Camel from Kyzylkum

One of the most traumatic experiences we survived in Zarafshan happened on March 20, 1984, at about 2:00 a.m. Our few-month-old puppy, Dinka, started to cry at about 1:45 a.m. and woke us up. Animals can feel what’s coming long before humans know about it. We tried to comfort Dinka, when suddenly we heard some strange noise coming from outside—it felt like the sound was coming deep from the Earth, and from the air, and from the roof of the building. Suddenly our apartment building moved back and forth in a wild rhythm, the furniture slid from the wall to the middle of the room, and things were falling. I looked in the kitchen and saw that our sink was dancing. All of this happened for about forty seconds, but it felt like forever. When I opened the door to the outside of our apartment, I saw people running down the staircase in underwear, screaming, “Earthquake! Earthquake!” We ran downstairs, too, and spent the rest of the night outside—we were afraid to go back to the eighth floor. In the morning we found out that the epicenter of the earthquake was close to the city of Gazli, about 245 km southwest of Zarafshan.

Every day for the next month, or maybe even longer, there were a lot of aftershocks and tremors. I remember that many times at night I would have the same dream: I was in a boat in the open ocean. I would wake up and feel as though our nine-story building was moving again as a boat in the ocean—it was another aftershock. The original earthquake and its aftershocks made me feel like a little grain of sand lost in the endless universe—vulnerable, unprotected, unable to stop the danger. It was at the will of a merciful God or Mother Nature to save our lives or not.

A few weeks after the earthquake, we were informed that the foundation of our apartment building was damaged and all of us had to be evacuated. But evacuated to where? There was no spare nine-story building waiting for us. There were no empty apartments in the city where we all could move with our families and belongings. In fact, people had already been waiting for months and years to get an apartment. In Zarafshan, people could not buy an apartment at that time—all apartments belonged to the government and were given to those who worked in the mines or any other government-operated companies. No one was ready to deal with the aftermath of the disaster, so our local government decided to pack us into whatever rooms they had available. Our little family—Natasha and I—got a nine-meter room in a small, two-room apartment. We were supposed to share a kitchen, bathroom, and toilet with a family of three that got a bigger room in the same apartment. As if that was not enough, the connecting door between our rooms could not be locked and the man of the family had drinking problems—he was drunk, abusive, and dangerous every day after work. I was afraid to leave Natasha alone in our room, and I worried about her while I was at work. Plus, I did not know what to do with all of our furniture and other belongings that were still in our original apartment back at the damaged building. There was no way we could bring it all to the nine-meter room. I did not know what to do. Suddenly we had no place to call home. At night, I cried.

Very soon I realized that crying at night would change nothing. I needed to do something. So I went to talk with our city officials. I thought if I explained our situation, they might find a way to improve our living conditions. They listened to all of my complaints and remained absolutely indifferent. They told me they did not have an empty apartment available in the entire city where we could move and have a normal life again. I was in despair. My friends hinted to me that, in fact, there were empty apartments in the city that the government kept under lock just in case someone close to them needed it. I even got the address of one such apartment. It was away from the central Lenin Street, with blocks of charmless four-story buildings that had identical, boring facades. With the address, I went to the city officials again and asked them to give us that particular empty apartment because our current situation was unbearable and unsafe. Again, they said no.

I said to them, “You force me to occupy this apartment without legal permission because I have no other choices to save my child and myself.” They could not arrest me for that because they knew that we were in an impossible position, and I had already asked them for help. But even if they could have arrested me, I had no other means to fight for our lives and our place to live. Some other families that had connections with people in charge improved their living conditions right away. I was a single mother with no connections to “important” people. All I could do was fight for our better life.

So I did just that. My co-workers and friends helped me to move our belongings from the nine-meter room and our furniture that was still in our apartment on the eighth floor, to an empty apartment on the first floor of one of the charmless buildings. I worked very hard to unpack all of our things quickly and make it look like we were living there. I knew that my battle for the apartment was not over yet. Leaving for work every day in the morning, I told Natasha, “When you are at home after school, do not open the door for anyone.” But one day I came home from work just to find out that two strangers, husband and wife, were sitting on our sofa waiting for me. Natasha was crying—she had opened the door for them. They shook their legal papers right in my face—it stated that the apartment had been given to them officially. They shouted that we should vacate their apartment immediately. I promised them we would vacate the apartment the next day because it was late and we did not have any place to go. Cursing us, they left and said they would be back. It took many visits to the city officials, many curses from these strangers, and many tears and sleepless nights before we, finally, got an official paper for another apartment on the fourth floor of a nearby apartment building. By that time, I felt drained and exhausted, physically and emotionally, but I had won the battle for our home, for our life.

We had to move one more time. It was not easy to do in Zarafshan—there were no moving services available. I needed to ask for help from my male coworkers and pay them with bottles of vodka—that was the unwritten rule of the game. The fourth-floor apartment was the last place we called home in Zarafshan.