In a Tashkent beer garden

After we meet at the airport, as we're heading into the city in his Volga sedan, Sergei asks me if Tashkent is more beautiful than Almaty or not. I tell him that it's a difficult question but that to me Tashkent seems quieter, more peaceful and he says 'and Almaty is more criminal?'. I don't mean that I tell him, but in Almaty there are a lot more cars. 'Ah, everybody is rich there?' he replies. Ten minutes later he drops me off here.

In the garden two black shirts with nut-brown guitars flank a candle-catching saxophone. A symmetrical trio playing wallpaper. Tashkent cool. The waitresses wonder who we are that can pay so much for this but someone else is paying for mine.

The guitars are strumming a ground colour to match the underwater lighting in the pool. 'Yesterday'. Yesterday I was at home and could choose what to listen to.

A fat man enters the small pool making me think of Archimedes. The flowers round the edge of the pool look succulent and I assume that this establishment receives a steady stream of plump visitors who favour such dramatic entry into the pool. Fat man enters with a resounding splash then goes quiet. Maybe he has drowned. But then he must have left some water in the pool to drown in. I don't see how.

A visitor to a lunatic asylum asks why the patients are writhing about on the bottom of an empty swimming pool. 'When they learn to swim we'll put the water in.' is the explanation he receives from the staff.

I'm offered a menu. The vegetarian selection is surprising. Surprising in that it exists but not surprising in that most of the dishes are omlettes. More surprising is that two of the omlettes don't seem to contain eggs. This is something I must investigate. The waitress brings me a salad, cutlery and a place mat featuring a photographic still life composition of a bottle of red wine, a tomato and a selection of intestinal pink, mortuary purple and shit brown cold cuts. I want to ask her for one without meat but when it's on the table, the salad bowl covers it quite nicely and I can live with it.

Moths, or flying beetles, look huge, silvery white, underlit by the pool-bottom spotlights. They fly in curves. Maybe drunk in one hemisphere of their brain. 'Do they have brains?' I wonder. I think some of them have a one cell spinal chord which is affected by the spin of the earth just as water going down the plug-hole in the sink is, or compassless hill-walkers lost in the mist. Antipodean airbourne bugs and moths, also underlit silvery white and looking just as huge as these, probably drift the opposite way. My girlfriend's dad, during his national service days in the navy, sat by the sink all night, running water from the tap in order to witness the changeover from clock-wise to anticlock-wise as the ship crossed the equator, but he fell asleep during the crucial period. I wonder what would happen if you released moths from a jar over the equator.

The music has stopped. The fat man is out of the pool and the water has magically filled up to the top and once more solidified into a sheet of blue glass. The air is still and thick. It's cooler now it's getting late but still warm enough to hold the damp desert sand smell that distinguishes the southern Silk Road cities from their northern counterparts. Huge old trees rise above the walls of the courtyard, heavy with oily leaves and the sound of crickets.

Lights go off somewhere. I hadn't noticed they were on. Now candles outshine the swimming pool's underwater glow. The trees look even heavier, their enormous weight gained from sucking up the water which flows from the mountains, across the plain, then criss-crosses the city through the network of roadside channels, breathing cool humidity into the dusty streets. The roots of the trees buckle and contort the channels, cracking young asphalt and lifting the cosmetic concrete slabs lining the ancient trenches. None of that is visible from here. In here is too new and the walls are too high. But the trees are visible, their size dwarfing all else, forming a protective canopy which has kept the cool precious water vapour within the layer of the city for centuries, nourishing the spirit of Tashkent.