigora’s, they were also romantic.
Lazizjon
, he was thinking.
Lazizjon
.

Oh my Laziz.

A dubbed and imported video of
The Philadelphia Story
- a present for their anniversary - lay clipped inside a clouded plastic box, on the passenger seat beside him. The passenger seat and its headrest were shrouded in the costume of a panda.

Laziz believed in two things. He believed in tribulation. The history of the world was a history of pain. But Laziz did not worry about this world. Its pain did not distress him. Neither loss nor death distressed him. For he also believed in God, and His inscrutable gifts.

He picked a cassette, titled in red felt-tip, from a pile beside the gear-stick, and blew into each spoked wheel before slotting it happily into its slit. After several uncertain and anxious seconds, the voice of Natacha Atlas began to be husky in his car.

Laziz (thought Laziz) was happy. He was a married man. Nothing, therefore, could harm him. He was protected by the love of God, and its earthly counterpart, the love of his wife.

He knew that when he died he would hear a voice, and that voice would greet him by his name.

 

In Namangan, the city where he was born, and where he had assumed that he would die (but he would not), Laziz had begun a bakery business. He started a chain of shops selling cake, flowers - gladioli in translucent plastic, like a wedding dress - and boxes of outdated chocolate. He had started it in 1989, when everyone believed in
perestroika
, for the West and for the East.

In Namangan, Laziz’s sexual encounters had been limited to occasional kisses, occasional fumblings. He would listen with careful unconcern to the stories of his colleagues, his employees - about their wives and their affairs. None of Laziz’s affairs were
affairs of the heart
.

As he sat each night in his only armchair, with its pornographic rents and tears, as he read business textbooks in Russian, Laziz used to console himself with the theory that this prolonged virginity was not, as some might argue, due to weakness, or fear. It was instead due to a care for the female; it was a superhuman tenderness. He was a superhero of tenderness.

In this way, Laziz accepted the burden of his inexperience. He developed a way of not caring about girls, by saying that he cared about girls.

And so when he was first and finally in bed with a girl, whose name was Nigora, on a business trip to Samarqand, Laziz was unprepared. He was also thirty-two.

Although both of them acknowledged that
intercourse itself
would not take place, there was still a tacit understanding that, since their clothes had been removed, other actions might be performed. There was an air of expectation. In Nigora’s mind, there was an idea of hopes to be fulfilled. But when Laziz’s fingers first felt the deep wetness of Nigora, its fur and unexpected sensations, he was not able to control himself. He spurted, a little to the left of Nigora, who was lying on her front.

At this point, Laziz felt his sex life
running away from him
.

How far is a person the same as their sex life? This was what Laziz began to think, naked, beside a naked girl. He became ontological, epistemological. Laziz wanted to believe that his sex life could be separate from his life. Like many people who have caused their own distress, he wanted to believe that events were not a sure guide to character - somewhere, inviolate, and far away from this scene, existed a Laziz who was powerful and perfect.

And yet events are a sure guide to character. Nigora, in the cake-shop queue, considering if she could leave Laziz, would have been able to tell him that. Our characters - she would have argued, sadly - are nothing but events. Everything else is only romance.

One proof of her improvised theory is what Laziz did next, in Namangan, many years ago, on that
fateful night
with Nigora.

He did not talk to Nigora; he did not tell the truth, and trust his charm. Instead, Laziz lay on his left side, with one hand propping up his head. A dying gladiator. He gazed at Nigora. He neglected to mention that he was lying on his own emission.

Nigora looked at him. And in this look began the subsequent relationship of Laziz and Nigora. For Laziz was trying to look cool and unconcerned; while Nigora was looking anxious. Laziz was hoping not to be found out; Nigora was fretting - why had her body, now naked, rendered Laziz so nonchalant, so lolling? Where was his fire? His inner spirit? Where was the lust?

The lust, thought Laziz, was simply premature. It was not on time. The lust would therefore return eventually. He was young and healthy, after all. And so he thought that
the crisis would pass
. He trusted to a timetable.

But the crisis did not pass. Leaning on his hand, Laziz continued to observe his new girlfriend in distress. His pose was classical. It was picturesque.

Oh, the picturesque is no substitute for lust! And yet the picturesque was all Laziz could perform; everything else was beyond him.

This image - in which Laziz was picturesque, leaning on his elbow, and Nigora was distressed, lying naked beside him - is the image of their subsequent marriage.

Two years later, succumbing to
the pressure of events
, they left their country (a country to which they would never return).

Each night, these facts recurred to her: Nigora was thirty-four; Yaha was twenty-three. These numbers were suddenly becoming fraught for Nigora. She remembered them every morning; at her rising up, and at her going to bed. She remembered them when she went out, and on her coming in.

She was a married woman. She did not know if she still loved her husband. She did not know if she, a married woman, whose hands and breasts - whose every opening - had since her marriage known only one man, was now in love with someone else.

Sometimes, Nigora believed that if she only kissed Yaha, then she would be cured. Her pain would be relieved. Cupid’s arrow would be removed from her breast. But she was not sure.

Nigora was a housewife and a part-time secretary. Yaha was a reserve footballer for AHLY.

As she spoke to her immortal and all-powerful God - a God she had disconsolately adopted from Laziz - she reasoned in this way. That she was not to blame. That so long as no sexual acts occurred she was not guilty of any sin. That the definition of a sexual act was problematic. That it necessarily included introduction of the penis into her body; and necessarily included ejaculation of semen, whether inside or outside a female body; and also, necessarily, any touch of a man’s hand or mouth on the bareness between her legs. But at this point Nigora grew perplexed. She felt the need for guidance, and could not find it.

Her problem was the kiss. She could not define the moral status of the kiss. If she kissed him, thought Nigora, then maybe she would not want to venture into the unambiguously immoral; she would no longer be tempted by the temptations of his flesh.

Since she thought that the kiss might be her cure, she tended to believe that a kiss was innocent. It was just on the right side of morality.

Nigora was not convinced of the soul’s immortality. Laziz was convinced; but she was not. And since she was not convinced, she was also unsure of his belief in crime and punishment. Without the threat of punishment or the promise of reward, her actions were oddly depleted. They existed only for her.

In this way, Nigora was a libertine.

All Nigora’s temptations were now refracted through the immortal. Her body’s immortal longings were her anxiety, her worry. They seemed more important than the possibility of her soul’s immortal life.

And yet, and yet. How much pleasure could her body procure, she wondered? If they slept together, she would not give Yaha pleasure; when he remembered her, she worried, he would remember her only with amusement, with pity. Her memory of passion would be his memory of the laughable.

At what point, she wondered, could she act out of character? When would she have the courage?

Her life was all Laziz: they could not contemplate themselves without each other. It was Laziz / Nigora; Nigora / Laziz; and Laziz bored her.

Nigora had a theory of romantic comedy. It might, perhaps, have helped Laziz to know this theory. It might have helped him in his own thoughts and theories of marriage. But he did not know her theory.

Every plot in the movies (thought Nigora) was the same. She knew the plots. There was the life-changing moment. Then the meet-cute. Then the discovery of an obstruction to happiness. Then the decision to embark on a particular strategy. The test, or tests. The sudden reversal of the obstruction. And finally the happy ending.

These were the plots: but there was another way of describing the plots.

Every plot was about morality: it was the opposition of adultery and marriage; it was saying that there was always a choice to be made between sex and love. Every hero or heroine believed they could not have the two together. And yet this opposition would always be resolved in the coercive paradise of the finale, where sex and love were revealed to be identical.

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.

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.