The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (18 page)

Watson will be utterly confused. “A criminal act, without a criminal actor—my dear Holmes, surely you cannot have gone over to the supernaturalists!”

Holmes will smile sadly. “Nay, my old friend—I fear that, of all forces, it is the most natural.”

Call it Professor Moriarty or Madame la Mort, call it the black monk, or use its Latin name: this killer has infinite means and unfathomable motives.

And still life goes on in Chekhov’s garden, where it’s always a fine day for hanging yourself, and somebody somewhere is playing the guitar. In a hotel in Kharkov, the old professor is deducing the identity of his future murderer: “I will be killed by . . . that abominable wallpaper!” Interior decoration is often the Final Problem; Ivan Ilyich was done in by some drapes. Now the samovar has almost gone cold, and frost has touched the cherry blossoms. Dr. Chekhov, loyal custodian of the human body, you who could look in the ear of an idle man and see an entire universe—where are you now?

_____________

*
The Dukhobors—literally, “Spirit Wrestlers”—were a Russian peasant religious sect, whose tenets included egalitarianism, pacificism, worship through prayer meetings, and the rejection of all written scripture in favor of an oral body of knowledge called the “Living Book.” When they were persecuted for their refusal to fight in the Russo-Turkish war, Tolstoy donated all the proceeds from his novel
Resurrection
to finance their immigration to Canada in 1899.

*
There really was an accordion concert, although I have been unable to confirm the existence of a Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy.

If there is one thing I heard a thousand times in Samarkand, it’s that they have the greatest bread in Uzbekistan because of their amazingly clean water and air. The famous bread of Samarkand comes in round, flat loaves, known in Russian as
lepyoshka
. As legend has it, the emir of Bukhara once summoned the best baker of Samarkand to bake him some Samarkand bread. The baker arrived in Bukhara bringing his own flour and water and firewood. But according to some kind of inter-emirate bread arbiter, the bread he baked didn’t taste the same as real Samarkand bread. The emir decided to have the baker executed, pausing only to ask if he had anything to say in his own defense. “Well,” the baker replied, “there isn’t any Samarkand air here, to leaven the bread.” The emir was so impressed by these words that he spared the baker’s life.

This story was invariably deployed as evidence not of the baker’s cleverness, but of some actual properties of the Samarkand air.

Instead of relying on one of the abstract or inedible representations of “bread” so popular in other parts of the world, the Samarkand bread sellers used, as signage, an actual
lepyoshka
hammered to a board with a large iron nail, like the body of Christ. Looking at those signs was like witnessing
the first glimmerings of abstract thought. How does a loaf of bread nailed to a board differ from a loaf of bread in a store window at an unmarked bakery? Both indicate the sale of bread, but you can actually buy and eat the bread you see in a bakery window. In Samarkand, the bread had been sacrificed—rendered inedible by being nailed to a board and hung out all day, maybe multiple days, in the sun—in the name of signification.

My introduction to the
lepyoshka
of Samarkand took place on that first evening at Gulya’s house. I had just returned from my first meeting at the university with Vice-Rector Safarov and my future language teacher, Muzaffar, and was so tired I could barely walk. I found Eric in the dining room of the guest wing of the house, sitting in a fake Louis XV chair at a long Louis XV table, solving chess problems. Bukhara carpets lay beneath his bare feet, and ghostly curtains floated in front of the windows. The sun was setting outside and orange light filled the room, bouncing off the mirrored walls and the crystal chandelier.

“You’re awake!” I said.

“I waited for you,” Eric said.

We stumbled into the bedroom. In my dream, the poor ward was trying to move Jane Fairfax’s piano. “Emma! Emma!” shouted the ward, but the piano was still falling down the stairs, falling and continuing to fall, making a terrible racket. Gulya was rapping on the window. “Emma!” she called. “Em-
ma
!” I staggered out of bed and fumbled with the window latch. The sky outside was a deep, liquid blue. “Emma, dinner!” Gulya said. She was standing outside the window, just below eye level. Her features looked exaggerated, the heavily penciled eyes and eyebrows, the cartoonishly mouth-shaped mouth.

“Thank you very much,” I said, “but I think we need to sleep some more. I think we need to sleep until the morning.”

We had a long conversation then, about the dinner Gulya had cooked for us, and how angry my “husband” would be to wake up in the night and learn that I had kept it a secret from him. “Wake him up,” Gulya suggested with steely playfulness. “Go on, Emma, wake him up.”

Eric gazed at me with sleep-clouded eyes. “I think the easiest thing to do would be to just go eat dinner,” he said.

Clutching each other’s hands, we trudged across the courtyard to the annex kitchen where we were to eat all our meals: a narrow room with gas burners, a long table, a row of cabinets, and a refrigerator. The refrigerator was kept unplugged all night, to save electricity. Gulya handed us two enormous bowls of borscht, redolent of mutton, covered by a thin film of orange grease.

“This looks great,” Eric said in a woolly, gentle voice. He was the kind of person who could eat anything at any time, and once ate one thousand dumplings in one week, just to make some kind of point.

I ate a piece of Samarkand bread and drank cup after cup of bitter green tea, while fielding Gulya’s questions about our fictional wedding. We had been instructed to tell her that we were married. Conveniently, we already owned platinum wedding bands, purchased two years earlier as engagement rings, using the savings cleverly invested by Eric in Irish banks and especially in some Mexican corn-processing plants, whose stock had skyrocketed because of an unexpected U.S. subsidy for ethanol production. I had stopped wearing my ring after a few months, when it started giving me a rash. Having determined through online research that platinum was the world’s most hypoallergenic metal, I interpreted this rash as a hysterical symptom, although it later turned out to have been caused by soap getting trapped under the ring, which was slightly too big. Meanwhile time had passed and although, in certain respects, nothing had changed—we never called
off the engagement in so many words—things had, in other, almost imperceptible ways, changed a great deal, so that our old plans had gradually come to seem unreal, unrealizable, ill-advised.

We were wearing the rings again now. Eric had already finished his borscht, whereas I had managed only a few spoonfuls.

“You don’t have to eat it, dear thing,” he told me. When Gulya wasn’t looking, we traded bowls and he ate all of my borscht, too.

Gulya wanted to know when and where the wedding had taken place, how many guests had attended, what kind of hat I had worn. I told her that we had had a small wedding, one and a half years ago, on a boat, in Canada.

“Where did you spend your honeymoon?” Gulya asked.

“On the boat,” I said.

After dinner we rushed back to bed. Too jumpy to fall asleep, I started to read. Gradually I became aware of Eric rolling and kicking beside me. He suddenly opened his eyes and said, “Black king to e-seven.” Closing his eyes, he added, “Black knight to j-four.”

I put down my novel and picked up the book of chess problems that lay next to his pillow. “There is no j-four,” I said, worried. “It only goes up to h.”

“Oh, I’m really sorry,” Eric said. Eyes still closed, he furrowed his brow and looked really sorry. “I thought it was one of those times when the knight goes outside, like to Kazakhstan.”

I touched his forehead. It was cold and clammy. “Are you feeling OK?”

“Oh no, my friend,” he said apologetically. “I’m really sick.” A moment later he sat up, put on his sweatpants, and shuffled out the door and into the courtyard.

He came back a few minutes later and climbed into bed.
His skin was an indescribable color. My heart began to pound. Why had I let him eat that borscht? What if his mother found out? She already disliked me, Eric’s mother. In my head I heard the voice of the professor from Berkeley: “Four thousand dollars for the body bag to send you home.” Pulling on some shorts, I went out into the courtyard to look for Gulya.

Gulya said it was nothing to worry about. Foreigners always got sick. “Why aren’t you sick?” she asked, looking suspicious.

She put some water to boil, brewed a pot of tea, and brought out a tin box, from which she produced mysterious items: a resinous amber log and a pink glassy rock. With a sharp knife, she shaved off pieces of these presumably medicinal objects and dissolved them in the tea.

Back in our room, Eric had fallen asleep. I struggled to lift him to a sitting position. His T-shirt was soaked through. It was like trying to pull a bear cub out of a river.

“If we ever have children,” he announced, “they can say that their father was a methodical man.”

“Oh—great,” I said. I got him to take a sip of tea, and dragged off his wet T-shirt, a giveaway from a software company. Printed on the back was the slogan “No Whiners, No Crybabies, No Prima Donnas.”

“What will they say about their mother?” I asked, pulling a fresh shirt over his head.

Eric fell back onto his pillow. “She was serious and lively.”

I opened the screen door and stepped outside. The flagstones were cool under my feet. The moon had risen and a slight breeze rippled the greenish water in the pool. A phrase suddenly came to my mind:
the amber lozenge
. For the first time in many years, I found myself remembering a rainy afternoon in college when my friend Sanja appeared at my door,
streaming wet, to notify me of the two simple keys that were necessary for a perfect understanding of the poet Osip Mandelstam.

“The first thing is ‘as I come to you from the rubble of Petersburg, take a little honey from the palms of my hands.’ ” As she spoke these words, Sanja stared into my face with a deranged, wide-eyed expression, holding her cupped hands outstretched. “Second,” she continued, “ ‘Psyche is slow to hand Charon the amber lozenge.’ ” She looked at me meaningfully. “The
amber lozenge
,” she repeated.

Later, when I happened myself to be reading Mandelstam, I discovered that the amber lozenge was actually a copper lozenge—literally, one of the coins Psyche carried in her mouth to pay Charon when she went to Hades to look for Persephone. Mandelstam’s phrase was
mednaya lepyoshka
, the same word for the delicious bread of Samarkand.

I had seen it in Gulya’s box, beside the glassy rock: the amber lozenge. I had given it to Eric myself; I had put it in his mouth with my own hands. Where had he gone? Whom was he seeing there?

I went back inside and fell into an uneasy sleep, troubled by distorted phrases and images from the past forty-eight hours.
In our nation’s capital I partook of the deathly government salads. Handing Charon the amber lozenge, I passed to the other side. Dry laments surrounded me like a fine rain. I saw a white pawn become a queen, and the spirits of Sophocles and Euripides embattled in a fatal spelling bee.

In the morning, Eric was completely recovered. He didn’t remember anything at all.

All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy after their own fashion. The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic
(SSR) was established in 1925. Tajikistan became its own Soviet Socialist Republic in 1929. Samarkand, a predominantly Tajik city, remained in Uzbekistan.

I didn’t know before I got there that the majority of the Samarkand population was still Tajik and spoke a form of Farsi, an Indo-European language grammatically unrelated to Turkish and Uzbek. Furthermore, our host family was actually Tajik. Gulya knew Uzbek from spending vacations with her aunt in the Fergana Valley, but at home with the children she spoke Tajik and Russian—mostly Russian. Four-year-old Lila, who was being groomed for the Russian school system, barely knew any Tajik at all. Not that I minded—my enthusiasm about learning Uzbek, already pretty lukewarm, was nonetheless a fiery furnace compared to my feelings about learning Tajik. Although I sometimes tried speaking Uzbek with Gulya, she would switch to Russian almost immediately, pointing out that we would understand each other better. Like most people, she was more interested in communicating her own thoughts and feelings than in helping to keep alight the flame of the Eastern Turkic languages.

At Gulya’s request, I met a few times with Lila’s nineteen-year-old brother, Inom, to help him with his English lessons.

“A book is at table,” Inom said.

“Right, almost . . . The book is
on the
table.”

“Uh-huh, OK . . . You know, Emma, it’s hard for me to take English seriously, since I already speak three languages: Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek. English is much easier and simpler than these languages, so the little details of it aren’t really important to me.”

Discontinued by mutual agreement, these English lessons were rapidly incorporated into Gulya’s ongoing invective against her son. “There’s an American right here in our house, and you won’t be bothered to talk English with her!
You care nothing about your future! All you care about is washing your car, you no-good
muzhik
!”