The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (14 page)

It occurred to me that nobody was actually forcing me
to stay in this room. Surely it would be more constructive to go buy a sun hat. (I have black hair and Uzbekistan is very sunny: along with Liechtenstein, it is one of only two double-landlocked countries in the world.) The speaker either affected not to notice or did not notice my departure from the mauve ballroom. In the lobby I asked the concierge, whose name tag said
ALBRECHT
, where I could buy a sun hat. Albrecht suggested that I might like to look for a hat in nearby Georgetown. “So we’re
here
 . . . ,” he said, poising his hotel pen over a map. But the pen just hovered there, like a helicopter. Albrecht couldn’t locate our hotel on the map. “This is very embarrassing,” he said. His sincerity left a strong impression on me.

In the humid evening, fireflies hovered at eye level over little brick streets. Somehow I ended up in an Urban Outfitters. All around me, girls were buying absolutely unwearable-looking clothes: sheer dresses with V-necks down to the navel; jeans measuring literally two inches from waist to crotch; rhinestone-encrusted G-strings with
no elasticity whatsoever
. I found a hideous white ill-fitting sun hat, bought it, and fled to Barnes & Noble.

There was one other student in the program going to Uzbekistan: Dan, a Tashkent-bound political science major who was indescribably average in both appearance and demeanor, like some kind of composite sketch. On the plane, Dan managed to befriend a group of twelve Uzbek and Ukrainian exchange students. During the layover in Frankfurt, we all sat in two rows of seats in a waiting area, looking at a photo album belonging to a young Uzbek called Muratbek. Muratbek was very tan, with bleached hair and a fixed grin. To his every utterance in every language, he appended the exclamation:
“Awesome!” “
Turkcha gapirasizmi?
” he asked me. “Do you speak Turkish? Awesome!”

Having extinguished two hours of my youth in this way, I went to meet Eric, who had skipped the orientation and was flying to Frankfurt directly from San Francisco. His plane arrived in another, larger terminal. A BMW sedan, the grand prize for something, was parked in the middle of a vast atrium. On the other side of a glass panel, an open cart piled high with suitcases glided along the runway, against the pale early-morning sky. A wall-size television screen was broadcasting a World Cup match: Turkey versus Japan. A small group of Turkish janitors was gathered in front of the screen. At tense moments, they would drop their mop handles and grip one another’s arms, shouting at the players in German.

Eric came out of the plane wearing a white T-shirt and a backpack, looking, with his gentle blinking Chinese eyes, as philosophical and good-humored as Snoopy. Because Eric was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve (part of his geopolitical ambitions), we ended up in some kind of a military lounge. It had free Internet and bran muffins, and a tiny television broadcasting the Japan-Turkey game. Turkey won, 1–0. Even inside the military lounge, we could hear the janitors cheering.

It was late at night when we got to Tashkent. The baggage claim area felt like a room in a dream, a room in someone’s house. A breeze was blowing through an open window. We passed through customs and filed into a parking lot, where Dan’s Tashkent host family came to pick him up: three teenage boys with hangdog expressions, and their mother, Marjuda, an overweight woman with gold teeth and a bright red dress. Marjuda greeted us all warmly; she wrote her phone
number on a piece of paper and told me and Eric to visit her in Tashkent. Then she gestured to Dan to come to their car. Dan turned to me. “So you’re going to stay with us tonight, right?” he said urgently, as though I were his closest friend.

“Ah, no, in a hotel,” I said. They were sending a driver to take us to Samarkand the next day.

“But she just invited you!”

In a haze of sleep, Eric and I got into the car of an ACTR officer, who was taking us to our hotel. Propaganda slogans were printed in enormous letters on walls and billboards—I could recognize
HALQIM
, “my people,” and
VATANIM
, “my country”—signed by Islom Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan since the fall of the Iron Curtain. His last reelection had been in 2000, when he won 91.9 percent of the vote against his sole opponent: a professor of Marxist philosophy, who later admitted that he himself had voted for Karimov.

In the morning, a tiny Korean car, buzzing with the vibrations of a poor-quality stereo, picked us up at a street corner. The driver, an inscrutable Tajik, turned off the stereo when we got into the car. Once we reached the main road, the sun blazed down and it was unbearably hot. The driver periodically made tiny adjustments to the temperature. He turned the air conditioner between “lo” and “off”; opened and closed the vents; rolled down the window a crack, then closed it again. No matter what he did, it was unbearably hot.

After an hour of silence, the driver turned to me and said, in Russian:

“So you didn’t bring any cassette tapes with you?”

We hadn’t, I said, but maybe we could listen to some of his tapes.

The driver remained silent for a moment. “What if you don’t like my music?” he asked finally.

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll like it,” I said.

The driver looked genuinely confused. “How can you say that?” he asked. “You don’t even know what kind of music I have.”

Thirty kilometers of the highway from Tashkent to Samarkand passes through Kazakhstan. The moment we cleared the police checkpoint, the landscape looked completely different. Patchy, grayish fields stretched as far as the eye could see. There were no trees at all, no human figures. Here and there stood a few melancholy, skeletal horses, with drooping prehistoric heads.

Twenty minutes later, trees reappeared, leafy trees with their trunks painted white, on either side of the road; Uzbek police were guarding a roadblock.

“So we’re back in Uzbekistan?” I asked the driver.

“Yes, this is Uzbekistan. Trees, you see.”

“They, um, don’t have trees in Kazakhstan?”

He shook his head, frowning. “Don’t like them.”

“The Kazakhs don’t like . . . trees?”

The driver shook his head more emphatically. “No way.”

We pulled up in front of the house late that afternoon. Two massive wooden doors were set in a pink plaster wall; one of them swung out slowly and Gulchekhra, our “host mother”—they really called her that, as if we were tapeworms—came outside. Peculiarly familiar music drifted toward us. Gulchekhra smiled graciously at me and Eric, and less graciously at the driver, whom she addressed in Tajik: she was evidently trying to dismiss him, while he shuffled his feet and looked at the ground, with the appearance of somebody waiting to be paid. It was not, as we later learned, a deceptive appearance. The driver was a sort of relative, in the broadest sense, so one
tried to be kind to him, Gulchekhra explained, but it was the Americans in Tashkent who had his money; they hadn’t given it to her.

We walked through a covered passage, to a stone courtyard with a square pool, its water green and cloudy with vegetable life. The hot, shimmering air throbbed with what I belatedly recognized as a ballad by Enrique Iglesias. Next to a large boom box, a boy with a weedy adolescent mustache was washing a Daewoo sedan with a garden hose.

Eric and I were given an entire wing of the house, consisting of three rooms: a bedroom, a little sitting room with a television, and a dining room with a long table that could seat twenty. (The malfunctioning toilet was in a different wing.) Gulchekhra told us to call her Gulya, and announced her intention to call me “Emma,” because my real name was so complicated. A former Communist apparatchik, she now worked as a travel agent and had been to “every country in the world, except America, Africa, and Japan.” She had two children: Inom, the teenager with the car, and Lila, a four-year-old girl. Inom and Lila’s father had, Gulya explained, “become a yogi” and moved to California two years ago.

That afternoon Inom drove me to the university, where I met Vice-Rector Safarov, a personage whose refrigerator-like build, rubbery face, and heavy eyelids brought to mind some anthropomorphic piece of furniture in a Disney movie. Reclining in a leather chair in his office, speaking in accented Russian, Vice-Rector Safarov gave me a speech about the importance of comparative literary and cultural study.

“We can study symbols and how they are used in different cultures,” he announced, “or we can study systems of folklore, or we can study how different languages structure
people’s perceptions of the world.” He leaned back in his chair with his arms folded. “What kind of language do you wish to study here, in the principal aspect?”

“The Uzbek language,” I ventured cautiously. Did he already know that I was supposed to teach Russian next year?

Safarov took out a notebook and proceeded to sketch my program of study. I would have four hours of class every day: two hours of “spoken speech” and two hours of “written speech,” aka, the great Uzbek literary language. I was the sole student in these classes. Rising from his desk, Safarov opened the office door with a flourish, revealing a lanky young man in a button-down shirt. “Here is your language teacher,” Safarov said. “His name is Muzaffar.” Muzaffar, a philosophy graduate student, had pale skin, pale almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and a floppy, sad, puppetlike comportment. He bowed, lifting one hand to his chest. Despite his exotic appearance and foreign gestures, his general air of malaise was familiar to me from previous observations of philosophy graduate students.

Muzaffar had been instructed to accompany me back to Gulya’s house. I found his presence oppressive. At one point during our walk, we passed some Russian girls smoking cigarettes. “I have to apologize to you, Elif,” Muzaffar said in English, softly and in what seemed to me an insinuating tone. “Our girls, Uzbek girls, of course do not smoke in street, but Russian girls, they do this.”

“That’s fine,” I said. I tried twice to invite him to go home and let me walk the rest of the way alone, but it was no use; man or God had instilled in him too strong a sense of responsibility for my welfare.

We turned onto Gulya’s street. “I will see you tomorrow,” Muzaffar said. “We will work very hard.”

“Great,” I said.

“At our age,” he observed, “we must work and study a lot, while we still have the strength.”

This remark for the first time began to dispose me kindly toward Muzaffar. I laughed, and a glint of amusement appeared in his pale eyes. “While we still have time,” he clarified. “Already time is running out, but soon we won’t have strength left, either.”

By now we were a few yards away from the massive wooden doors; I could already hear Enrique Iglesias. Muzaffar said that it was time to say goodbye, and that he would now stand behind a tree until I was safely inside the house.

“Oh, OK,” I said. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye. You go into the house now. Don’t worry. I will be here.” He pointed at an emaciated tree.

I knocked on the door, glancing over my shoulder where Muzaffar, faithfully stationed behind the tree, raised one limp arm. I returned this gesture. Inside the courtyard, the music was very loud. Inom was washing his car again.

“Was there a man hiding behind that tree?” Gulya asked, suspiciously.

“I didn’t see anyone,” I said.

The International Tolstoy Conference lasts four days and is held on the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana: the estate where Tolstoy was born, lived most of his life, wrote
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
, and is buried.

In the summer after my fourth year at Stanford, I presented part of a dissertation chapter at this conference. At the time, the department awarded two kinds of international travel grants: $1,000 for presenting a conference paper or $2,500 for field research. My needs clearly fell into the first category, but with an extra $1,500 on the line, I decided to have a go at writing a field-research proposal. Surely there was some mystery that could only be solved at Tolstoy’s house?

I rode my bicycle through blinding sunshine to the library and spent several hours shut up in my refrigerated, fluorescent-lit carrel, with a copy of Henri Troyat’s seven-hundred-page
Tolstoy
. I read with particular interest the final chapters, “Last Will and Testament” and “Flight.” Then I checked out a treatise on poisonous plants and skimmed through it outside at the coffee stand. Finally, I went back inside and plugged in my laptop.

“Tolstoy died in November 1910 at the provincial train station of Astapovo, under what can only be described as
strange circumstances,” I typed. “The strangeness of these circumstances was immediately assimilated into the broader context of Tolstoy’s life and work. After all, had anyone really expected the author of
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
to drop dead quietly, in some dark corner? And so a death was taken for granted that in fact merited closer examination.”

I was rather pleased by my proposal, which I titled “Did Tolstoy Die of Natural Causes or Was He Murdered? A Forensic Investigation,” and which included a historical survey of individuals who had motive and opportunity to effect Tolstoy’s death:

Arguably Russia’s most controversial public figure, Tolstoy was not without powerful enemies. “More letters threatening my life,” he noted in 1897, when his defense of the Dukhobor sect
*
drew loud protests from the Orthodox Church and Tsar Nikolai, who even had Tolstoy followed by the secret police.

As is often the case, Tolstoy’s enemies were no more alarming than his so-called friends, for instance, the pilgrims who swarmed Yasnaya Polyana: a shifting mass of philosophers, drifters, and desperados, collectively referred to by the domestic staff as “the Dark Ones.” These volatile characters included a morphine addict who had written a mathematical proof of Christianity; a barefoot Swedish septuagenarian who preached sartorial “simplicity” and who
eventually had to be driven away “because he was beginning to be indecent”; and a blind Old Believer who pursued the sound of Tolstoy’s footsteps, shouting, “Liar! Hypocrite!”

Meanwhile, within the family circle, Tolstoy’s will was the subject of bitter contention . . .