The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (19 page)

As soon as I had left for class, Gulya and Inom apparently began their day with a screaming argument. One morning, Gulya had actually picked up a brick from the ground and thrown it at her son, shrieking,
“Muzhik! Muzhik!”
I didn’t believe Eric at first when he told me, but he showed me the broken brick in the courtyard, where it had shattered against a wall. After wearing themselves out, mother and son would get into Inom’s car and drive to Gulya’s travel agency—one of the few air-conditioned buildings I saw in Samarkand—where she processed visas and organized tours for foreigners.

I have never been so hungry in my life as I was that summer. I remember lying across the bed with Eric, fantasizing about buying
anything we wanted
from the twenty-four-hour Safeway across from our apartment in Mountain View.

“A whole catfish,” I proposed.

“Birthday cake ice cream,” Eric countered, alluding to a Safeway-brand flavor laced with blue frosting and pieces of cake.

When we first moved to Mountain View, I used to think it was depressing to look out the window and see a gigantic Safeway parking lot, but that was before I spent any time in the “Fourth Paradise.”

Breakfast consisted of “soft-boiled” eggs, dipped briefly in warm (not boiling) water, with bread and orange jam. The jam came from a vat under the sink; when Gulya lifted its oilcloth cover, you could see a network of busy ants hurrying over the gemlike surface.

Our relationship with Gulya reached a new level of unspoken antagonism the day Eric discovered a second kitchen in
the other wing of the house, where the jam container had a rubberized lid and no ants—we alone were given the jam with ants. In the absence of any visible jam shortage, this behavior was difficult for me to understand. Eric claimed that it was characteristic of the Tajik Communist elite. In a closet next to the secret kitchen, Eric had also discovered a secret, flushing toilet. The toilet in the main bathroom was broken, and Gulya said the man who fixed toilets was on vacation, so Eric and I had to use the “Uzbek-style” toilet: a hole in the ground. When you lifted the wooden cover over the Uzbek-style toilet, a dense black cloud of flies buzzed up in your face. Sometimes the Uzbek-style toilet clogged, and then you had to poke in it with a big pointed stick. Our feelings were very hurt when we learned that we were the only ones who had to use this toilet.

Every morning at seven thirty, I left Gulya’s house for the university. Her street at that hour was quiet and deserted. A few times I saw a chicken walking around importantly, like some kind of a regional manager. There was a police station at the corner of the main road. Large numbers of police officers sprawled on benches in a yard, talking loudly. All along Sharof Rashidov Street, old men in skullcaps sat at card tables selling lottery tickets and single cigarettes. The proprietors of teahouses hosed down the sidewalks, waking up the stray dogs.

Despite these and other interesting sights offered by the city dubbed by Tamerlane “the Mirror of the World,” I spent most of the walk staring at the ground, trying not to fall into the yawning chasms that appeared every few blocks. The people of Samarkand probably weren’t thrilled to have all those yawning chasms in their sidewalks, but they made the most of things by using them to incinerate their household garbage. Newspapers, watermelon rinds, and other items
smoldered obscurely in their depths. Often, the only way to traverse the yawning chasms of burning garbage was via wooden or metal planks. I was greatly impressed by the agility with which the Russian girls in particular trotted across these makeshift bridges, in their high-heeled sandals, with their somehow empty facial expressions—so unlike my own facial expression, which, I felt, probably conveyed a kind of deep literary trepidation.

The last part of the walk passed through a past or future construction site, a vast expanse of orange clayey soil and crumbly rocks. Walking on this terrain gave you the hopeless feeling of running in a dream, but afterward you knew it had been real because your shoes were orange. Eventually the orange clay gave way to sparse grass, and there was my destination: “the nine-story building,” the biggest building in the university. A janitor at this building, with whom I later struck up a friendship, gave me his mailing address as “Samarkand State University, Nine-Story building, Janitor Habib.” “That’s how I get most of my mail,” he explained.

In the morning, the lobby of the nine-story building was filled with serious young people. The girls wore bright red lipstick and brilliantly colored ankle-length dresses; the boys, light shirts, dark pants, and pointy-toed shoes. When they smiled, their gold teeth glinted in the sunlight. Uniformed guards at the door checked your pass and made you walk through a metal detector, which didn’t appear to be plugged into anything.

The elevator was always broken, so I walked up to the fifth floor, where I met my language teacher, the philosophy graduate student Muzaffar. (His specialty, I later learned, was the Marburg school of neo-Kantians.) Muzaffar’s teaching materials consisted of a 1973 Soviet textbook that presented the Uzbek language exclusively through the lens of cotton
production: a valuable lesson in how monomania structures the world. The unit about the months and seasons was about the months and seasons in which cotton was sown or harvested. The unit about families was about the roles played by different family members in the production of cotton.

“Rustam works in a cotton mill all year round, but his younger sister, Nargiza, is still a student,” I read. “She picks cotton only in the summer, with the other students.”

“Did you understand?” Muzaffar asked.

“I did.”

Muzaffar nodded. “I thought so.”

We finished the textbook in two weeks. The basic grammar was nearly the same as in Turkish, as was much of the simple household vocabulary, though there were some differences in usage. The word
it
, for example, means “dog” in both Uzbek and Turkish—but in Uzbek it means a regular dog, whereas in Turkish it means a contemptible, low-down cur. As a Turkish person in Uzbekistan, one was always wondering why the Uzbeks spoke so insultingly about their dogs. Conversely, the standard Turkish future-tense verb ending exists in Uzbek, and is also a future-tense ending, but with a pompous or literary-heroic connotation. “You can use it to say, ‘President Karimov will cover his nation in glory,’ ” Muzaffar explained, “but not to say that ‘Muzaffar will drive to Tashkent to pick up Safarov’s friend’s visa.’ ” (Muzaffar worked part-time as Vice-Rector Safarov’s secretary.)

After we finished the cotton production textbook, Muzaffar started making up his own grammatical texts, usually featuring one of these recurring characters: President Karimov and poor Muzaffar. I especially liked to hear about poor Muzaffar’s troubles as a graduate student. One morning, for example, Muzaffar went to the library to get books for his dissertation. Samarkand State University had a closed-stack
library which had never been fully catalogued, so you just had to write what kind of books you wanted on a request form and hope for the best. Muzaffar turned in his request at opening time. It hadn’t been processed yet by lunch. The library was closed for an hour and a half, at which point the librarian disappeared altogether. Several hours later, he was discovered asleep in some corner, and was dispatched to the philosophy stacks in the basement, where he again vanished. The library closed for the day, and Muzaffar had to go home. Two days later, he rushed to the library in response to a phone call, and there was a big pile of books waiting for him . . . written in Arabic script, which had been discontinued in 1928. Muzaffar had to get his grandfather to read him the books. “But my grandfather isn’t interested in philosophy. He would read to me only after I spent all Saturday pulling weeds from his cabbage garden. It was a particularly hot day . . .”

The Uzbek orthography had changed multiple times in the past seventy-five years, a reflection of the fact that, as of 1917,
there was no standard written or spoken language called Uzbek
. There was just a continuum of uncodified Turkic dialects, many of them mutually incomprehensible. The region’s shared literary language, Chaghatay Turkish, was unknown to most “Uzbeks,” whose rate of literacy was estimated by the Soviets at 2 or 3 percent.

Even more remarkably, the very concept of an Uzbek ethnicity dates only to the Soviet period. To quote a 1925 report by the All-Russian Academy of Sciences Commission for Studying the Tribal Makeup of the Population of Russia and Adjoining Countries: “Uzbeks could not conceive of the same sort of unified and distinct ethnic group for themselves
as the Kazakhs, Kirgiz, or Turkmens.” Who were the Uzbeks? Did they even exist?

The term
Uzbek
was used as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century, to designate a loose confederation of nomadic Turkic-Mongolian tribes in Central Asia, a region whose natives identified themselves primarily by their tribes or clans, rather than by national or ethnic supergroups. In the nineteenth century, Russians started colonizing Central Asia to gain leverage against British India, initiating a century-long strategic rivalry marked by proxy wars, puppet khans, and double agents. The British called this conflict “The Great Game,” but no Russian people called it that. In 1867, Russia established the Russian Turkestan Governor-Generalship, with its administrative capital in Tashkent. When approached by skeptical Muslim envoys, the Russian governor-general would show them an impressive document bound in gold: an enumeration of his plenary powers. Uzbeks called him the “semi-tsar.”

After the 1917 Revolution, the people of Turkestan thought they had seen the last of the Russians. They established an autonomous government, which was, however, liquidated by Red Army forces in 1918. In order to preempt further pan-Turkic initiatives Lenin appointed a Commission for the Regionalization of Central Asia, which, having collected maps, ethnographic reports, economic inventories, and census data, set about distributing the Turkestan natives among five “ethnogenic” categories: Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz. Most Central Asians were unable to identify themselves with any one of these categories. Cartoons from the period show different tribesmen in regional dress having comical troubles filling out their national identity papers. By 1924, the designation
Turkestan
had disappeared from common use. Under Stalin it became a “forbidden political concept or name.”

In 1921, a Language and Orthography Congress met to standardize the region’s varying Arabic orthographies, and a Soviet commission was appointed to codify “the cleanest, most distinctive, most Uzbek” of the regional vernaculars. The commission settled upon the Iranized dialect of Tashkent, which was unusually high in Tajik-Persian words and unusually low in vowel harmony, a phonological rule in most Turkic languages.
*
In 1926, another commission replaced the Arabic orthography with a Latin alphabet. This All-Union Central Committee for the New Turkic Alphabet was fraught with discord between the Caucasian and Central Asian contingents, particularly over the inclusion of uppercase letters, which did not exist in Arabic. The Azeris felt that capital letters were universal and beautiful, as well as necessary for students of mathematics, chemistry, and foreign languages. The Uzbeks countered that the language reforms were targeted mainly at the illiterate masses, for whom an extra form of each letter was a “superfluous luxury.” Though the Central Asians were eventually forced to accept the uppercase, a concession was won by the poet Fitrat: capital letters would look just like lowercase letters, only bigger. Fitrat and the other Turkic “nationalists” also succeeded in preserving vowel harmony in the new alphabet, which had nine different vowels (designated by diacritics).

In subsequent years, the Russian endings -
ov
and -
ova
were appended to Uzbek surnames. Khojand, Pishpek, and Dushanbe were renamed Leninabad, Frunze, and Stalinabad. (By the 1970s, there were no fewer than fifteen villages in the Samarkand district named Kalinin, after Lenin’s and Stalin’s
titular head of state.) “International” words were Russified: Uzbeks spoke of “Hamlet” as
Gamlet
, and “hectares” as
gektars
. Television and radio were broadcast in “Uzbek.”

In the late thirties and early forties, each Central Asian SSR was outfitted with its own local Cyrillic alphabet. The Turkic languages were closer than ever to Russian . . . and further than ever from one another. The poet Fitrat was arrested and convicted of “bourgeois nationalism.” He was shot during the Great Purges. Vowel harmony, upheld by Fitrat as the “iron law” of Turkic languages, was eliminated from Uzbek orthography. (To Turkish people, the near lack of vowel harmony makes Uzbek sound harsh and toneless.)

Throughout the Soviet era, the state universities, the post offices, and all other government agencies operated in Russian. During perestroika, the Soviets proposed a bill declaring Uzbek the “state language”: a purported concession to Uzbek nationalists. The bill, which preserved Russian as the official “language of inter-ethnic communication,” only served to infuriate the Uzbek Writers’ Union. The poet Vahidov charged that, according to his textual analysis, the document itself had been translated into Uzbek from a Russian original; other writers demonstrated that the bill used the word
Russian
fifty-one times, and
Uzbek
only forty-seven times. The Uzbek Young Pioneers magazine,
Gulkhan
, received hundreds of angry letters. The editors wrote back, addressing their replies in Uzbek; the envelopes were all returned by the post office with a note in Russian: “Indicate address!” The bill was modified in 1995, specifying that by 2005, the state language was to be Uzbek, written with a new Latin alphabet. Everyone who had attained literacy after 1950 now needed to relearn the alphabet.