Summer in Samarkand (continued)
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!”
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.
In the national mythology devised by the Soviets, Uzbek statehood was retroactively dated to the era of Timur (Tamerlane), whose grave was located in Samarkand. The Timurids were declared to be the Uzbeks’ ancestors—even though, in real life, the people known as Uzbeks had been enemies of the Timurids. A statue of “Amir Timur” replaced the Karl Marx monument in the center of Tashkent; previously condemned by Marxists as a barbaric despot, Timur suddenly turned out to have understood all the forms of socioeconomic life: nomadic, agricultural, urban. He was declared to have been not only a military genius, but a great chess player, and even the inventor of a game called Perfect Chess, played on a 110-square board.
I was particularly intrigued by Perfect Chess, which reminded me both of Eric’s delirious ravings and of The Knight’s Move, a book by the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. In The Knight’s Move, Shklovsky proposes that the history of literature proceeds not in a straight line, but in a bent one, like the L-shaped path of a chess knight. The authors who influence one another are not always the ones you would expect: “the legacy is transmitted not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.” Furthermore, literary forms themselves grow by assimilating foreign or extraliterary material, veering off in new angles.
Shklovsky would probably have liked Perfect Chess, in which each player has, in addition to the standard pieces, two giraffes, two camels, two siege engines, and a vizier. The camel moves in a “stretched” knight’s move—one square diagonally and two squares forward—while a giraffe moves one square diagonally and at least three squares forward. The Soviet invention of an Uzbek national identity reminded me of the giraffe’s move, a move two steps further than anyone would normally think of. They assimilated the Timurids, circumnavigated Genghis Khan: the legacy twists and turns, passing from the great-uncle to the great-nephew of the one who sacked his palace.
As Amir Timur was declared the father of Uzbek statehood, so was the greatest Timurid poet, Mir Ali-Shir Navai (1441–1501), declared the father of Uzbek literature. Alisher Navoi, as he became known in Uzbek, was born and died in Herat, in present-day Afghanistan, and had previously been claimed as a shared patrimony by all of Chaghatay literary culture. The Soviets reclassified him, along with the Chaghatay language itself, as Old Uzbek. “Chaghataysm” was declared anti-Soviet. The term Old Uzbek gradually expanded to denote any human achievement that had ever taken place within the boundaries of the UzSSR, including the composition of Avicenna’s medical textbook and Al-Khorazmi’s treatise on algebra.
I learned many of these historical circumstances only later. They helped me understand the feeling I so often had, while studying Uzbek literature in Samarkand, of being a character in a Borges story, studying a literature invented by a secret cabal of academicians.
Every day for two hours, after my language class with Muzaffar, I studied “Old Uzbek” literature with Dilorom Salohiy, an assistant professor at Samarkand State University. Dilorom, who held doctoral degrees in both Russian and Uzbek literature, was a beautiful woman in her early forties, with high cheekbones, olive skin, and slightly Asiatic eyes outlined in kohl. She wore small gold hoop earrings and long silk dresses printed with tiny, amazingly variegated flowers. One dress had so many colors that I wrote them down in my notebook: brown, fuchsia, green, yellow, white, pink, purple, black, and orange-red. Unlike Muzaffar, Dilorom spoke perfect Russian, but she didn’t know any English at all. Her voice was soft and regretful, as if she were gently breaking you some terrible news.
Dilorom spoke in Uzbek most of the time, very slowly, often addressing me as qizim (“my girl,” “my daughter”). She didn’t like to speak Russian, and used it only as a last resort. Nonetheless, to my surprise, I understood most of what she said—or at least I understood something, continuously, most of the time she was talking. The Chaghatay texts we read together in class, on the other hand, were almost completely impenetrable. I recognized about three words in ten, which, due to the metaphorical style of the writing, wasn’t enough to get even the most basic gist. You would understand man, snake, and evil, and the poet could be talking about anything, from politics, to love, to snakes. At the end of each class, Dilorom loaned me a Russian or modern Uzbek translation to read at home. Sometimes the books seemed to confirm what she told me in class; other times, they seemed completely unrelated.
It was, furthermore, impossible to find any external confirmation of anything Dilorom told me simply by walking into a bookstore: no Uzbek literature was being printed in book form while I was there. The bookstores sold only romance and detective novels, Russian editions of Windows for Dummies, newspapers, and endless manuals about pregnancy and child-rearing. The state had recently declared the Uzbek birth rate to be in a crisis, and baby propaganda assailed you from all media outlets. One television commercial showed the spotlessly clean free maternity clinics open to all those who fulfilled their civic duty of procreation. Rosy babies lolled beatifically in individual glass basins. The resemblance of these basins to casserole dishes was accentuated by the maternity nurses’ white aprons and tall white hats, which resembled chef’s hats. This commercial always made me think of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”
• • •
As nineteenth-century British people considered Napoleon to be Satan incarnate, so did Dilorom consider Genghis Khan to be the superhuman nemesis of the Uzbek people, the wrecker of the “First Uzbek Renaissance” embodied by the achievements of Avicenna and Al-Biruni. Shaking her head sorrowfully, she told me that Genghis Khan not only rode a bull, but he didn’t wear any pants. She said that God should forgive her for mentioning such things to me, “but he didn’t wear any pants.” Because the Mongols were too ignorant to make swords, they carried wooden sticks. In Samarkand, scholars were drinking tea from special porcelain teacups that rang different musical tones when you tapped them with a spoon. Genghis Khan destroyed every single one of these teacups, the secret of whose craftsmanship has been lost forever.
“In English we have an expression: ‘like a bull in a china shop,’ ” I remarked.
“That’s how Genghis Khan was—but even worse. He destroyed not a shop, but a whole civilization.”
Timur was the opposite of Genghis Khan. The Mongols destroyed eleven centuries in 130 years; but Timur rebuilt it all in seventy years. This “Second Uzbek Renaissance” reached its fullest expression in the lifetime of Alisher Navoi. At the time of Navoi’s birth, the people of Turkestan were already telling time using a chest from which a doll would emerge every hour. In Europe, people were still using the hourglass: a “sand clock.” Only the Turks had clockwork, which they used to make an escalator that lifted the king onto his throne every morning.
Navoi lived for four years in Samarkand: a city so deeply imbued with poetry that even the doctors wrote their medical treatises in verse. But before Navoi himself transformed the Old Uzbek vernacular into a literary language, all of this poetry was written in Persian. In his Muhakamat al-lughatayn, or Judgment of Two Languages (1499), Navoi mathematically proved the superiority to Persian of Old Uzbek, a language so rich that it had words for seventy different species of duck. Persian just had duck. Impoverished Persian writers had no words with which to differentiate between a burr and a thorn; older and younger sisters; male, female, and infant boars; hunting and fowling; a beauty mark on a woman’s face and a beauty mark somewhere else; deer and elands; being adorned and being really adorned; drinking something down all at once in a refined way, and drinking slowly while savoring each drop.
Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.
It was all just like a Borges story—except that Borges stories are always so short, whereas life in Samarkand kept dragging obscurely on and on. In Borges, the different peculiar languages yield up, in a matter of pages, some kind of interesting philosophical import: the languages of the northern hemisphere of Tlön have no nouns, a circumstance that immediately turns out to represent an extreme of Berkeleyan idealism whereby the world is perceived as a sequence of shifting shapes; the Chinese encyclopedia has different words for animals drawn with a fine camel’s-hair brush and animals who have just broken a flower vase, which dramatizes the impossibility of devising any objective system of classifying knowledge.
By contrast, whatever it was that you learned about Uzbeks when you studied their language, it was something long and difficult to fathom. What did you know about Uzbekistan once you learned that Old Uzbek had a hundred different words for crying? I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem to bode well for my summer vacation.
The earliest texts composed in the Turkic vernacular, Dilorom said, were fables and didactic maxims. Of the fables, I particularly remember the tale of the deer and the hammam. One day, the story goes, the deer went to the hammam. Afterward he felt so clean and comfortable that he lay down for a nap in a cool, muddy spot under some trees. He woke up and went to visit his friends, not realizing that he was covered in mud.
“Where are you coming from?” his friends asked. “From the hammam,” the deer replied.
“Can you guess the moral of this story?” Dilorom asked me.
I thought it over. “You can’t tell where someone comes from just by looking at them?”
Dilorom shook her head, smiling sadly. “No, qizim, the moral is this: Don’t resemble that deer!”
The greatest Old Uzbek didactic writer was the twelfth-century poet Adib Akhmad Yugnakiy. Yugnakiy, who suffered from congenital blindness, demonstrated in numerous ways his preternatural poetic vision—for instance, by molding a cooked bean into the shape of a ram, an animal he had never seen before. “A ram,” Dilorom repeated, and drew in my notebook a picture of a bean, followed by a picture of a ram. The ram had a mild, sickly countenance and huge curved horns. Who was the true genius: Yugnakiy or the nameless one who first saw a bean mashed up by a blind poet and called it ram?
Dilorom told me, and I wrote in my notebook, that five copies of Yugnakiy’s masterpiece, The Gift of Reality, had reached our era. They were discovered in 1915 by a Turkish scholar named Najib Osim. “Osim” didn’t sound to me like a Turkish name—it violates vowel harmony—but I later found out that Turkish people call him Necip Asim “Yaziksiz” (“the Merciless”). Turkish people refer to Adib Akhmad Yugnakiy as Edip Ahmet Yükneki; they call his book not Xibatul Xaqoyiq, but Atabetü’l Hakayik. Their name for the language it’s written in isn’t Old Uzbek, but Hakaniye Turkish, or “the King’s Uighur.” Despite these discrepancies, I was relieved to learn that “Yugnakiy” corresponded to something in the consensus view of reality.
“Mana, qizim—here is a precious, rare thing, a very old book,” Dilorom said, reverently handing me a 1962 Soviet edition of the Xibatul in modern Uzbek translation. It was printed on newsprint and bound with yellowing glue. (Yugnakiy had been reprinted in a large edition under the Soviets, because he wrote about the dangers of wealth.) “This is a very precious, rare thing, but I will let you bring it home and read it tonight because I know you love books, and I know you will take good care of it.” As homework that night, I translated some of Yugnakiy’s maxims into Russian.
The world holds in one hand honey; in the other, poison. One hand feeds you honey, and the other—poisons you.
When you taste something sweet, consider it bitter. When the road seems easy, then come tens of difficulties. Hey, dreamer, so you want grief and ease: but when will hope achieve itself?
This world is like a snake: first it looks soft, but then it looks like a bitter draught. Even if the snake has a nice, soft appearance, nonetheless it has a bad character. Precisely when the snake appears to be very soft, that is when you should run away from it.
Dilorom, looking over my translations the next day, said that they were too literal. “You should think more about the meaning and less about the words,” she advised me.
The most popular fourteenth-century literary genre, sometimes composed in Old Uzbek, was epistolary poetry. Poems during this period took the form of love letters between nightingales and sheep, between opium and wine, between red and green. One poet wrote to a girl that he had tried to drink a lake so he could swallow her reflection: this girl was cleaner than water. “Most people, like you and me, are dirtier than water,” Dilorom explained. “That’s why we take baths to get clean. But this girl is cleaner than water. If she puts her arm in the water, maybe the water will become cleaner.”
Another poet compared his beloved’s upper-lip hairs to the feathers of a parrot feeding a pistachio to the beloved’s lips. To help me appreciate the richness of this poetic image, Dilorom drew a picture of it in my notebook. It was terrifying.
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?
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.
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.
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* In languages with vowel harmony, every word typically contains either “back vowels” (in Turkish, a, i, o, u) or “front vowels” (e, i, ö, ü), but not both. There are multiple forms of every declension and verb tense to match the different kinds of vowels.
* What Is to Be Done? and Who Is to Blame? were influential nineteenth-century political novels by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Alexander Herzen.
* The ghazal is a short lyric form of Persian origin, consisting of rhymed couplets, usually on the subject of romantic love and religious mysticism.