Story of a boy awaits his father since long, sitting in the street until dark, and sometimes crying, not knowing that his father was languishing in a prison.

[author title=”Sherzod Artikov” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Contemporary-WorldLiterature-Sherzod-Artikov-Sindh-Courier.jpg”]Sherzod Artikov, short story writer and poet, was born in 1985 in the city of Marghilan of Uzbekistan. He graduated from Fergana Polytechnic institute in 2005. He was one of the winners of the national literary contest “My Pearl Region” in prose in 2019. In 2020, his first book “The Autumn’s Symphony” was published in Uzbekistan.[/author]

 

Letters from Moscow

When the postman left, Zarina put the envelope he had given her in the side pocket of her jacket. She entered the house a little worried and annoyed. Especially when she passed in front of her brother’s room, she walked on tiptoe. When she entered the living-room, her mother was there. A weak woman with more white hair than black was reading a newspaper.

“From my father, as always,” said Zarina, passing her the envelope.

Her mother opened the envelope slowly, unwillingly. She took out a sheet of paper and read it without voice. Then she gave it back to Zarina.

“This time he asked us to send more cigarettes and warm clothes.”

As Zarina was reading the letter, she sent a couple of cautious glances at the open door. Unlike her mother, she read the letter for a longer time. Her mother sat silently during this time, not taking her vision of the letter and her.

“I’ll get an advance on my salary tomorrow,” said Zarina, after reading the letter, folding it in two and putting it in an envelope. “We will send the things he asked for.”

Her mother did not say a word to her. She just shook her head as if to say okay. Zarina picked up the envelope and hurried to her room. As she passed her brother’s room, this time she listened coming to the door. Her brother was apparently preparing for class because, as usual, he was solving math problems out loud.

As she entered her room, Zarina threw the envelope in her hand on the table and looked at it with pain and sadness from aside. It lasted a long time. All her attention was on the envelope, as if she were thinking of nothing but standing up.

Finally, she approached the table and sat down helplessly on the chair there. Disappointed, she grabbed one of the white papers on the table, clutching her head as if in pain. After examining it for a moment, she began to write something with a pen on her left hand, not rushing and sighing. After that, Zarina took a new envelope from the desk drawer and put the paper in it. After sealing the envelope with liquid glue, she turned back the envelope the postman had given her and, looking at it, copied the details there into the empty envelope. Immediately, the two envelopes became almost identical. The only difference was that she wrote “Moscow” instead of “Karshi” in the address part of the envelope.

When she had finished, she felt relaxed. She leaned back in her chair for a moment, closed her eyes, and sat relaxed. She took a few deep breaths, as if her lips were dry. She paid attention to the autumn’s rain hitting the window panes. She then tore the letter with the envelope. She gathered the pieces of paper in her hand and hid them in the bottom of a bucket of trash standing on the edge of the hallway.

When she picked up the new envelope, something made her think. She had to affix a postage stamp. The stamp must also be put. Without a postage stamp, he could be suspicious, she said, imagining her brother. The seal must be insane. However, it soon calmed down. “He did not feel it before, nor does he feel it today,” she said consolingly.

When she entered her brother’s room, he was really busy preparing for class. He focused his attention on solving math problems, staring at the book through his tiny glasses with intelligence and passion. Seeing Zarina, he raised his head from the book.

“Who has come, sister?”

Zarina went and leaned against the windowsill.

“Postman”

When her brother heard the word postman, he got up at lightning speed.

“Did he bring a letter from my father?” He asked. His eyes were shining.

Zarina shook her head in approval and gave him the envelope in her hand. “If only he does not notice that there was no postage stamp,” she said to herself.

His brother watched long and curiously before opening the envelope. He checked the details on it. When he opened it, his mood rose and he screamed with joy.

“My father’s letter,” he said to Zarina, looking either to Zarina or to the new fake letter.

The letter was written in Cyrillic, not Latin, so her brother read it with embarrassment as usual. He read two or three times, obviously, because once was not enough.

During this time, his face alike small bread got red and his eyes twinkled with excitement. He pursed his lips and frowned to understand the meaning of the words in the letter.

“My father was given a new bus,” he said happily, turning to Zarina. “It’s bigger than before. Its color is red.”

Zarina couldn’t stand it any longer. She came over to him and leaned over and grabbed him by the shoulder. Her eyes got wet and she kissed him on temple, forehead, and cheeks. She caressed him curly hair.

“That’s why he is going to stay there for a longer time,” she said, hugging him. “There is no other driver to drive a new bus.”

His brother swallowed lightly, either out of missing or something else.

“He said so in his letter, I saw it.”

Zarina hugged him for a long time. His brother, too, did not resist, and sat silently, holding the letter in his hand. After a while, he stepped out of Zarina’s arms and walked over to the small bookshelf in his room. He brought back a dark blue book from there. There were a lot of envelopes in the middle of the book.

“Are these my father’s previous letters?” Zarina asked, holding her breath as if someone were hanging her.

These were also written by her.

“Yes, I saved them,” said her brother, putting the new letter back in the envelope and adding it between them.

“I read them every day, twice a day. When I wake up and go to bed.”

Zarina stayed in front of her brother for a long time. She helped to solve the homework assigned to him. Frankly, she taught him easily. After all, there is nothing easier for adults than solving math problems designed for fourth grade.

When she left her brother’s room, she quickly took a step straight to the kitchen. She poured cold water from an crystal carafe on the window sill into an empty glass and tried to calm down her heart, which had begun to burn like fire, with the temperature of that water. But her heart did not stop beating hard and uneasy. Her nerves also seemed a little tense. On top of that, reluctantly, the recent past crept out of her consciousness, giving a vague look to the recent past in her mind.

It all started when her father killed a man under the influence of alcohol and was imprisoned for twelve years. Neither Zarina nor her mother knew at first how to explain to her brother that he was not there, that he was not coming home. Even later, they could not find a reason for it. Her brother asked his father every day, sat in the street until dark, waiting for him to come, and sometimes he cried. Gradually, he stopped going to school, lost his appetite, and became very thin.

When the first letter came from her father, this thought came to Zarina’s mind. There was no other way. Neither she nor her mother could tell her brother that her father was in prison. Instead of the letters his father had sent him out of prison for the same two years, she herself wrote a letter to her brother, thereby calming his heart and perhaps his longing. Only she and her mother read her father’s letter, then tore it up with an envelope and hid it in a trash can.

She does not know from where Moscow came to her mind. It was just a distant city that came to mind to write instead of the city of Karshi (her father was in a prison in Karshi) shown on the envelope. By this way, Zarina made up a lie that her father was in Moscow, convincing her brother that he was driving a bus in a transport park in Moscow. Since then, fake letters from Moscow have been coming home every month.

“What will you do if one day he notices that there is no postage stamp in the envelope?”

Zarina didn’t notice her mother coming in as she filled the glass a second time. When the glass was full of water, she for some reason held it tightly with both hands and looked at her mother confidently.

“It will never be like that,” she said firmly after that. “Next time there will be a stamp on the envelope. I’ll find the stamp of the Moscow post office- Even from under the Earth.”

She drank the glass of water till the end with the same determination.

“He shouldn’t know my father was a murderer,” she said, stopping at the door as she left, suddenly turning to her mother. “At least until he grows up.”

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Translated into English by Muslimakhon Makhmudova