Camel from Kyzylkum

Navoi was founded in 1958. The city got its name in honor of the great Uzbek poet and statesman, Alisher Navoi. The city of Navoi is nearly a midpoint between Samarkand and Bukhara. In my years in Uzbekistan, it was never under the jurisdiction of Tashkent. It was administered and supplied directly from Moscow. The city was completely artificial; the grand boulevards, square parks, and rectangular apartment blocks represented the height of Soviet perfectionist ideology. The city of Navoi currently has an ethnically diverse population of 133,526. But in 1969, it was a 10-year-old city rising on the southern corner of the Kyzylkum Desert.

Nikolai brought me to Navoi, but he had to return immediately to our geological party to continue to work while I waited for my delivery date. Right before he left, Nikolai went to a little radio station that kept in contact with our geological party by transmitting messages. He asked the radioman to send him a message as soon as the radioman received a phone call about my delivery. To make it easier for the radioman, he wrote a template of a message for him to transmit. It read something like this: “To Nikolai Gelya. Larisa has delivered a daughter/son and is waiting for you to come.” The radioman promised everything would be okay on his end. Nikolai and I said goodbye to each other, and he went back to work.

Two endless weeks still lay ahead before our baby came. I didn’t know anyone except our friend, so I started out anxious and lonely during those two weeks waiting for the baby. I was astonished to see Nikolai return just two days later. He, too, was wondering why I was still walking around with my big tummy. What happened was that the radioman got very drunk the day Nikolai left, and he saw the template of the message in front of him and transmitted it to our geological party for Nikolai: “Larisa has delivered a daughter (the radioman skipped ‘son’).” That’s why Nikolai had to do an extra trip back to Navoi and then return again to his work before my delivery date. Excessive drinking was a common problem in the Soviet Union, and in the geological industry, it seemed especially pronounced.