The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (22 page)

According to the critic Vahid Abdullayev, who had been a friend of Dilorom’s father, each writer in the history of literature is a qaqnus: he spends his whole life gathering firewood with which to burn up the previous generation of writers. This was Abdullayev’s version of the “knight’s move.”

I thought a lot about the language of birds, and its relationship to the logic of birds. What were the birds—our strange
uncles—trying to tell us? In various esoteric traditions, the “language of birds” is a code word for total knowledge. As Solomon exclaims in the Koran, “O mankind! Lo! We have been taught the language of the birds and have been given abundance of all things.” Tiresias, endowed by Athena with the gift of prophecy, was suddenly able to understand birds. So was Siegfried, when he accidentally tasted dragon’s blood. That was lucky for Siegfried because some nearby birds were just then discussing a plot to kill him. Among alchemists and Kabbalists, the perfect language that would unlock ultimate knowledge was known as either “the green language” or “the language of birds.” The Russian futurist poet Velemir Khlebnikov is famous for inventing several “transrational” languages, among them “god language” and “bird language.” Interestingly, Khlebnikov’s father was an ornithologist.

Every day near sunset, when one could imagine that the temperature might be falling, Eric went to play soccer at a nearby stadium. (Like most Soviet-era stadiums, this one was called Dynamo.) I went with him a couple of times to use the track, which consisted of irregular rubberized panels laid on top of a bed of sand and gravel. Some of the panels overlapped, creating ledges on which it was easy to trip. Other panels were separated by chasms in which one might twist an ankle. It was by far the worst track I have ever seen in my life. The enclosed soccer field was also riddled with holes and burrows, in which unknown small creatures lived out their mysterious existences. As nightfall approached, the soccer players—mostly high-school students—twisted their ankles with increasing frequency. “See you later, kids!” they would shout bravely to their teammates, as they hobbled off the field.

Eric was befriended by one of the soccer players, a sixteen-year-old
Uzbek boy named Shurik, who wanted to join the CIA when he grew up. One night Shurik invited us to dinner. His whole family—seven-year-old identical twin sisters, a grandfather, and a baby—were sitting on pillows at a low table in a courtyard one-quarter the size of Gulya’s. The parents came out of a tiny wooden lean-to with a huge pot of
plov
, fragrant with saffron, lamb, and dried apricots. The grandfather, who took a great liking to Eric, gave him a history book in Uzbek. “You can translate it for him,” he told me, proceeding to write a completely illegible inscription on the flyleaf.

When we got back to the house that night, Gulya was furious. We had been instructed not to go out after dark unless someone from the university had cleared it with her first. “You can’t just walk out of here and eat with strangers!”

“But it wasn’t a stranger; it was Eric’s friend.”

“Those kinds of friends will drug you and cut you to pieces and eat you!”

At Gulya’s behest, a social worker called Matluba called me on the phone. “Don’t go out after dark,” Matluba said. “Your mother worries about you. She loves you very much.”

Eventually we stopped trying to leave the house in the evenings. Eric played with Lila, while Gulya showed me photo albums of all the Communist prizes she had won in different countries. Another of Gulya’s favorite activities was to paint my eyebrows together using henna, so I had a unibrow. “You really should pay more attention to your appearance,” she told me, surveying her handiwork with satisfaction.

A few nights every week, Gulya was joined after dinner by her old school friends, women of regal bearing and vivid lipstick, who sat for hours in the courtyard listening to Tajik pop music and drinking endless vodka toasts to their beautiful friendship. At the first such gathering, I politely sat with
them for half an hour, drank some vodka, and even recited a toast about how great it was that Gulya had such great friends. This proved to be a tactical error, since afterward Gulya wanted me to drink vodka and recite toasts with them every night, which was not compatible with my program of study of the great Uzbek language.

“I have to do my homework,” I would say.

“You’ll learn more from us than from studying those books—isn’t that right, Betty?”

“And how!” agreed the one called Betty.

I sat up late every night, reading Russian translations of Old Uzbek poetry, and writing various compositions assigned as homework by Muzaffar. These compositions took literally hours to write, and I had soon used up both of the notebooks I had brought with me to Uzbekistan. The only notebooks on sale in Samarkand that summer were stapled booklets of pulpy, fibrous, grayish newsprint—a kind of paper I hadn’t seen since the standardized test booklets of my early childhood. For the cover, you could choose between the following images: the Russian pop star Zemfira, a motorcycle being struck by lightning, a dew-covered rose, or three cartoon monkeys variously covering their eyes, ears, and mouth. I chose the monkeys.

Outside the stationer’s that day, a slight, leathery old man was selling old Russian books, which he had laid out on a blanket under the blazing sun. For fifteen dollars, I bought an amazing fifty-thousand-word Uzbek-Russian dictionary from 1973, as well as a four-volume 1956 edition of Vladimir Dal’s
Explanatory Dictionary of the Great Living Russian Language
, bound in cracked brown leather, with dusty, yellowed pages. He let me bargain for the Uzbek-Russian dictionary, but insisted on the original penciled-in price for the
Dal: “That one is special,” he said. The Dal dictionary went online in 2004, but I still haven’t brought myself to throw out those four volumes, which Eric carried back for me all the way from Uzbekistan, and which are now sitting in a kitchen cabinet over the stove.

I wrote a composition about Istanbul, and another one about cornbread. Searching for words in the Uzbek-Russian dictionary, trying to guess which Turkish words would exist in Uzbek and how they would be spelled, I wrote a satirical dialogue between two frogs on the subject of a water outage. Another composition was supposed to use the special vocabulary that Uzbek people use to summon or dismiss animals. (Turkish has it, too: to call a dog, you say “
hav
,” and to make it go away you say “
hosht
.”) I wrote a composition based on
kisht
, the word Uzbek people use to repel birds. It was written from the perspective of a farmer who found a strange bird ripping up his orange trees and singing a strange song that made him incredibly sick. The bird turned out to be a qaqnus, but the farmer didn’t want a qaqnus bird ripping up his orange trees, so he told it “
kisht
,” and it went away.

One afternoon, to make up for not taking me watermelon shopping, Muzaffar invited me to his English translation workshop. The workshop was taught by a wiry, manic, mosquito-like American in his thirties, with a goatee and wearing the single oldest and most tattered T-shirt I have ever seen being used as clothing. The class was collaborating on an Uzbek translation of a terrible English translation of Maupassant’s “Le Petit.” When the cuckolded widow erupts at the nursemaid, “
Dehors, va-t’en!
” this had been rendered into the great living English language as “Done with you!”

Nine Uzbek graduate students debated for half an hour how to translate the English phrase “Done with you!”

“But that’s not an English phrase,” I finally objected.

“The text we have is the text we have,” the teacher replied, glancing at me a bit irritably, and I noticed dark circles under his eyes.

Starting around that time, I was plagued by a recurring nightmare about penguins. I had applied for a grant to go to Russia on a homestay, and the household I got assigned to was a family of penguins in Antarctica. “But penguins don’t even have a language!” I protested. In fact, those penguins did have a language, with two branches, one epic-narrative and one lyric-folkloric. I was jerked awake by the pounding of my own heart.

In our third week of class, Dilorom and I studied Navoi’s three most famous love poems:
Farhod and Shirin
,
The Seven Planets
, and
Layli and Majnun.

“God gave love to three people,” Dilorom told me. “Farhod was robbed by a king, Bahrom was unworthy, and Majnun went mad.” Each of the love poems, she continued, was directed at a different, insoluble question: Why were people created? Why are all people unhappy? Why are intellectuals even unhappier than everyone else? Each night, Dilorom loaned me a volume from the ten-volume Russian translation of Alisher Navoi, published between 1968 and 1970 by the Uzbek SSR Academy of Sciences.

Farhod and Shirin
is about the doomed love between a poor stonecutter and the daughter of the king of Armenia. Farhod is such a good stonecutter that he actually solves the Armenian water shortage by halving a mountain with a pickaxe, creating a sixty-kilometer canal: this was the stipulated condition for his marrying Shirin. But Shirin’s father goes back on his word. Because he wants Shirin to marry not some stonecutter, but a Persian king, he sends an old woman to
tell Farhod that Shirin has drunk poison and died. Farhod throws his pickaxe in the air and lets it break his head in two. After that, Shirin really does drink poison.

The first great theme of
Farhod and Shirin
, Dilorom said, was the eternal problem of social inequality, classically posed in the form of two questions: “What is to be done?” and “Who is to blame?”
*
The other great theme of
Farhod and Shirin
was . . . crop irrigation. Despite her Uzbek nationalism, there was a touching Soviet strain in Dilorom’s approach to literature.

In
The Seven Planets
, she continued, Navoi chooses a hero at the opposite end of the social spectrum: a king named Bahrom. One day Bahrom goes hunting accompanied by his beloved, whose name is also Dilorom. He takes aim at an onager, the same preternaturally elusive wild ass whose skin, in Balzac’s
Peau de chagrin
, functions as a magic talisman. Bahrom not only hits the onager, but does so in such a way that the creature’s hoof is pinned to its ear. Dilorom, my teacher’s namesake, is overcome by pity and bursts into tears, so Bahrom kills her. Later he is sorry. In seven castles, representing the seven planets, seven travelers tell seven stories for seven nights: the last story reveals Dilorom’s whereabouts.

Of Navoi’s three famous love poems, Dilorom told me the most about
Layli and Majnun
: the ill-fated romance between a young boy named Qays and his schoolmate Layli, who belongs to a rival clan. Driven mad by his forbidden love, Qays transforms into Majnun, the Madman. His heart falls to pieces like a pomegranate. Roaming the streets and bazaars, he recites poetry about the affliction that has doomed him to a life of misery. Majnun’s father swallows his family pride and asks
Layli’s father to let the young people marry. But Layli’s father doesn’t want his daughter to marry a crazy person with a pomegranate heart. He replies that Majnun should be taken to the Black Stone of Kaaba, to be cured of his love. Instead, Majnun goes to Layli’s tent and beats himself with stones.

When Majnun’s father finally does take the unhappy boy to Kaaba, Majnun is unable to pray for the love to be removed from his heart. “You torment me with this love, but I don’t say, ‘liberate me from it and make me like other people.’ Instead I ask for more. Whatever color you made Love to be, I want to be that color, too,” he tells God. He recites a poem about the characters in Layli’s name. One letter has dots over it, representing nails driven into his body; another, C-shaped letter hangs around his neck; a third letter, shaped like a mountain range, symbolizes the mountains that are sitting on his heart. Majnun lurks outside Layli’s tent writing her long letters: “Take the muscles out of my body and make a leash for your little dog!” Layli is given in marriage to a rich clansman, who takes her far away. Day and night she clutches a knife, poised to kill herself if he tries to touch her.

Majnun goes into the desert, forgets human language, and acquires the language of gazelles. The gazelles are beautiful, with big sad eyes just like Layli’s. Majnun paces like a drunken lion, recites
ghazals
,
*
wastes away. In the Arabic script, which omits vowels,
gazelle
and
ghazal
have the same spelling: the language of gazelles is thus a figure for poetic language. Dilorom told me that another homonym for
gazelle
and
ghazal
is a word meaning “eyelid”; hence a famous line from one of Navoi’s
ghazals
: “I sweep the floor at your feet with my eyelashes.”

In the desert, Majnun also befriends lions, monkeys, deer, snakes, foxes, and some kind of bird that sometimes carries letters for him. It is difficult not to be impressed by the richness of animal life in the Old Uzbek deserts. In one story a hero perishes by killing so many stags that their blood soaks the desert floor and awakens a swamp that swallows him up, together with his hunting entourage and his beautiful Chinese bride.

Years pass, and Layli’s husband dies of a heart attack. She calls Majnun to her, but someone tells her that Majnun is sick and probably won’t come. In fact he isn’t especially sick, and rushes to her side, but by the time he gets there, she has died of grief. He sees her body laid out for the funeral, lies next to her, and dies.

Some Eastern scholars believe that
Romeo and Juliet
was informed by a Latin translation of
Layli and Majnun
. How else to explain all the shared features: star-crossed lovers from feuding families, heroes who make journeys into exile, poetic orations over heroines’ corpses? Shakespeare scholars object that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have read
Layli and Majnun
in any language, that his sources are known to have been French and Italian—and that, as for unhappy families, star-crossed lovers, and exiled heroes, they are simply universal.