What should he bring home? (5/19/04)

"So, what did you bring me?"

To my family's everlasting credit, that question has never been posed.

But when you find yourself traveling to the edges of the earth, as I have the past few years, the question of souvenirs and gifts inevitably surfaces.

What do you bring somebody from Kazakhstan? Or Armenia? Or Uzbekistan? Or Georgia? Or Kyrgyzstan? Or Moldova? Or — most recently — Tajikistan?

The answers are varied, and the search is enough to arouse the hunter-gatherer spirit in any true shopper.

After all, how do you shop when there aren't many shops?

When we were in Moldova in 1998, the economy was so weak that gift shops or places you could buy souvenirs were rare. By 1999, when I returned, an antique shop had appeared. The reason? The economy was even weaker; people were selling old stuff to get some hard currency.

Similarly, in Georgia, an entire bazaar — known as the Dry Bridge Market — had sprung up near an overpass simply so people could sell old china, silver, books, and assorted junk. Think of the Engine Association swap meet with a Russian accent, and you'll have some idea what it's like.

In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, there were also museum stores to consider.

These were nothing like museum shops in the U.S. but were places where you could buy authentic crafts, already cleared to be able to leave the country, at fair prices.

Last month in Tajikistan was another story entirely.

The museum has no shop, just as the country has no developed commercial economy. And when it came to finding something interesting that might be old, it took a full day of questioning to end up at a pair of consignment shops that sell things like old busts of Lenin and czarist coin silver.

Given that, what does one shop for? There are only so many Lenin busts that one can buy. (I brought my first one home this spring, a little monument to the guy whose bold idea — the Soviet Union — was such a bloody disaster.)

First off, there are hats. Central Asia is the official land of funny hats. I've brought home funny Kazakh hats, funny Uzbek hats, funny Tajik hats, and some funny Kyrgyz hats that can't be worn in public without inducing a large round of laughter, all of it aimed at me when I'm wearing them.

Then, there are fabrics. I've brought home as gifts some lovely embroideries and silk weavings. They're not valuable, but they're beautiful, and they have the advantage of being easy to pack.

And then, there are knives. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, knives and daggers are a huge part of the cultural heritage. So, despite my non-violent nature, I've brought home a couple of daggers (one for me and a smaller one for Sally) and some great knives. The best of the knives is an old Uzbek one from Samarkand that I slipped out of the country. But newer knives make great gifts as well.

Last month, sitting in a knife-maker's hut in the bazaar at Khujand, Tajikistan, I picked up five, three as gifts, one as a letter-opener for myself, and one for the kitchen at home.

Obviously, those get packed away in checked bags, not in carry-on luggage.

Finally, there is art, paintings and drawings that give a sense of a part of the world that sometimes seems like another planet.

A couple of my favorites have come from a place we called the "Never Open Art Gallery." That's because its doors on the main drag in the capital of Tajikistan are usually padlocked shut.

I bought a painting there last fall, but on this most recent visit the place never seemed to be open.

Until my last day.

We were walking to lunch when Denis, my translator, and I both spotted the owner, standing in the doorway, smoking a cigarette. Not too much later, we were in the gallery.

Essentially, it's a case of an aging artist selling off his own work and the works he has collected over the years. He's turning art into food in the years before his death.

One does what one has to do.

What I had to do was purchase a portrait I'd seen last fall and had been haunted by ever since. It's by a guy named Lisakov, and I love it.

Framing it will cost more than twice what I paid to buy it, but that's not the point. After all, souvenirs aren't about economics. They're about emotion.[[In-content Ad]]