Patronymic

Vadim first saw Shahnoza Karimova in a rectangle on Teams.

The meeting was in Russian. The client was from Tashkent, and Vadim had been put on the project for two reasons: expertise in this field that nobody else in the company had, and the language. Russian was still his native tongue, and ever since the war began, that fact had pleased him less and less.

One window showed a meeting room in Tashkent with five people in it; the other windows held individual participants. In the meeting room people addressed each other by first name and patronymic: Rustam Ilkhomovich, Dilnoza Khamidovna, Bakhtiyor Erkinovich. Vadim noted it with detached interest. In his own life the patronymic had been abolished long ago, officially at that. He himself was addressed simply as “Vadim”, as befitted a Western contractor, and that suited him.

He identified the boss within a minute. Rustam Ilkhomovich was the most casually dressed of them all: open-necked shirt, no jacket. He sat leaning back, hands folded on his stomach, head slightly tilted, and watched the others the way the owner of a chicken farm watches the hens in the pen: with a smile in which concern was indistinguishable from counting eggs. He said little. The others glanced at him whenever they began a sentence.

Shahnoza joined from a window of her own, somewhere else, and she alone was called by her first name only. Vadim represented his side of the project, she the client. Before the meeting he had skimmed the list of participants and remembered only their job titles. Twenty minutes in, he had to remember her as well.

She asked few questions, but twice she stopped the discussion exactly where everyone else was ready to agree. First she asked what, precisely, counted as an initial condition. Then she asked why a constraint everyone called technical was considered technical at all, if it came from the terms of the contract.

Vadim answered. She asked him to be more specific. He answered again.

Rustam Ilkhomovich moved for the first time in the meeting: he took his hands off his stomach and gave a short nod, looking somewhere in the direction of her window.

“Fine,” Shahnoza said. “Then these are different problems. Someone just put them in the same table.”

Vadim looked at the table. She was right.

When the conversation drifted to organisational matters, Shahnoza almost dropped out of it: she sat slightly to one side of the camera, took notes, glanced now and then at a second screen. At the end Bakhtiyor Erkinovich, who ran the project on the client’s side, asked where everyone would be next week.

“I’m in Brussels for now,” Shahnoza said.

Vadim looked up.

“You’re in Brussels? Then it’s rather odd that we’re talking over Teams.”

“It is a bit.”

“Let’s meet. We need to go through the input data anyway, and we can sort out which of our questions are technical and which are contractual.”

“Let’s.”

On Tuesday both were free after six. Ten minutes later Vadim received an invitation to a restaurant near Place du Luxembourg and went back to work.

By evening he remembered her line about the table.

He had a habit of preparing for meetings with people who could affect the course of a project. A job title tells you less about a person than people think, and what mattered more to Vadim was how someone made decisions. One needs figures, another wants the conclusion in the first paragraph, a third the risk first, a fourth the opportunity. The same technical material can be shown in five ways and produce five different conversations.

He opened her profile. Shahnoza Karimova. Several years at an international company, consulting before that, a large infrastructure project before that. Her education was unexpected: Tashkent, then Russia, then a programme in Europe. The university page had nothing useful, but fifteen minutes of searching turned up the recording of an old conference, an hour and a half long, Shahnoza the third speaker.

He listened to the first two minutes at double speed, then switched back to normal. The subject was far from their project, and he understood almost at once how deep she went into the technical side. He watched to the end anyway. She spoke without effects, sometimes stopped mid-sentence and rebuilt it, twice went back to a slide she had already shown. When the model lacked data, she said so. When the audience tried to turn an assumption into a conclusion, she corrected them.

At the end someone asked a question plainly designed to display the questioner’s competence. Vadim had already formulated an answer. Shahnoza answered differently: she agreed with part of the objection and asked what would change in practice if the proposed alternative were adopted. The man began to explain, and within a minute it turned out that nothing would change.

“Then it’s a good remark about the model, but a bad remark about the decision,” Shahnoza said.

Vadim stopped the video, rewound, and listened again.

Then he opened one of her papers, then another, no longer connected to the project in any way. At ten in the evening he found himself at home reading an eight-year-old text on the distribution of uncertainty in investment decisions. He did not need it for Tuesday. He finished it.

The next day went to work. At five an email from Shahnoza arrived: three short questions, not a single superfluous sentence. Vadim sat over one of them for a minute before he understood why she had asked it. She cared little about the calculation; she was checking where they drew the system boundary.

He replied and opened the search again, no longer explaining to himself why.

Among the old results was a photograph from a university conference: Shahnoza some fifteen years younger, third row, a green jacket several sizes too big, looking somewhere to the left of the camera. Below the photograph ran the list of participants. Shahnoza Karimova.

Vadim lingered on the name. Tashkent, a year of birth he could roughly guess, a Soviet family or at least a still-Soviet system of documents. At the meeting everyone had been called by their patronymic except her. It was missing here too.

He had no use for it. Its absence simply caught the eye.

Vadim had his own history with patronymics. When he was granted citizenship, the municipal clerk copied his details from a sworn translation of his Soviet birth certificate. The translator had followed Dutch rules, and the identity card read: Vadim Nikolajevitsj Morozov. Nikolajevitsj became a second given name.

The bank worked in French and issued a card to Vadim Nikolaïevitch Morozov. The insurer took the details from his old passport and wrote Nikolaevich. The airline dropped the diaeresis and glued everything into VADIMNIKOLAIEVITCH, and the agent at the gate in Geneva spent five minutes comparing it with a passport that said Nikolajevitsj. In the systems at work the long string did not fit the fields: here he became Vadim N. Morozov, there the software decided that Nikolajevitsj was his surname. Three spellings of one word, and no system considered them one person. Every mismatch cost a letter, a phone call, sometimes a notary.

“Meneer Nikolajevitsj?” an operator once asked, conscientiously pronouncing every consonant.

“Almost,” Vadim said.

Nobody in the country used patronymics, and nobody understood why the word was part of his name. Eventually Vadim grew tired of explaining the structure of Eastern European names to strangers and started the procedure to change his name. It turned out that removing a word from your own name is far harder than having it put there by mistake: applications, old documents, a justification, an official decision and several more steps whose purpose he had long forgotten. The new identity card said Vadim Morozov. He checked it several times and put the old one away in a folder.

Since then he had paid more attention to how names are built than most people do.

Shahnoza ought to have a patronymic, unless her family had deliberately dropped it. Several search variants gave nothing. Then an old Russian-language publication turned up, signed “Sh. A. Karimova”, and that “A.” could mean anything.

Now it was a puzzle. Vadim began searching for combinations of surname, city, university and years. Anvar Karimov fitted by age and city, but the surname was far too common; Vadim discarded him and came back ten minutes later. Another mention turned up, then a newspaper page with badly recognised text, where a daughter, unnamed, was mentioned next to Anvar Karimov. Then the university archive, a conference programme and, at last, a line:

Shahnoza Anvarovna Karimova.

Vadim leaned back in his chair.

“There we go.”

It came out as if he had remembered it. The find had no practical value whatsoever.

After that the material began to form chains: the university page led to a publication, the publication to a conference, the conference to an interview, and the CV gradually turned into a biography. Shahnoza had twice changed fields abruptly: once at the start of her career, and again when nothing required her to change anything. There was no direct explanation, only traces. In one interview she said she quickly got bored when all that was left in the work was optimising the known. In another, that she liked the moment in a new field when you have to ask bad questions because you do not yet know how to formulate good ones.

Vadim knew that phase. He himself had several times entered fields where at first he looked like a man who did not understand the obvious. Most people tried to get out of that state as fast as possible. He liked it.

Then he found a discussion about urban transport, more than ten years old. The transport company planned to lengthen the evening headway on several routes from fifteen minutes to thirty. The buses ran half-empty, and the logic seemed flawless: half as many runs, the same passengers, each bus fuller. Vadim read the rationale and agreed.

Shahnoza disagreed. With a bus every fifteen minutes, she wrote, a person walks to the stop without looking at the timetable and waits seven and a half minutes on average. With a bus every thirty, they wait fifteen on average or start fitting the moment they leave home to the bus, and a twenty-minute trip becomes a forty-minute undertaking. Whoever can take the car does. There are half as many runs, and if more than half the passengers leave, every remaining bus runs emptier than before. The company sees empty buses and lengthens the headway again. “This is the frequency paradox. You save on runs and pay in passengers.”

Vadim reread it. His “obviously” rested on a single assumption: the number of passengers had been taken as a constant, although it depended on the timetable itself. The argument was twelve years old, between strangers, about a city he had never lived in. He kept reading.

A few messages later Shahnoza applied the same argument to a night route out to a hospital campus, and here Vadim saw the hole before her opponent did. At night that bus carries nurses after their shift and people without cars. They have nowhere else to go, they will wait as long as it takes, and no spiral will arise. The opponent wrote exactly that in the next message.

Shahnoza had been much sharper in that argument than she was now, at times unfair. At first she snapped back at the objection. The next day she wrote:

“Yes. You’re right here. I was counting the people who have a choice.”

No reservations, and no attempt to turn the admission into a new victory.

He noticed that he was thinking “I like that” suspiciously often.

Nine years ago someone had asked her why learn yet another European language when English was enough for work. She answered at length; Vadim disagreed with about half of it and ten minutes later was arguing with her in his head. Arguing turned out to be more pleasant than agreeing. Then came notes on Central Asian architecture, on amateur astronomy, and a text on machine translation, though she had never worked in the field. “The machine makes mistakes where the text itself doesn’t know what it wants to say,” she wrote.

“No,” Vadim told the screen.

Next paragraph.

“All right, fine.”

Another one.

“No, still no.”

He caught himself formulating a question for Tuesday and stopped. On Tuesday they had a work meeting, and Shahnoza had no idea he had been reading her old arguments.

Vadim closed the laptop. The next day he opened it again, no longer calling it preparation.

Shared interests meant nothing in themselves. What mattered was that Shahnoza moved through a subject the way he did: she would start with a practical question and a few steps later end up in the history of a language or in some long-forgotten technical standard. If a more interesting question lay next to the original one, she moved on to it. Gradually he began to feel that with such a person the topics would never run out, and every exhausted one would give rise to new ones. He pictured a conversation without an agenda and realised he would like to test that.

By Friday he knew far more about her than he had intended: Tomsk, the return to Tashkent, the next departure, early research topics, the names of projects she herself might no longer remember, her father’s name, a patronymic she did not use in Europe, and that green jacket. He also knew how she argued and how she made mistakes. The last turned out to matter, because until then the picture had been coming together suspiciously smoothly.

Then he found a professional conflict in which Shahnoza looked bad, at least in the first version: categorical, pressing a man who had already stopped arguing, unable to stop once she had proved her point. Vadim read everything he found, twice. Another version supplied the context: her opponent had turned personal several times before that; some of his messages had been deleted but survived in quotes. That explained the sharpness, though it did not fully excuse it. It was this incomplete excuse that he liked most of all.

There was also an interview in which she reasoned confidently about a subject she understood less well than she thought.

“Oh, come on,” Vadim said.

At the end she did add that she might be wrong.

“Too late,” Vadim said, and laughed.

For a few hours the interest vanished, and he felt relief: a normal person, no need to build anything out of a chance meeting. In the evening he remembered one of her arguments from a completely different discussion, wondered how she would answer an objection, and realised he was thinking about her again.

By Monday he admitted what had happened. There had been no moment, no line beyond which professional interest ended. The question “how do I talk to her?” had simply, imperceptibly, been replaced by the question “will she like me?”

It was a little silly. They had spoken once, on a video call, then exchanged a few emails. Everything else he had assembled from traces a person had left over twenty years. Vadim understood the difference between a person and a model of a person perfectly well, and that understanding did nothing to stop the model appealing to him more and more. Photographs had long since stopped mattering. Several times he opened one of her texts, imagined in advance where she would turn, and each time was wrong by just enough to want to read on.

After that the searching became awkward. The woman he had spoken to once over Teams had told him nothing about Tomsk or about her father. She herself knew, as far as he could judge, the name of his company, his job title and a couple of facts from his career. The asymmetry was harmless and unpleasant all the same. He had not hacked any accounts, bought any databases or called any acquaintances; everything was in the open. Still, “this can be found” and “a normal person would look for this” are different statements.

Vadim decided not to search for anything more. The decision lasted until evening: he opened her profile once more, found nothing new, and after that really did stop.

On Tuesday the day dragged. The technical part was ready. Vadim drew up a short list of questions, deleted two, added one, and then discovered a new problem: now he also had to watch what he was not supposed to know. If she said she had studied in Russia, he must not reply, “Yes, in Tomsk.” If she mentioned her first job, he must not name the project. If the talk turned to languages, he must not argue with a text from nine years ago.

He tried to draw the line of normal knowledge. The company website and LinkedIn: fine. A public talk on the project’s subject: fine too; an old paper, probably also fine. A university conference archive was already questionable, her father’s name too much, the patronymic far too much.

On the patronymic he lingered. Shahnoza Anvarovna. There was something funny about it. He imagined saying it when they met, one small provocation, with no wish to show how much he had searched. If she was surprised, he could say he had found it in an old publication. That would even be true.

At six he closed the laptop and walked, twenty minutes. The restaurant turned out to be small: a few tables by the window, a bar, pale wood, chairs set too close together. Vadim arrived early, gave the name on the booking, but did not sit down and stayed by the entrance. A short shower had just passed; people came in, folded umbrellas, took off their jackets. Three minutes to seven.

Over the past days he had seen Shahnoza dozens of times: in the window of a video call, on a stage, in group photographs, in the green jacket, beside some building in Tashkent. Only now did a simple thought occur to him: he had never met her. All these days a person had lived in his flat who had never been there. Now the real one was about to appear, perhaps someone quite different.

Through the glass he saw a woman walking along the façade and recognised her at once. She looked almost the same as on the last video call and quite unlike her photographs: there her face was fixed in a single expression, while now she walked quickly, checked the house number, glanced inside and saw Vadim. He raised a hand.

She came in, took off her coat, came over. For a second both found themselves in the ordinary awkwardness of people who have already talked but have never met, and now have to choose a greeting to match how well they know each other.

Shahnoza held out her hand first. Vadim shook it and allowed himself just one thing:

“Good evening, Shahnoza Anvarovna.”

She did not let go of his hand.

“Good evening, Vadim.”

The pause was short. Just long enough for him to decide that was all.

“Nikolaevich.”