Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER FORTY THREE – OUR COMPANY. THE WORLD BEHIND THE ORCHARD
This story happened to us completely by accident. With me and my university friend, Yuliy. Yuliy was a very modest guy, Sasha’s classmate, Denis’s neighbor and “my driver.” That’s what Denis jokingly nicknamed him, for his unfailing response to my ideas and plans using Yuliy’s “Zaporozhets”. At that time, few people had a car; often they were not needed in a big city, but I highly valued the availability of a vehicle, and even with a driver.
Yuliy had not only modesty and restraint, but also a very integral character. It was easy to persuade him to travel if the idea suited him, but no force could move him from his place if the movement went against his views. He didn’t come up with any reasons to justify his refusal, he simply put forward an ironclad argument, “I don’t want to!”
“Yuliy, two girls I know are coming from Odessa. Let’s go meet them at the airport and I introduce you to them.”
“Thank you, Nick, but somehow… I don’t want to.”
“But this is an opportunity to flirt with them, well… you never know…”
“Yes, I’m understanding. Thank you. But… another time.”
“What other time? Do I have a travel agency? It is just luck!”
“Very good. But I don’t feel like it now.”
“Do you have free time? Do you feel OK? And is the car okay? Are you really just giving up like this?”
I was literally crawling out of my pants, not knowing how to persuade my friend to take an innocent trip to the airport.
“Of course, just like that! If it were necessary, well, let’s say you met two disabled people, I would go to help. You and two girls can easily get where you need by bus. I don’t want to go.”
It was possible to continue endlessly, but with the same result. I remember that in Yerevan, at army training, Yuliy was one of the few who did not use bad words. Fellow students even offered him money to swear out loud at least once, but he never agreed. And when the ensign ordered him to do something contrary to his views, he refused, stood punished for an hour under the scorching sun, which earned him the respect of the entire company, was sent into the guardhouse for insubordination, but did not give up.
So, one summer day I went to the market to buy fruits. I spent a long time choosing cherries; they seemed too expensive to me, and I offendedly asked the Azerbaijani boy,
“Why it’s so expensive?”
“It’s expensive here, but in our village it’s cheap!” said the boy, “Come to us!”
And, looking at the facial expressions of his open, weathered face and emphasized gestures, which so clearly separated his native “there” from the alien “here,” I immediately believed him and became eager to go to his fruit world, since I had a driver along with the car. Yuliy easily agreed to the trip, and the next weekend we set off towards Azerbaijan, in search of my new friend Musa from the small village of Karakhaly, unknown to us.
In the absence of navigators and the Internet, finding this village was not easy. We reached the desired area without difficulty, but to find a specific place, a map was not enough – we had to ask about turns on the dusty roads. Not knowing Azerbaijan language, one wave of the hand indicating the direction was not enough, since, sooner or later, the matter ended in a fork and a new question, “Where to go now?”
But we were stubborn and, after wandering for a while, we drove into the thickets of fruit trees, which turned out to be our goal. A flock of barefoot children shouting “Karakhaly!” escorted our all-terrain vehicle to the fences of village houses. Adults had already appeared there and confirmed that we were indeed in the village of Karakhaly.
“Who are you looking for?” asked a man in a striped robe and skullcap, speaking some Russian.
“Musa,” I answered, feeling cold that I didn’t know his last name and couldn’t clearly describe the guy.
“Musa ‘U-u’ veya (or) Musa ‘i-I’?” asked a man in a dressing gown, colorfully depicting a fat man with arms open in an embrace, swollen cheeks and the buzzing ‘U-u’, and a thin guy with the thumbs and third fingers of both hands almost brought together, elongated lips and a high-pitched sound of ‘i-i’.
I think that the interpreter in the skullcap imagined himself as Kuk or Miklouho-Maclay, communicating with the aborigines from the wild Tbilisi tribes. But his method was successful. I confirmed that I needed Musa ‘i-i’. In any case, the man said something to the children, and they shouted, “Musa! Musa!” flew away like a flock of birds.
A couple of minutes later, the chirping flock returned. It was led by our Musa, in worn-out shoes, but with radiant joy.
“Bayram!” (The holiday!) he said, “These are my friends from Tbilisi. I invite everyone to come for lunch.”
Amid the cheers of those gathered, we were taken to Musa’s house, hidden in a grove of fruit trees. The living room in the house was a spacious, practically devoid of furniture, room. Before we had time to enter, the owners brought in a rolled-up carpet and rolled it out on the painted floor. Then they brought in a lot of pillows and mutakas (bolster pillows), on which the guests were seated. The women started preparing pilaf, someone in the yard was lighting a barbecue and clinking skewers, and strong tea and sweets were placed in front of us “to refresh ourselves after the journey and sweeten the conversation.”
As it turned out, Musa’s father died, and the feast was led by Musa’s uncle, the head teacher of the local school. He spoke Russian well and translated when required. We were respectfully asked to tell about ourselves.
“I work as an engineer, I work in electronics,” said Yuliy.
“I see, you distribute electricity! Light?” the translator clarified, and with our consent, he colorfully explained to the audience, pointing first to Yuliy, then to the light bulb.
“And I’m a physicist, I work at the Institute of Traumatology,” I shared.
Musa’s Uncle spread his hands in bewilderment,
“Explain clearly how you make money?”
I realized that I had taken the wrong direction.
“I’m working with penguins… uh… students.”
“Great! A teacher!” my rural colleague was delighted, “What is your salary?”
His question again switched me to my previous train of thought, because classes with students were not legal income, and the salary was the small money that I was paid officially at work.
“One hundred and forty rubles,” I answered, referring to my monthly salary.
“In what?” the interviewer was amazed, “Hundred forty in a month is not enough, and in a day – is a lot.”
I admitted that in a month. All the guests made a noise, shook their heads, and clicked their tongues. The people clearly supported me, not the state.
“What do you teach?”
“Physics.”
“Nobody needs this physics-shysics here, but do you know Russian?”
“Certainly!”
“Then move in here! You will teach Russian at school. We’ll give you seven rubles for the lesson. Five lessons a day, twenty-five a week, one hundred a month. The salary will be seven hundred rubles.”
I smiled. What would be a more polite way to refuse this offer, made from all their heart?
“I won’t have anywhere to live…”
Everyone started making noise and spoke at the same time, gesticulating,
“You just don’t understand our life,” said Musa, “If you move, the whole village will build you a big house on a plot with a garden. The garden provides good income. If you yourself process, harvest and sell it at the market in Tbilisi, you’ll get sixty thousand a season. We don’t feel sorry for the townspeople! If you give it to your neighbors, eat as much as you want and make jam, then for the sale they’ll bring you half of the money, that is, thirty thousand. But keep in mind that life here is not easy, everything is expensive: a wedding costs one hundred thousand, getting out of the army costs one hundred thousand, placing a child in college costs one hundred thousand. Now the townspeople don’t feel sorry for us! But we have common joy and sorrow – for the whole village. Think without rush about whether this kind of life suits you, but for now let’s have lunch.
We tasted pilaf and homemade kebabs, washing it all down with vodka.
“Sorry, we don’t hold wine – the Koran forbids it, but it doesn’t say anything about Stolichnaya,” the head teacher grinned.
After lunch, fruit was brought in on trays. Then I remembered why, in fact, we arrived to this unknown rural world.
“Musa, we came to buy fruit from you,” I whispered in the guy’s ear.
“Another time,” he replied.
I didn’t understand his answer well, but such a warm welcome excluded any offense, and when we went out onto the road to say goodbye, we saw several boxes tied to the roof rails. This was a gift from Musa and his fellow villagers – selected fruits for guests from the capital.
Inadvertently, we touched a completely different life with different values and criteria, but fair and humane in its own way. No, I couldn’t move there, but I often recalled pictures of this unusual world that accidentally opened up to me behind the orchard.
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