Dushanbe

Dushanbe is the lost home at the center of the K. family’s account of flight: a city remembered first through work, friendship, and family rituals, and then through war, persecution, and departure. For the mother and daughter, leaving was not simply a journey to safety. It meant losing the familiar civic world they had shared with neighbors, while carrying the violence and divided identities of the city into exile.

Home and shared life

The mother had been deputy chief of Dushanbe’s train station. She and her Tajik colleague worked in the same office, and their children grew up together and attended school. The families gathered for New Year’s and May Day, drank beer, and ate plof; he addressed her as his Russian sister. In her recollection, Dushanbe once held the ordinary closeness of work and family life across ethnic lines. The later rupture is measured against that intimacy, not against an abstract idea of peace.

That history makes the colleague’s change especially devastating. One day he stopped at her desk and demanded to know when she would return to Russia, declaring that the land belonged to them. The mother says she jumped up at him and thought she might go mad. The encounter turned a shared office into a place where a former friend could cast her as an outsider. The daughter’s account gives that fracture a further generation: her school-age daughter came home asking whether she was Tajik or Russian, a question prompted by the hostility surrounding the family and one the mother could not explain away.

War and the collapse of safety

The daughter begins her testimony with the war in Tajikistan and the experience of being a pregnant woman trying to speak about what she had witnessed. On a bus, armed men checked passengers’ passports and pushed two men outside, where they were shot. One victim, a young man, called out that his wife had just given birth and that he had three small children. The passengers sat silently; after the bus drove off, the shots followed. The daughter says she was afraid to look back. Her account places sudden public violence alongside an everyday journey, making the bus a passage out of danger that is itself penetrated by danger.

Her husband was Tajik and was expected to go and kill other people in the war. He chose to leave rather than take up an automatic weapon against fellow Tajiks. His refusal did not end his connection to the conflict: his brothers remained there, one had been killed, and his mother and sisters were still in Tajikistan. The family’s escape also exposed them to hostility in transit. On the train from Dushanbe, the windows were broken by rocks and the passengers heard demands that Russians leave, although the daughter’s husband was Tajik. Their children heard it too. In the account, ethnic labels become dangerous and unstable, imposed on a family whose members do not fit neatly within them.

Departure and material loss

The mother recalls the route from Dushanbe to Tashkent, followed by the attempt to continue to Minsk. There were no tickets, and getting their belongings through required bribes and repeated disputes over weight and volume. Officials held the family for two nights and questioned what they were transporting. Their container weighed two tons; they had to unload and sort through clothes, mattresses, a broken refrigerator, and two bags of books, including works by Chernyshevsky and Sholokhov. The episode turns displacement into a struggle over the ordinary contents of a household: even books and a broken appliance had to be defended and explained.

The mother describes the departure as the loss of two homelands at once: Tajikistan and the Soviet Union. That formulation makes Dushanbe more than the point of origin on a travel route. It was part of a larger political and cultural world in which the family had understood its place, and the dissolution of that world compounded the immediate loss of home. In exile, the mother’s former position as a station deputy and her military rank gave way to unemployment and, eventually, floor-cleaning work at the town council. The move altered not only where she lived but also her social standing and sense of a life already completed.

Dushanbe in exile’s memory

The daughter and mother arrive at different ways of describing what was lost. The daughter says that her soul was dead in the place they left and that she could not have given birth there; she was a nurse, already pregnant, and had seen a newborn thrown from a window. The memory overwhelms her testimony. In Belarus, in Narovlya, the family was given a house and her husband found work. She contrasts that relative safety with a city and country where normal routines had become impossible and where fear shaped even movement through public places.

The mother’s testimony likewise holds security and dispossession together. She explains the family’s move toward the abandoned Chernobyl area by saying that no one would drive them off land people had left. In the new place, she no longer occupied the office or rank she had held before; she also encountered suspicion toward refugees. Dushanbe therefore remains present not as a recoverable home but as the measure of what exile has cost. Its remembered friendships, the colleague’s rejection, the broken train windows, and the family’s forced journey form a sequence in which belonging is first shared, then contested, and finally carried away as memory.