Imperium

PIŃSK, ’39

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with the Imperium takes place near the bridge linking the small town of Pińsk, Poland, with the territories to the south. It is the end of September 1939. War is everywhere. Villages are burning; people are taking shelter from air raids in ditches and in forests, seeking salvation wherever they can. Dead horses lie in the road. If you want to pass, a man advises, you will have to move them to the side. How much time is lost because of this, how much sweat: dead horses are very heavy.

Crowds of refugees, fleeing in dust, dirt, panic. What do they need so many bundles for, so many suitcases? Why so many teakettles and pots? Why are they cursing? Why are they constantly asking questions? All of them are walking, riding, running somewhere — nobody knows where. But my mother knows exactly where we are going. She has taken my sister and me by the hand, and all three of us are heading to Pińsk, to our apartment near Wesola Street. We were on holiday at our uncle’s near Rejowiec when the war surprised us, and so now we have to go back home. Tutti a casa!

After days of wandering we are near Pińsk, and in the distance we can already see the town’s houses, the trees of its beautiful park, and the towers of its churches, when suddenly sailors materialize on the road right by the bridge. They have long rifles and sharp, barbed bayonets and, on their round caps, red stars. They sailed here several days ago all the way from the Black Sea, sunk our gunboats, killed our sailors, and now they don’t want to let us into town. They keep us at a distance—“Don’t move!” they shout, and take aim with their rifles. My mother, as well as other women and children — for they have already rounded up a group of us — is crying and begging for mercy. “Plead for mercy,” the mothers, beside themselves with fear, implore us, but what more can we, the children, do — we have already been kneeling on the road, sobbing and stretching out our arms, for a long time.

Shouting, crying, rifles and bayonets, the enraged faces of the sweaty and angry sailors, some sort of fury, something dreadful and incomprehensible, it is all there by the bridge over the river Pina, in this world that I enter at seven years of age.

IN SCHOOL, starting in the first grade, we learn the Russian alphabet. We begin with the letter s. “What do you mean by s?” someone asks from the back of the classroom. “It should begin with a!”

“Children,” says the teacher (who is a Pole) in a despondent voice, “look at the cover of our book. What is the first letter on this cover? S!”

Petrus, who is a Belorussian, can read the whole title: “Stalin, Voprosy Leninizma” (Studies in Leninism). It is the only book from which we learn Russian, and our only copy of this book. On the stiff cover wrapped in gray linen, large, gold letters.

“Departing from us, Comrade Lenin commanded us to …,” the humble and quiet Władzio reads from the first row in a faltering voice. Best not ask who Lenin was. All our mothers have already instructed us not to ask about anything. But these warnings weren’t necessary anyway. I cannot explain it, I cannot say where it came from, but there was something so frightening in the air, something so tense and heavy, that the town in which we used to cavort with wild and joyful abandon had suddenly become a minefield. We were afraid even to take a deep breath, lest we set off an explosion.

All children will be members of the Pioneers! One day a car pulls into the schoolyard, and out step some gentlemen in sky-blue uniforms. Someone says that it’s the NKVD. What the NKVD is isn’t quite clear, but one thing is certain — when grown-ups utter this name, they lower their voice to a whisper. The NKVD must be terribly important, because its uniforms are elegant, new, spick-and-span. The army walks around in rags; instead of knapsacks they have small linen bags, most often empty, tied up with a piece of old string, and boots that look like they’ve never been polished, whereas if someone from the NKVD is coming, there is an azure glow for a kilometer around him.

The NKVD people brought us white shirts and red scarves. “On important holidays,” says our teacher in a frightened and sad voice, “every child will come to school in this shirt and scarf.” They also brought a box of stamps and distributed them to us. On each stamp was a portrait of a different gentleman. Some had mustaches, others not. One gentleman had a small beard, and two didn’t have any hair. Two or three wore glasses. One of the NKVD people went from bench to bench distributing the stamps. “Children,” said our teacher in a voice that resembled the sound of hollow wood, “these are your leaders.” There were nine of these leaders. They were called Andreyev, Voroshilov, Zhdanov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Mikoyan, Molotov, Khrushchev. The ninth leader was Stalin. The stamp with his portrait was twice as large as the rest. But that was understandable. The gentleman who wrote a book as thick as Voprosy Leninizma (from which we were learning to read) should have a stamp larger than the others.

We wore the stamps attached with a safety pin on the left side, in the place where grown-ups wear medals. But soon a problem arose — there was a shortage of stamps. It was ideal, and perhaps even obligatory, to wear all of the leaders at once, with the large Stalin stamp opening, as it were, the collection. That’s what those from the NKVD also recommended: “You must wear them all!” But meantime, it turned out that somebody had Zhdanov but didn’t have Mikoyan, or somebody had two Kaganovichs but didn’t have Molotov. One day Janek brought in as many as four Khrushchevs, which he exchanged for one Stalin (somebody had earlier stolen his Stalin). The real Croesus among us was Petrus — he had three Stalins. He would take them out of his pocket, display them, boast about them.

One day a neighbor from a side bench, Chaim, took me aside. He wanted to exchange two Andreyevs for one Mikoyan, but I told him that Andreyev wasn’t worth much (which was true, because no one could find out who this Andreyev was), and I refused. The next day Chaim took me aside again. He pulled Voroshilov out of his pocket. I trembled. Voroshilov was my dream! He wore a uniform, therefore he smelled of war, and I already knew war, which is why I felt a sort of closeness to him. In exchange I gave him Zhdanov, Kaganovich, and threw in Mikoyan for good measure. In general, Voroshilov fared well. Similarly Molotov. Molotov could be traded for three others, because grown-ups said that Molotov was important. The price was also high for Kalinin, because he resembled a Polish grandfather. He had a pale beard and — unique among the leaders — something resembling a smile.

SOMETIMES CLASSES are interrupted by gunfire. The discharge resounds nearby, violent, loud, the panes quiver, the walls tremble, and our teacher looks with terror and despair at the window. If silence follows the detonation, we go back to reading our thick book, but if the crash of iron sheets is heard, the roar of bursting walls, and the thud of falling stones, the classroom comes alive. One hears raised voices—“They hit! They hit!”—and barely has the bell rung than we are racing to the square to see what has happened. Our small, single-storied school is right by a broad square, which is called the Third of May. On this square stands a large, a truly large, church, the biggest in town. You have to raise your head high to see where the church ends and the sky begins. And it is precisely at that spot that the cannon is now firing. It is firing at the tower, to knock it down.

This is how at the time we reasoned about it in class: When the Bolsheviks were marching toward us, before they saw Poland and before they saw our town, they must have first caught a glimpse of the towers of the Pińsk church. They were that high. This apparently irritated them very much. Why? We didn’t know how to answer that question. But we concluded it was irritation solely from the fact that as soon as the Russians entered the town, before they had taken a breather, before they’d had a look around to see which street is where, before they’d had a good meal and before they’d taken a few drags on their cheap tobacco, they had already set up a cannon in the square and started firing at the church.

Because all their artillery had gone to the front, they had only one cannon left. They fired it pell-mell. If they hit the mark, clouds of black dust rose from the tower; sometimes a flame burst out. People took cover in deep gateways around the square and observed this bombardment gloomily, but also with curiosity. Women knelt and said the rosary. A drunken gunner walked around the deserted square and shouted: “Look, we’re firing at your God! And what does he do? Nothing! Not a peep out of him! Is he afraid, or what?” He laughed, and then got an attack of the hiccups. Our neighbor told my mother that one day when the dust had settled she saw the figure of St. Andrew Bobola on top of the ruins. St. Andrew, she said, had a terribly suffering face — they were burning him alive.

WALKING TO SCHOOL I have to cross the railroad tracks, right by the train station. I like this place; I like to look at the trains arriving and departing. Most of all I like to look at the locomotive: I would like to be a locomotive engineer. Crossing the tracks one morning, I see that the railroad workers are starting to gather freight cars. Dozens and dozens of them. Feverish motion on the shunting stations: the locomotives are moving; the brakes are screeching; the bumpers ringing out. And the place is swarming with Red Army men, with the NKVD. Finally the motion stops; for several days there is silence. Then one day I see that wooden wagons full of people and bundles are pulling up to the freight cars. Beside each wagon, several soldiers, each one holding a rifle in such a way as though he were going to fire it at any second. At whom? Those on the wagons are already half-dead with fatigue and fear. I ask my mother why they are taking these people. And she, very nervously, says that the deportations have begun. Deportations? Strange word. What does it mean? But my mother doesn’t want to answer the question, doesn’t want to speak to me. She is crying.

NIGHT. A knocking at the window (we live in a little house half-sunk into the ground). Father’s face pressed against the windowpane, flat, melting into the darkness. I see my father entering the room, but I barely recognize him. We had said good-bye in the summer. He was in an officer’s uniform; he had on tall boots, a yellow belt, and leather gloves. I walked down the street with him and listened with pride to how everything on him creaked and clattered. Now he stands before us in the clothes of a Polish peasant, thin, unshaven. He is wearing a cotton knee-length shirt tied with burlap string and straw shoes on his feet. From what my mother is saying, I understand that he fell into Soviet captivity and that he was being driven east. He says that he escaped when they were walking in a column through the forest, and in a village he exchanged his uniform with a peasant for the shirt and straw shoes.

“Children,” says my mother to my sister and me, “close your eyes and go to sleep!” From the adjoining room where our parents are we can hear whispers and sudden commotions. In the morning, when I get up, Father is already gone. Walking to school, I look around in every direction — maybe I can still catch a glimpse of him? There was so much I wanted to tell him about — about myself, about school, about the cannon. And that I already know the Russian alphabet. And that I had seen a deportation. But I do not see my father, not even in the most distant reaches of Lochiszynska Street, which is so long that it probably leads all the way to the end of the earth. It is autumn. A chill wind is blowing. My eyes sting.

• • •

THE NEXT NIGHT. A pounding at the windows, at the door, so insistent, intrusive, so violent, that it seems at any moment the ceiling will cave in. Several of them burst in, Red Army men and civilians, they barge in nervously and with such lightning speed, as if enraged wolves were chasing them. Rifles immediately leveled at us. A great fear: What if they fire? And what if they kill? It’s a very unpleasant sensation, seeing a dead human being. Also, seeing a dead horse. It makes one shudder.

Those holding the rifles stand like statues, without so much as budging, whereas the rest of them are chucking everything to the floor. From the wardrobes, from the chest of drawers, from the beds. Dresses, caps, our toys. Straw mattresses, shoes, Father’s clothes. And to Mother: Muz kuda? (Where’s your husband?) And Mother, pale as a sheet, spreads her trembling arms and says that she doesn’t know. But they know that Father has been here, and so again: Muz kuda? And Mother — well, nothing, she doesn’t know, doesn’t know, and that’s that. Why, you, says one of them, and makes a gesture as though to strike her, and she draws back her head to avoid the blow. The others are still searching and searching. Under the beds, under the cupboard, under the armchair. What are they searching for? They say that it’s weapons. But what kind of weapons could we have? My toy gun, which I used to fight Indians with? Well, yes, when the gun was still good, we could always drive the Indians from our courtyard with it, but now my revolver has a broken spring, and it’s good for nothing.

They want to take Mother away. Why, as punishment? They threaten her with their fists and curse terribly. Idi! a soldier shouts at her, and tries to push her outside into the dark night with the butt of his rifle. But just then my younger sister suddenly throws herself on him and begins pummeling, biting, and kicking him, throws herself at him in a sort of delirium, in fury, in madness. There is so much unexpected, startling determination in this, such a rapacious unyieldingness, doggedness, and finality, that one of the Red Army men, probably the eldest, probably the commander, hesitates for a moment, then puts on his cap, fastens the holster of his pistol, and says to his people, “Pashli!” (“Let’s go!”)

• • •

IN SCHOOL, during breaks, or when we are returning home in a group, the talk is of deportations. There is now no subject more interesting. Our town is full of green; gardens stretch around the houses; every open space is thick with tall grasses, weeds, bushes, and trees; therefore it is easy to hide, to see everything and yet to be invisible oneself. In the higher grades there are those who have managed to sneak away from home, conceal themselves in the underbrush, and observe an entire deportation from start to finish. We already have veritable experts on deportations. They discourse on the subject eagerly and with connoisseurship.

The deportations take place at night. The method here is surprise. The person is asleep, and suddenly shouts wake him, he sees above him the fierce faces of soldiers and of the NKVD; they pull him out of bed, shove him with rifle butts, and command him to leave the house. They order that weapons be handed over, which of course no one possesses anyway. The whole time they spew vile obscenities. The worst is when they call someone a bourgeois. “Bourgeois” is a terrible term of abuse. They turn the whole house upside down, and they take the greatest delight in this. During the time that they are conducting the house search and creating this whole indescribable mess, the wagon arrives. It is a peasant wagon pulled by a paltry little horse, for the inhabitants of the Polesie region are poor and have bad horses. When the commander sees that the wagon is there, he shouts to the ones who will be deported: You have fifteen minutes to pack and get on the wagon. If the commander has a kind heart, he gives them a half hour. Then one simply has to pounce on anything and everything and stuff it into the suitcases, whatever one can manage. Choosing anything, or deliberating about something, is out of the question. Quickly, at once, now, hurry up, hurry up! Then at a run to the wagon — literally at a run. On the wagon sits a peasant, but the peasant won’t help; he is not allowed to; he is not even allowed to turn around to see who is getting into the wagon. The house is left empty, for they take the entire family — grandparents, children, everyone. They turn off the lights.

Now the wagon rolls along in the darkness, along deserted streets, in the direction of the train station. The wagon shakes and sways, for the majority of our streets do not have asphalt, not even cobblestones. The wheels fall into deep holes or sink into mud. But everyone here is used to such inconveniences — the driver from Polesie and his horse and even these unfortunates, who are now swaying atop their bundles, dejected and terrified.

The boys who have managed to observe a deportation say that they have followed after these wagons on foot all the way to the railroad tracks. The freight cars stand there, a long transport. Every night there would be a dozen or so wagons, or several score or more. The wagons would come to a stop on the square in front of the train station. To get to the freight cars, one had to go on foot. It is difficult to board a car like that, because it is high. Those from the escort drove the deportees on, swung their rifles around, shouted, cursed. When they filled one car, they moved on to the next one. What did it mean — to fill a car? It meant to stuff these people into it using knees and rifle butts so that there would be no room left even for a pin.

ONE NEVER KNEW what night they would come, or for whom. The boys who knew a lot about the deportations attempted to discern some rules in this matter, some hierarchies, to discover the key. Alas, in vain. Because, for example, they would begin deporting from Bednarska Street, and then, suddenly, they would stop. They would go after the inhabitants of Kijowska Street, but only on the even side. All of a sudden someone from Nadbrzeżna would vanish, but that same night they would have taken people from the other side of town — from Browarna. Since the time of our house search, Mother does not let us take our clothes off at night. We can take off our shoes, but we have to have them beside us all the time. The coats lie on chairs, so they can be put on in the wink of an eye. In principle we are not permitted to sleep. My sister and I lie side by side, and we poke each other, shake each other, or pull each other by the hair. “Hey, you, don’t sleep!” “You, too, don’t sleep!” But, of course, in the midst of this struggling and shoving we both fall asleep. But Mother really does not sleep. She sits at the table and listens the whole time. The silence on our street rings in our ears. If someone’s footsteps echo in this silence, Mother grows pale. A man at this hour is an enemy. In class we read in Stalin about enemies. An enemy is a terrifying figure. Who else would come around at this hour? Good people are afraid; they are sitting hidden in their homes.

Even if we do sleep, we’re on pins and needles. We are asleep, but we hear everything. Sometimes near morning we hear the rumble of a wooden wagon. The noise swells in the darkness, and by the time the wagon passes our house, the racket is like that of some infernal machine. Mother walks to the window on tiptoe and carefully draws aside the curtain. It is possible that at this very moment other mothers on Wesola Street are doing the same thing. They see the slowly rolling wagon, on it the huddled figures, the Red Army men walking behind it, and — behind them — darkness once again. The neighbor who saw how they were burning St. Andrew Bobola alive tells Mother that it is as if these wagons are rolling over her. The next day she aches everywhere.

THE FIRST IN CLASS to disappear was Paweł. Because winter was approaching, the teacher suggested that Paweł had probably caught a cold and was staying in bed. But Paweł didn’t come the next day or the next week, and in time we began to understand that he would never come. Shortly thereafter we saw that the bench in the first row, in which Janek and Zbyszek sat, was empty. We grew sad, because the two of them played the best practical jokes, which was why the teacher made them sit in the front row, so that he could keep an eye on them. In other classes children also disappeared, more and more frequently. Soon no one even asked why they didn’t come or where they were. The school grew empty. After class we still played ball, hide-and-seek, stickball, but something had happened — the ball became very heavy, during hide-and-seek no one felt like running fast, and in stickball everyone waved the stick around any old way. Bizarre disputes and fierce battles erupted easily, after which everyone took off — angry, sullen, and listless.

One day our teacher disappeared. We arrived at school as usual by eight o’clock, and after the bell, when we had sat down at our benches, the principal, Mr. Lubowicki, appeared at the door. “Children,” he said, “go home now and come back tomorrow, you will have a new teacher, a lady.” For the first time since my father’s departure I feel a cramp near my heart. Why did they take our teacher? He was constantly nervous and looked out the window frequently. He would say, “Ah, children, children,” and shake his head. He was always serious and seemed very sad. He was good to us, and if a student stammered while reading Stalin, he didn’t shout, and even smiled a little.

I walked home dejected. As I was crossing the tracks, I heard a familiar voice. Someone was calling me. Freight cars stood along the railway, packed with people who were about to be deported. The voice was coming from there. In the door of one of the cars I saw our teacher’s face. He was waving to me. My God! I started to race in his direction. But a second later a soldier caught up with me and struck me over the head so hard that I fell. I was getting up, dizzy and with a sharp pain, when he made as if to strike me again but didn’t; he only started shouting at me that I should clear out of here, go to the devil. And he called me a son of a bitch.

BEFORE LONG the hunger began. There hadn’t been any frost yet, and right after school we would start prowling through the gardens. We knew well their intricate geography, because there, amid the beds and shrubs, we used to play our endless games, our wars, hide-and-seek, and Indians. Everyone knew in whose garden the large apples grew, where it was worth shaking down the pear tree, where so many plums had ripened that everything was purple, or where there had been a good crop of bulgy rutabagas. These expeditions were risky, because the owners of the gardens would fiercely drive us away. Hunger was already staring everyone in the face, and everyone was trying to lay down provisions. No one wanted to lose even one apricot, one peach or gooseberry. It was much safer to plunder the orchards of those who had been arrested and locked up in the freight cars, for no one was guarding their trees or vegetable patches.

The river market on the Pina, where peasants brought in their treasures by boat — fish, honey, kasha — was long deserted. Most of the shops were closed or had been robbed. The only hope was the countryside. Our neighbors would take a ring or a fur coat and drive to the nearby villages to buy flour, salt bacon, or poultry. It happened, however, that when these women were out of town, the NKVD would come to their houses and take their children away for deportation. Our neighbors talked about this, completely shaken, and warned my mother. But even before that she had already determined never to be more than a step away from us.

OUR LITTLE TOWN, green and sweltering in the summer, in the autumn brown and gleaming in the sun like amber, suddenly, one night, turned white. It was on the cusp between November and December. The winter of 1939–1940 was early and harsh. It was a frosty, icy hell. From the direction of Spokojna Street, from the side of the cemetery where my grandmother lay, my sister and I crawled as far as the bushes, from which we could see a transport standing on the railway siding. Inside the freight cars were people who were about to depart. Where to? The grown-ups said Siberia. I didn’t know where that was, but from the way in which they pronounced this word, it was clear that even thinking about this Siberia was enough to make one shudder.

I didn’t see my teacher. He had surely left long ago already, for the transports were leaving one after another. We sat hidden in the bushes, our hearts pounding from fear and curiosity. Moans and cries reached us from the direction of the siding. A moment later they grew very loud, piercing. Wagons were driving from one car to the next, collecting the bodies of those who had died that night from cold and hunger. Four NKVD men walked behind the wagons counting something, writing something. Again they counted and wrote. Counted and wrote. Afterward, they closed the doors to the cars. The doors must have been heavy, because they did this with great difficulty. The doors moved on little rollers, and the rollers screeched terribly. The men secured each door with wire, then squeezed the wire tight with pliers. Each one of the four then tested the lock to make sure no one could undo the wire. We crouched in the bushes, petrified from the cold and the emotion. The locomotive whistled several times, and the train started to move. When it was far in the distance, the four NKVD men made an about-face and went back to the station.

WE SAID NOTHING about it to Mother, so as not to make her angry. For days on end she stood at the window, motionless. She was capable of not moving for hours at a time. There was still a little bit of kasha and flour in the house. Sometimes we ate the kasha, sometimes Mother cooked flour pancakes on the stove. I noticed that she herself would not eat anything, and when we ate she would turn away so as not to watch, or she went into the other room. When we went outside, she would say, “Bring a little brushwood.” We would walk around the neighborhood digging up dry stalks and sticks from beneath the snow. It’s possible that she no longer had the strength to go out herself, and we had to heat the furnace, if only a little, for we were turning into icicles. In the evenings we sat in the darkness shaking from cold and from fear, waiting for deportation.

Sometimes I roamed with my friends around the town, ice-covered and sparkling in the sun. We snooped around after food, not really expecting to find anything. One could eat a bit of snow or suck on a piece of ice, but that only increased the hunger. The most tormenting thing, but at the same time the most pleasant and rare, was the smell of food cooking. “Hey, fellas!” one of us would call, and with his hand wave the others over. We would dash toward him, and he would already be standing with his nose thrust between the fence rails, staring at someone’s house. Together we would begin inhaling the smell of roasting chicken or cooking sauerkraut stew that floated our way. Later, we had to pull one another away by force from such a fence.

Once, hungry and desperate, we approached the soldiers guarding the entrance to the barracks. Tovarishch, said Hubert, day pokushat, and mimed putting a piece of bread into his mouth. But the guards only shrugged their shoulders. Finally, one of the sentries reached into his pocket and instead of bread pulled out a little linen sack and handed it to us without a word. Inside were dark brown, almost black, finely chopped stems of tobacco leaves. The Red Army man also gave us a piece of newspaper, showed us how to twist it into a cone and pour into it the damp, foul-smelling tobacco gruel. Cigarettes made out of good tobacco and cigarette paper, in other words normal cigarettes, were unobtainable then.

We began to smoke. The smoke scratched our throats and stung our eyes. The world started to swirl, rock, and was turned upside down. I vomited, and my skull was splitting from pain. But the all-consuming, gnawing sensation of hunger eased, weakened. Despite the nasty taste, despite the tormenting nausea, this was more bearable than the sharp, insistent need, tearing at our guts, to fill our stomachs.

MY CLASS had dwindled by a half. Our teacher sat me on a bench with a boy whose name was Orion. We liked each other at once and began walking home together. One day Orion told me that on Zawalna Street they were supposed to be selling candy and that if I wanted to, we could go stand in line together. It was a beautiful gesture, his telling me about this candy, for we had stopped even dreaming of sweets long ago. Mother gave me permission, and we went to Zawalna Street. It was dark and snow was falling. In front of the shop, there was already a long line of children, stretching the length of several houses. The shop was closed with wooden shutters. The children standing at the head of the line said that it wouldn’t open until tomorrow and that one had to stand here all night. Distressed, we returned to our place at the end of the queue. But new children were arriving continually; the line grew into infinity.

It became even colder than it had been during the day, the frost sharp, piercing, biting. As the minutes passed, then the hours, it was increasingly difficult to stand. I had had for some time very painful abscesses on my legs and hands, burning, swollen with pus. Now the icy cold made the pain unbearable. I moaned with every movement.

Meantime one fragment of the line after another would break away and scatter over the snowy, frozen street. To warm themselves the children played tag. They tussled, wrestled, rolled in the white powder. Then they returned to the line, and the next group would sally forth, yelling. In the middle of the night someone lit a fire. A delicious, luxuriant flame burst out. One by one we took turns beside it so as to warm our hands if only for a moment. The faces of the children who managed to push their way to the fire reflected a golden glow. In this glow their faces thawed, flushed with warmth. Thus warmed, they returned to their places and passed on to us, still standing in line, the rays of their heat.

Toward morning sleep overcame the line. Warnings about how one shouldn’t sleep in freezing temperatures, for that means death, were of no use. No one had the strength anymore to look for firewood or play our game, the square circle. The cold pierced through to the bone, cruel, crackling. Hands and feet went numb. To save ourselves, to last the night, we stood in line huddled tightly together, one close upon the other. Despite the chain in which we locked fiercely and desperately together, all remaining warmth was escaping. The snow was burying us more and more, blanketing us with a white, soft sheepskin.

IN THE MORNING darkness, two women wrapped in thick scarves arrived and started to open the shop. The line sprang to life. We dreamed mountains of candies, magnificent chocolate palaces. We dreamed marzipan princesses and gingerbread pages. Our imagination was afire; everything in it sparkled, radiated. Finally the doors of the shop opened and the line moved. Everyone was pushing so as to warm himself and get to the front. But in the shop there was neither candy nor chocolate palaces. The women were selling empty fruit-candy tins. One for each. They were round, large cans, their sides painted with colorful, cocky roosters and an inscription in Polish — E. WEDEL.

At first we were extremely disappointed and depressed. Orion was crying. But when we began to inspect our loot more closely, we slowly cheered up. On the inside walls of these cans there remained after the candy a sweet deposit, fine, multicolored chips, a thick residue smelling of fruit. Why, our mothers could boil some water in these cans and offer us a sweet, aromatic drink! Already appeased, contented even, instead of going straight home we turned into the park, at the place where the circus stood during the summer. The circus had departed long ago, but it had gone in a hurry and left behind the carousel. The motor from the carousel had been stolen, as had almost all the seats. But one seat remained, and if one gathered together several boys, they could get the carousel moving with a rod in such a way that it spun like mad.

It is empty and silent in the park, so we run to the carousel and start turning it. It is already stirring, creaking. I jump into the seat and buckle myself with the chain. Orion gives the orders, shouts, fires up the boys, urges them on, and they, like galley slaves, push on the rod with all their might, faster and faster and faster! Orion, all in a fever, shouts at the top of his lungs, a madness has already seized the other boys too, the carousel rushes round, I feel a stinging, frosty wind, which lashes my face, a gusting and increasingly stronger wind, on whose wings I rise like a pilot, like a bird, like a cloud.

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN, ’58

THE PLACE of my second encounter with the Imperium: far away, in the steppes and snows of Asia, in a land difficult of access, whose entire geography consists of unfamiliar and extraordinary names — rivers called Argun, Unda, Chaychar; mountains, Chingan, Ilchuri, Dzagdy; and cities, Kilkok, Tungir, and Bukachacha. From these names alone one could compose sonorous, exotic poems.

The train of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which set out the previous day from Peking and is making the nine-day trip to Moscow, after Harbin, China, pulls into Zabaykal’sk, the border station of the USSR. At the approach to every border, tension rises within us; emotions heighten. People are not made to live in borderline situations; they avoid them or try to flee from them as quickly as possible. And yet man encounters them everywhere, sees and feels them everywhere. Let us take the atlas of the world: it is all borders. Borders of oceans and continents. Deserts and forests. Precipitations, monsoons, typhoons, cultivated land and fallow land, permafrost and bog, rocky soil and clay. Let us add the borders of the Quaternary deposits and volcanic flows, of basalt, chalk, and trachyte. We can also see the borders of the Patagonian plate and the Canadian plate, the zones of tropical climates and of Arctic ones, the borders of the erosion zones of the Adycha watershed and of Lake Chad. The borders demarcating the habitats of certain mammals. Certain insects. Certain reptiles and amphibians, including the extremely dangerous black cobra, as well as the frightening — although, fortunately, lazy — anaconda.

And the borders of monarchies and republics? Kingdoms remote in time and lost civilizations? Pacts, treaties, and alliances? Black tribes and red? Human migrations? The borders to which the Mongols reached. The Khazars. The Huns.

How many victims, how much blood and suffering, are connected with this business of borders! There is no end to the cemeteries of those who have been killed the world over in the defense of borders. Equally boundless are the cemeteries of the audacious who attempted to expand their borders. It is safe to assume that half of those who have ever walked upon our planet and lost their lives in the field of glory gave up the ghost in battles begun over a question of borders.

This sensitivity to the border issue, this untiring enthusiasm for constantly marking them out, widening them, or defending them, are characteristic not only of man, but all animate nature, of everything that moves on land, in water and air. Various mammals, in defense of the borders of their grazing lands, will let themselves be torn to pieces. Various beasts of prey, so as to secure new hunting grounds, will bite their adversaries to death. And even our quiet and meek kitten, how he labors, how he compresses and torments himself, to squeeze out a few drops with which to mark, here and there, the borders of his territory.

And our brains? Encoded in them, after all, is an infinite diversity of borders. Between the left and the right hemispheres, between the frontal and the temporal lobes, between the corpus callosum and the cerebellum. And the borders between ventricles, meninx, and convolutions? Between the lumbar region and the spinal cord? Notice the way in which we think. For instance, we think: That’s the limit; beyond that — no. Or we say: Be careful that you don’t go too far, for you will overstep the mark! Moreover, all these boundaries of thought and feeling, injunctions and interdictions, are constantly shifting, crossing and permeating one another, piling up. In our brains there is ceaseless border movement — across borders, near borders, over borders. Hence our headaches and migraines, hence the tumult in our heads; but pearls can also be produced: visions, dazzlements, flashes of inspiration, and — unfortunately more rarely — genius.

The border is stress — fear, even (significantly more rarely: liberation). The concept of the border can include a kind of finality; the doors can slam shut behind us forever: such is the border between life and death. The gods know about such anxieties, and that is why they try to win adherents by promising people that as a reward that they will enter the divine kingdom — which will have no borders. The paradise of the Christian God, the paradise of Yahweh and Allah, all have no borders. Buddhists know that the state of nirvana is the state of blissful happiness without limits. In short, that which is most desired, awaited, and longed for by everyone is precisely this unconditional, total, absolute — boundlessness.

ZABAYKAL’SK — CHITA

Barbed wire. Barbed-wire barriers are what you see first. They protrude out of the snow, hover over it — lines, trestles, fences of barbed wire. What extraordinary combinations, knots, billows, entire constructions of barbed wire clasping together the sky and the earth, clinging to every bit of frozen field, to the white landscape, to the icy horizon. On the face of it, this thorny, rapacious barrier stretching along the border seems like an absurd and surreal idea, for who would force his way through here? As far as the eye can see there is only a desert of snow, no roads, no people, and the snow is two meters high; taking a single step is impossible. And yet these walls of barbed wire have something to say to you, have something to communicate. They are saying: Be careful, you are crossing the border into a different world. You will not escape from here; you will not get away. It is a world of deadly seriousness, orders, and obedience. Learn to listen, learn humility, learn to occupy the least amount of space possible. Best mind your own business. Best be silent. Best not ask questions.

The barbed wire instructs you the whole time the train is rolling toward the station; it imprints upon your mind everything which you should from now on remember, and it does so relentlessly, but after all it is for your own good that it pounds into your head the long litany of limitations, prohibitions, and instructions.

Then come the dogs. German shepherds, furious, trembling, frenzied; the train has barely stopped when they throw themselves under the cars, barking, baying. But who could be riding underneath the wagon, in minus forty degrees Celsius? No matter how many sheepskin coats he had on him, he would freeze in an hour, and we have already been rolling nonstop for an entire day. The sight of the ferreting dogs is so absorbing that for a while one doesn’t notice the next image — soldiers have sprung up as if from beneath the earth and have instantaneously lined up on both sides of the train. They stand in such a way that the train cars are under total surveillance, and if, for example, a passenger — a madman (or perhaps an agent, an infiltrator, a spy) — decided to jump out of any one of the cars and throw himself into the immense, snowy, ice-cold space, he would be immediately spotted and shot.

All the same, who could shoot him, just like that, instantly? Well, the sentries who stand on the lookout towers and have their rifles aimed at the doors and windows of the train cars could do so without a moment’s delay (because I am looking out the window just now, one of the rifles is aimed at me — yes, directly at me!). On the other hand, however, no madman (or agent, or infiltrator, or spy) could jump out and throw himself into the snowbound space, for all the doors and windows of the cars are tightly, carefully shut.

In short, the total surveillance clearly plays the same persuasive role as those one-story-high, thick billows of barbed wire: it is simply a silent but emphatic warning, lest some preposterous idea accidentally enter your head!

But that’s not the end of it. For barely has the pack of high-strung and possibly hungry German shepherds passed beneath the train, barely have the soldiers arranged themselves vigilantly along the tracks, and the sentries at the lookout posts aimed the barrels of their rifles at us, than patrols enter the cars (in one hand a flashlight, in the other a long steel skewer), throwing all the passengers out into the corridor. A search of the compartments begins, a rooting about on the shelves, under the seats, in nooks and crannies, in ashtrays. The sounding of the walls, the ceiling, the floor begins. The examining, looking, touching, smelling.

Now the passengers take everything they have — suitcases, bags, packages, bundles — and carry them to the station building, in which stand long metal tables. Everywhere, red banners joyfully welcome us to the Soviet Union. Beneath the banners, in a row, customs inspectors, men and women, without exception fierce looking, severe, almost as though they were bearing some sort of grudge, yes, very clearly a grudge. I search among them for a face with even slightly more gentle, relaxed, open features, for by this time I myself would like to relax a little, to forget for a moment that I am surrounded by barbed wire and lookouts, fierce dogs, sentries stiff as stone; I would like to establish any kind of contact, exchange a courtesy, talk a little; it’s something I always need very much.

“You, what are you grinning at?” A customs inspector inquires sharply and suspiciously.

A chill goes through me. Power is seriousness: in an encounter with power, a smile is tactless, it demonstrates a lack of respect. Similarly, one must not stare too long at someone who has power. But I already know about this from the army. Our corporal, Jan Pokrywka, punished everyone who looked at him too long. “Come on over here!” he would shout. “What are you staring at me like that for?” And as punishment he would send the offender to clean the latrines.

Now it begins. The opening, the unfastening, the untying, the disemboweling. The rummaging, the plunging in, the pulling out, the shaking about. And what is this? And what is that? And what is that for? And this? And that? And this one? And that one? And which way? And what for? Worst of all are the books. What a curse to be traveling with a book! You could be carrying a suitcase of cocaine and keep a book on top of it. The cocaine wouldn’t arouse the least bit of interest; all the customs inspectors would throw themselves upon the book. And what — God forbid! — if you’re carrying a book in English? Then the real running, checking, paging through, reading would begin.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that I am carrying several books in English (they are mainly textbooks for studying Chinese and Japanese), I am not the worst offender. The worst offenders are positioned at a separate table, a sort of second-class table. These are the locals, citizens of the Soviet Union, thin and slight people, in torn smocks and felt boots full of holes, dark-complexioned, slit-eyed Buryats and Kamchadals, Tunguses and Aynovs, Orochans and Koryats. How they were ever allowed to go to China, I don’t know. In any event, they are returning, and with them they are bringing food. I can see out of the corner of my eye that they have many little sacks of kasha.

And it is this kasha that is going to be at issue now. For clearly kasha belongs, beside books, among the products most under suspicion. Apparently there is something in kasha, some sort of ambiguity, some sort of perverse, insidious quality, some sort of deceitfulness, some sort of two-facedness; for yes, this seems to be kasha, but after all it can turn out that this is not completely kasha, that this is kasha, but not one hundred percent. That is why the customs officers are pouring all the kasha out onto the table. The table is beginning to turn gold and brown; it looks like a scale model of the Sahara spread out before them. The sifting of the kasha begins. A careful, meticulous sifting through the fingers. The fingers of the customs inspectors allow narrow little streams of kasha to pass through them, sifting, sifting, but suddenly — stop! The fingers stop and become motionless. The fingers have felt a strange grain. They felt it; they sent a signal to the customs inspector’s brain; the brain responded — stop! The fingers stand still and are waiting. The brain says, Try one more time, cautiously and carefully. The fingers, delicately and imperceptibly, delicately and imperceptibly, but very carefully, very vigilantly, roll the grain about. They investigate. The experienced fingers of a Soviet customs inspector. Skilled, ready to throttle the grain instantly, catch it in a trap, imprison it. But the little grain is simply what it is — meaning, an ordinary little grain of ordinary kasha, and what has singled it out from the million other grains strewn on the table in the border station in Zabaykal’sk is an uncommon, strange shape, the result of some sort of roughness in the millstone, which turned out to be warped, uneven. So, not contraband, not a trick, concludes the customs inspector’s brain, but it doesn’t give up yet. On the contrary, it commands the fingers to keep on sifting, keep on examining, keep on feeling, and even at the shadow of a doubt to stop — immediately!

Let us consider, after all, that this is the 1950s, and that the mills in China are already very old and ineffectual. Let us consider what problems this creates for the customs inspectors from Zabaykal’sk. There are an infinite number of grains with atypical, suspicious shapes. Almost every second the fingers are sending a message to the brain. Almost every moment the brain raises an alarm — stop! Grain after grain, handful after handful, little sack after little sack, Buryat after Buryat.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from this spectacle. I watched fascinated, forgot about the barbed wire and the lookouts, forgot about the dogs. Why, these are fingers that should be sculpting gold, polishing diamonds! What microscopic movements, what responsive tremors, what sensitivity, what professional virtuosity!

We returned to the cars in the dark; snow was falling; ice creaked under our boots. In Zabaykal’sk I received another kind of lesson, that the border here is not a line on a map, but a school. The pupils who graduate from this school will be divided into three groups. The first group — the absolutely enraged. They will be the most miserable, for everything around them will cause them stress, will reduce them to a state of fury, to madness. Will irritate, annoy, torment. Before they even realize that they can change nothing in the reality surrounding them, that they can improve nothing, they will be felled by a heart attack or a stroke.

The second group will observe the Soviet people and imitate their way of thinking and acting. The essence of this posture is resigning oneself to the existing reality, and even being able to derive from it a certain satisfaction. There is a saying that is very helpful in this, and which it behooves one to repeat to oneself and to others every evening, regardless of how terrible the day that has just ended: “Rejoice in this day, for things will never again be as good as they were today!”

Finally, the third group. They are the ones for whom everything is above all else interesting, extraordinary, improbable, who want to get to know this different world hitherto unknown to them, examine it, plumb it. They know how to arm themselves with patience (but not superciliousness!), and to maintain distance with a calm, attentive, sober gaze.

Such are the three attitudes characteristic of foreigners who have found themselves in the Imperium.

CHITA — ULAN-UDE

Looking through the window of the rushing train, I think: Siberia, so this is how it looks! I heard this name for the first time when I was seven years old. Stern mothers from our street cautioned: “Children, behave yourselves, or they’ll deport you to the Sybir!” (They said it in Russian — Sybir — for this sounded more menacing, apocalyptic.) Gentle mothers would become indignant: “How can you frighten children this way!”

It wasn’t really possible to imagine Siberia. One of my friends finally showed me a drawing in a book: in a heavy snowstorm walked a column of tattered and hunched-over men. Heavy chains with iron balls at the end were attached to their hands and legs, and they dragged these balls behind them over the ground.

Siberia, in its sinister, cruel form, is a freezing, icy space … plus dictatorship.

In many states there exist icy territories, lands that for the greater part of the year are frozen over, dead. Such, for instance, are vast stretches of Canada. Or take Danish Greenland, or American Alaska. And yet it doesn’t occur to anyone to frighten children with: “Wash your hands or they’ll send you to Canada!” Or “Play nicely with that little girl or they’ll deport you to America!” In those countries, quite simply, there is no dictatorship, nobody puts anyone in chains, nobody imprisons anyone in camps, dispatches him to work in hellish frost, to a certain death. In those frozen lands, man has one antagonist — the cold. Here, as many as three — the cold, hunger, and armed force.

In 1842, in Paris, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz delivered two speeches at the College de France about the memoirs of General Kopeć. Kopeć fought by Kościuszko’s side near Maciejowice, and there was taken prisoner by the Russians and sentenced to Siberia. They drove Kopeć some ten thousand kilometers over the Russian and Siberian wilderness, to Kamchatka.

It was a real journey through hell.

They drove him, as the general writes, in a police wagon “which had the shape of a trunk, covered with skins, and inside with sheets of iron, with only a small window on one side for serving water or food.

“This trunk,” Kopeć continues, “was without a seat, and because my wounds had not yet healed, they gave me a sack with straw and I was designated a secret prisoner, with a number only, no name. Such a prisoner is for them the greatest criminal, with whom no one, under pain of the greatest punishment, can converse or even know his name or the reason he was taken captive.”

Driven in the police wagon, as though in a coffin with the lid slammed shut, he was able to conjecture about where he was only through sounds. Hearing the rumble of cobblestones below the wheels, he surmised that they were in a town: “On the sixth day I heard the rumble of cobblestones, it was Smolensk.” From the dark police wagon they transfer him directly into a dark cell, so that Kopeć cannot tell if it is day or night: “There were two windows with iron bars, nailed up with black wooden planks so that daylight couldn’t enter anywhere. One had to guess — night, or day? — the guards never wanted to say even a word to me.” Exhausted by the journey, Kopeć nevertheless cannot sleep — this rest stop on the road deep into Siberia turns out to be a place of torment: “I couldn’t sleep: I thought I heard beatings from beyond the walls next to me, the sounds of torture, and the clank of chains.”

They drag the general to an inquest. “They ask Kopeć,” Mickiewicz writes, “what was the cause of his rebellion. Love of the motherland, he answers. The commission becomes indignant at this answer and breaks off the interrogation, unable to suffer the prisoner’s pride.”

They drive Kopeć farther east. “From Smolensk to Irkutsk,” the general reminisces, “three soldiers from my escort died, others broke their legs or arms falling off my police wagon. Drunk and careless, they would speed down mountains, and it often happened that as the horses broke into a run, the wagon would flip over and the horses would drag it for a quarter of a mile, and I, shut inside, would smash around like a herring in a barrel. The fact that I was wrapped in a sack, chaff, and straw would save me.”

Despite being transported in a wagon-coffin, the general is aware of being in a certain way privileged — they are driving him; others they force to march for years on foot. “On the road I met several hundred people of both genders, being marched for deportation toward Irkutsk, under a very small guard, people they would send from settlement to settlement, and it is only at the end of the third year, if then, that they would arrive in Irkutsk from Europe. None can escape along the way, for there are no secondary settlements anywhere … if one of the enslaved wants to save himself by slipping away somewhere to the side, into the forest, he will be eaten by animals.…”

This wandering of the deportee is not only a displacement in space and in time. It is accompanied by a process of dehumanization: the one who reaches the end (if he doesn’t die along the way) has already been stripped of everything that is human. He has no surname; he does not know where he is; he does not know what they will do with him. His language has been taken away: no one will speak with him. He is a consignment; he is a thing; he is a trifle.

Later, they deprive the general of even the wagon; they force him along on foot: “We always walked from morning until evening without a break.”

And he adds: “No road of any kind, only through terrifying mountains and gorges.”

ULAN-UDE — KRASNOYARSK

“No road of any kind, only through terrifying mountains and gorges.”

I dreamed of seeing Lake Baikal, but it was night, a black stain on the frost-covered window frame. It wasn’t until morning that I caught a glimpse of mountains and gorges. Everything in snow.

Snow and snow.

It is January, the middle of the Siberian winter.

Outside the window everything appears stiff from the cold, even the firs, pines, and spruces look like great, petrified icicles, dark green stalagmites sticking out of the snow.

The immobility, the immobility of this landscape, as if the train were standing still, as if it too were a part of this region — also immobile.

And the whiteness — whiteness everywhere, blinding, unfathomable, absolute. A whiteness that draws one in, if someone lets himself be seduced by it, lets himself be caught in the trap and walks farther, deep into the whiteness — he will perish. The whiteness destroys all those who try to approach it, who try to decipher its mystery. It hurls them down from mountaintops, abandons them, frozen, on snowy plains. Siberian Buryats consider every white animal to be sacred; they believe that to kill one is to commit a sin and bring death upon oneself. They look upon white Siberia as a temple inhabited by a god. They bow to its plains, pay homage to its landscapes, continually frightened that from there, from the white depths, death will come.

Whiteness is often associated with finality, with the end, with death. In those cultures in which people live with the fear of death, mourners dress in black, to scare death away from themselves, isolate it, confine it to the deceased. But here, where death is regarded as another form, another shape of existence, mourners dress in white and dress the deceased in white: whiteness is here the color of acceptance, consent, of a surrender to fate.

There is something in this January Siberian landscape that overpowers, oppresses, stuns. Above all, it is its enormity, its boundlessness, its oceanic limitlessness. The earth has no end here; the world has no end. Man is not created for such measurelessness. For him a comfortable, palpable, serviceable measure is the measure of his village, his field, street, house. At sea, the size of the ship’s deck will be such a measure. Man is created for the kind of space that he can traverse at one try, with a single effort.

KRASNOYARSK — NOVOSIBIRSK

Beyond Krasnoyarsk (is it already the fourth day of traveling?) it begins to grow lighter. (At this time of year, darkness prevails here for the greater part of the night and the day.) I drink tea and look out the window. The same snowy plains as yesterday, as the day before yesterday (and, I am tempted to add, as last year, as centuries ago). The same endless forest. The same forests and clearings, and in the open areas high snowdrifts, sculpted by the wind into the strangest of shapes.

Suddenly I remember Blaise Cendrars and his “Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France.” In this poem, written before World War I, Cendrars describes a journey on this same railroad line, but in the opposite direction — from Moscow to Harbin. The refrain of this poem is the incessantly repeated question asked by his frightened girlfriend, Jeanne:

“Blaise, say, are we really a long way from Montmartre?”

Jeanne experiences the same sensation that comes over everyone who plunges into Siberia’s white boundlessness — the sensation of sinking into nonbeing, of evanescing.

The author has nothing to cheer her up with:

A long way, Jeanne, you’ve been rolling along for seven days

You’re a long way from Montmartre …

Paris is the center of the world, the point of reference. How does one measure the sense of distance, remoteness? To be far from what, from what place? Where is that point on our planet from which people, as they move farther from it, would have the impression that they are closer and closer to the end of the world? Is it a point with only an emotional significance (my house as the center of the world)? Or cultural (for example, Greek civilization)? Or religious (for example, Mecca)? Most people, when asked which they consider the center of the world — Paris or Mexico — will answer: Paris. Why? After all, Mexico City is larger than Paris and also has a metro and magnificent monuments and great paintings and excellent writers. And yet they will say Paris. And what if someone declares that for him the center of the world is Cairo? It is, after all, larger than Paris and has monuments and a university and art. And yet how many people would vote for Cairo? And so it is Paris (in any event it was Paris when the frightened Jeanne was riding with her heart in her boots across Siberia). It is Europe. European civilization is the only one that has ever had global ambitions and (almost) realized them. Other civilizations either couldn’t satisfy such ambitions for technical reasons (for instance, the Maya), or simply didn’t have such interests (for instance, China), convinced that they themselves were the entire world.

Only European civilization proved capable of overcoming its ethnocentrism. Within it arose the desire to know other civilizations, as well as the theory (formulated by Bronislaw Malinowski) that global culture is created by a constellation of parallel cultures.

NOVOSIBIRSK — OMSK

Day, night, and day.

The monotonous, insistent thud of the wheels, increasingly difficult to bear. It resounds the loudest at night: you are imprisoned in this thudding, as in a trembling, vibrating cage. We ran into a storm, for suddenly snow sealed up the window and you could hear the howling of the wind even inside the compartment.

“No road of any kind, only through terrifying mountains and gorges.”

OMSK — CHELYABINSK

The sixth, or maybe the eighth, day of traveling. In the great, monotonous spaces, the measures of time are lost; they cease to have any force, cease to have any meaning. The hours become formless, shapeless, elastic like the clocks in the paintings of Salvador Dalí. Moreover, the train passes through various time zones, and one should be constantly adjusting the hands of one’s watch, but what for, what is there to gain by this? The perception of change (the principal determinant of time) atrophies here; so does the need for change: man lives here in something like a state of collapse, of numbness, of internal paralysis. Now, in January, the nights are very long. And for most of the day, a dark gray, persistent gloom prevails. The sun appears only occasionally: then the world becomes bright, azure, drawn with a sharp, decisive line. But later the gloom seems all the more deep and all the more pervasive.

Traveling on the Trans-Siberian, what can one see of the so-called reality of the country? Nothing, really. The greater part of the route is swathed in darkness, but even during the day little is visible beyond the snowy emptiness that unfolds in every direction. Little stations — at night, lonely, weak lights, some specters staring at the train as it rushes by in clouds of snow, and immediately vanishes, sinks from view, swallowed by the nearest forest.

I have a compartment for two, in which I ride the entire time alone. An oppressive loneliness. One cannot read, for the car lurches about in all directions, the letters jump, get blurry, and after a while the eyes hurt. There is no one to talk to. I can go out into the corridor. And then what? All the compartments are closed; I don’t even know if anyone is traveling in them, for they don’t have little windows to look through.

“Is anybody traveling in these compartments?” I ask the steward.

“That depends,” he answers evasively, and disappears.

There is no way to start a conversation with anyone. People (even when they materialize from somewhere) either immediately skirt around me or, if I all but catch them by the sleeve, will snap something back in reply and instantly disappear. If they do answer, it is evasively, ambiguously, monosyllabically, so that nothing can really be deduced from the answer. They say, “We shall see”; they say, “Well, yes”; or they say, “Who can tell?”; or else, “Absolutely!” But most often they say something that could indicate that they have already understood everything, that they have penetrated to the very essence of the truth. They say, “Well, that’s life.”

If there exists such a thing as the genius of a nation, then the genius of the Russian nation is expressed in, among other things, just this saying: “Well, that’s life!”

Anyone who will ponder at length the meaning of these words will understand a great deal. But I would like to learn something more — and I cannot. All around me is emptiness; all around me is scorched earth; all around me is a wall. It is no mystery why: I am a foreigner. A foreigner gives rise to mixed emotions. He gives rise to curiosity (one must quash this one!), to envy (a foreigner always has it better; it suffices to see that he is well dressed), but above all to fear. One of the pillars upon which the system rests is isolation from the world, and a foreigner, by the mere fact that he exists, undermines this pillar. For contact with a foreigner Stalin would condemn a person to five, ten, years in the camps, and often he would order him shot, so it is small wonder that people fear the foreigner as they do fire.

I too am riding in a police wagon, only it is incomparably more comfortable than the one in which they transported General Kopeć. And I have not been sentenced; I am not a deportee. But the principle of isolation is the same. This underscoring of the fact that one is a stranger here, an other, that one is an intruder, an abomination, something jarring, trouble. And that is in the best case! For a foreigner is after all something far more dangerous — he is an infiltrator and spy! Why is he staring out the window, what is he looking for? He will see nothing! The entire Trans-Siberian route is cleansed of everything that could catch the spy’s attention. The train rushes on as if in a plastic tunnel — only bare walls and more walls: the wall of night, the wall of snow. And why does he try to ask questions like that? Why does this interest him? What does he need to know that for? Did he take notes? He took notes. What did he take notes of? Everything? Where does he keep those notes? With him at all times? That’s not good!

And what did he ask? He asked if it’s far to Sima. To Sima? But we’re not stopping in Sima. Precisely. But he asked. And what did you say? Me? I said nothing. What do you mean, nothing! You had to say something. I said that it’s a long way. That’s not good! You should have said that we already passed Sima, that would have confused him!

There, see? It’s better to avoid questions, because one doesn’t ever really know how to answer them. It’s easy to come out with something truly stupid. There is something about a human being that makes it difficult for him to hit it right on the button with a proper reply. And the worst of it is that anyone who has met with a foreigner and has exchanged a word with him is already suspect, already marked. One has to live in such a way, walk around town in such a way, along the streets, along the corridors of train cars, so as to prevent this from happening, so as not to bring misfortune down on one’s head.

CHELYABINSK — KAZAN

It is closer and closer to old, native Russia, although it is still a long way to Moscow.

“No road of any kind, only through terrifying mountains and gorges.”

While still at university I read Bierdayev’s old book in which he reflected upon how the great expanses of the Imperium had influenced the Russian soul. What does a Russian think about, somewhere on the shore of the Yenisey, or deep in the Amur taiga? Every road that he takes seems to have no end. He can walk along it for days and months, and always Russia will surround him. The plains have no end, nor the forests, nor the rivers. To rule over such boundless expanses, says Bierdayev, one had to create a boundless state. And behold, the Russian fell into a contradiction — to maintain the great expanses, the Russian must maintain a great state; on the maintenance of this great state he expends his energy, of which not enough remains for anything else — for organization, for husbandry, and so on. He expends his energy on a state that then enthralls and oppresses him.

Bierdayev believes that this immensity, this limitlessness of Russia, has a negative influence on its inhabitants’ way of thinking. For it does not demand of them concentration, tension, an intensification of energy, or the creation of a dynamic, vigorous culture. Everything falls apart, is diluted, drowned in this ungraspable formlessness. Russia — an expanse, on the one hand, endless, broad, and yet, on the other hand, so crushing that it takes one’s breath away, and there is nothing left to breathe.

KAZAN — MOSCOW

Fatigue, an increasingly tormenting, stifling, sleep-inducing fatigue, a sort of stickiness and numbness. During the rare surges of energy, the desire to jump out of this rushing, trembling cage. My admiration for the endurance of Kopeć and of so many thousands like him, my homage to their suffering, their torment.

FIRST, green, snow-covered woods and more woods, then woods and houses, then more and more houses, then houses and apartment buildings, finally only apartment buildings, taller and taller.

The steward removes the sheet, pillow, two blankets, and tea glass from the compartment.

The corridor fills with people.

Moscow.

THE SOUTH, ’67

NINE YEARS after my journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I traveled again to the Imperium. My expedition took me across seven southern republics of the former USSR: Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, and Uzbekistan. The tempo of this journey was murderous — there were only several days for getting to know each of the republics. I was aware of how superficial and aleatory such encounters were. But in the case of a country so difficult of access, so closed, so steeped in mystery, one has to take advantage of even the smallest chance, of the most unexpected opportunity, so as to raise, if only slightly, the impermeable and heavy curtain.

What was most surprising in this third encounter with the Imperium? In my imagination, the USSR constituted a uniform, monolithic creation in which everything was equally gray and gloomy, monotonous, and clichéd. Nothing here could transcend the obligatory norm, distinguish itself, take on an individual character.

And then I traveled to the non-Russian republics of what was then the Imperium. What caught my eye? That despite the stiff, rigorous corset of Soviet power, the local, small, yet very ancient, nations had succeeded in preserving something of their tradition, of their history, of their, albeit, concealed pride and dignity. I discovered there, spread out in the sun, an Oriental carpet, which in many places still retained its age-old colors and the eyecatching variety of its original designs.

GEORGIA

One should see the museum in Tbilisi. It is located in the former seat of a theological seminary, where Stalin once studied. A marble plaque at the entrance commemorates this. The building is dark but spacious and stands in the center of town, at the edge of the old downtown district. The rooms are virtually empty. A student is showing me around: Tamila Tevdoradze, a girl of a subtle, romantic beauty.

The splendor and excellence of Georgia’s ancient art are overwhelming. The most fantastic are the icons! They are from a much earlier time than Russian icons; the best Georgian ones came into being long before Andrey Rublyov. According to Tamila, their originality lies in their having been executed largely in metal: only the face is painted. The most glorious period of this work spans the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The faces of the saints, dark, but radiant in the light, dwell immobile in extremely rich gold frames studded with precious stones. There are icons that open, like the altar of Vit Stoss. Their dimensions are immense, almost monumental. There is an icon here on which several generations of masters worked for three centuries. There is a small cross, the museum’s most valuable exhibit, the only remaining possession of the empress Tamara.

Then there are the frescoes in the Georgian churches. Such marvels, and yet so little is known about them outside of Georgia. Virtually nothing. The best frescoes, unfortunately, were destroyed. They covered the interior of the largest church in Georgia — Sveti Tschoveli, built in 1010 in Georgia’s former capital, Meht, near Tbilisi. They were a masterpiece of the Middle Ages on a par with the stained glass of Chartres. They were painted over on the order of the czar’s governor, who wanted the church whitewashed “like our peasant women whitewash stoves.” No restoration efforts can return these frescoes to the world. Their brilliance is extinguished forever.

Sveti Tschoveli is the best preserved monument of eleventh-century architecture in Europe. The church looks as if it were no more than a hundred years old, even though it has never been restored. It was built by the Georgian architect Arsukizdze, whose hand the emperor later ordered cut off so that he would never erect anything that would compete. Tamerlane tried several times to blow up this church, but the walls did not so much as tremble. It is open to this day, and the head of the Georgian Church, the catholicos of Greater Georgia, Jerffrem II, celebrates services there.

I also saw, although only in photographs, Vardzya. It is one of those incomprehensible wonders that contemporary man cannot explain. Vardzya is a Georgian town of the twelfth century, carved completely out of rock. It is laid out not horizontally but vertically, as if in stories. It is important to understand that this is not some collection of caverns or ruins, but an entire town, with a plan, with streets, with original architecture, only all of this is cut into living rock, embedded in an enormous mountain. But how, with the aid of what tools? Carving out such a town must have been more difficult than building an Egyptian pyramid. Vardzya was once a practical creation. Today, like the pyramids, it is dead. What remains is the wall of rock, sculpted into a melancholy, surrealistic composition.

At the end Tamila led me to the Niko Pirosmanashvili room so I could see the paintings that soon would be going to Paris for an exhibition. Tamila claims that Niko Pirosmanashvili is all the rage in Paris these days. Niko died in 1916. He was a Georgian Nikifor or Rousseau.

A great naive.

Niko lived in Nachalovce, the Tbilisi neighborhood of the lumpen and the poor. He never had anything. He made his own brushes. The predominant color in Niko’s paintings is black — he always used mostly black because he got his paint from coffin makers. He collected old tin signboards so he would have something to paint on. That is why lettering sometimes shows through in the background of his paintings, an incompletely covered over “Magaz” or “Tabak.” The advertisement in gold and red and, on top of that, Niko’s black-and-white visions. Georgian naive art laid over Russian commercial art nouveau. Niko painted in taverns, in stuffy Nachalovce bars. Sometimes onlookers would buy him wine. Perhaps he had tuberculosis? Perhaps epilepsy? Little is known about him. Many of Niko’s works perished, a portion survived. The main subject of his paintings is the supper.

Niko painted suppers like Veronese.

Only Niko’s suppers are Georgian and secular. Against a background of the Georgian landscape, a richly laid table; at this table Georgians are drinking and eating. The table is in the foreground. It is the most important thing. The culinary fascinated Niko. What will there be to eat, what will man gorge himself on? All this Niko would paint. He depicted what he would like to eat and what he would not eat, not today, or maybe not ever. Tables piled high. Roasted lambs. Greasy piglets. Wines red and heavy like calves’ blood. Juicy watermelons. Fragrant pomegranates. There is a kind of masochism in this painting, a sticking the knife into one’s own stomach, although Niko’s art is cheerful, even humorous.

Niko’s Georgia is sated, always feasting, well nourished. The land flows with milk. Manna pours from the sky. All the days are fat. The residents of Nachalovce dreamed at night of such a Georgia.

Niko painted Nachalovce’s dreams.

Painting did not bring him happiness. He had a girl called Margerita. No one knows what sort of girl she was. Niko loved her and painted her portrait. Margerita’s face is done according to the conventions of the great naives, by which everything is too big and out of proportion. Oversized lips, bulging eyeballs, enormous ears. Niko gave this portrait to Margerita. The girl shrieked in indignation. Enraged, full of hatred, she left him. His talent condemned him to solitude.

From then on he lived in lonely abandonment.

Over and over again he painted his feasts, with that table against a mountainous landscape. He was fifty-four when he died, in Tbilisi, in some room, of unknown causes, hungry, maybe mad.

VACHTANG INASHVILI showed me his place of work: a great hall filled to the ceiling with barrels. The barrels lie on wooden horses, huge, heavy, still.

In the barrels cognac is maturing.

Not everyone knows how cognac comes into being. To make cognac, you need four things: wine, sun, oak, and time. And in addition to these, as in every art, you must have taste. The rest is as follows.

In the fall, after the vintage, a grape alcohol is made. This alcohol is poured into barrels. The barrels must be of oak. The entire secret of cognac is hidden in the rings of the oak tree. The oak grows and gathers sun into itself. The sun settles into the rings of the oak as amber settles at the bottom of the sea. It is a long process, lasting decades. A barrel made from a young oak would not produce good cognac. The oak grows; its trunk begins to turn silver. The oak swells; its wood gathers strength, color, and fragrance. Not every oak will give good cognac. The best cognac is given by solitary oaks, which grow in quiet places, on dry ground. Such oaks have basked in the sun. There is as much sun in them as there is honey in a honeycomb. Wet ground is acidic, and then the oak will be too bitter. One senses that immediately in a cognac. A tree that was wounded when it was young will also not give a good cognac. In a wounded trunk the juices do not circulate properly, and the wood no longer has that taste.

Then the coopers make the barrels. Such a cooper has to know what he is doing. If he cuts the wood badly, it will not yield its aroma. It will yield color, but the aroma it will withhold. The oak is a lazy tree, and with cognac the oak must work. A cooper should have the touch of a violin maker. A good barrel can last one hundred years. And there are barrels that are two hundred years old and more. Not every barrel is a success. There are barrels without taste, and then others that give cognac like gold. After several years one knows which barrels are which.

Into the barrels one pours the grape alcohol. Five hundred, a thousand liters, it depends. One lays the barrel on a wooden horse and leaves it like that. One does not need to do anything more; one must wait. The right time will come for everything. The alcohol now enters the oak, and then the wood yields everything it has. It yields sun; it yields fragrance; it yields color. The wood squeezes the juices out of itself; it works.

That is why it needs calm.

There must be a cross breeze, because the wood breathes. And the air must be dry. Humidity will spoil the color, will give a heavy color, without light. Wine likes humidity, but cognac will not tolerate it. Cognac is more capricious. One gets the first cognac after three years. Three years, three stars. The starred cognacs are the youngest, of poorest quality. The best cognacs are those that have been given a name, without stars. Those are the cognacs that matured over ten, twenty, up to one hundred years. But in fact a cognac’s age is even greater. One must add the age of the oak tree from which the barrel was made. At this time, oaks are being worked on that shot up during the French Revolution.

One can tell by the taste whether a cognac is young or old. A young cognac is sharp, fast, impulsive. Its taste will be sour, harsh. An old one, on the other hand, enters gently, softly. Only later does it begin to radiate. There is a lot of warmth in an old cognac, a lot of sun. It will go to one’s head calmly, without hurry.

And it will do what it is supposed to do.

ARMENIA

Vanik Santrian leads me around various back alleys of Yerevan, because that is what I’ve asked him to do: take us off the beaten path. In this way we happen upon the backyard of Benik Petrusyan. This backyard, enclosed on four sides by the walls of apartment buildings, is the site of a permanent exhibition of Benik’s works. Benik is twenty-eight years old, has graduated from the Academy of Yerevan, and is a sculptor. Slight of build, shy, he lives in his cramped studio, whose door opens on this backyard showroom. In the studio hang magnificent Armenian stone crosses, called hachkars, which Armenians once carved in cliffs. You encounter these hachkars all over Armenia, for they were the symbols of Armenian existence, or else boundary markers, and also, sometimes, signposts. You can find old hachkars in the most inaccessible places, sometimes high up on the tops of sheer cliffs, and today it is impossible to imagine how their sculptors, most often monks, managed to climb up there.

Benik treated us to wine. We were sitting on a plank bed, among stones that he had been working on for several years. He turned on a tape player so that we could hear patarks. Patarks are a kind of Armenian psalm, haunting, beautiful. Benik had a new French recording of patarks sung in Paris by an Armenian choir. You can also hear patarks in Armenia if you go outside of Yerevan, to Echmiadzin, which is the Vatican of the Armenian Church.

Benik sculpts in stone and also practices chekanka, a kind of metallic bas-relief. He has a remarkable talent. The subject of his sculpture and of the chekankas is always love — more precisely, the amorous embrace. But there is little joy in these gestures: only lovers who in a moment must part forever hold each other in this way. One of Benik’s cycles is the parting of Adam and Eve.

His sculptures seldom find their way to exhibitions. Most often they stand, as they do now, in his backyard, under trees or leaning against a wall, or lying directly on the ground. Benik sculpts for the residents of the four buildings that enclose his backyard. He sculpts for the superintendent and the mailman. For the garbagemen who come to clean up the piles of refuse. For the children who wash these sculptures for the fun of it or in the hope that they will get a piece of candy. For the bill collector from the electrical company. And also for the policeman, should he come around here on some business.

In the same neighborhood where Benik lives, Amayak Bdeyan has his studio. Bdeyan makes enormous amphoras, vases, and water jugs, which he exhibits in the squares of Yerevan. It is a monumental ceramics, just right for showing on the lawns of Yerevan’s wide avenues. Bdeyan likes bright, cheerful colors, but the texture of his forms is rough, lumpy. He covers the tips of these bumpy protuberances with a light, luminous enamel, so that the vases and water jugs glitter from afar. Bdeyan’s amphoras can be seen all over the city. Bdeyan is a professor at the Armenian Institute of Art and has founded a movement that aims to turn Yerevan not only into a work of architecture but also into an artistic showplace. The municipal authorities bestow their full support upon these ambitions. Thus, Bdeyan has designed the interior of the Dramatic Theater in Yerevan — one of the most interesting achievements of contemporary interior art. The interior of the Café Araks is also his work, as is the splendid interior of the Ararat restaurant. Ararat is situated underground and is an example of modern design executed with taste and restraint. There are already many such places in Yerevan. Armenia’s capital is becoming, piece by piece, a museum of the latest art.

There was a heavy downpour when we arrived at Bdeyan’s, and his studio, which lies below street level, was flooding. Bdeyan, like an antique potter, was molding a slender vat out of clay. He showed me photographs of his exhibitions — from Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Syria. He is forty-two years old, a massive man, silent, hard driven. Unfortunately, Bdeyan’s most interesting works can be seen only in Yerevan, because what he creates first and foremost is the city.

We also visited a young composer — Emin Aristakesyan. Vanik took me there so that I could hear the great Komitas sing. Komitas is to Armenians what Chopin is to Poles: their musical genius. His real name was Soomo Soomonyan, but as a monk he assumed the monastic name Komitas, and that is what they call him here. He was born in Turkey in 1869. At that time the majority of Armenians lived in Turkey. Estimates differ: two, three million. He studied composition in Berlin. He dedicated his entire life to Armenian music. He wandered around villages collecting songs. He established tens, others say hundreds, of Armenian choirs. He was a wandering balladeer; he improvised epics; he sang. He created hundreds of compositions, magnificent, great, known to all the Philharmonic orchestras of the world. He wrote masses, sung to this day in Armenian churches.

In 1915 the massacre of Armenians began in Turkey. Until the time of Hitler, it was the greatest massacre in world history: 1.5 million Armenians perished. Turkish soldiers dragged Komitas up on a cliff from which they were going to push him. At the last minute his pupil, the sultan of Istanbul’s daughter, saved him. But he had already seen the abyss, and this made him lose his mind.

He was forty-five years old then. Someone took him to Paris. He did not know that he was in Paris. He lived on for twenty more years. He did not make a sound. Twenty years in an institution for the mentally ill. He hardly walked, said nothing, but he watched. One can assume that he could see; those who visited him say that he observed faces.

Questioned, he did not answer.

They tried various things. They sat him down at the organ. He got up and walked away. They played records for him. He gave the impression that he did not hear. Someone placed a folk instrument on his knees, the tar. He carefully laid it aside. No one knows for certain whether he was ill. What if he chose silence?

Perhaps that was his freedom.

He had not died, but he no longer lived.

He existed-did-not-exist in that limbo between life and death, the purgatory of the insane. Those who visited him say that he grew more and more tired. He became stooped, gaunt; his skin blackened. Sometimes he tapped his finger along the table, in silence, for the table emitted no sound. He was calm, always serious.

He died in 1935: and so only after twenty years did he fall into the abyss from which his pupil, the sultan of Istanbul’s daughter, had once saved him.

IN MATENADARAN one can see the ancient books of the Armenians. To me they are doubly inaccessible: they lie in cabinets behind glass, and I do not know how to read them. I ask Vanik if he understands them. Yes and no, for he can read the letters but cannot discern the meaning. The alphabet has remained the same for fifteen centuries, but the language has changed. The Armenian walks into Matenadaran like a Muslim into Mecca. It is the end of his pilgrimage; he is moved, overwhelmed. In Armenian history, the book was the national relic. The comrade who is our guide (so beautiful!) says in a hushed voice that many of the manuscripts that we see were saved at the cost of human life. There are pages stained with blood here. There are books that for years lay hidden in the ground, in the crevices of rocks. Armenians buried them in the same way defeated armies bury their banners. They were recovered without difficulty: information about their hiding places had been handed down from generation to generation.

A nation that does not have a state seeks salvation in symbols. The protection of the symbol is as important to it as the protection of borders is to other states. The cult of the symbol becomes a form of the cult of country. Protection of the symbol is an act of patriotism. Not that the Armenians never had a state. They had one, but it was destroyed in antiquity. It was then reborn in the ninth century, and after 160 years it perished — in that earlier form — forever. It is not just a question of statehood. For at least two thousand years Armenians were in danger of complete extermination. They were still threatened with it as recently as this century, right up until 1920.

The history of Armenians is measured in millennia. We are in that part of the world that is customarily called the cradle of civilization. We are moving among the oldest traces of man’s existence. In the valley of the Razdan River, near Yerevan, stone tools from half a million years ago have been unearthed. The first mention of Armenia is four thousand years old, but by then, as the stone inscription proclaims, there had already existed on Armenian territory “sixty empires” and “hundreds of cities.” Armenia therefore is the contemporary of the world’s oldest civilizations. Babylon and Assyria were its neighbors. The biblical rivers Tigris and Euphrates have their sources within its borders.

Armenians have a measure of time different from ours. They experienced their first partition 2,500 years ago. Their renaissance occurred in the fourth century of our era. They accepted Christianity seven centuries earlier than we. Ten centuries before us they started to write in their own language. But Armenia shared with ancient Egypt, Sumer, and Byzantium a drama typical of this part of the world — its essence was a lack of historical continuity, that sudden appearance of empty chapters in the history book of one’s own state.

A magnificent ascent, and then a dispiriting fall.

Gradually, the nations living in this cradle of mankind, having created great, monumental civilizations, as if exhausted by the superhuman effort, or perhaps even crushed by the immensity of what they had brought forth and no longer capable of further developing it, handed over the reins to younger peoples, bursting with energy and eager to live. Europe will come on the scene and, later, America.

The source of all of Armenia’s misfortunes was its disastrous geographic location. One has to look at the map, not from our vantage point, from the center of Europe, but from an entirely different place, from the south of Asia, the way those who sealed Armenia’s fate looked at it. Historically, Armenia occupied the Armenian Highland. Periodically (and these periods lasted centuries) Armenia reached farther, was a state of three seas — the Mediterranean, the Black, and the Caspian. But let us remain within the borders of the Highland. It is this area upon which the Armenians’ historical memory draws. After the eleventh century, the Armenians never succeeded in rebuilding Armenia within those borders.

The map, looked at from the south of Asia, explains the tragedy of the Armenians. Fate could not have placed their country in a more unfortunate spot. In the south of the Highland it borders upon two of the past’s most formidable powers — Persia and Turkey. Let’s add to that the Arabian caliphate. And even Byzantium. Four political colossi, ambitious, extremely expansionist, fanatical, voracious. And now — what does the ruler of each of these four powers see when he looks at the map? He sees that if he takes Armenia, then his empire will be enclosed by an ideal natural border in the north. Because from the north the Armenian Highland is magnificently protected, guarded by two seas (the Black and the Caspian) and by the gigantic barrier of the Caucasus. And the north is dangerous for Persia and for Turkey, for the Arabs and Byzantium. Because in those days from the north an unsubdued Mongolian fury loomed.

And so Armenia gives all the pashas and emperors sleepless nights. Each one of them would like his realm to have a nicely rounded border. So that in his realm, as in King Philip’s, the sun should never set. A border that does not dissipate itself amid flatlands, but which leans against a proper mountain, against the edge of the sea. The consequence of these ambitions is continual invasions of Armenia; someone is always conquering and destroying it, always subjugating it.

That is the political sphere. But there is also the matter of religion. In the year 301, during the reign of the emperor of the Armenians Tiridates III Arashakuni, Armenia adopts Christianity. It is the first country in the world in which Christianity attains the rank of a state religion. Conflict hangs in the air: neighboring Persia professes Zoroastrianism, hostile to Christianity, and from the south Islam will soon draw near, hostile to both. The epoch of unleashed fanaticisms begins, of religious massacres, sectarianism, schisms, medieval madness. And Armenia enters this epoch.

Armenians have their church, which is called the Holy Apostolic Armenian Church. In the centuries-long feud between the Vatican and Byzantium, they occupied a middle ground — somewhat closer, however, to the Vatican. That is why, although they belonged to the group of churches practicing the Greek rite, in Constantinople they were counted among those who had severed themselves — among the heretics even. “Their rite,” Runciman reports, “diverged in many particulars from the Greek. They readily offered bloody animal sacrifices, they began the great fast on the Septuagesima, fasted on Saturdays, and above all used unleavened bread in the Eucharist.” Because of this bread, on which they heretically insisted, they were contemptuously called “the unleavened.”

The head of the Armenian Church is the catholicos, who traditionally always resides in Echmiadzin, near Yerevan. The catholicoses have counted among their number several distinguished poets, philosophers, musicians, and grammarians. During those periods when the Armenian state did not exist — an almost permanent condition in feudal and more recent times — it was the catholicoses who represented the Armenian cause in the international arena. They performed the function of the unofficial head of a nonexistent state. From this they derived additional prestige.

A certain monk named Mashtots creates the Armenian alphabet. Mashtots’s life bears the mark of the anonymous monastic existence. He is entirely hidden by his work. Armenians always say of him “the genius Mashtots.” For this alphabet, the church makes Mashtots a saint, an act that in this case can be considered a kind of state honor. It is astonishing that the invention of a then-little-known monk could be so immediately and generally espoused. And yet it is a fact! Already, then, there must have existed among Armenians a strong need for identity and individuation. They were a lonely Christian island in a sea of alien Asiatic elements. The mountains could not save them: at approximately the same time as Mashtots’s alphabet is proclaimed, Armenia loses its independence.

From then on foreign armies — Persian, Mongolian, Arab, Turkish — will blow across this country like ill winds. A curse will grip this land. Whatever is built will be destroyed. The rivers will flow with blood. The chronicles are full of dismal images. “Armenian roses and violets have died,” despairs a medieval Armenian historian, Leo. “Armenia has become the motherland of pain. The fugitive Armenian either wanders in foreign climes or strays, hungry, over a corpse-strewn native ground.”

Vanquished in the field of arms, Armenia seeks salvation in the scriptoria. It is a retreat, but in this withdrawal there is dignity and a will to live. What is a scriptorium? It can be a cell, sometimes a room in a clay cottage, even a cave in the rocks. In such a scriptorium is a writing desk, and behind it stands a copyist, writing. Armenian consciousness was always infused with a sense of impending ruin. And by the fervent concomitant desire for rescue. The desire to save one’s world. Since it cannot be saved with the sword, let its memory be preserved. The ship will sink, but let the captain’s log remain.

So comes into being that phenomenon unique in world culture: the Armenian book. Having their alphabet, Armenians immediately go about writing books. Mashtots himself sets the example. He had barely produced the alphabet, and already we find him translating the Bible. He is assisted by another luminary of Armenian culture, Catholicos Saak Partef, and a whole pleiad of translators recruited throughout the dioceses. Mashtots initiates the great movement of the medieval copyists, which among the Armenians will develop to an extent unknown anywhere else.

Already by the sixth century, they had translated into Armenian all of Aristotle. By the tenth century, they had translated the majority of the Greek and Roman philosophers, hundreds of titles of ancient literature. Armenians have an open, assimilative intellect. They translated everything that was within reach. They remind me in this of the Japanese, who translate wholesale whatever comes their way. Many works of ancient literature survived owing entirely to the fact that they were preserved in Armenian translations. The copyists threw themselves upon every novelty and immediately placed it on the writing table. When the Arabs conquered Armenia, the Armenians translated all the Arabs. When the Persians invaded Armenia, the Armenians translated the Persians! They were in conflict with Byzantium, but whatever appeared on the market there, they would take and translate that as well.

Entire libraries start coming into being. These must have been enormous collections: in 1170 the Seljuks destroy a library in Syunik consisting of ten thousand volumes. They are all Armenian manuscripts. To this day, twenty-five thousand Armenian manuscripts have survived. Of these, more than ten thousand are in Yerevan, in Matenadaran. Whoever would like to see the rest will have to make a journey around the world. The largest collections are in the Library of St. Jacob in Jerusalem, in the Library of St. Lazarus in Venice, and in the Library of the Mekitarians in Vienna. Paris and Los Angeles have beautiful collections. Poland also once had a large collection, in Lvov, where, incidentally, there was a large Armenian printing press.

At first they wrote on skins, then on paper. They once made a book that weighed thirty-two kilograms. Seven hundred calves went into it. But they also have trifles, books small as May flies. Whoever could read and write, copied, but there were also professional copyists whose entire lives were spent behind the writing desk. In the fifteenth century Ovanes Mankasharence transcribed 132 books. “For seventy-two years,” notes his pupil Zachariash, “winter and summer, day and night, Ovanes copied books. When he reached his later years, his sight dimmed, and his hand shook and writing caused him great suffering. He died in Panu at the age of eighty-six, and now I, Zachariash, pupil of Ovanes, am completing his unfinished manuscript.” These were titans of painstaking labor, martyrs of their passion. Another copyist describes how, while going hungry, he would spend his last penny on resinous chips to illuminate the pages he was transcribing. Many of these books are masterpieces of the calligraphic art. Golden armies of small Armenian letters crawl over hundreds of pages. The copyists were also accomplished painters. The art of the miniature attains world-class heights in the Armenian book. The names of two miniaturists in particular — Toros Roslin and Sarkis Picak — shine with an immortal light. The miniatures with which Roslin decorated manuscripts in the thirteenth century have retained the full intensity of their original color, and to this day they dazzle from the pages of the books of Matenadaran.

The fate of these books is the history of the Armenians. Armenians, persecuted and exterminated, reacted to their situation in one of two ways: some went up into the mountains, taking refuge in caverns, and some emigrated, scattering over all the continents. Both groups took Armenian books with them. Because the wanderers left Armenia on foot, certain manuscripts, those that were too heavy, were divided in half. These halves often roamed to different ends of the earth.

AZERBAIJAN

On Oilmen Boulevard, Gulnara Guseinova heals people with the smell of flowers. Those who are afflicted with senility are made to sniff laurel leaves. Those with high blood pressure — geraniums. For asthma, rosemary is best. People come to Gulnara with a piece of paper from Professor Gasanov. On it the professor has prescribed the name of a flower and the length of time it should be sniffed. You sniff sitting down, most often for ten minutes. Gulnara sees to it that everybody sniffs that which they are supposed to; that some senile old fellow, for instance, doesn’t start sniffing rosemary. The flowers stand in rows in a glass house that is called the office of phytotherapy, which resembles a greenhouse. Gulnara tells me to sit down and sniff something too. Do I detect the fragrance? I detect nothing. Well, now — that’s because the flower does not smell in and of itself. One has to gently move the stem, and then the flower feels that someone is interested in it. And it begins to release its scent. Flowers do not smell for themselves, only for someone else. To every touch the flower will respond with fragrance — it is naive and frivolous; it wants to please everyone. “Comrades, move the flowers!” Gulnara admonishes the old men sitting in the office, who begin shaking the twigs as if they were brushing ants off them.

I ask Gulnara, who is a student of medicine, if she believes that a flower can cure a man. I don’t mean heal someone psychically, for that has been proven possible, but heal physically — for instance restore elasticity to a calcifying joint. Gulnara smiles. She offers only that people come to her for healing from all over the world. She emphasizes: “Even from America.” Professor Gasanov’s method — this healing with the scent of flowers — is already renowned.

I think that the enchanting thing about this method, for Gulnara, as for me, is its aesthetic aspect, as well as the cheerfulness and kindliness of its wisdom. For what can the professor do with a seventy-year-old man who forgets the date of his birth? He could, of course, place him in a crowded hospital room, with the odor of chloroform and iodine. But what for? Is a twilight fragrant with flowers not more beautiful than one reeking of chloroform? So when someone who must look at his identification card to give his date of birth comes to Gasanov complaining that something is muddying his head, the professor listens to him attentively and then writes down for him on a piece of paper: “Rx: Laurel leaves. Ten minutes a day. For three weeks.” And look, says Gulnara, crowds are pouring in to see the professor. You have to wait months for an appointment.

I am sitting with Gulnara on Oilmen Boulevard, at the edge of the sea. From here Baku rises up gently in stone terraces. The city lies on a bay, has the shape of an amphitheater, and so is completely visible. Gulnara asks if I like Baku. I answer that I do, yes, very much. Its buildings parade one next to another in a great revue of architectural styles and epochs. Everything is here! Pseudo-Gothic and pseudobaroque and post-Moorish and Corbusier’s school and twenties’ constructivism and edifices in the grand style and pretty modern constructions. It is a one-of-a-kind spectacle. Everything is in one place, each style displayed right next to the other, as in the window of the London office of Mr. Cox, Estate Agent, which offers everyone exactly what he desires.

Furthermore, there are several Bakus.

The oldest Baku is the smallest. It is not only tiny, but so tightly packed, so compressed, so cluttered, that when I walk into it I involuntarily take a deep breath to make sure I will have enough air to breathe. If one were to stop here in the middle of the street and stretch out one’s arms, then one could with one hand stroke a child sleeping in a cradle in the apartment on the left and with the other treat oneself to a pear lying on the table in the apartment on the right. One walks single file here, because a couple walking side by side immediately creates a bottleneck. And Baku’s old town has no plan — or maybe it has one, but it is so surrealistic that no normal mind can grasp it. One never knows how to find one’s way out of here. I came with Valery, who was born and raised in Baku; we tried various alternatives, this way, and that way, but nothing worked. We were at the end of our rope when some kids finally saved us.

This part of Baku is called Ichen-Shereh, which means “Inner City.” It is steeped in legend and extolled in many backyard ballads. For residents of the larger Baku, Ichen-Shereh has always been utterly exotic, a place where people speak their own language and live as if under one roof, without secrets. Today Ichen-Shereh is gradually being pulled down; there will be a new neighborhood here.

Around the Inner City stretches Baku proper, large and slightly snobbish. For this large Baku is a city custom-built, built for privateers, for parvenus, for the kings of Baku oil. Baku always made a career of oil. As far back as the tenth century Arab writers refer to Baku as the place from which oil is brought. According to Adjaib ad-Dunia, a twelfth-century Persian treatise, “Baku blazes like a fire all night. They stand a cauldron on the ground and boil water in it.” A Turkish traveler, Eveli Chelebi, describes this boiling in 1666: “There are various barren places in Baku. If a man or a horse should put his foot down there and stand a while, his foot will start to burn. Caravan guides dig up the earth in those places, set kettles in it, and the food starts to boil immediately. Prodigious is God’s wisdom!”

Caravans transported the oil over all of Asia. Marco Polo writes that it was first and foremost an invaluable cure for the skin diseases of camels. And so, in a certain sense, the transportation network of medieval Asia depended on Baku oil. Because of the burning ground, Baku was also the Mecca for Hindu fire worshipers, who journeyed here from India to warm themselves near their flaming gods. Their temple, Ateshga, has been preserved, with four extinguished chimneys.

One hundred years ago the first derrick goes up in Baku. The city’s vertiginous career begins. A Pole came here — an elegant man, I am told, with dash. He hired a droshky and had himself driven around. At a certain moment he took off his top hat and threw it on the ground. He indicated to the astonished driver the place where the hat had fallen. “We are going to drill here,” he said. He was a rich man later. More than two hundred foreign firms exploit Baku oil. “In 1873,” writes Harvey O’Connor,

the first oil spouts in Baku from an automatic shaft. During the next decade Baku grew to the level of the world’s wealthiest city, and Armenian and Tatar oil millionaires started to rival millionaires from Texas. The city became the largest refining center in the world. Russia assumed the position of a great exporter of crude oil, and for a few years would overshadow the United States. The Nobel brothers, who arrived in Baku quite by accident in 1875, built their first refinery here a year later, and in 1878 formed the Nobel Brothers Naphtha Company, which by 1883 already controlled 51 percent of crude oil production. They built the first oil pipeline in the Baku region, brought in drillers from Pennsylvania, and applied the latest scientific advances to the organization of this chaotically developing industry. In the course of a few years the Nobels acquired a fleet of enormous ocean-going steam-powered tankers and smaller river tankers for the transport of oil on the Volga. This was happening at a time when sailing ships still transported oil from America in barrels and cans. The Nobels were to be the exception to the rule which held that whoever lived even a year among the oil magnates in Baku could never again become a civilized man. The “Black City” of Baku became one of the most hideous, crowded, and rough corners of the world. Tatars, Armenians, Persians, and Jews created, together with the Russians, an ethnic mosaic which from time to time exploded in violent massacres. Quite a few oil-rich fields were given as presents by the czar to various court favorites. Speculation was unleashed, fortunes were made from one day to the next. The world had never before seen anything like it, not even in western Pennsylvania. Because there was no way to catch all the streams of gushing crude, the wells were ringed with dikes, creating lakes. Nevertheless entire rivers of crude frequently flowed from the wells straight into the sea.

“PLEASE FORGIVE ME, but I will speak a bit nationalistically.” She is very amusing, this pugnacious Azerbaijani girl, who on the one hand knows that nationalism is a forbidden fruit and on the other cannot resist the temptation. We are standing over a relief map of Central Asia, and she wants to show me how great Azerbaijan once was (this is what she regards as a bit of nationalism). I tell her that her desire to present to me the Great Yesterday is a universal impulse in today’s world. Wherever one goes, in each country people will boast about how far their ancestors had once reached. People seem to need this awareness, perhaps more and more as time goes on. I tell her that there must be some law of compensation at work here. The world once used to be roomy, and if some nation suddenly felt that it had to expand, it could go quite far in this expansion. Consider the impressive expansion of the Romans. Look at how magnificently the Mongols expanded themselves. How the Turks did. Can one fail to marvel at how the Spaniards expanded themselves? Even Venice, so small, after all, but what successes in expansion.

Today expansion is difficult and risky, as a rule broadening ends in narrowing, and that is why nations must satisfy the instinct for breadth with a feeling of depth, which means reaching into the depths of history to demonstrate their strength and significance. It is the situation in which all small nations that value peace find themselves. Fortunately, if one looks at the history of humanity, it turns out that every nation, in one epoch or another, has had its period of swelling and broadening, at least one patriotic spurt, which today allows it to preserve a certain — admittedly relative — psychic balance among the rest of mankind.

I don’t even know this Azerbaijani’s name. Girls’ names always mean something here, and parents attach great importance to the choice of a name. Gulnara means “Flower”; Nargis is “Narcissus”; Bâhar is “Spring”; Aydyn is “Light.” Sevil is a girl with whom someone is in love. After the Revolution, Valery tells me, they started giving girls’ names that celebrate the modern inventions now making their way to the countryside. So there are girls with the names Tractor, Chauffeur. One father, apparently counting on tax reductions, called his daughter Finotdiel, which is an abbreviation of the name of the Office of Finance (Finansovyj Otdiel).

So I stand with the nameless Azerbaijani over the map of Asia and look at how great Azerbaijan once was. It stretched from the Caucasus to Tehran and from the Caspian Sea to Turkey. Soviet Azerbaijan represents only the smaller part of that other, earlier Azerbaijan. The rest lies in Iran. The majority of Azerbaijanis, around 4 million live there, and in the Soviet Union around 3.5 million.

In the past Azerbaijan was more of a geographic and cultural concept than a political one. There never really was a centralized state of Azerbaijan, and in this its history differs from that of Georgia and Armenia. It differs in other respects, as well. By way of the Black Sea and Anatolia, Georgia and Armenia maintained contact with ancient Europe, and later with Byzantium. They received Christianity from there, which created within their territories a resistance to the spread of Islam. In Azerbaijan the influence of Europe was weak from the onset, at best secondary. Between Europe and Azerbaijan rise the barriers of the Caucasus and the Armenian Highland, whereas in the east Azerbaijan turns into lowlands, is easily accessible, open.

Azerbaijan is the threshold of Central Asia.

The dominant religions are, first, Zoroastrianism, then Islam, but when I read Sketches from the History and Philosophy of Azerbaijan by the Eight Authors, I am astonished at how many heretics, apostates, atheists, sectarians, dissenters, mystics, pit dwellers, and hermits found shelter and a pulpit here. For Azerbaijan had Matazalites, Batists, Ismailis, Mazdakites, Manichaeans, as well as Monophysites, fire worshipers, Bedtashites, Nugdavites, also Sufis, Hurramites, the Pure Brethern, and Hurufites — known as mystics of the numeral — Serbedites, Kadirites, and Sunnis. In relation to the cosmopolitan centers of the East, this region must have been considered part of the deep provinces, a place of asylum and survival, although this was not always true: in 1417 the heretical philosopher Imadeddin Nezimi is skinned alive here, and several years before that, the leader of the Hurufites, Shichabedin Fazlullach Naimi Tebrizi Azterabadi al-Hurufi, dies in Azerbaijan at the hands of the Muslim inquisition.

The disciples of this martyr, the Hurufites — mystics of the numeral, cabalists, and diviners — believed that the origins of the universe could be comprehended in terms of the figures 28 and 32. Using these numerals one can explain the mystery of each thing. It was the Hurufites’ belief that God expressed himself through beauty: the more beautiful something was, the more God manifested himself in it. Beauty was their criterion for valuating the phenomenal world.

They searched for God in the human face.

Although Muslims, they saw God in the faces of beautiful women.

There was in the twelfth century an Azerbaijani poet of world renown named Nezāmī. Like Kant, Nezāmī never left his native city, which was Gandzha, today’s Kirovabad. Hegel said of Nezāmī’s poetry that it is “soft and sweet.” “At nights,” Nezāmī writes, “I extract shining pearls of verses, scorching my brain in a hundred fires.” His remark that “the surface of the word should be vast” is wise. Nezāmī was an epic poet and a philosopher who occupied himself with logic and grammar, even cosmogony.

From one side pressed upon by Turkey, from the other by Persia, Azerbaijan was unable to secure its autonomy. A series of principalities did in fact exist here, but their significance was local. For many centuries Azerbaijan was a province of Persia. In the years 1502–1736, Persia was ruled by the Safavid dynasty, which is of Azerbaijani descent. Under this dynasty Persia experienced years of glory. But the Azerbaijan language belongs not to the Persian group, but to the Turkic. Few realize that the Turkic constitutes the largest language group in the Soviet Union. Uzbeks, Tatars, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Chuvashes, Turkmen, Bashkirs, Kirghiz, Yakuts, Dolganes, Karakalpaks, Kumites, Haguzites, Tuvinians, Uighurs, Karachai, Chakasites, Chulites, Altays, Balashites, Nogai, Turks, Shirtes, Karaites, Crimean Jews, and Tofals are all Turkic speakers. An Uzbek and a Tatar, a Kirghiz and a Bashkir, can speak to one another, each in his own language, and understand one another well.

IN THE EVENING, Nik-Nik orders me to climb high up in a tower.

From the tower I will be able to see how the Oil Rocks shine, and Nik-Nik says that I cannot leave until I have seen this. The tower stands in the middle of the sea, the sea is black, although it is called Caspian, and I am climbing up to heaven on stairs that creak because they are made of wood, the whole tower is made of wood nailed together, it reaches to the stars, and although the wind rocks it like a stalk, it stands, gniotsa nie lamiotsa (it will bend but it won’t break), so on this tower I am climbing up to heaven, it is dark here, actually it is black like the sea, we are walking into tar, I prefer not to look anymore, I would like to stop, enough is enough, but I can hear Nik-Nik going farther, so I go too, into the darkness, into the abyss, into the chasm. Everything is becoming unreal, because I can no longer see anything, meaning that I can see only this thing of wood around me, rough, unplaned, as if hairy, a piece of raw wood wedged into the sky, in an utterly gratuitous place, jutting out in the darkness, improbable, abstract.

“Nik-Nik!” I cry.

Because, you understand, I was left alone with this piece of wood, in some strange situation, incomprehensible, really, suspended in an indefinable place, for beyond this piece of wood was darkness, no point of reference whatsoever by which to determine my coordinates, no chance of taking a few steps, lighting a cigarette, calmly considering what next; above all I didn’t know what to do with this piece of wood, and in this way I remained, stuck in the dark, idiotic and senseless, until I heard Nik-Nik’s voice, somewhere above me, in another region of the galaxy.

“Did you see it?” panted Nik-Nik, who was long ago lost from sight. Only now did I look down, although with great trepidation because I have a fear of heights.

I saw the city.

It is nothing strange to see a city, even country people are accustomed to the sight today, but I saw a city on the open sea, on a stormy, turbulent, vast sea; it was one hundred kilometers from this city to the nearest land.

I saw the city’s lights, its streets, which disappeared over the horizon, the bustle downtown, people seemed to be coming out of the movies, I myself had gone there the previous day to see the Polish film Boomerang, in the center of the city neon lights flickered, buses were running, a café shone brightly, shops and apartment windows glowed. A tanker stood in the harbor, for there is also a port here, two ports even, and an airport. Very far away I could see the derricks over the oil wells, buzzing like beehives, although this was barely audible from here, the night shift was at work up in those towers. This city never really sleeps, not even toward morning.

Below, underneath the city, the sea surges.

The sea pounds against the rows of steel piles upon which the city stands, pours itself into the labyrinth of metal constructions that keep its streets, squares, and houses above water. But the city stands motionless, resting on mighty pillars planted firmly in the seafloor. Let’s put it another way: it is a city built on mountaintops, only these mountains lie underwater.

An underwater mountain range connects the eastern and western shores of the Caspian Sea. The mountains stretch from Baku to Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan. In these mountains, along their entire length, are rich deposits of oil and gas. When the sea is calm one can see in certain places the peaks of this underwater chain. From crevices, from under rocks, here and there oil is leaking. That is why these rocks were called the Oil Rocks, and it is from this that the city built in the middle of the sea got its name.

TURKMENISTAN

Ashkhabad, a peaceful city. Now and then a Volga passes along the street. Now and then a donkey’s hooves tap against the asphalt. They are selling hot tea in the Russian market. One potful — twenty kopecks. But can the value of tea be measured in this way? Here, tea is life. An old Turkman takes the teapot and pours two small bowls — one for himself, the other he passes to the little yellow-haired boy. “Nu,” he says to the boy. “Oy, Diadia,” the little one answers, “I’m always telling you that you’re supposed to say na, not nu.” Diadia laughs, perhaps at the same thought that occurs to me: that he can no longer be taught anything. A Turkman that has lived long enough to have a gray beard knows everything. His head is full of wisdom; his eyes have read the book of life. When he got his first camel, he learned what wealth was. When a herd of his sheep died, he learned the unhappiness of poverty. He has seen dry wells, and so he knows what despair is, and he has seen wells full of water, and so he knows what joy is. He knows that the sun brings life, but he also knows that the sun brings death, which no European really understands.

He knows what thirst is and how it feels to have one’s thirst quenched.

He knows that when it is hot one must dress warmly, in smock and sheepskin, and not strip down to the bare skin, as some men do. A dressed man is thinking, an undressed one — no. A naked man is capable of committing every stupidity. Those who created great things were always dressed. In Sumeria and Mesopotamia, in Samarkand and Baghdad, despite the diabolical heat, people walked about dressed. Great civilizations arose there, which neither Australia nor the African equator, where people walked naked in the sun, can boast of. All you need do is read the history of the world.

It could be that this old man knows the answers to Shakespeare’s great question.

He has seen the desert, and he has seen the oasis, and in the final analysis it comes down to this one division. There are more and more people in the world; the oases are becoming overcrowded, even the large oasis that is Europe, not to mention those of the Ganges and of the Nile. Will not mankind, which was born in the desert, as all the sources attest, have to return there to its cradle? And then to whom will he turn for advice, this sweaty urbanite, with his broken-down Fiat, with his refrigerator and no place to plug it in? Will he not start searching for the Turkman with the gray beard, the Tuareg wrapped in a turban? They know where the wells are, which means that they know the secret of survival and salvation. Their knowledge, devoid of scholasticism and doctrinairism, is great, because it serves life. In Europe they have the habit of writing that people of the desert are backward, even extremely backward. And it doesn’t occur to anyone that this is no way to judge a people who have been able to survive millennia under the most dire conditions, producing a culture that is most valuable because it is practical, a culture that allowed entire nations to exist and develop while during that very same time many sedentary civilizations fell and disappeared forever from the face of the earth.

Some think that man went into the desert out of poverty, because he had no other choice. But it was exactly the opposite. In Turkmenistan only those who had herds could go into the desert, and thus only the rich; nomadism was a privilege of the wealthy. “A sojourn in the desert,” says Professor Gabriel, “is an honor, the desert is the chosen ground.” The transition to a sedentary life was for the nomad always a last resort, a sign of failure in life, a degradation. One can settle a nomad only by force, by economic or political coercion. For him, the freedom that the desert gives has no price.

Can one even begin to imagine human civilization without the contribution of the nomads? Take the Golden Horde and the state of the Timurids. They were the greatest empires of the Middle Ages. The longest epic in world literature, which is called Manas and numbers forty volumes, is the national epic of a nomadic people — the Kirghiz. Take the flowering of Indian art under the rule of the nomadic dynasty of the Great Mogul. And one must not forget Islam, a phenomenon that has influenced world events for thirteen centuries, a religion whose following is still growing, with members across the great sweep of the globe, from Senegal to Indonesia, from Mongolia to Zanzibar.

But above all, in the course of those millennia that did not know the airplane, and still earlier did not know the steamship, the nomads were the only people who had mastered the magnificent and dangerous art of conquering dead space; simply in the course of their continual wanderings, they created what was truly the world’s first global system of mass communication, carrying from city to city, from continent to continent, from one extremity to another, not only gold, spices, and dates, but books and letters, political news and reports of discoveries, originals and copies of great works of learning and of imagination — which made possible, in those ages of dispersion and isolation, the exchange of accomplishments and the development of culture.

Next to where the old Turkman, the boy, and I are drinking our tea stands a flower vendor. “Gradzanki,” she calls, “nev zabyvajtie roz.” Ashkhabadian roses, heavy, languorous. But no one is buying flowers; the marketplace is empty at this time of day; it is noon in the desert. Ashkhabad, crushed by the heat, lies in the sun, numbed, silent. It is one hundred meters from this place to my hotel. From here to the Iranian border — one hour’s drive. But it is far to Moscow—4,300 kilometers. To Warsaw — more than five thousand. In 1935 a group of Turkmen set off on horseback for Moscow. They rode day in and day out for three months, a total of eighty-three days, and this record has been noted down in The History of the Turkmen SSR.

In the marketplace there are vegetable vendors, meaning kolkhoz members come here to sell the produce from their private gardens and plots, vendors of medicines, which one can buy here from stalls, nationalized booksellers, and barbers. Many barbers, but only for men. Turkmen women braid their hair, and you don’t need a barber for that. There is a vendor of pencils and notebooks, so fantastically wet, sweaty, positively dripping, he looks as if he were standing under a continuous shower. “Uzbek!” he calls to the tea vendor. “Day chayu!” And he pumps the hot beverage into himself, bowl after bowl. “Grazdanie!” he calls after a moment, “support culture! Buy notebooks!”

The entire marketplace is covered in asphalt, the streets too. On the streets run trolley cars, hot as furnaces. Both sides of the streets are planted with trees; there are many lawns and flower beds; one can see a great concern for greenery; the city is well cared for, clean and groomed. The trees give shade, but they also serve another function, this one psychological. The presence of greenery eases the exhausting sense of claustrophobia, which torments the resident of the oasis. A sedentary man fears the desert; the desert fills him with dread. And all he has to do is go to the edge of town, often just to the end of his own backyard: desert all around. The desert forces its way into the city, buries squares and streets. I was in Nuakshott, which lies in the Sahara, where heaps of sand that have drifted over the asphalt are regularly removed, just as snow is removed from the streets at home during winter. In the Atar oasis I saw peasants whose continual task it was to dig out date palms that were being buried up to their tops in sand. The desert attacks houses, which is why there are no windows except those that are kept permanently closed. In such a climate! And yet in this way man protects himself from the dust, which ruins homes, provisions, possessions.

Trees create the soothing impression that the oasis is not an island endlessly under attack by the elements of the desert, but a fragment of a greater earth propitious to people and to plants.

Ashkhabad is a young city in two senses. It started to come into being only in 1881, when the Russian army, after breaking the Turkmen’s resistance, built a fort here. The fort started to sprout little streets, a small town grew around it. In 1948, during an earthquake, one of the most severe in modern history, in the space of fifteen seconds the town disappeared from the face of the earth. There had been one cemetery in the town, Misha recalls, and after the quake there were sixteen. Of all the city’s structures, only the statue of Lenin survived.

The Ashkhabad you see today is the city that came into being after the disaster, essentially new from the foundations up. There is nothing here for the lover of antiquities to visit.

RASHYD SHOWED ME on the map where the Uzboj flowed.

It drew its waters from the Amu Darya River, cut across the Kara Kum Desert, and plunged into the Caspian Sea. It was a beautiful river, said Rashyd, as long as the Seine. This river died, he said, and its death became the beginning of war. He added that the archaeologist Yusupov studied the history of the Uzboj. According to Yusupov, the river appeared on the desert suddenly and relatively recently, perhaps five thousand years ago. Together with the water, fish and birds arrived in the desert. Later, people came. They belonged to the tribes of Ali-ili, Chyzr, and Tivedzij. Turkmen at the time were divided into no tribes, perhaps even more. The people of Ali-ili, Chyzr, and Tivedzij divided the Uzboj into three segments, a third of the river’s length falling to each tribe. The banks of the Uzboj were transformed into a flowering and populous oasis. Villages and centers of manufacture, gardens and plantations, arose. In the very heart of the desert it became crowded and noisy. That is what water can bring. Water is the beginning of everything. It is the first nourishment. It is the blood of the earth. People represented water with three wavy lines. Above the lines they drew a fish. The fish was the symbol of happiness. Three lines plus a fish signified — life.

Merchant ships sailed on the river. Goods passed through here on their way from India to Anatolia, from Khorez to Persia. The Uzboj was renowned the world over. In countries where people were literate, various references to it have survived. We find references among the Greeks and Persians, and also references among the Arabs. On the banks of the Uzboj stood hospitable caravansaries where rowers could rest, get a place to sleep and a meal. There were bazaars in Dov-Kala, Orta-Kuy, and Talaychan where everyone could buy goods of the highest quality from all over the world.

The people of the Uzboj worshiped sacred stones. This is typical of inhabitants of deserts, who revere everything they have at hand — stones, gorges, wells, and trees. Fighting was forbidden in the place where a sacred stone stood. The stone protected one from death. A concentrated force dwelled inside it, imprisoned in an immutable form, bestowed upon it for all eternity. Kissing the stone gave people an almost sensual pleasure. Rashyd calls my attention to a fragment of The Voyage in which Abū ‘Abd Allāh Mohammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Lawātī aṭ-Ṭandzi, otherwise known as Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, writes that “the lips feel an immense sweetness when kissing stone, so that one wants to go on kissing it forever.” To the people of the Uzboj, a stone was a divine being.

Human thought during those times revolved around such matters as the distribution of water. We can ascertain this through deductive reasoning. Even after the Revolution, until reforms were instituted, the division of water was for the Turkmen an event as important as the outbreak of war or the signing of peace. Virtually everything depended on it. Water reached the fields through canals called aryks. The distribution of water took place at the main aryk. If the spring was good, the distribution of water became a celebration. But good springs occur rarely here. In the course of an entire year there can be as little rainfall as one shower brings in Europe. And it can also happen that the entire yearly rainfall pours down from the sky in the course of only two days, and after that there is only drought. The distribution of water would then turn into war. Cemeteries stretch on both sides of the aryks, at the bottom of the canals lie human bones.

The rich had large aryks and the poor small ones. The poor man tried to open the valves on the sly to let more water into his aryk. The rich man suppressed such practices. That is how the class struggle looked. Water was an object of speculation; it was a commodity on the black market. There was a water exchange, a water boom, a water crash. People made fortunes on water, or lost everything. Various customs arose that only the Revolution would abolish. A woman did not have the right to a water allotment. Only married men received water. A man to whom a son was born married the infant to a grown girl; the infant, being married, received a water allotment. Water was the road to riches for those people to whom many sons were born. It was not until 1925 that the First Congress of the Councils of Turkmenistan ratified the revolutionary decree that forbids the marrying of infants and grants women the right to water.

Everyone tried to live as close to the Uzboj as possible. The river carried water; it carried life. Along its banks ran the trails of caravans. In the currents of the Uzboj the army of Genghis Khan watered its horses. To its shores journeyed the merchants of Samarkand and the Yomud — slave traders.

The river’s agony, said Rashyd, began four hundred years ago. Having appeared suddenly on the desert, the river now just as suddenly began to vanish. The Uzboj had created a civilization in the very heart of the desert, had sustained three tribes, linked the west with the east; on the banks of the Uzboj stood dozens of cities and settlements, which Yusupov would excavate. Now the sands were swallowing up the river. Its energy began to weaken, its current to wane. It is not known who first noticed this. The Ali-ili, Chyzr, and Tivedzij gathered on the banks to watch the river, the source of life, departing; they sat and they watched, because people like to observe their own misfortune. The water level fell from one day to the next; an abyss was yawning before them. The whole class struggle over the opening and shutting of the valves lost all its meaning. It made no difference who had what aryk—there was no water in any of them. People ran to the mullahs, ran to the ishans, embraced every stone they came across. Nothing helped. The fields were drying up and the trees withering. For a skin of water one could buy a Karakul sheep. Caravans, which before stopped here and there, now passed by in a hurry, as if an epidemic had befallen this land. The bazaars grew deserted; merchants closed their shops.

Yusupov, who excavated in the former oases of the Uzboj, claims that there is a great disorder among the objects found there. People just abandoned everything they had. Children abandoned their toys; women abandoned their pots. They must have been seized with panic, hysteria, fear. No doubt the most fantastic rumors circulated. Perhaps prophets and fortune-tellers appeared. People felt the band of the desert tightening around them; the sand was whistling at their door.

A great exodus began. The people of the Ali-ili tribe, of the tribes of Chyzr and Tivedzij (the latter also called the camel drivers) set off toward the south, for in the south lay the then-renowned oases of Mar and Tedzhen. The exiles walked across the Kara Kum Desert, which means Black Sand, the largest desert of Turkmenistan and of all of Central Asia. Behind them was a dead river, which lay in the sands like a broken pitcher. The sand buried aryks, fields, and houses.

Rashyd says that the tribes of the dead river encountered resistance from the populations of the southern oases, the tribes of Tekke and Sariq. They were all Turkmen, the newcomers and the natives; it was one nation torn apart by the struggle for water. Rashyd says that in oases an ideal proportion reigns between the amount of water and the number of inhabitants, and that is why an oasis cannot absorb new people. An oasis can absorb a guest, it can absorb a merchant, but it will not absorb an entire tribe, for that would immediately disturb the balance upon which its very existence depends. That is why there must be war between the desert and the oasis. Man finds himself in a much more dramatic situation in these climes than does his brother living in a temperate zone, and for this reason the causes of wars are deeper here and, one would like to say, more humane than in Europe, where history records wars started over such petty affairs as lèse-majesté, a dynastic feud, or a ruler’s persecution mania. In the desert the cause of war is the desire to live, man is born already entangled in that contradiction, and therein lies the drama. That is why Turkmen never knew unity; the empty aryk divided them.

The death of the Uzboj, which drove its tribes to the south, set off the fratricidal wars of the Turkmen. The wars went on for centuries, until right after the Revolution, although these postrevolutionary struggles were already more politicized. Rashyd said that today the ministry apportions water. He said that in 1954 bulldozers arrived in Bosaga. Bosaga lies in Turkmenistan on the Amu Darya River, not far from the border with Afghanistan. They started to dig a canal from there. In this way the river, which at one time appeared all by itself and then went away, was again brought into the desert, this time by man. Such is the circle history describes. And as before, together with the water, fish and birds were drawn to the desert. The banks of the canal were transformed into a flowering and populous oasis. The canal is now eight hundred kilometers in length, and when it is completed it will have twice as many and will reach the Caspian Sea, as the Uzboj once did.

The water in the canal is sweet, said Rashyd. He filled a pitcher and ordered me to drink. It was cool and tasty. A pontoon swayed near the bank, and all around was desert. On this pontoon, in a large cabin wallpapered with photographs of actresses and naked pinup girls, lived the crew of Yaroslav Shchaviey, four Ukrainians. Rashyd and I were their guests, although by accident, for our motorboat had broken down, and we had to stop. The brigade is digging a branch of the canal so that water can reach a nearby kolkhoz. Enormous trucks, with wheels as high as a man, transport sand from one place to another. On the mountain of sand stands a blue-eyed girl, keeping a record of each run a driver makes. And how does she keep this record? In such a way as to ensure that the drivers meet their quotas. Her name is Palina, and she came here from somewhere near Char’kov. If a driver is nice, Palina will give him as many pencil marks as he needs to become a superquota worker. When it gets very hot, Palina puts down the notebook, jumps into the canal, swims to the other side, returns, and again makes her pencil marks. Shchaviey is after her to fry some fish: He himself sent one of those gigantic trucks off somewhere, to the kolkhoz, for vodka. They gave us a lavish banquet. We left in the evening. The lights of ships were reflected in the water of the canal.

RETURN TO MARY and the last day in Turkmenistan. Mary is the capital of the Murgab oasis and the second largest city after Ashkhabad, with a population of sixty thousand. The population of Turkmenistan (less than two million) lives in five oases, and the rest of the Republic, ninety percent of its surface, is desert. The center of Mary is old, single storied, painted blue and yellow. Once there were hundreds of little stores here, Uzbek, Russian, and Armenian, now nationalized or converted into workshops and warehouses. It is hot, airless; in the middle of the day it turns gray. A sandstorm is approaching from the desert. A sharp wind and clouds of dust, which fill all the space between the earth and the sky. Dust that blinds and chokes; there is nothing to breathe. All life stops; machines grind to a halt. Now Palina, Shchaviey, and everyone else hide in corners, sink into crannies, draw sheets over their heads, blankets, whatever happens to be at hand, so as not to suffocate; the sandstorm buries everything; the deluge drowns men and herds (for in the desert there are deluges!), chokes, suffocates, gags to death. Particles of dust, these bits of near nothingness (they are stones ground to powder by wind and water), suspended in the air, grow warm in the sun, and thus comes into being a dry mist, the terror of all desert people, a dry and hot mist, clouds of powder as hot as burning coals; that is what the desert commands one to breathe in the hour of its fury. I am in a hotel, in my room; there is no light, and more important there is no water; the wind must have torn down the wires, the sand stopped up the pipes; I still have a sip of warm liquid in the pitcher, but what will happen later? The city has no water; the telephones are down; there is only radio communication. I am lying on the bed, but everything is damp, dusty; the pillow gives off heat like a furnace; in the desert, during a storm, people are seized by a water madness, all of a sudden they drink their entire water supply, greedily, thoughtlessly, it is really a kind of madness, they drink not because at that moment they are suffering from thirst, they drink from fear, obsessed by the thought that there will be no more water, they drink to beat the inevitable to the punch. Deserted streets, quiet in the hotel, empty corridor, I go downstairs. Empty restaurant. The barmaid is sitting, staring out the window. A Russian comes in from the street, dusty, the wind has pulled his shirt out of his pants, on his head he wears a warm cap with earmuffs, buckled beneath his chin. “Give us two hundred grams,” he says to the barmaid. She gets up, pours him a glass of vodka. He drinks it and utters an ahhhhhhhhh! “Now that’s better,” he says, and walks out into the street with this fire in his belly — into the fire of the desert. For a moment the barmaid follows him with her eyes. “He’s one of us,” she says, “that sort will endure everything.” Then she looks at me, kindly, but also with a touch of irony, and without a word hands me a bottle of lemonade.

TAJIKISTAN

We are going to the Komintern kolkhoz. It is near Dushanbe and encompasses fifteen villages. It is a large kolkhoz, but there are larger ones still. The director of Komintern is called Abdulkarin Sharipov. A large, heavy man without one leg. He lost it in the war, defending the Ukraine. He got hit by German shrapnel; they took him to the hospital; from there he returned home. He never saw a German, neither during the war nor later.

Sharipov cannot walk; he drives us everywhere in his small director’s pickup. Along the way he recites what a kolkhoz member can own: three cows, twelve sheep, and as many donkeys and horses as he wants. A good sheep costs 150 rubles, and a new house costs 15 sheep. In addition to raising animals, kolkhoz members farm the land. They collect eight hundred pounds of wheat from one hectar. It should come as no surprise that the harvest is so small and yet lasts several months, since the fields are high up in the mountains and situated at various altitudes, with the low fields ripening early and the high ones late. It is like this in all of Tajikistan, where they sow and gather year-round. In June in the valley of Vahsh it is already harvesttime, while in the Pamirs peasants are just then going out to sow. Apricots are ripening in Leninabad, while in Isfar the apricot trees have just started to flower.

We pass through a village. Tajik women stop, turn their backs to the car, and hide their faces with their hands. The Revolution liberated these faces from their coverings, women took off the veil, but the reflex has remained. At the university in Dushanbe I met Rochat Nabijeva, who in 1963 became the first Tajik woman to receive an academic degree. The subject of her thesis was the struggle to abolish the veil. The struggle had cost many lives. Hundreds of women who had bared their faces were killed. The Basmachis publicly executed these women. It is curious that mankind, whose essential nature is so determined and invariable, should produce at various latitudes such contradictory customs. For in some civilizations it is man’s ambition to expose his woman’s face as much as possible, and, in others, to conceal it as much as possible.

Sharipov drove us to the edge of the village, into the shade of a spreading tree. Here he threw a party. There were cherries, apricots, and apples. Immense bowls of steaming meat. Stacks of wheat pancakes. Various soups, national dishes, salads. Mountains of all kinds of food. Cases of vodka. Sharipov wouldn’t drink, saying that Muslims are forbidden to drink. But in the end he did drink something. Then he got up, stripped, detached his prosthesis, and stepped into the stream that flowed nearby. The peasants stared at the naked director. What is he doing? I asked. He is lowering his blood pressure, one of them answered.

The feast continued without the director. Many people had gathered. One of them started to tell a story, and now and then all the others would burst out laughing. I asked what they were talking about. Then a teacher translated for me the story about a young Tajik who returned from the war to the Komintern kolkhoz and had forgotten his own language. He spoke to everyone in Russian. Few people in the village know Russian. “Speak in Tajik,” his father told him, but the young Tajik pretended he didn’t understand what his father was saying. People started to gather in front of his father’s house, wanting to see what a Tajik who has forgotten his native tongue looks like. First the neighbors came, then the entire village. The crowd stood and watched the young Tajik who had returned from the war. Somebody started to laugh, and the laughter spread. The whole village laughed, roared with laughter; people were holding their stomachs, rolling on the ground. Finally the young Tajik couldn’t stand it any longer; he came out of the house and shouted to the people: “Enough!” He shouted in Tajik and then started to laugh himself. That day on which the young Tajik remembered his native tongue, a sheep was slaughtered in the village, and everyone feasted all night.

“It is good to know Russian,” the teacher concluded, “but a Tajik must also know his own language.” We drank a toast to all the languages of the world.

In the morning I was flying to Kyrgystan. Turan took me to the airport. In each direction a different landscape. To the north — gentle, green hills. To the south — high, snow-covered mountains. To the east — desert mountains, scorched by the sun. And then — buried in greenery — Dushanbe. Beyond the snow-covered mountains — India. Beyond the desert mountains — China.

KYRGYSTAN

In Kyrgystan I am accompanied by Rustam Umralin. Rustam is a man of few words; in the course of an entire day he utters only a couple. “I don’t really like talking,” he told me on the first day we met. As a result we spent our time in silence. On Sunday we went out on the town. Frunze resembles Ashkhabad and Dushanbe, only it has a better climate, and Russians who for one reason or another have to live in Asia try to settle in Frunze. In appearance and atmosphere the city is European, Russian. The main street, which is called Twentyrsecond Congress of the CPSU, serves as a promenade. One can see many young people on it, strolling in groups or in couples — a Russian couple, an Uzbek couple, a Kirghiz couple. On Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU Street one can buy ice cream and pierogi with meat; one can look at modern shop windows. One can sit on a bench.

In front of the old post office African students congregate, extremely elegant, bored, without girls. It is hard to figure out where to go. There is a bar, but there is a line in front of it. We look in on the sports stadium. Junior teams are playing; the bleachers are empty. We walk farther, but where are we going, what for? I sense that Rustam doesn’t know what to do with me. Rustam has to walk with me because that is in the program of my visit. I don’t know how to behave. Stop this walk? “Maybe we should stop walking?” I ask Rustam, but he protests. “How can we? No, no, we will walk,” he says. He falls silent again, keeps walking; I trail behind; he’s edgy and I’m edgy; we cannot find a comfortable fit, get close, get friendly; we cannot come to an understanding even on what would appear to be the simplest of matters — whether or not to stop walking.

From Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU Street we turn into Sovieckaya Street. There are little cottages here, cozy, well cared for, with mallows and raspberries growing beneath the windows. A landscape transported straight from Smolensk to here, to the foot of the Tien Shan range. On the porches sit Russian grandmothers, wrapped up despite the heat in checkered kerchiefs, in warm lambskin jerkins, in ankle-length skirts. The grandmothers ply their trade cautiously, holding in plain view only one or two glasses of cherries, ten kopecks for a glass. The old women sit in solitude, one on each porch, along the entire length of Sovieckaya Street, which stretches for kilometers.

I SPENT THE EVENING in the yurt of Dzhumal Smanov, in the Tien Shan, in the Susamyr Valley, two hundred kilometers from Frunze. Dzhumal herds the sheep of the Panfilov kolkhoz, and because he distinguished himself in this work, he was awarded by government decree the title of Outstanding Shepherd of the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic. The flock Dzhumal herds numbers six hundred head of sheep. If one inquires carefully, it will turn out that in this kolkhoz flock only half the sheep are kolkhoz sheep. The rest are Dzhumal’s, his brother’s, his uncle’s, his neighbor’s, and so on. Dzhumal finished the seventh grade, is forty-one years old, and has nine children. Here families are large, with many children. Dzhumal spends the entire summer in his yurt and returns for the winter to the kolkhoz. He lives in the yurt with his wife, with other shepherds, and with a large troop of his own and others’ children. The hospitality of these people is extraordinary; for my arrival, which was completely unexpected, Dzhumal slaughtered a ram and hosted a feast. The entire yurt filled up with people, who, notified by a mounted messenger, arrived here from other pastures. We squatted on felt rugs, gnawing on sheep bones and drinking vodka. In the drinking of vodka the Kirghiz surpass the Russians, not to mention the Poles. Women also drink. As a rule, during the feast they remain outside the yurt. Every now and then the host pours a glass of Stolichnaya and calls out a woman’s name. She comes in, squats, and tosses back the entire glass in one gulp. Then, without a word, without a bite of anything to eat, she gets up and disappears in the darkness outside.

During the feast they serve the guest the sheep’s boiled head on a plate. The guest must eat the brain. Then he must pluck out and eat one of the eyes. The host eats the other eye. In this way the knots of brotherhood are tied. It is an experience one does not quickly forget.

UZBEKISTAN

Erkin said that he had business in town and left, leaving me alone in the fortress of the emir of Bukhara. There is a museum inside the fortress. One can view the emir’s gold robe; one can view the executioner’s knife, so worn through use that not much of the blade is left. Elderly American women are running around the courtyard, around the emir’s bedroom, snapping photographs, peering into the depths of the dungeons. They are thrilled by the robe, by the sight of the knife. “And now look here,” says a teacher to a group of schoolchildren. They crowd around the entrance to the dungeon, sealed off by iron bars. Inside, in the semidarkness, are figures representing the emir’s prisoners. One is hanging from a halter; another is awash in blood. Several figures are sitting on the ground, chained to the wall. The teacher explains what a cruel ruler the emir was and that all this — this fortress, these robes, that one in the halter — is called feudalism.

It is noon. I go out of the fortress onto a large, dusty square. On the opposite side is a chaykhana. At this time of day the chaykhanas are full of Uzbeks. They squat, colorful skullcaps on their heads, drinking green tea. They drink like this for hours, often all day. It’s a pleasant life, spent in the shadow of a tree, on a little carpet, among close friends. I sat down on the grass and ordered a pot of tea. On one side I had a view of the fortress, as big as Kraków’s Vavel Castle, only made of clay. But on the other side I had an even better view.

On the other side stood a glorious mosque.

The mosque caught my attention because it was made of wood, which is extremely rare in Muslim architecture, whose materials are typically stone and clay. Furthermore, in the hot, numb silence of the desert at noon, one could hear a knocking inside the mosque. I put aside my teapot and went to investigate the matter.

It was billiard balls knocking.

The mosque is called Bolo-Khauz. It is a unique example of eighteenth-century Central Asian architecture, virtually the only structure from that period to have survived. The portal and exterior walls of Bolo-Khauz are decorated with a wooden ornamentation whose beauty and precision have no equal. One cannot help but be enraptured.

I looked inside. There were six green tables, and at each one young boys with tousled blond hair were playing billiards. A crowd of onlookers rooted for the various competitors. It cost eighty kopecks to rent a table for an hour, so it was cheap, and there were so many willing customers that there was a line in front of the entrance. I didn’t feel like standing in it and so couldn’t get a good look at the interior. I returned to the chaykhana.

Blinding sun fell on the square. Dogs wandered about. Tour groups were coming out of the fortress, first the American women, then the children. Between the fortress-turned-museum and the mosque-turned-billiards hall sat Uzbeks drinking tea. They sat in silence, facing the mosque, in accordance with the ways of the fathers. There was a kind of dignity in the silent presence of these people, and despite their worn gray smocks, they looked distinguished. I had the urge to walk up to them and shake their hands. I wanted to express my respect in some way, but I didn’t know how. In these men, in their bearing, in their wise calm, was something that aroused my spontaneous and genuine admiration. They have sat for generations in this chaykhana, which is old, perhaps older than the fortress and the mosque. Many things are different now — many, but not all. One can say that the world is changing, but it is not changing completely; in any case it is not changing to the degree that an Uzbek cannot sit in a chaykhana and drink tea even during working hours.

In Bukhara I also saw the crowded and colorful bazaars. These bazaars are old, dating back more than a thousand years, and yet still alive, teeming with humanity. Erkin showed me the bazaar in which Avicenna liked to stroll. He showed me the bazaar where Ibn Baṭṭūṭah would buy dates. Small stores, booths, stands, each one with a number, because they have been nationalized. Erkin said that an Uzbek prefers to overpay and buy in the bazaar than to spend less in a store. The bazaar is tradition, the place of meetings and conversation, a second home.

I went to the courtyard of the Mir-Arab Madrasa. A madrasa is a Muslim university. Mir-Arab is an imposing architectural complex built in 1503 and now undergoing assiduous restoration. The university was closed after the Revolution, but is now open once again. Its new name is Theological Seminary of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan.

It is the only university of its kind in the Soviet Union. The first class was admitted in 1966. There were sixteen candidates for each place.

BUKHARA IS BROWNISH; it is the color of clay baked in the sun. Samarkand is intensely blue; it is the color of sky and water.

Bukhara is commercial, noisy, concrete, and material; it is a city of merchandise and marketplaces; it is an enormous warehouse, a desert port, Asia’s belly. Samarkand is inspired, abstract, lofty, and beautiful; it is a city of concentration and reflection; it is a musical note and a painting; it is turned toward the stars. Erkin told me that one must look at Samarkand on a moonlit night, during a full moon. The ground remains dark; the walls and the towers catch all the light; the city starts to shimmer, then it floats upward, like a lantern.

H. Papworth, in his book The Legend of Timur, questions whether the miracle that is Samarkand is in fact the work of Timur, also known as Tamerlane. There is something incomprehensible — he writes — in the notion that this city, which with all its beauty and composition directs man’s thoughts toward mysticism and contemplation, was created by such a cruel demon, marauder, and despot as was Timur.

But there is no denying the fact that the basis of Samarkand’s fame was born at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and hence during Timur’s reign. Timur is an astonishing historical phenomenon. His name aroused terror for decades. He was a great ruler who kept Asia under his heel, but his might did not stop him from concerning himself with details. Timur devoted much attention to details. His armies were famed for their cruelty. Wherever Timur appeared, writes the Arab historian Zaid Vosifi, “blood poured from people as from vessels,” and “the sky was the color of a field of tulips.” Timur himself would stand at the head of each and every expedition, overseeing everything himself. Those whom he conquered he ordered beheaded. He ordered towers built from their skulls, and walls and roads. He supervised the progress of the work himself. He ordered the stomachs of merchants ripped open and searched for gold. He himself supervised the process to ensure they were being searched diligently. He ordered his adversaries and opponents poisoned. He prepared the potions himself. He carried the standard of death, and this mission absorbed him for half the day. During the second half of the day, art absorbed him. Timur devoted himself to the dissemination of art with the same zeal he sustained for the spread of death. In Timur’s consciousness, an extremely narrow line separated art and death, and it is precisely this fact that Papworth cannot comprehend. It is true that Timur killed. But it is also true that he did not kill all. He spared people with creative qualifications. In Timur’s Imperium, the best sanctuary was talent. Timur drew talent to Samarkand; he courted every artist. He did not allow anyone who carried within him the divine spark to be touched. Artists bloomed, and Samarkand bloomed. The city was his pride. On one of its gates Timur ordered inscribed the sentence: IF YOU DOUBT OUR MIGHT — LOOK AT OUR BUILDINGS! and that sentence has oudived Timur by many centuries. Today Samarkand still stuns us with its peerless beauty, its excellence of form, its artistic genius. Timur supervised each construction himself. That which was unsuccessful he ordered removed, and his taste was excellent. He deliberated about the various alternatives in ornamentation; he judged the delicacy of design, the purity of line. And then he threw himself again into the whirl of a new military expedition, into carnage, into blood, into flames, into cries.

Papworth does not understand that Timur was playing a game that few people have the means to play. Timur was sounding the limits of man’s possibilities. Timur demonstrated that which Dostoyevsky later described — that man is capable of everything. One can define Timur’s creation through a sentence of Saint-Exupéry’s: “That which I have done no animal would ever do.” Both the good and the bad. Timur’s scissors had two blades — the blade of creation and the blade of destruction. These two blades define the limits of every man’s activity. Ordinarily, though, the scissors are barely open. Sometimes they are open a little more. In Timur’s case they were open as far as they could go.

Erkin showed me Timur’s grave in Samarkand, made of green nephrite. Before the entrance to the mausoleum there is an inscription, whose author is Timur: HAPPY IS HE WHO RENOUNCED THE WORLD BEFORE THE WORLD RENOUNCED HIM.

He died at the age of sixty-nine, in 1405, during an expedition to China.