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__ENCOUNTER IN SAMARKAND .|. PAGE 2 OF 2

We arrived in Samarkand sometime after midnight, the train gasping to a halt at what seemed another unscheduled delay but was actually our destination. The platform next to the train began to teem with life as passengers disembarked and bundles were thrown from the train to outstretched arms. Descending to the platform, we stood shivering amid the hurly-burly of djellaba-clad Central Asians securing their fabric-wrapped parcels and baskets of fruit. As first-class passengers, we were once again told not to worry about our luggage, the porters would make sure it was passed on to the Intourist drivers, who would see it safely to the Hotel Samarkand.

Teenagers in denim jackets shuffled alongside us as we walked through the station, nodding to us and moving their heads as though they were talking. They did this so that anyone watching would think they were trying to practice their English. What they were actually hoping was to purchase some black market gear.

We had heard, like all Westerners who visited Russia in those days, that one could make a handsome profit by trading designer jeans. But the Russians and Central Asians had been thoroughly unimpressed by the copious amounts of denim we had imported; the market was by then flooded. What every Russian under the age of 40 desperately wanted was heavy metal cassettes -- Iron Maiden, Dokken, AC/DC, Van Halen, Quiet Riot, Ratt and, the apparent favorite band of all Russian metalheads, the Scorpions. Unfortunately, most of my fellow travelers were too sophisticated to be listening to heavy metal; this was, after all, the mid-'80s, and your average college student was then into much hipper music: R.E.M., the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, the Talking Heads -- music, in other words, that Soviet headbangers found incomprehensible. As a music fan with an annoyingly developed sense of the ironic, I happened to be going through a phase of re-appreciating heavy metal (a phase that lasted approximately seven years), particularly AC/DC and Van Halen, and so arrived in the Soviet Union with a backpack full of metal cassettes that proved to be more valuable than dollars in Gorbachev's Russia.

We waited in the cavernous, darkened lobby of the Hotel Samarkand on battered Brezhnev-era knockoff naugahyde chairs. Sergei, our Intourist guide, was undertaking the usual protracted struggle to check us into the hotel. No matter how many rooms were vacant, train compartments empty or airplane seats unoccupied, no one in the Soviet Union's tourist sector seemed particularly pleased to be filling those spaces with hard-currency-paying foreigners. It was as if the entire tourist infrastructure of the country was perpetually reserved for some high-ranking government official who would never arrive.

The staff of the Samarkand, once they were roused from whatever collective backroom stupor they had managed to organize for themselves, grudgingly passed over a dozen fourth-floor room keys with no room number indicators attached to them. A surly, sour-smelling desk worker assured us through Sergei that all the keys in the hotel worked in every door, except those doors with newer locks for which the keys had been lost. We fell in behind a bell captain in a tattered uniform who led us up several flights of marble stairs where we disbursed to claim our rooms. Our luggage, we were assured, was on its own separate way up.

I arranged to share a room with Barnett, who immediately fell onto the spongy mattress to pass out, his bare feet hanging over the side of the bed and his toe swollen to the size of a newborn infant's head. The room was even colder than it had been outside. Flipping through his duffel bag, I removed a Roll Tide sweat shirt, which I threw on over my cut-off army pants and polo shirt. The light switch near the door had proven useless; when Barnett had flipped the switch upon entering the room, the switch had come off in his hand, leaving one exposed wire, which we both felt it prudent to avoid. In the bathroom I found a string hanging from the ceiling that when pulled produced a tepid stream of yellow light sufficient for me to make out the following day's agenda. It went something like this: Breakfast, Mosque, Mosque, Mosque, Lunch, Mosque, Mosque, Monument to the Great Patriotic War, Dinner. I rooted through Barnett's duffel again for some caviar, which I ate with my fingers.

It was Melissa's idea that we take a walk. She had knocked on our door, ostensibly to check on her brother, and finding me with my fingers blackened by Beluga and her brother unconscious on the bed, she asked if I would like to take a stroll, explore the city. At that point, had she suggested we sneak into a Soviet nuclear testing facility I would have gone along with her.

The roads were deserted. The streetlights did not work, save at the occasional intersection where a flickering bulb would burn surrounded by thousands of moths. But a full moon cast a dull glow and lit the way down a wide, palm tree-lined avenue. The vast, imposing, shadowy gray buildings that loomed on each side appeared to be government buildings. Every five minutes, olive-colored trucks rumbled past, the driver slowing to stare at Melissa and me.

Melissa led us from the main drag onto a two-lane dirt road, past shuttered apartment buildings. She was intoxicated by the place, by the strangeness of it, the foreignness; it was vastly different from her native Jefferson County, Ala., and it was even a wide remove from the Fifth Arrondissement in Paris, where she had been living the last few years. The people here were ethnically opposite; their arid land was topographically alien; their languages -- Cyrillic and Arabic -- were alphabetically exotic; their system of government was anathema. There was even a distinctive smell to the place, a honeyed sweetness mingled with the usual third world sour. In this unknown land, I hoped, this place of mystery, surely the romantic possibilities were limitless. If back in the United States we never would have met, we had been brought closer together by Paris and then tossed next to each other on the same narrow dirt road here in Samarkand.

We turned again, onto a track that led off through irrigated tracts of desert farm land. Already, that feeling of wonderment and mystery at our dislocation had begun to give way, for me at least, to something like fear and discomfort; for not only did we not know where we were, neither did anyone else. Our classmates were by now into their third pints of vodka or were already asleep while Sergei, our Intourist guide, was probably into his 60th pint of vodka. We had vanished off the map, had simply walked out of our hotel and stumbled onto the cultivated fringes of some has-been caravan town now run by a bunch of drunk commissars.

But I was reluctant to show this fear to Melissa. She was of sturdier stock than me. Her father, she had told me, was a celebrity of sorts, the head football coach of a prominent college team that had not lived up to preseason expectations, although Melissa had insisted that the Aloha Bowl had been the stated goal of this team all season long. And as she walked in that evening light, her face silhouetted by the full moon's glow, she was plainly the striking, good-looking embodiment of her family's wholesome American image, her brother's soporific condition notwithstanding. She still held at that moment, at age 20, all the charms of girlhood and the knowing sexuality of womanhood. As hard as she tried to seem like a woman of the world, to seem sophisticated -- in Paris, I knew, she went to trendy boîtes like Bain Douch, Appocalypse and La Piscine -- there was the redolent whiff of the cheerleader and "A" student about her. Even on this dusty lane, in this Central Asian night, she was plainly an American Girl of the type I tirelessly lusted after through high school and college.

We had emerged onto another paved stretch of blacktop. The vast sky, a purple-lit sheet of pin-prick stars that ran in an immense belt from horizon to horizon, provided us with no clues as to where we were. Every star was of a brightness sufficient to be deemed the brightest in the sky, and anyway, even if we had been able to divine a North Star, we had no clue in what direction our hotel lay. It had been a kilometer since we had seen any man-made structures, and I pointed this out to Melissa as a bad sign, indicating that we were heading away from civilization rather than toward it. Yet when we reversed course, hoping to find the narrow lane on which we had come to this paved stretch of road, the lane seemed to have vanished, the side of the road offering up only the relentless sameness of tilled plots with farmhouses invisible in the night. The moonlight that had previously seemed ample now was inadequate. The darkness closed in around us.

"Nous sommes perdus," said Melissa in her Alabama-twanged French. At that moment light flickered on the horizon at the end of the ribbon of black road. At first I took it to be a distant flash of thunder, but the light seemed too yellow, somehow artificial.

Headlights! It was a truck. Its husky, gasping engine already audible through the thin, dry desert air, a canopied diesel cab was erratically swerving toward us. We were found. We could thumb a lift back to whatever passed for the center of this one collectively-owned horse town.

This was a troop truck, the property of the People's Army of the Soviet Socialist Republics. We stopped waving when we saw the maddened, febrile eyes of the driver and his three compatriots in the lighted cab of the vehicle, leering in shock at us over the headlights of the truck as it came to idle. Plainly, whatever we were, we did not belong here, along this dirt road, in the middle of the night, when all good comrades were safely asleep. While the driver swung open his door with a slow metallic groan, the whole canopied back of the truck seemed to come alive as the troops in the trailer roused themselves and began to peer over the cab. Russian conversation erupted.

And even from this distance, struggling to see past the headlights, I could tell that the majority of gazes had fallen upon Melissa.

About two dozen soldiers disembarked from the vehicle to form a semi-circle, panting sour, boozy effluvium at us. The soldiers wore olive-green uniforms soiled with thick, grimy layers of dust and boots caked with dried mud. They had been working all day. And probably drinking all day and night. A mustachioed man wearing a green cap who had been sitting next to the driver appeared to be in command. He regarded us with a mixture of curiosity, suspicion and a desire to sniff out some way to make this serendipitous discovery somehow pay off for him.

He spoke brusquely -- fast, hoarse commands in Russian that we could not understand.

We did not have passports, and we had surrendered our Intourist cards upon checking into the hotel. I had my wallet, from which I produced a California driver's license that I showed to the man in the cap. He took this and studied it, and then looked over Melissa's Carte de Sejour, a document entitling her to study in France. In the hopes of further convincing him we were Americans, students and definitely not some bizarre brand of counter-revolutionary Soviet citizen or air-dropped Western spies, I showed him the American Express card my father had given me and Melissa produced, of all things, a Galeries Lafayette charge card.

"Hotel Samarkand, Hotel Samarkand," we kept repeating over and over.

The crowd of curious, drunken soldiers was becoming restless. For them, Melissa was a wondrous surprise. A gift, perhaps. A foreign woman, in jewelry, wandering on a stretch of road where she should not have been. And her very presence out here indicated she would not be missed. For if anyone were monitoring her whereabouts, then surely she would not have been allowed to wander so far. If these 20 soldiers gave a thought to me it was only that they would have to kill me, either before or after they were finished with Melissa.

Two of the men lunged forward, their green uniforms shaking off a small cloud of dust that swirled in the headlights. They tugged at Melissa's coat; she grabbed for my shoulder.

I took her in my arms.

The man in the cap sternly ordered the men back into line.

Then he held his hand out, gesturing for Melissa to put her hand in his. She shook her head. He slapped the palm of his own hand and proffered it again.

She tentatively held her hand out. The man in the cap bent down for a closer look at the emerald ring on her right hand.

The troops were murmuring among themselves now. A few had grown bored, probably from the realization that whatever was to be gained from us would not trickle down to them. But a few of the soldiers remained interested in us, and a noisy round of arguing between the man in the cap and some of the soldiers ensued, during which violent hand gestures were thrown our way and my driver's license and Melissa's Carte de Sejour were passed from hand to hand, and once cast down to the pavement.

Finally, the man in the cap took Melissa by the arm, attempting to pull her away from me, toward the back of the truck. She clung to me, shaking her head violently.

Another round of angry discussion ensued, during which Melissa kept on hugging me.

"Married, married," she said, pointing to her ring and then to me.

The man in the cap shook his head slowly. Some decision had been reached. He gestured for us to go to the truck. We didn't move.

He then barked at us angrily in Russian. The crowd of soldiers parted for us as we walked to the truck, several of the soldiers reaching out to feel Melissa's hair as she passed.

We had been ordered into the sour-smelling cab, where we sat surrounded by four Russian soldiers. Melissa placed herself onto my lap rather than on the hard seat next to the commander. The truck started up, grinding into gear, and we set off down the narrow road. As the Russian men slid closer to Melissa she managed to arrange herself so that she was perched atop me.

We did not know where we were going. But as disoriented as I was, I was sure our hotel lay somewhere to the right of this road. As long as we hung a right at some point, we would be fine. That would mean we were being driven back to our hotel. We rolled up to a deserted intersection, a barren crossing of two seldom-traveled roads. Turn right, I was thinking, hang a right. Please, please, please.

We turned left.

Now I was certain we were in trouble. We would be arrested. Or even worse: Melissa would be raped, tortured, mutilated, her body abandoned for the coyotes -- did they even have coyotes? -- somewhere in this vast, inhospitable desert. And what would happen to me? Would I valiantly -- and pointlessly -- seek to defend Melissa's honor? Force these God-hating Reds to kill me before they had their way with Melissa? I really had no choice but to surrender myself on the altar of Melissa's honor. If they were driving us to some more convenient disposal point, where our screams would be unheard and our bodies unfound, then to be honorable was also the only rational course. I would be killed either way. I had run through the probabilities and decided I would make a last stand when we were out of the truck. I would at least die with dignity, defending the honor of American womanhood.

"They'll have to kill me to get to you," I murmured to Melissa.

"What are you talking about?" she said.

We were slowing down. There it was, the Hotel Samarkand, lit up and beckoning, the most beautiful sight I would lay eyes on in the Soviet Union. The soldiers opened the door and let us out, returning my driver's license, her student identification and our credit cards.

Upstairs, when Melissa came with me to check on her brother, we found Barnett had disappeared. The imprint of his body was still visible in the foam mattress. We assumed he was somewhere in the hotel, drinking with our classmates. So it was just us. She stood next to me beside the bed. And finally, for the first time this whole trip, we knew exactly where we were going.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I woke up before Melissa and climbed out of bed to look for our baggage. It had not yet arrived. I found a tin of crab legs in Barnett's duffel, which I pried open with his pocket knife to eat with my fingers.

Melissa stirred, blinking her eyes as she lay up in bed on one elbow. "That's disgusting."

I shrugged.

"Where's my brother?"

I shrugged. "Maybe he turned up, saw us and then went to sleep in your room."

I swallowed a hunk of crab meat.

"Our luggage still hasn't arrived," I told her.

This jolted Melissa out of bed. "What?"

I offered a moist slab of crab. She shook her head, pushing my hand aside. "Where is it?"

I shrugged again.

Fifteen minutes later we were downstairs, along with our classmates, crowding around Sergei, our Intourist guide, and demanding that our luggage be located immediately. Was it in the hotel? At the station? On the train? Sergei had no idea.

We had now been in the same clothes for close to 24 hours, without our toiletries, soap, clean underwear, warm clothes. The girls, more agitated than the boys, were in a state of open rebellion. They dreaded the prospect of going another day without changing clothes or freshening up. Then there was the sticky problem of tampons, feminine hygiene, myriad issues Sergei was uniquely unqualified to address.

The luggage, I suspected, had rolled back to Tashkent on the first train we had taken. It would take days to locate it, days more to send it to us, and by then who knew how many times it would have been ransacked. My guess was that from here on we had only what we carried. In my case, that meant my worldly possessions now consisted of my Walkman, my cache of heavy metal cassettes and a few sets of triple-A batteries.

Melissa walked from the crowd surrounding Sergei to sit on the faux-naugahyde lobby chair next to me, leaning her head onto my shoulder in a gesture I adored. Even without a shower or clean clothes, she smelled wonderful.

She sat upright. "Where is my brother?"

The hotel staff revealed that Barnett had gone out sometime after we had; they remembered because he had been barefoot and carrying a half-liter of vodka.

"He's probably drying out somewhere," I consoled Melissa. "He'll turn up."

She shot me a glance that instilled in me fear that there would be no encore of last night.

After we plied a hotel employee with a Motörhead "Ace of Spades" cassette, he suggested we check the local detention center, the drunk tank where comrades who pass out on city streets were taken during morning sweeps.

He joined Melissa, Sergei and me in a taxi, directing us down the wide avenue to a building resembling a college dormitory before which uniformed men and women sat fanning themselves in the shade. A few fruit vendors were doing slow trade in the lee of the building. We parked and followed the hotel employee along the uneven sidewalk to the dirty granite portico. In a vast, low-ceilinged, dimly lit lobby a blue-capped official sat behind a beaten-up wooden desk that had nothing on it save a dirty black telephone.

After a brief conversation, Sergei pointed to the telephone. "Nyet, nyet." The man with the blue cap kept shaking his head. I gathered we needed this man to pick up this telephone to call someone to find out about Melissa's brother. Melissa stood with her arms crossed, fuming. I mourned the loss of my Motörhead cassette.

Finally, Melissa, tired at the unexplained delay, stormed forward and grabbed the telephone.

"Hello?" she asked.

An angry voice shouted back in Russian, audible from where I stood. She handed the phone to the hotel employee, who held it in his hand for a moment and then dropped it, as if burned.

The man behind the desk stood up, replacing the phone in its cradle. He shouted something in Russian.

"He says to wait a moment," Sergei said.

The blue-capped official stood with his arms folded, staring at us. He was literally waiting, not for anything to happen but to prove that he had the power to make us wait. Removing a long, paper-filtered Russian cigarette from a blue package, he lit it with a wooden match and smoked it all the way down to the nub before flipping it to the cinder floor and stamping it out. Then he sat down and lifted the phone, speaking to whoever was always listening on the other end.

He asked a few questions, waited, asked more questions and hung up the phone.

"We must wait a moment," Sergei said again.

"Is he here?" Melissa asked.

Sergei shrugged. "They are checking."

The man with the cap mumbled something.

We headed up a flight of stairs and along a corridor, past cavernous offices filled literally to overflowing with paper. This was the only time in my life I have ever seen papers spilling out of an office; some of the rooms were so stuffed with bundled-up blocks of documentation that there was no more space for human beings. As these piles of paper had settled, their collective weight had buckled the poorly reinforced walls, causing the walls to cave in around several streams of extruding documents that littered the hallways. The bureaucrats working here skirted the various paper mounds, stepping over the reams as if they weren't there.

The whole of the building smelt of stale, black, Russian tobacco; cigarette butts were mashed into every available corner or crevice and flattened along the cinder floors. After passing a foul-smelling, empty cafeteria we walked downstairs and out of the building to pass into another, smaller structure where uniformed men sat on stools and benches smoking cigarettes. A man in a green uniform with a leather strap running across his chest sat at a desk near the back. His face was pinkish red, as if he had been holding his breath all day. As we entered, he pretended to be busy with a Cyrillic document. The other men whose duties, apparently, consisted of sitting on benches smoking cigarettes, made leering gestures toward Melissa and offered guttural, Uzbeki comments.

The pink-faced man shook his head before we could begin speaking. With his eyes closed he spoke in Russian, as if he already knew why we had come.

"He is here," Sergei said, translating for us.

"Where is he?" Melissa demanded. "Can we see him?"

There was a problem.

"He has caused harm to the People's property," Sergei explained.

What Barnett had busted up was not exactly clear. Having stumbled about this city myself, I could not recall seeing anything not constructed of concrete and granite.

"What did he do?" Melissa asked.

Sergei shook his head.

The pink-faced man shuffled some documents on his desk, producing an onion-skin sheaf of paper that outlined in Cyrillic letters Barnett's list of transgressions. Sergei looked it over.

Sergei rubbed his chin and turned to me. "Perhaps some of your cassettes."

"My tapes?"

"Yes," Sergei said. "What else do you have of comparable value?"

He was right. But I didn't want to give up all my tapes. With the luggage missing, these were my sole remaining assets. "He doesn't like this kind of music."

Sergei shook his head, "He can sell them."

"Give him the tapes," Melissa ordered.

Reluctantly, I handed over my precious store of heavy metal cassettes, which the pink-faced officer quickly stashed in his desk drawer.

"And your cassette player," Sergei told me.

Barnett had not been ill-treated during his stay in an Uzbeki drunk tank. One of the guards had actually bandaged his infected big toe with a filthy strip of cotton packing. Barnett didn't thank us upon his release, taking it for granted that his sister would come for him and bail him out yet again. While we rode back to the hotel, I desperately tried to think of the night spent with Melissa rather than the fact that I would have to go the rest of this trip without any music. Somehow, in my mind, it had become a trade: All my tapes for Melissa, or at least for her affection. And that was a fair deal.

Melissa and I were together the rest of that trip. Upon our return to Paris, however, our affair abruptly ended. We were both in relationships, silly college romances that were easy to slip back into. Occasionally, we ran into each other at the American College in Paris cafeteria or in the hallways around 31 Avenue Bosquet, and we said hello and smiled, and there was that mutual recognition of our collective memory.

And we would be like, oh yeah, you, that was something.
SALON | April 29, 1998

Karl Taro Greenfeld is a Wanderlust contributing editor. He has previously written about adventures in Thailand, Ibiza, Tokyo and on the Asian Circuit.