The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (12 page)

“What author are you reading? What author are you concentrating on?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Maybe Pushkin.”

“Pushkin? Who is that, an American?”

“Well, more of a Russian, actually.”

This information clearly made no sense at all to the sergeant. He blinked once or twice and told me how lucky I was to study at such a famous American university, how many Turkish boys and girls—and not only boys and girls—would give their ears to have such an opportunity.

“An opportunity for what?” he demanded rhetorically, leaning toward me over the table.

“An opportunity for what?” I echoed.

“An opportunity for having their voices heard! For telling people the truth about Turkey, and not the nonsense propagated by Europeans!”

It was dark when we drove down to the city, past Kayseri’s third claim to fame, after pastrami and skiing: a hulking fifteen-hundred-year-old citadel, hewn from black volcanic rock. Lit by spotlights, it resembled a diabolical cauldron.

Looking back, I am surprised by how much I took to heart the words of people like this sergeant. If I didn’t actually believe in my responsibility to tell Americans the truth about Turkey, nevertheless I did feel it was somehow wasteful of me to study Russian literature instead of Turkish literature. I had repeatedly been told in linguistics classes that all languages were universally complex, to a biologically determined degree. Didn’t that mean all languages were, objectively speaking, equally interesting? And I already
knew
Turkish; it had happened without any work, like a gift, and here I was tossing it away to break my head on a bunch of declensions that came effortlessly to anyone who happened to grow up in Russia.

Today, this strikes me as terrible reasoning. I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on
all the least convenient things—and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then
that’s
the wonderful gift right there.

But I was younger and dumber then, and demoralized by the state of the Turkish novel. The thing that immediately struck one about the Turkish novel was that nobody read it, not even Turkish people. I often noticed this when I was in Turkey. Most people just weren’t into novels at all. They liked funny short stories, funny fables, serious fables, essays, letters, short poems, long poems, newspapers, crossword puzzles—they liked practically any kind of printed matter better than novels. Even in 1997, of course, there was already Orhan Pamuk, already writing novels . . . and you could see how miserable he was about it. I bought
The Black Book
that summer. It was about a man who had lost a woman called “Dream.” This guy was walking around the streets of Istanbul calling: “Dream! Dream!” I remember reading this on a bus in Turkey and feeling deeply, viscerally bored. I spent the rest of the bus ride looking out the window. I was interested by the names of towns. I remember the sign for a town called
ereflikoçhisar, literally, Fortress of the Honorable Ram.

As a less strenuous concession to the idea of “local color,” I started reading Pushkin’s Turkish travelogue,
Journey to Arzrum
. I found it much more entertaining than
The Black Book
. I was already entertained by the very premise that Pushkin had ever set foot in Turkey. It was fully as entertaining to me as the premise of Jesus Christ having set foot in England is to English people—for example, to William Blake: “And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England’s mountains green?” Interestingly, one of Pushkin’s most famous lyrics is an elegy to feet: “Ah, little feet, little feet! where are you now? . . . Cosseted in Oriental languor, you left no tracks on the sad northern snow.” Pushkin is not here referring, of
course, to his own feet. Nonetheless, I saw a pair of Pushkin’s boots once in a museum, and they were very small.

As the summer rushed on, I took night buses from one unknown city to another, visiting caves where Christians had hidden from Romans, and Greek amphitheaters that had been converted into caravanserais by the Seljuks; drifting in and out of sleep, I looked out the bus windows for Pushkin’s tracks. They could be anywhere! Indeed, Pushkin’s cartoonish omnipresence is one of the wonderful things about Russian literary culture. Daniil Kharms wrote a play about it, called
Pushkin and Gogol
, in which Pushkin and Gogol keep tripping over each other:

GOGOL
,
getting up
: This is mockery, through and through! (
walks, trips on Pushkin and falls
) Pushkin again!

That’s how it is: Pushkin is everywhere. To this day, “Pushkin” is used interchangeably with the phrase “someone’s uncle” in Russian expressions such as: “And who will foot the bill—Pushkin?”

My favorite part of
Journey to Arzrum
is that Pushkin himself keeps stumbling over a nobleman called . . . Count Pushkin. Pushkin and Count Pushkin decide to travel together, but argue and part company. Pushkin will have no part in Count Pushkin’s plan to cross a snowy mountain pass in a britska pulled by eighteen emaciated Ossetian bulls. Their courses diverge . . . but they meet again in Tiflis. They can’t escape each other. In Turkey, I was reminded of Count Pushkin every time my path crossed that of another Elif, a thing I wasn’t used to, growing up in the States. I went into all the stores called “Elif Clothing.” I bought something from every “Elif Grocery.” Once I gave some money to a Gypsy woman,
who asked my name and offered to tell my fortune. “My daughter’s name is Elif!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that right?” I was startled to realize that the daughter was actually standing beside her: a skinny child, five or six years old. The Gypsy looked at my palm and told me to beware of a woman called Mary.

The further I read in Pushkin’s
Journey
, the more parallels I found with my own experience. As Pushkin was in hiding from the secret police, so was I hiding from my aunt Arzu. As Pushkin was mistaken in his travels for a Frenchman and a dervish, so was I mistaken for a Spaniard and a pilgrim. As Pushkin happened in his travels upon a soiled copy of his own earlier Caucasian poem, “Prisoner of the Caucasus”—the very text he was supposed to be updating with his new Eastern impressions—so was I constantly stumbling, in teahouses and gardens, upon earlier editions of
Let’s Go
. Finally, as Pushkin, a Russian, was ambiguously positioned between the “Orient” and the seventeenth-century Anglo-French tradition of travelogue, so was I ambiguously positioned between Turkey and the exasperating twentieth-century discourse of “shoestring travel”: the quest for an idyll where, for three U.S. dollars, Mustafa would serve you a home-cooked meal and tell you about his hair collection. The worst part of this discourse was its specious left-wing rhetoric, as if it were a form of “sticking it to the man” to reject a chain motel in favor of a cold-water pension completely filled with owls.

I stayed in all the novelty hotels—tree house hotels perched on stilts, troglodyte hotels carved from dolomites—and everywhere I found the same atmosphere of distrust. The travelers lived in terror of getting ripped off, or missing an “authentic” experience. The locals were terrified lest they miss some “opportunity” afforded by their foreign visitors.
Of course I met many kind and reasonable people among both groups, but by definition it’s the importune ones who sought one out: the tourists cadging insider tips, the locals demanding that I lure rich foreigners to their establishments. A Turkish schoolteacher turned hotelier gave me a typed report he had written debunking the Armenian genocide, for me to give to the American government. A tour-bus operator wanted me to help his uncle get a kidney transplant “in Houston.” “And who will pay for that,” I reflected gloomily. “Pushkin?”

I spent the last two weeks of the summer living in Moscow with two very kind but depressed Russian academics: a mathematician from the Academy of Sciences, and his wife, a biologist who had recently been fired from the Academy of Sciences and who spent all night in the kitchen playing Super Mario Brothers on a Nintendo Game Boy. They were renting me the bedroom usually occupied by their daughter, who had been banished to a grandmother’s dacha.

Back at school that year I managed to get a somewhat larger grant, and to enroll for the spring semester in a study-abroad program. This program was operated by two Russian entrepreneurs, both named Igor, and had a distant affiliation with a liberal arts college in Kansas.

Moscow in 1998 was like Paris during the Restoration. The Caspian oil pipeline had drawn the largest foreign investment in Russian history. The city was overrun by speculators. Mayor Luzhkov resurrected Peter the Great’s Table of Ranks, and plotted the construction of an underground city in the suburbs. The state had stopped funding the maintenance of Lenin’s corpse in Red Square, and the vast reserves of unemployed master embalmers were hired to restore the victims of
Mafia car bombings, and to mummify the nouveau riche in marble mausoleums.

In Moscow, for the first and last time in my life, I dated bankers. Things didn’t work out with the first banker, but I still remember the second banker fondly. His name was Rustem, he had remarkable yellowish brown eyes, and he had until recently been an engineer at an explosives factory in Yekaterinburg, designing bombs that were named after flowers. Now he was working for Bank Menatep, which the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky used to manage the state funds for Chernobyl victims, and also to commit alleged embezzlement and tax fraud for which he is, at the time of this writing, serving a prison sentence. Rustem was saving up money to pay for parachuting lessons.

Rustem regularly traveled to Uzbekistan: his sister had married an Uzbek businessman and now lived in Tashkent, which Rustem said resembled the American West of cowboy movies. He could count to ten in Uzbek, and I was amazed to learn that the numbers were almost the same as in Turkish. I had been told, but had not believed, that Uzbek was related to Turkish. The fact hadn’t been presented in a convincing way. A distant uncle of mine had married an Uzbek beauty called Lola, who never talked to anyone or even opened her mouth (although she smiled often, showing beautiful dimples). Only two years after their marriage did it become generally known that Lola had three gold teeth. Everyone would always ask my uncle: “How do you live with someone you can’t communicate with?” And my uncle always shouted: “Uzbek Turkish is very close to our Turkish language!”

I hadn’t believed my uncle, partly because he was crazy—hadn’t he spent his later years in a gardening shed in New Jersey, writing a book about string theory and spiders?—and partly because, in my experience, Turkish people thought
that
every
language was close to our Turkish language. Many times I had been told that Hungarian was related to Turkish, that the Hungarians and Turks descended from the same Altaic peoples, that Attila the Hun was Turkish, and so on. When I went to Hungary, however, I discovered that Hungarians do not share these beliefs at all. “Of course we have some Turkish words in our language,” they would say. “For example,
handcuffs
. But that’s because you occupied our country for four hundred years.”

But Rustem had some Uzbek money in his apartment, brilliantly colored bills on which the familiar Turkish words were set in Cyrillic type, above portraits of stern, almond-eyed Central Asian bards and geographers. It was like play money, the currency of a fantastic land where Turkish and Russian overlapped and generated some
other thing
.

Several years later, while writing my dissertation (about European novels), I formulated a theory of the novel: the novel form is “about” the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books. Looking back, this is how I understand my interest in Central Asia: there was an actual place you could visit, with a language you could learn, that linked my favorite books with one of the more arbitrary and “given” aspects of my life: being Turkish.

Once I learned about the existence of Tashkent, it, too, kept turning up. Anna Akhmatova was evacuated to Tashkent from Leningrad during the siege. So was Bulgakov’s widow: that’s where she hid the manuscript of
Master and Margarita
. Solzhenitsyn’s stomach tumor was miraculously cured at a Tashkent hospital, which became the setting of
Cancer Ward
. In
Anna Karenina
, Vronsky ruins his brilliant military career by refusing a “flattering and dangerous assignment in Tashkent,” instead running away to Italy with Anna.

I decided to visit Tashkent over spring break. Rustem wanted to come with me, but he couldn’t leave the bank. The nation’s bankers were working long hours in those days. I wasn’t following the escalating financial malaise, which Rustem rarely mentioned; as for Raisa, the elderly pensioner with whom I was living, she only turned on the news when it was about the Lewinsky scandal. “I don’t watch our news—it’s so dark. It leaves you feeling bad.”