The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (30 page)

Dilorom realized that Shirin must have seen the two minarets that rise up behind the Kaaba. “God should forgive me, because I was so surprised!” she explained. “I love Shirin very much, but she is so small and thin and lighthearted . . . how should I say it? She doesn’t think about problems of the
soul. But I understood that she must in fact be exceedingly pure of heart.”

I had once briefly met Shirin, who worked in a psychology lab at the university. She was indeed very slight and younglooking, with a pixie haircut, jeans, and an appearance of struggling to hold back uncontrollable laughter.

“Ey, Xudo!”
Dilorom had said to the sky. “Hey, God! Forgive me for having misjudged Shirin! I will work harder to help you make my heart pure enough to see Mecca.”

But Shirin had said, “Big sister, I know you’ll be able to see it.
Mana
, here”—and lo, Dilorom saw the two minarets! This was one of the happiest moments of her life. She drew a picture of the minarets in my notebook, above the name of the suburb where the fountain was located: Chorchinor.

Dilorom wanted very much to bring me to Chorchinor. “I want to know if you’ll see Mecca,” she said, smiling faintly. “I think you will.”

“Hmm, I hope so,” I said, secretly wondering which would be worst: to pretend to see Mecca, to admit that I didn’t see it . . . or actually to see it. I was tremendously relieved when it turned out that, because of construction, the Urgut bus route was suspended all summer.

When I got home that afternoon, Gulya was waiting for me at the gate. “Emma, you can’t have lunch yet—you have to go back to the university. It’s very important. It’s about your bill. Inom will drive you.”

“My bill?” I knew for a fact that ACTR had already cashed the seven-thousand-dollar check that covered my body bag. “I’ll talk to them about it tomorrow,” I told her. But Inom had opened the door of his newly washed Opel, and Gulya was shrieking, “Emma, Emma, get in the car!”

I got in the car. Inom drove me to the university, where
the social worker called Matluba—the one who had forbidden me to leave Gulya’s house at night—announced that I had overpaid my bill. The seven thousand dollars had been distributed among all the proper parties, and one hundred dollars were left over.

“It’s a lot of money—
your
money,” she said. “You can decide what to do with it. You can give it to Vice-Rector Safarov, as thanks for using the university facilities, or to Gulya, who has been your host for all this time . . .”

Matluba said that Vice-Rector Safarov had already received one thousand dollars from my tuition, and she thought it was enough. But Gulya had received only two thousand dollars for our room and board. “Maybe you should give the money to her,” Matluba suggested.

“What about Muzaffar and Dilorom?” I asked.

“They have already been paid. They received one hundred and fifty dollars.”

I stared at her. “Do you mean fifteen hundred?”

Matluba smiled pityingly. “Fifteen hundred? What for? You didn’t stay at their house. You met them in Safarov’s department.”

In other words, as payment for meeting with me one on one, ten hours a week, for two months, Muzaffar and Dilorom had received seventy-five dollars each. I asked for the hundred dollars to be divided between them.

“You really don’t want to give this money to Gulya? Did she do something to offend you?”

Matluba eventually drove me back to Gulya’s house, in a Daewoo hatchback. The two women sat awhile talking in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

In the evenings, Eric and I watched a lot of television: Bollywood movies, Russian variety shows, Kazakh war epics,
Uzbek music videos. One video showed an overwrought young man in a car singing a ballad while purposefully parking the car in a bush. “Why did he park his car in that bush?” you wondered. Then you saw the singer lying on the ground with blood coming out of his nose, amid the flashing lights of ambulances, and you realized that he was supposed to have crashed his car into a tree and died.

The World Cup was still going on—incredibly, the same contest we had seen on televisions in California and Frankfurt. Against all expectations, the Turkish team had advanced to the semifinals. The match against Brazil aired on the Uzbek national channel, in a dubbed Russian telecast. I was dismayed, even hurt, to see that all the Uzbek people were rooting for Brazil. “Show me the Brazilian girl who came here to learn about your national literature,” I remember thinking.

As the Brazilian soccer team defeated the team of my ancestral homeland 1–0, as people in the streets of Samarkand shouted, “Ronaldo! Ronaldinho!” I became aware of a deep flaw in my understanding of the world and human knowledge. I had previously thought of knowledge as a network of connections that somehow preserved and safeguarded the memory of what they were connecting. But of course it was only
people
who remembered things; words and ideas themselves had no memory. The Uzbek language truly was related to both Turkish and Russian, by either genetic origin or secondary contact . . . but that didn’t make it a reconciliation between the two. When you studied Uzbek, you weren’t learning a history or a story; all you were learning was a collection of words. And the larger implication was that no geographic location, no foreign language, no preexisting entity at all would ever reconcile “who” you were with “what” you were, or where you came from with what you liked.

The Uzbek soccer fans’ lack of identification with the Turkish national team was what finally made me see that Uzbekistan
wasn’t a middle point on some continuum between Turkishness and Russianness. Uzbekistan was more like a worse-off Turkey, with an even more depressing national literature. Even I, who was always making fun of Orhan Pamuk, could see that if Pamuk were somehow magically ceded over to the Uzbeks, they would have cause for a national holiday.

Toward the end of our stay, Gulya’s husband, Sharif, started confiscating our furniture, item by item. One day a chair would go missing; the next day, another chair or the nightstand. In their place, he left us cassettes of the tranceinducing Swedish yogis. Soon all we could do in the evenings was sit on the floor where the chairs used to be and look at the square where the television used to be, taking turns listening to the Swedish choir on my Walkman. Turkey won the third-place match versus Korea, but I’m not sure it was even shown on Uzbek TV.

Like a dying star, the summer in Samarkand swelled and grew more luminous toward its end. More and stranger melons appeared at the market. The classroom where Dilorom and I met was being repainted. We moved to a room with no windowpanes, the air filled with the gentle gurgling of pigeons, the surfaces splattered with guano. Some mornings we found pigeons standing on the table, gray and rose-colored with geological-looking markings, looking around importantly with their beady academicians’ eyes. “
Kisht
—out you go,” Dilorom would say. Looking offended, they would grudgingly hop away.

In that last week, Dilorom told me about the colonial period of Uzbek literature. The tale began with Peter the so-called Great who, noticing that the English had colonies
in India, decided that Russia had to have colonies in Central Asia. Peter availed himself of a book on governance and military strategy written by the Timurids: “That’s how our own grandfathers’ writings sold us to slavery.”

In those days Russian
muzhiks
bathed once a year in the Volga, without even taking off their shirts. Central Asians steamed themselves daily in marble bathhouses. So who should have been colonizing whom? Dilorom told me about the time in 1868 when the tsar relocated an entire Cossack village to Surkondaryo. “Now it’s yours,” the tsar told the illiterate Cossacks, who were good for nothing but digging up mud and spoiling the riverbeds.

The Russians were very different from the English, who had sent to India not
muzhiks
but aristocrats. “Things would have gone better for us if we had been colonized by the English,” Dilorom said. It was one of their
idées reçues
; they all thought of India as their missed fate—even little Shurik, when he came over to borrow my Oxford pocket Russian-English dictionary, which he said was the best dictionary he had ever seen in his life, and I believed him. “If we had been colonized by the British, I would already speak English,” he said apologetically.

At the time of the Russian incursion, there were two groups of Uzbek writers: the aristocrats, who loved beautiful women, nature, and kings; and the democrats, who loved mud and head colds. Some Central Asian intellectuals were taken in by the promises of socialism and progress, and by the appearance of lycées, trains, theaters. The poet Furqat (1859–1909) wrote poems called “Piano,” “Hermitage,” “Gymnasium,” “Science,” and “Suvorov.”

Dilorom gave me a photocopy of Furqat’s ode to the Tashkent Exposition of 1890.

She said that the poem was actually critiquing the artificiality
of the concept of exposition, since the Uzbeks had had beautiful things, bazaars, and the Silk Road for thousands of years. The Russians, evidently not sensing this critique, had applauded Furqat and invited him to a banquet—where Furqat expressed his Eastern courtesy by declaiming some extemporaneous verses to one of his hosts’ wives. The Russians banished him to China, where he eventually died.

Furqat had a friend named Muqimiy, who wrote in every genre: lyric, satiric, and comic verse, and
ghazals
composed in folk language. Muqimiy spent fifteen or twenty-five years studying in the madrasa. There was supposed to be a banquet for his graduation, but it never took place, because his parents had died. Muqimiy had no capital and no craft. Somehow he became a calligrapher and got married, but was unable to integrate himself with the conditions of life. He abandoned his wife and never remarried, though he always remained in love. In Dilorom’s opinion he was never happy. He began to help his friends by writing legal requests to judges, in verse. These verses were so delightful that they smoothed the procedural way. In his middle age, Muqimiy revitalized the Uzbek epistolary and travel genres. “I went from village to village,” he wrote. “In this one the women bathe naked and the men all watch; in that one the dogs bark all night, a woman sings me a song worse than a donkey’s braying, and meanwhile three boys are catching a noisy bird . . .”

G’afur G’ulom, the “Uzbek Maxim Gorky,” wrote anecdotes, prose, journalism, and narrative poems, and was known all over the Soviet Union, even in Ukraine and Moldova. He received an Order of Lenin and could produce a poem “at any moment.” He carried his problem inside him. Like his country, he appeared to be free but wasn’t. He wept at home, in solitude: “The words I want to say are left in my heart.”

G’ulom’s best friend, Abdulla Qahhor, was the son of a
woodworker specializing in the production of hammer handles. Qahhor wrote in the style of Chekhov, but at a one-thousand-times higher level. The authorities would print one tiny book by him every year and say it was all he wrote, to deceive people. In fact, he was always writing, writing. Because so much writing is bad for the health, Qahhor suffered from diabetes and heart attacks. He died in a Moscow hospital in 1966, but actually the hospital was a jail where Communists practiced the mass hypnosis of society.

In Qahhor’s most famous story, “Pomegranate,” a woman craves pomegranates. A man comes in with a cloth bundle. He stands in the doorway for a moment, then drops the bundle with a thud. Pomegranates roll out. “Where did you get them?” asks the woman. The man stares at her, wordless, trembling.

Then the past caught up with the present, and we reached the literary-historical landmark I had been waiting for: the emergence of an indigenous novel form. Abdulla Qodiriy’s
Past Days
, considered to be the first Uzbek novel, was serialized in the magazine
Inqilob
in 1922–25. The action is set in Tashkent and Fergana in 1847–60, years of infighting among the khanates of Turkestan, who formed various volatile alliances with and against Russia. The hero of the novel is a young man from a Tashkent merchant family dealing in shoes and housewares. He goes to Fergana, falls in love, gets married, but is denounced by a rival as a spy. Years later he is released from prison, and his mother forces him to take a second wife, who poisons the first wife out of jealousy because the first wife bore him a son. The boy goes to Fergana to live with his mother’s parents, and the father goes to war and dies. Qodiriy wrote a second historical novel,
The Scorpion from the Pulpit
, set during 1865–75, the last decade of the reign of the last khan of Kokand. Qodiriy called the khan the last representative of feudalism,
oppressor of the farmer and small-craftsman classes. Compatible with Soviet ideology as these views may sound, Qodiriy was executed during the Great Purges.

On our last afternoon in Samarkand, Eric and I went to the park to meet the janitor Habib, the towering, light-haired youth who had befriended me at the university and insisted on taking my husband and me to the amusement park with his wife and seven-year-old daughter. But when we got to the park, there was no wife or daughter—just Habib. We invited him on the Ferris wheel, and then he invited us on a ride where we sat in a rotating swing suspended by chains from the rim of an enormous disk that simultaneously spun and tilted on an axis. The mechanism was jerky and irregular, accelerating and stopping, and seemed to run on forever. Overcome by nausea, I held my breath, willing myself to lose consciousness, but it didn’t work.

“Did you like it?” Habib asked in Uzbek, when we got off. (As a young working-class Uzbek, he didn’t speak Russian.) “Shall we do it again? No? Good.” Habib looked relieved. “It made me really sick. Some things you want to do more than once. But with this particular thing, once was enough.”