Jane Merryman

I have fooled myself—as I must—that I am safe. But a dog and a sleepy man in a drizzly dawn prove me wrong.

When I come in to breakfast a little before eight, my interpreter looks worried. He scowls as he scrutinizes his cell phone, as if he doesn’t use it often. And he paces up and down beside the table set for our morning meal.

It is only after Nail has finished his call and comes to sit at the table in front of the teapot that I learn what has happened this morning. Akmed, our young driver, was bitten by one of the dogs of the household. Not the one with curly black hair who lies comatose in the doorway all day, but the small, snippy, brown-and-white mutt who patrols the courtyard.

Through the filmy white curtains, I can see Akmed shivering outside the kitchen building in his black pants and tan golf jacket, his left hand cradling his right arm, a cigarette dangling from the limp fingers of the injured limb. Mutt strains at the end of a thin piece of rope tied to a post at the farthest corner of the yard.

The dining room looks out on a narrow concrete courtyard off a quiet street in a small Central Asian town. Shakhrisabz was once a bustling oasis on the Silk Road—Marco Polo slept here in the thirteenth century. Since then it has been pretty much downhill for glamour and tourist appeal. Now the town serves as a depot for the Uzbekistan cotton industry, a regional market, and an administrative center—all housed in concrete block buildings of the Soviet era. I am here because I am a connoisseur of the fabulous and the fall of 2000 seems as good a window as any in recent times to visit fabled old cities. Shakhrisabz is on my itinerary because of its antique blue-tiled mosques and modern silk factories.

I had asked my travel agent to put me up in homes or family-run guesthouses rather than in Western-style tourist hotels. That is how we—my interpreter, my driver, and I—ended up in these modest accommodations. We each have room of our own, but I can see past the carelessly drawn curtains shielding a room across the hall and it appears that the family camps in one large room with a rabbit-eared television set staring out of the far corner. We all share the sink outside in the courtyard and the hole in the floor of a dark cubicle at the end of the driveway near the chicken coop. For a bath, everyone goes down the street to the Turkish-style bathhouse, an excursion I will miss because today I am off to the much larger and more famous city of Bukhara.

Nail is still wrestling with the phone as one of the teenage daughters of the house comes in with a tray of small plates that she arranges on the white cotton tablecloth—boiled eggs, raisins, walnuts, almonds, apples, honey, grapes, butter, and several golden rounds of just-baked bread. She turns her taut, unsmiling face toward Nail, now speaking rapidly into the phone in Russian.

I’ve been in Uzbekistan a week and a half. That is enough time for me to see that the people of this impoverished former Soviet republic are struggling just to put food on the table and to realize that they don’t have a budget for trips to the vet for rabies vaccinations. Akemd’s dog bite means more to me than all the gloomy western news reports and ominous State Department advisories. It reminds me that—although I have chosen to spend time in a country where the bank I did business in yesterday was bombed by Moslem terrorists a few years before, where check points between provinces prevent people from moving freely about the country, and where fundamentalist violence has short-circuited my visit to Fergana Valley to see silkworm farmers and silk weaving—a life-threatening situation doesn’t necessarily involve men with guns. It could trot toward me down a sleepy street or in a peaceful back garden.

Tea and a slab of bread topped with sweet butter are enough breakfast for me. Nail begins to attack a plate of scrambled eggs the mother has carried across the courtyard from the kitchen. Akmed sits slumped and silent in front of his pile of golden eggs. I can’t see his wound. No bandage, towel, or rag wraps the arm, but judging from the distress everyone has been plunged into, the skin must have been broken.

I have learned when traveling in Asia not to touch or approach animals, even family pets, no matter how appealing—but then few of them are. The dogs—about forty pounds with a tail that curls up over their brown or white back—the generic dogs I have seen around households, seem to be more tolerated than loved. Food and water aren’t put out for them; these animals live on what garbage they can glean around the house or in the street. Many are dirty and mangy, with eye infections or other sores, and regard an approaching human warily. Surely, Akmed must be used to keeping his distance.

Munching away in the self-conscious silence, I recall that rabies often causes dogs that appear to be healthy and friendly to bite with little provocation. Now I am concerned that Akmed merely stepped outside to brush his teeth and was attacked. Since he doesn’t speak English, I can’t quiz him about what happened. Nail should be on duty as my interpreter, but he just grunts—as if he anticipates having to answer to a higher power for the unfortunate experiences his charge happens to get exposed to.

A buzzing sound erupts from the direction of Nail and he snags the cell phone out of his jacket pocket.

“We will go back to Samarkand,” he says, flipping the phone shut. “We have to get a new driver; there isn’t one available here. He,” nodding toward Akmed, “will go to the hospital there.”

The family—father, mother, two teen daughters—stand grimly in the courtyard as we back out in our wine-red Toyota SUV. Families can garner much-needed cash by opening their homes to foreign visitors and they must be vetted by the government tourist office. This incident will probably end a valuable source of income for our family or else they will have to do plenty of squirming and explaining down at the municipal offices.

Akmed drives the three hours back to Samarkand. He seems relieved and revived to be getting out of town. The road, which Soviet tanks tore up on their way to Afghanistan, winds through barren, dun-colored hills and is practically deserted. We arrive in front of the Samarkand tourist agency shortly after noon. I stuff some dollar bills in Akmed’s shirt pocket as he pulls his overnight bag from under the seat. He heads down the street, presumably toward the hospital, alone, shoulders sagging under the light rain that has begun to fall. He will lose an unknown number of days of work and faces painful rabies treatment. We—Nail and I and our new driver—will go on to Bukhara and beyond, as if nothing happened.

I scan the wet pavement for movement—for four legs trotting nervously, the twitch of a curled-up tail. I no longer fool myself.