The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (21 page)

Most days, while I was at the university, Eric walked to the city to buy mineral water, which he hid under the bed or in our suitcases. We couldn’t leave bottled water in plain sight because Gulya would grandly thank us for buying water and then she and Inom would drink it all. Every few days Eric changed dollars for sum. Without speaking any Uzbek or Russian, he somehow got a much better rate than at the exchange offices, and better, too, than the discount
rate that Gulya offered us. When we walked around in the city, he frequently exchanged greetings with young money changers; they would tap their hearts and bow to each other. In his free time, Eric read and annotated the ACTR regional guide for Uzbekistan, underlining various interesting phrases: “several hostage-taking incidents in the Kyrgyz Republic”; “certificates verifying legal conversion of foreign currency”; “South Korea: 14%”; “purchasing power parity: $2,400”; “inflation rate (consumer prices): 40%”; “Islamic insurgents based in Tajikistan”; “generally valid for four years with multiple entries”; “only boiled water”; “only sporadically enforced.”

Curiously, Eric also occupied his free time by writing poetry. I found several poems scribbled on the back of the regional guide, one about baseball, another about DNA. Apparently, I was the only one unaffected by Samarkand’s preternaturally poetic atmosphere.

When I came back from class at noon, we ate lunch together in the annex kitchen: bread, raw tomatoes, and
kholodets
, a cold Ukrainian meat jelly, which Gulya prepared in unfathomable quantities. I’m not a huge
kholodets
fan, and this particular version came out not only lumpy but also full of tiny bones. Eric ate it anyway. After lunch, we took turns hosing each other’s heads with the garden hose. Completely drenched (though we would be dry within two minutes), we walked to the city, stopping to purchase small permafrost-hard ice cream sandwiches of Russian manufacture from a tiny boy named Elbek, whose father owned the tobacco store. Elbek executed these transactions with touching professionalism, producing the ice cream from the big steel freezer with a flourish, scrupulously counting out the change. We wanted to give him a gift when we were leaving Samarkand, but couldn’t find anything to buy him, and tried
to give him a twenty-dollar bill. He looked crestfallen. He didn’t want any money. His father came outside, and he also wouldn’t take the twenty dollars.

“We like your son so much,” I explained. “Can we at least buy him an ice cream?”

After some negotiation, Elbek’s father let us buy him a small bottle of orange Fanta. Then he gave us each a small bottle of orange Fanta, for free. Our whole time in Samarkand, we were either trying not to give money to people who were trying to take it, or trying to give money to people who were trying to refuse it.

After devouring as much of the ice cream as possible before it completely melted, we rushed to the park to ride the Ferris wheel. This ancient, clattering apparatus was operated by a gloomy Turk from Trabzon, who let us ride around three times per ticket. When the wheel paused at the top, you could feel a faint, pleasant breeze that sometimes even rocked the seat, producing a loud braying.

From the Ferris wheel we often proceeded to the Internet salon in the Soviet part of the city: an infernal storefront jam-packed with teenagers who were possessedly manipulating avatars through gutted buildings and abandoned warehouses, shooting one another in the back with Uzis. Periodically, some young person, shot in the back one too many times, would leave in disgust, at which point the proprietor rushed to the abandoned station and sprayed the chair and keyboard from a can of Sure deodorant. Chemical clouds of shower-fresh deodorant hung in the sultry air, adding a certain
je ne sais quoi
to the ambience.

In the second week of class, Dilorom told me more about the life and works of Alisher Navoi. During his four years in
Samarkand, Navoi had tutored the king’s children in history, and worked in the court. One day an old woman came to court and said that because the king had killed her son, she wanted to kill the king’s son. The king was brought into court and placed in the defendant’s seat—“precisely analogous to Clinton with Monica Lewinsky,” Dilorom explained. Navoi offered the old woman a choice of the king’s son’s blood or some gold. She chose the gold. Everyone applauded Navoi’s judgment, but he quit his job anyway. To be a good king, he said, you have to be blind and dumb—and also some kind of a paralytic. He was that, for seven years, and it was harder than life itself.

Dilorom gently pulled my notebook toward her and, with the apparent intention of illustrating Navoi’s position in the court, drew an enormous serpent’s head with a tiny man wearing a hat standing inside the serpent’s mouth, staring into its throat: that was Alisher Navoi.

Navoi said that it is better to be a scholar than a king, because a scholar doesn’t leave his learning at the door of the bathhouse. Being a king is no guarantee of happiness: Alexander the Great was not only the world’s greatest king but also owned a magic mirror that showed him the whole empire, and even so, he died at age thirty-three in a terrible depression. Navoi expressed his views in an allegorical work about a dog’s funeral in Khorezm. A row of dogs march single file to the graveyard; other dogs pace in a circle around the first dogs.

Navoi wrote an anatomy of human society, from the king to the beggar. A bad king is like a pig that roots around in the earth for no reason. A good king is like a farmer who roots around in the earth for orderly, beneficial reasons. The worst king in human history, Herod, had a plan for Pharaoh to fly to heaven in a basket powered by vultures in order to shoot God. The vultures kept flying because there was carrion on
a stick over the basket. They saw the basket’s shadow and thought it was God who had been shot down.

In addition to kings, humanity includes travelers, scholars, businessmen, farmers, gleaners, bakers, millers, orphans, and wives. Bad businessmen sell the same wares at different markets at different prices. “Be careful of that when you go to the market,
qizim
,” Dilorom advised me. Farmers, she continued, are the highest people because they bring the garden of heaven to earth. There are good beggars, bad beggars, Sufis and Sufi teachers, called
shayx
. Good beggars are sick and have many children and are unable to work. A good
shayx
has such knowledge that he can blow and make the water part with his breath, or he can blow on a woman’s belly and make her pregnant. A bad
shayx
tricks the people with false miracles: he produces a flame from a glass tube, but it turns out later that the tube contained a special kind of gas that combusts on contact with oxygen. That’s no miracle!

“
Mana, qizim
,” Dilorom said: “Here, my daughter.” She carefully removed from her handbag a folded piece of paper and smoothed it out on the table. It was a photocopy of a drawing of a man who looked just like a goat.

I inspected the drawing. “That’s the bad
shayx
?”

“That’s the bad
shayx
.”

“He looks a bit like a goat.”

Dilorom smiled. “Goats can lead sheep to the best place in the mountain,” she said gently. “And if anyone steals anything from them, the goat knows.”

Reaching into her bag again, she produced a flimsy paperback booklet: a trilingual Uzbek-German-English collection of Navoi’s verses, titled
Pearls from the Ocean
.

Was it my heart—a bird—that was caught in your locks that unfortunate night,

Or was it bats of some kind?

Remember, the sultan dooms to death even his closest friend

If he learns the latter has secreted away money from the treasury.

Speak, Navoi, if love has not yet crippled your soul—

Why do you spew blood whenever you sob?

Meanwhile in language class, Muzaffar started teaching me about Uzbek conversational etiquette. Whenever Uzbeks meet, he explained, they immediately begin bombarding each other with questions: “How are you? How are the ones at home? Are things peaceful? How is your wife? Is she in good health? How is your work? Is your work good? Are you in good health? Aren’t you tired?” I initially tried to answer the questions, but it turned out that you were supposed to simply shoot them back as fast as you could, while raising your right hand to your heart and holding your left hand in the air. “Look where my hands are,” Muzaffar said, jerking his hand to his chest in his puppetlike way. We practiced these niceties for a long time, striking our hearts and shouting at one another: “Are the ones at home good? Aren’t you tired?”

Later we went to another floor of the nine-story building, where I lurked in a hallway in order to assail total strangers with these questions. Muzaffar stood half hidden in a doorway, making helpful gestures. By and large, once they had gotten over their initial surprise, the strangers seemed to find it perfectly pleasant and appropriate to be ambushed in this manner. One diminutive woman in a housekeeper’s uniform pursued the exchange for ten minutes, firing off more and more questions. “Do you like hot weather? Did you fly here on an airplane? Are your ears pierced?” When I confirmed
that my ears were pierced, she stood on her toes to peer at my earlobe. “You should wear earrings!” she concluded.

Another day we learned about watermelons. Muzaffar taught me a folk expression: “The watermelon fell out of its armchair.” “Can you guess what it means?” he asked.

I thought about it. “A usurper will always eventually be deposed?”

“Wha-a-at?”

It turned out that the Turkish word for armchair is the Uzbek word for armpit, so the expression actually meant “The watermelon fell out from under his arm,” and was used to denote a great disillusionment. “Muzaffar is walking back from the market, proud of his watermelon,” Muzaffar explained. “All of a sudden, something happens; he isn’t proud anymore.

“In my family,” he continued, moving from figurative to literal watermelons, “Muzaffar is famous for always buying the worst watermelon. ‘Send Muzaffar to the market,’ they say. ‘He will bring us a big, round, beautiful melon and eating it will be like chewing on some old dry grass.’ ” Muzaffar’s grandfather, by contrast, chose the best watermelons, which were often ugly in appearance, and which he identified by holding them up to his ear and listening to them “talk.” Muzaffar had tried listening to the watermelons talk, but he never heard anything. He had tried deliberately buying ugly melons, but then he just ended up with a melon that united a pale and tasteless interior with an ugly exterior.

Muzaffar did his best to teach me how to buy a good watermelon. Some people, he said, maintained that a watermelon should be heavy and dense. Others said that the best melons were large and light. So that was no help. A good watermelon had to have an orange spot, to show where it had sat in the sun, and a dry belly button, to show that the
vine had broken naturally. When you tapped it with your right hand, it had to resonate against your left hand. As to the rind, the important thing wasn’t the color itself, but the contrast between the different colors.

Muzaffar and I kept trying to schedule an outing to the market, so he could watch me try to buy an Uzbek watermelon, but he was always prevented by either Vice-Rector Safarov or the Marburg neo-Kantians. Eventually he said I should go to the market without him. But he had impressed upon me so seriously that they would try to sell me the worst watermelon and overcharge me for it that I got demoralized and never bought any melons at all.

When Alisher Navoi was six years old, his favorite book was Farid al-Din Attar’s didactic poem
Mantiq al-Tayr
, usually translated as
The Conference of Birds
, although Dilorom called it
The Logic of Birds
. He carried the volume with him everywhere and constantly recited from it until finally his parents confiscated the book and said they had given it to a sick orphan. It was too late; Alisher already knew the book by heart.

The Logic of Birds
, Dilorom explained, is about a group of thirty birds, including a peacock, crane, duck, rooster, parrot, eagle, laughing crane, and hoopoe. The hoopoe says that he will lead the other birds to a great king, who is also a bird—specifically, a simurgh, the world’s largest bird, who eats only delicious fruits and loves to sing, but only with its mate. Someone once captured a simurgh and put a mirror in its cage, but the simurgh was not deceived, did not sing, and died.

To reach the simurgh’s bird paradise, the thirty birds fly for a long time over seas and mountains. Some of them
get tired and want to turn back, but the hoopoe rallies their spirits by telling them didactic stories. Finally, after the birds have flown through seven realms, battling severe depression, without reaching the simurgh, the hoopoe announces: “You have already reached the simurgh—the simurgh is you. You forgot the bad things in your hearts and thought only of an ideal.” This makes sense in Persian, a language in which the phrase
si murgh
means “thirty birds”: the group of thirty birds striving for something beyond themselves is, thus, already the same thing as the transcendent bird paradise. That’s the logic of birds.

All his life, Navoi wanted to write an answer to
The Logic of Birds
. Finally, at age fifty-eight, he wrote
The Language of Birds
, the central figure of which is an ugly, ash-colored bird called the qaqnus. The qaqnus bird has one thousand teeth in its beak, and each tooth sings a melody. Collecting thorns and twigs, it builds a tall nest, sits on top of it, and starts to sing. Its song is incredibly beautiful, but makes human listeners sick. (This song is called
navo
, the root of the name “Navoi.”) As a function of singing, the qaqnus sets itself on fire, burns up, rises to heaven, and becomes a flower. A little bird comes from the ashes; that’s its baby. The baby then spends its whole life collecting its own bonfire. “Such is the dialectic of the qaqnus,” Dilorom explained. In
The Language of Birds
, Navoi compares Attar to the qaqnus, and himself to the baby bird that climbed out of the ashes.