Escape from Tashkent

A Peace Corps worker unwittingly falls into a romantic adventure with a Russian waitress stranded in Uzbekistan.

By Jeffrey Tayler

Feb 25, 1999 | When the waitress first stepped up to our table to take our order I couldn't see her face -- behind her head blinked the red-blue-yellow lights of the restaurant floor show. But she was blond, buxom and big-boned -- that much I could tell -- and I liked the way she moved. After noting our order she lingered over my shoulder for a moment, then snapped shut her pad and disappeared down the smoky aisles toward the kitchen.

I was in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, with a few other Americans. We had come to set up a Peace Corps program in the country, which had recently gained independence from the Soviet Union. Around us in the restaurant, members of the new Uzbek elite congregated, swearing, shouting and downing shots of chili-pepper vodka. They were shishki -- fat cats -- grim and oily nabobs of communist background and shady trade, whose fingers were slathered in gold rings and whose trousers bulged with wads of $100 bills; next to them sat the baubled whores who serviced them. Since independence, Uzbek mobsters and clan leaders had come into their own, and Tashkent had devolved into a warren of corruption, violence and ethnic and religious tension. As Peace Corps workers poured into Uzbekistan, locals with their wits about them were high-tailing it out of there. The best thing you could do in Tashkent, especially if you were Russian, was plot your escape.

Our waitress was one of the only Russians left on the restaurant's staff. A while later she brought us our order. I watched her lay out the plates, then walk to a spot opposite our table and lean against a pillar. Our eyes met, and locked. I called her over to ask her name. She smiled and stepped forward, but her gaze fell on something behind me. She turned rigid and traipsed past me.

A few minutes later she was leaning over my left ear.

"My name is Anastasia."

"You're a bit nervous, aren't you, Anastasia?"

"Oh, I'm just on the job, that's all."

We chatted. She bent over my shoulder as if ducking, her eyes now and again scanning the recesses of the restaurant. I asked for her phone number so I could invite her to dinner, but she said she would take mine instead; she then instructed me to slip it to her under the table on a balled-up piece of paper. In the middle of a promise to call me she froze, straightened her posture and marched off.

After my meal I looked up. Through the gloom, in the back, I discovered a pair of eyes -- the cold, slate-gray eyes of a mustachioed man -- staring at me.

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In 1966 an earthquake leveled Tashkent, which until then had been one big Turkestani bazaar wafted over by the spicy breezes of Central Asia, evocative of Tamerlane and the Khanates of yore. When the Soviets finished rebuilding it, it was a jungle of cement barracks, apartment hovels, fearsome Lenin statues and wide avenues built for parades of proletarians who never existed in a republic of cotton fields and desert. Rising above the center was the Hotel Uzbekistan, a 12-story concrete leviathan where roaches rained from the ceiling, clerks often doubled as pimps, and hookers solicited rooms on an hourly basis. In the wee hours of the morning Uzbek KGB agents stalked the stairwells, interrogating the floor attendants about the whereabouts of foreign guests. The Peace Corps called the Hotel Uzbekistan home, and I lived there during the first months of my assignment.

The next afternoon Anastasia rung my room from a pay phone -- she was afraid, she said, of calling from her apartment lest there be "complications" from the KGB. Still, she sounded relaxed and we talked for a long time: She liked to go to the theater, Chekhov was her favorite writer, she loved the poet Pushkin ...

"So what about dinner?" I asked. "I'm flying to Kiev tomorrow, so how about tonight?"

"Just meet me in front of the Zvezdopad Cafi at 8. Come in a taxi -- but not in a taxi from the hotel. And don't get out of the car when you arrive -- I'll recognize you. I'll take you to this restaurant I know."