The Moth (10 page)

And when it was treat time, I went up to the room, and every monkey in that room got treats. They all got nice juice treats, cucumbers and apples and grapes. But not Santiago. For Santiago, it was cashews and peanuts and crackers. And it took a long, long time, because I had really done a very good job of training Santiago that I was really a pushover.

But eventually, eventually,
eventually
there came a day, after months and months of suffering on his part and mine, when I walked up to the monkey cage and Santiago just did this [
extends one arm
]. And when I took his hand in my hand, Santiago did this [
places his other arm behind his back
]. And I grabbed him, and I brought him downstairs to work. And he started to play the game. But he didn’t play with the exceptional enthusiasm he had played it with before. He wasn’t like,
Wow, this is the greatest thing
. He sat there and just played the game like a factory worker on an assembly line—
whish, whish, whish
.

And that should have been a good day for me, because I was getting back to the science now. I would get my data, Santiago would get his juice. The suffering for us was over.

But it wasn’t a good day, because with all that stuff that had come before, the competition and the cooperation between, I had gotten to know Santiago. And now
that
Santiago wasn’t there anymore. I was sitting here with just another monkey with a broken will. And I was the one who had broken it.

Something snapped a little for me too that day because I was going to finish my thesis, but the mystique of being a scientist—of finding out all this stuff about the mind—just didn’t seem so magical anymore.

There were other monkeys. I didn’t need to be told not to fall in love with them. Instinctively, I held myself aloof from them, and because of that, I had no mercy on them. And when they went on strike, when they got upset and it was time to break them, I broke them like that [
snaps fingers
], and that was good, because they didn’t suffer very much and neither did I. But I also didn’t go up to the monkey room anymore, because I didn’t want to see those monkeys while they were still a little bit wild. I didn’t want to be reminded of that part of them, and what I was going to do to that part of them.

It took me eight years, but I got all the data I needed, piece by piece by piece. And I put my brick in the edifice of human knowledge, and I got my Ph.D.

And then I quit.

I wrote a thesis, and the thesis is 364 pages long and is filled with facts and data and graphs and theories. But the most significant page for me is the first one, which says simply: “Dedicated to the memory of Santiago.”

After receiving a Ph.D. in neuroscience in 2000,
Ari Handel
turned to filmmaking, where he has worked as both a writer (Darren Aronofsky’s
The Fountain
and the upcoming
Noah
) and a producer (
The Fountain, The Wrestler, Black Swan
, and
Noah
). He is currently president of Protozoa Pictures and has served on The Moth’s Board of Directors since 2005.

ANOID LATIPOVNA RAKHMATYLLAEVA

I
t’s half past five in the morning. I get up, and I don’t feel rested because I have been walking and walking in my dreams all night.

I look around to see what I have left over from yesterday’s meal. There’s no bread, no sugar (I can’t remember when I last saw sugar). So I drink some tea with herbs.

I look outside to see which flag is out. Our city is at war, and what dress I should wear today will be influenced by which side holds the city as of this morning.

Today it is a red flag, so I can wear European clothes and leave off my head handkerchief. But in the back of my mind, I think that I should take the dress and the handkerchief with me in case the regime changes while I’m at work.

I close my door, locking my two children in for the day. I’m going to my job as a piano teacher at the university.

I walk, and it usually takes me two hours each way. I don’t want to think about bad things, but they keep entering my mind.

It’s the middle of November, and I still have no news from my husband. He left for work on the first of November, and he disappeared. I called his brothers, but his brothers are now missing as well. People keep disappearing from their homes. I can’t leave the city, because if I do, he’ll have no way to find me if he
is
able to get back. So me and my children stay in the city and wait and hope for his return.

I keep walking, and more thoughts come. My teenage daughter came home yesterday crying, with her eyes big. She was attacked for the second time in a row. In the middle of the day at a bus stop, two guys got out of their car and tried to drag her into the car, but there happened to be another woman standing there, and she and my daughter held on to each other and wouldn’t let themselves be pulled into the car. So they were beaten and got large bruises, but they managed to get away. This time. I will probably have to send her to Moscow in the end, because I can no longer protect her here.

I keep going, and I reach the Hotel Dushanbe. This is the spot where the teachers usually meet, and we go to the university together. I’m waiting, but nobody comes today. So I continue alone.

At the first square, city residents are gathering, quietly protesting for the streets to be cleaned up and for the fighting to stop, so the people can get to work safely. The center of the city is currently in ruins.

For some reason people are very aggressive today. I notice these small sculptures in the square—my favorites—and I can see that some of them have been damaged, which makes me sad. If they were lighter I would probably try to bring some of them home to keep them safe.

Today arms are being given out in the square. And I notice
that the soldiers are not writing down who they give the arms to. It’s scary.

I’m so frightened, but I keep going and enter the next square. There are cannons there that have appeared overnight. And then I come to Baghdad Square, and I fear it the most because there are often people screaming into microphones there, and they sometimes scream at me as I pass.

Finally I reach the university. I get to the sixth floor. It’s still very early in the morning.

But as I step in, I see the deputy chief of the department running towards me, and he’s screaming, “
Teacher, Teacher, there are soldiers! Soldiers in the music room! And they’re smashing the instruments!
”

I don’t quite understand what is happening, but I hear the sounds of instruments being destroyed, and I run towards the sound. The deputy chief stays behind on purpose, afraid to go in.

But I run into the room, and I see about ten soldiers kicking and hitting the instruments lying around the room. Their armor and machine guns are lying on top of the grand piano. I’ve seen soldiers in the street before, but they were dressed in green with turbans and Arabic script on their sashes. I was used to them.

These soldiers are different. They are so tall, and they’re wearing all black, with black wraps around their faces—you can only see their eyes. I have no idea which army they come from. I’ve never seen them before.

I am in shock.

And I don’t know what I was thinking, but I think I had just had it with this war that was destroying my city and my family.

And I walked right in and walked up to the first one, who was beating on a piano, and in a loud voice begged him to
stop smashing the instruments
.

I said, “The instruments are very expensive, and these instruments will serve your children and your grandchildren in the future. If you want, I can play the piano for you.”

And they got very quiet and stared at me.

So I sat down, and I started playing the
Moonlight
Sonata. A few of them sat down too. Others came closer to see how my fingers moved across the keys.

And then one of them came even closer and asked me to play a Tajik folk song. When I had first walked in, they were all speaking Russian, but when he asked me to play, he asked in our native Tajik. So I played it, and all of them started singing along. They were like a choir.

And then out of nowhere, a man came to the door, and he said something to them, and they stood up quickly, took their armor and guns, and left, shutting the door behind them.

So I’m standing in the middle of the room, stunned. When suddenly the door opens just a tiny crack, and the deputy chief is peering in nervously.

He asks, “They left? Weren’t you scared?”

And I actually got scared only when I saw
him
, because I suddenly remembered that I have two children locked in the house at home, and I instructed them not to open the doors to anybody, and I thought:
What would have happened if I had been hurt?
I didn’t have any family staying in the city anymore.

In the evening I’m on the long, long road back home. And I’m walking, and I’m very tired. And I’m remembering that we didn’t have any bread given out at work today, and what can I feed my children with? So I have to come home and stand in line for five hours to get bread. But my children are going to be happy about the hot bread, and that keeps me going.

And I’m sure that my husband will come back (and this is
what happened, a year later he did come back to us, and he’s here with us tonight!).

And yet still even today so many women are waiting for their husbands to return to them. They
have
to believe they will come back.

And still they wait.

Anoid Latipovna Rakhmatyllaeva
was born on October 31, 1955, in Stalinabad (present-day Dushanbe), Tajik SSR. From 1961 to 1972, she attended the Republican Music Boarding School, where she was in the piano department. In 1972 Anoid entered Tajikistan State Art Institute, the department of musicology. After graduating, Anoid taught in several music schools in Dushanbe, and in 1982 she was assigned to work at the central music school in the city of Kurgan-Tube. From 1992 to 1995, Anoid taught at Tajikistan Pedagogical University in the department of musicology. In 1995, Anoid opened a branch of the school, Music School #6, at the Russian division based in Dushanbe. From 2002 to 2012, Anoid worked as a teacher and concertmaster at Music School #6. She is happily married and has two children and one granddaughter. Anoid travels a lot between Moscow, where both of her children live, and Dushanbe. The Moth’s artistic director, Catherine Burns, met Anoid when The Moth was invited by the U.S. State Department to direct a show at the Padida Theater in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The show was co-directed and hosted by the monologist Mike Daisey and featured locals who had been affected in some way by the region’s civil war, which had recently ended.

JOE LOCKHART

M
y story starts in late July in Washington, DC. It was a typical hot summer day. I found myself in the Oval Office by myself, and in walked the President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton.

He said to me, “I hear you want to be my next press secretary.”

And I said, “Yes sir, I think I do.” And it happened.

Now, there should have been some warning signs for me. Some were obvious, like the Lewinsky investigation. But a couple were not so obvious.

The first was, the guy who I was replacing, Mike McCurry, started smiling as soon as he heard I got the job. And for six weeks the smile didn’t come off his face.

The second, which was weird, was I was the only applicant for the job. There was no interview process. Nobody else applied. I was the only one in America who seemed to want the job.

But I had this thing about challenging myself personally, and I thought,
You know, I can do this, so I’m gonna try to do it.

I didn’t have to wait long for the challenge. My very first day, walking out to the podium in the White House Press Room, simultaneously—to the moment—the House Judiciary Committee was gathering for the third impeachment hearings in the history of the country. So I had a few things on my mind.

And I would love to say that I got off to a good start. But I can’t.

Just after I started, we went on a trip. We went off to Russia, and then we were going to Ireland, doing big foreign policy stuff. The trip was going pretty well, but the last night, in Moscow, I was coming into the hotel, and I ran into an old friend of mine, the godfather to my daughter, who I hadn’t seen in a couple years.

And he said, “Come on, we’ve gotta go out.” And he convinced me, so we went to—I’ll never forget—a place called the Hungry Duck. And they were doing things there that I couldn’t take my eyes off, so I had to stay till five in the morning.

Which was okay, because we weren’t leaving until six.

So I got back to my hotel and made one mistake, which was to sit down on the bed, and I obviously fell asleep.

And I’m telling you, you don’t know anxiety until you’ve woken up as the White House Press Secretary on your first foreign trip, at six-fifteen in Moscow, without a passport, knowing you’ve missed Air Force One.

The only good thing that I could think of was the day couldn’t get worse. I was wrong.

When I finally caught up with the traveling party, I was immediately surrounded by reporters who said, “How do you feel about being the first White House press secretary to ever miss Air Force One on a foreign trip?” And a strange phrase caught in my head, and I couldn’t lose it.

About a week earlier, the President had been at a prayer breakfast, talking about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, and he said, “I’m really sorry for what I did. And I’m working very hard to make up for it, particularly to those I’ve hurt the most.”

So when I got the question “How do you feel?” I said, “I’m really sorry for what I’ve done wrong, and I’m working hard to fix it, particularly to those who I’ve hurt the most.”

Now, mocking the President of the United States when you make a mistake isn’t always the best idea, but it came to my head, and I said it.

But the day went on, and we finally had a little break where the President had some private meetings, and I went to the back of the Irish ambassador’s residence to go to sleep.