The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Summer in Samarkand (conclusion)

The housecleaning at Gulya’s house was attended to every few days by Delia, a cheerful and attractive woman in her forties with fair skin, dimples, and dark hair. Bent double, she swept the entire courtyard and all the steps using a little whisk broom with no handle. Why didn’t she have a normal broom? Probably the same reason Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying. Delia spoke perfect Russian, which seemed strange for a cleaning lady; the mystery was explained when it turned out she was one of Gulya’s old high-school friends. “I help her out,” Gulya said of her practice of hiring a school friend to clean her house.

I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia’s alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money.

“But Gulya told us that her husband was in California, studying to be a yogi.”

“California? No, he lives just two streets away from here; I saw him last week.” Delia thought a moment. “Maybe he was in a bar called ‘California’?”

Her version of the story was supported, some five weeks into our stay, by the reappearance of the missing yogi. Shinyheaded, with muscular shoulders and a paunch, Sharif indeed projected the impression of someone who had never lived in California, which he thought shared a border with New York. He did, however, frequently try to make us listen to some cassettes of a Swedish yogi choir that he said could induce trances.

Sharif’s dominant conversational mode consisted of repeating the same sentence over and over, for inconceivably long periods of time. One afternoon, when Eric and I were sitting in the courtyard drinking tea, Sharif came out with a stale lepyoshka and proceeded to tell us at least thirty times that Uzbeks love to tear up lepyoshka, put it in their tea, and call it “duck soup.”

“Have some of our Uzbek ‘duck soup.’ We love ‘duck soup’ here. This ‘duck soup’ is the best kind of soup—filling, inexpensive, and, above all, delicious. Uzbek people love to eat delicious ‘duck soup.’ We call it ‘duck soup’ when we put lepyoshka in tea.” Desperate to make him stop, I ate an entire bowl of the tea-soaked bread. It didn’t work. “You ate our ‘duck soup,’ eh? So you love our ‘duck soup,’ do you?” He himself didn’t eat any “duck soup.”

Another statement Sharif liked to repeat was that Satan wasn’t outside us, in the world, but within us. “You think Satan is out there” (pointing in the bushes); “but Satan is everywhere—above all, inside us!” (pointing at his stomach).

“What’s wrong with his stomach?” Eric asked.

“He thinks Satan lives there,” I told him.

“Tell him!” Sharif urged me. “Tell your husband! Satan is everywhere!”

“He wants me to tell you that Satan is everywhere, including his stomach.”

Eric narrowed his eyes, assessing Sharif’s stomach.

One day when I got back from class, the neighborhood water had been turned off. Sharif was sitting shirtless in a plastic chair in the courtyard. He started to explain to me that Uzbeks can live without electricity or fire, but they can’t live without water, because water is an essential need for Uzbek people. At that point, the gate creaked open and Eric edged in sideways, lugging three enormous jugs of water.

“Do you see what we have to do in Uzbekistan?” Sharif demanded, pointing at Eric, who had carried the water all the way from the fountain in front of Dynamo stadium. “We have to carry water because sometimes our water doesn’t come to our house, and we can’t live without it. We can live without electricity or fire, but we Uzbeks cannot live without water, which is necessary for the human organism.” The water dependence of the Uzbek human organism, like most subjects, eventually led Sharif back to the problem of Satan’s whereabouts. “Not somewhere out there—but inside every one of us!” he shouted, pointing at his stomach, just as Eric came out of the kitchen. “What’s the matter?” Eric asked, drying his hands. “Satan in his stomach again?”

In literature class, Dilorom was teaching me about the second greatest Old Uzbek writer: Timur’s great-great-great-grandson, Emperor Zaxiriddin Muhammad Bobur, founder of the Mughal dynasty.* At age twelve, I learned, Bobur had been caught up in a feudal war. He fell into a chasm with dovecotes. Bobur had an ignorant cousin, a soldier, who wasted all his time on revenge killings and on staging fights between chicken and sheep. At fifteen, Bobur conquered Samarkand and again made it the capital of an empire. During the blockade, Bobur’s army ate dogs, donkeys, and boiled trees. Bobur is the author of the Boburnoma, or “Book of Bobur,” which recounts his conquests of Kabul and Delhi, his learned conversations with the Indian aristocracy, and the planting of many gardens.

A martyr to his own imperial vision, Bobur suffered all his life from a disease known as gemoroi. “That sounds like ‘hemorrhoids’ in Russian,” I remember thinking.

“Do you know what gemoroi is?” Dilorom asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

A sad smile hovered around the corners of her mouth. “Every one of us does two things. We do them every day in the bathroom . . . Ey, Xudo!” she called to the ceiling. “Hey, God! Forgive me for mentioning these words in front of respected Elif!” Dilorom went on to describe a certain affliction of the large intestine that caused great difficulties in one of the two things we do every day in the bathroom, involving swelling and pain and the passing of hard particles through the anus. In short, the Timurids, as passionate horsemen, suffered chronic hemorrhoids. Luckily, such was the refinement of their culture that they had a special grain that, when cooked with fat, water, and sugar, made a special porridge; when you ate it, you never had to defecate. “Oh, if I could taste it even once!” Dilorom exclaimed.

Bobur, a lover of poetry, once wrote a letter to Alisher Navoi, who wrote back. Bobur wrote another letter. Then Navoi died. “How will one survive the next hour?” Bobur shouted. After Navoi’s death, a big black snake started thrashing violently. Bobur slit the snake open from mouth to tail. The snake died, and another snake came out. Bobur slit open the second snake, and out came a rat. While crossing the Himalayas, Bobur dipped his head seventy times in a hole cut in the ice. Then he swam forty laps across the Ganges, despite the undertow, despite the snowdrifts piled higher than his head.

In India, Bobur and his ten thousand soldiers defeated one hundred thousand Indian soldiers and one thousand elephants. To defeat the elephants, they used nails. Nehru wrote about Bobur and liked him, even though he had killed so many Indians, and their elephants. Bobur seized all of northern India, but gallantly installed the rajah’s mother in a castle with servants. The mother bribed Bobur’s cook, so that every day Bobur ate poisoned bread. He got sick, and so did his son. Bobur prayed to God that he would die instead of his son.

“This was a marked contrast from Ivan the Terrible,” Dilorom observed.

Bobur outlived his son by three days. During this time, he ate only the purest birds, boiled for two hours into a soup. His hemorrhoids miraculously vanished, but then he died.

Dilorom loaned me a book of Bobur’s quatrains in Russian translation.

I’m no martyr to miserliness, I’m no prisoner of silver.

I don’t think that “domestic good” is a great good.

Don’t say that Bobur failed to complete his journey:

I’ve only stopped for a moment—it’s time I set out again.

In separation, Bobur grew sick and weak,

From his melancholy Bobur became old and grayhaired.

Bobur sent you a present of a bitter wild orange,

So even you can see how yellow Bobur has become.

Her braided hair is a noose, into which I have flown.

Confused, strung up by the feet, and blinded—oh, woe!

Poor, poor Bobur: in affairs of the heart,

No matter what you do, you always trip up.

Poor, poor Bobur! I read these verses to Eric, who said that Bobur was like me: “He tells you about his problems, but he doesn’t actually want you to solve them; he just wants you to express sympathy.” We thought it was clever of Bobur to supply his interlocutor with the right response, and adapted this technique for our own use.

“No problem, Bobur, of course we can go get some ice cream!” Eric would say, and then I knew it was time to take him out for ice cream.

“Good work, Bobur! You’re doing a great job learning the Uzbek language and the associated literary tradition!” I told Eric when I came back from the university covered with dust, and then he knew just what to say.

Sometimes Dilorom talked to me about the natural sciences, just as if they were aspects of Old Uzbek literature. Human nature, she told me, is composed of four elements: water, soil, air, and fire. This fact was long known in the East while Europe was still foundering in damp ignorance. Later, Europeans stole the Eastern theories and used them to found the medical sciences. The god Shamol blew the dirt around and animated the humans, who were vainly looking through the dirt for something of value. The material trace left by this process is the human thumbprint, a sign of God and a unique marker of identity, as testified by the seventy-fifth surah of the Koran: “Does man think that We shall never put his bones together again? Indeed, We have the power to restore to perfect order the very tips of his fingers.” Europe didn’t know anything about fingerprints until the nineteenth century.

Dilorom also told me that every human being has worms in his or her small intestines. “Even me and you, qizim,” she said, looking at me sympathetically. The worms are tiny parasites, and it isn’t possible to get rid of them completely, but you can at least stop them from multiplying, using clay. This property of clay was known to the East already in the seventh century. Because soil is an element of the human organism, clay naturally combats many diseases, especially those of the spinal cord—including incurable hemorrhoids. In the Koran it is written: if you clean yourself with clay after going to the bathroom, and then wash it off, you’ll never get hemorrhoids.

Ninety-seven percent of the soil’s elements are found in the human body, and these minerals are transmitted via the soil to various fruits and vegetables. The reason the plum is the same shape as the human heart, the reason the Uzbek word for “plum” (o’rik) is very close to the word for “heart” (yurak) is that the plum contains minerals beneficial for the heart. O’rik is also close to sariq, which means “gold”: among all fruits, plums contain the highest levels of elemental gold. In the human body, gold and silver are found only in the hair. All this is proof of God’s conscious creation.

Muzaffar, who also sometimes talked to me about science, had a more skeptical worldview. He wasn’t sure if God had created things consciously or not. “I’m an empiricist,” he explained, adding that Uzbeks generally believed only what they had seen themselves. For example, the Americans said they had sent a man to the moon. The Russians said those pictures were staged, and the “weightless” American flag was nothing but a wooden board. “We Uzbeks don’t get into these ideological debates,” Muzaffar explained. “We keep an open mind. We don’t know if there was a man on the moon, or if there wasn’t a man on the moon. We weren’t there.”

On the weekends, Eric and I went sightseeing, a dutiful trudge from tomb to tomb. We spent hours in the necropolis called Shah-i-Zinda, or Tomb of the Living King, climbing up and down stone staircases, turning blind corners, finding ourselves in domed cubes or octagonal cells. The name “Living King” denoted one of Mohammed’s first cousins, who had allegedly been introduced into the premises through a well by the prophet Elijah, and still lived there, in an underground palace.

At the ancient site of Maracanda, the Sogdian capital that fell to Alexander in 327 B.C., we visited the tomb of the prophet Daniel: a long, windowless building resembling a warehouse, with a row of shallow domes set in the roof. An old man asked if we wanted to know why the tomb was twenty meters long. “Do you think Daniel was a giant?” he demanded. “Daniel was no giant; he was a regular man! Only, his leg grows three centimeters every year! A sign of saintliness!” At a rate of three centimeters a year, I reflected, Daniel’s leg would have outgrown the tomb hundreds of years ago. I glanced uneasily around the countryside. How far would it have reached by now?

French archaeologists had built a museum on the site of the old city, displaying four walls of Sogdian frescoes. In these gorgeous panoramas, courtiers riding camels were preceded by rows of sacred swans; a huntsman riding an elephant was being attacked by a leopard as a princess in Chinese dress floated past in a gondola. Islamic iconoclasts had scratched out some of the human figures’ eyes, leaving blank gray circles that produced a zombielike effect. The room was torrid, damp, shadowy. A humidostat, an air purifier, and a cooling unit hulked against one wall, all unplugged. An antiquated chart registered daily temperatures around 45°C. A typed report on a clipboard, dated two years before, testified to “une accélération alarmante d’une dégradation rapide et irrémédiable, due principalement à l’absence d’isolation thermique et hydrometrique.”

One Sunday, in the company of Eric’s friend Shurik, we made a day trip to Shahrisabz, the city of Timur’s birth. Timur had also, at one point, planned to be buried there. As England is a network of locations where Queen Elizabeth once slept, so is Uzbekistan a network of locations where Timur once wished to be buried. In Shahrisabz—Persian for “Green City,” although in Turkish it sounds more like “City of Vegetables”—Timur even built a gigantic dynastic crypt, upon the death at age twenty of his son Jahangir. The crypt is crowned by a conical dome of obscurely organic, beehivelike appearance. Nearby stand the ruins of Timur’s summer palace, of which nothing remains but a colossal vaulted entranceway whose geometrically patterned tiles spell a sad message: “If you challenge our power—look at our buildings!” The rest of the palace had been destroyed in the sixteenth century by the original nomadic Uzbek tribes—the ones who were always destroying the Timurids’ stuff. Stark, vertical, unearthly, the walls shimmered in the hot afternoon.

Walking back to the bus stop, we crossed a concrete footbridge where two old men in skullcaps were sitting on crates. One of them jumped up and announced that we had to buy admission tickets. This was a common occurrence in touristic cities: old men would appear from nowhere and make you buy tickets with “Historical Site” printed on them.

“Keep your tickets, uncle,” Shurik said. “We don’t want to see any historical site.”

“But you already saw the historical site. The whole city is a historical site!”

Shurik, who had been looking more and more beleaguered as the afternoon wore on, looked around incredulously. “I don’t see any historical site—just some broken walls.”

“Of course they’re broken—they’re six hundred years old! What do you expect a historical site to look like?”

“Like the Registan in Samarkand,” Shurik said promptly. “It’s not broken, and you can look at it for free.”

I hurriedly gave the old man the money for three tickets. “A very interesting city,” I said.

“But I didn’t think it was interesting,” Shurik objected.

The old man glowered at him for a minute, then shrugged his shoulders. “What does a donkey understand about fruit compote!” he grumbled, handing me back one of the bills.

The Registan, of which Samarkand residents were understandably proud, was a complex of elephantine university halls arranged around a vast stone plaza, with the luminous and inhuman proportions of a de Chirico landscape. When you leaned back and strained your eyes to take in the whole plaza, you saw that all the buildings were slightly skewed in different directions. The most famous building is the Shir-Dor (Lion-Bearing) Madrasa, decorated with orange-and-black-striped creatures with gaping alligator mouths; huge, white, clocklike human faces are embedded in their backs. The artist responsible for these lions was reportedly executed for violating the Islamic ban on . . . representational art.

The first of the Registan’s buildings was constructed in the fifteenth century by Timur’s grandson Ulughbek, the “Astronomer King,” whose observatory lay two kilometers northeast of the city center. All that now remained of the former three-story circular edifice was an eleven-meter length of rail enclosed by two high marble parapets, resembling a sinister roller coaster: the arc of the enormous sextant that Ulughbek used to compile a catalogue of 1,018 stars. The last chapter of the catalogue was about horoscopes, which Ulughbek approached scientifically, attempting to correlate different historical events with the stars under which they had unfolded. The Astronomer King also composed tables for using an approximate time of birth to calculate the precise moment of conception, “the place of the Moon of birth in the moment of ejaculation,” and the length of gestation, all of which played vital roles in human fate.

Because of his belief that science would outlive religion, Ulughbek had many enemies among the dervishes. In 1447, when Ulughbek succeeded his father as king, a secret Sufic court ordered his assassination—and appointed the astronomer’s eldest son to help carry it out. (As legend has it, Ulughbek had already seen in the stars that his son would murder him, and had accordingly banished him from the kingdom . . . thereby driving him into the arms of the dervishes.) One copy of the famous star catalogue was saved. The observatory was razed, its location forgotten. Four hundred years later, a Russian archaeologist named Vyatkin made it his mission to find it. He succeeded in 1908, and is now buried in the observatory’s garden.

Gur-i-Amir, the mausoleum containing Ulughbek’s own tomb as well as that of Timur, was unearthed by Soviet archaeologists in Samarkand on June 21, 1941. At last, scientists were able to confirm that the legs of Timur the Lame really were two different lengths, and that Ulughbek had been interred in the vestments of an Islamic martyr. Timur’s tomb was covered by the world’s largest recorded slab of dark green jade, reportedly seized by Ulughbek for this purpose from a Chinese temple, and inscribed with the ominous legend “When I rise, the world will tremble.” Less than twenty-four hours after Soviet archaeologists opened the tomb, Hitler invaded Russia.

Inside Gur-i-Amir, sunshine filters through high grated windows onto tasteful beige marble; coffin-shaped cenotaphs are discreetly distributed like furniture in a waiting room. The idea of spending eternity there is terrifying.

A few days after visiting Gur-i-Amir, we went to the old Soviet department store in the Russian part of the city to buy Eric some pants. The atmosphere was uncannily familiar. Scattered through the dim interior were cenotaph-like glass cases displaying the lifeless appurtenances of capitalist existence: cutlery, radios, vitamins. On the walls, all the way up to the shadowy ceilings, hung polyester suits, dresses, and handbags. Eric pointed at the pants he wanted, and a boy fished them down with a long pole. The pants, made of a shiny greenish-brown denimlike fabric, looked very peculiar.

At the department store I bought a tiny electric fan, which I brought to class the next day. When I set it on the table and plugged it in, Dilorom turned it so it was facing me directly.

“Let’s put it in the middle,” I suggested, turning it toward her.

“As you like, qizim,” Dilorom said.

After twenty minutes, I became aware of a wave of heat radiating toward me. I touched the fan; it was burning hot.

“Yes, qizim,” Dilorom said dolefully. “I didn’t want to disappoint you, but I feared that this fan might become warm.”

• • •

Dilorom and I were studying the lesser Old Uzbek scholarpoets. Most of them were either madmen or saints. There was the scholar Harun al-Rashid, Omar Khafi’s son, who either pretended to go mad or actually went mad. He knew that there was such a thing as shoes, but had forgotten what they were. He had been hired as a slave to watch somebody’s shoes, but lost them. Finally, he himself made a pair of shoes, which he completed two months before his own execution.

In the sixteenth century there lived a religious fanatic called Mashrab, which means “wine-drinker.” In fact Mashrab didn’t drink at all . . . except for the Wine of Love. Mashrab got his name when his pregnant mother went to the market, stole two grapes, and ate them. The baby in her womb kicked and shouted, “Give back the price of two grapes, otherwise I’ll leave this house!” Because grapes had such a strong effect on his temperament, scholars named the unborn child Mashrab. Even in adulthood Mashrab was concerned about injustice. He was constantly giving away his clothes to poor people. As a result, he often walked around naked. He was in love with God, and at age three could tell by looking at a man’s shoes whether he would go to heaven or hell. Mashrab single-handedly fought society by defecating on the king’s throne—right there in front of the odalisques. He refused to eat anything gained through labor. At difficult times he would spin with a nail between his toes with one arm in the air, until he achieved ecstasy and lost consciousness.

A great sultan wanted Mashrab to marry his daughter. Mashrab put his hand on the bride’s belly and heard voices saying, “Father—food—water.” He explained to the sultan that he was unable to support a baby, and left. On the way home he fell asleep and dreamed that his mother was rubbing his feet. When he woke up, a lion was licking his feet. This continued for three or four hours.

Mashrab loved owls because they live in deserted places. He had an owl who was his constant companion.

“Give me one thousand houses,” the sultan once commanded this owl.

“One thousand houses? I’ll give you two thousand houses,” the owl replied. “In our country the people leave their houses because they are hungry. So go take their houses.” Only Mashrab’s owl had the courage to speak candidly to the sultan about the current economic situation.

The sultan convicted Mashrab of fomenting social unrest and sentenced him to hanging. Three days after the execution, a merchant came to town in a caravan. “Why are you all in mourning?” the merchant asked the townspeople.

“Because Mashrab has been hanged.”

“No, no, I just saw him,” the merchant said. “He’s walking on the street, singing, wearing no clothes.” Mashrab had become a saint, and saints can be in several places at the same time.

A certain sixteenth-century saint once read that Mohammed had a broken tooth. A stone had broken it. To become like Mohammed, the saint took a stone and knocked out his own tooth. Then he felt good . . . until he began to worry that he had knocked out the wrong one. Months of study and contemplation did not reveal to him the location of Mohammed’s missing tooth. Just to be safe, the saint knocked out his remaining thirty-one teeth. Things weren’t easy after that—especially eating and speaking. “Maybe I was wrong to knock out all my own teeth,” the saint sometimes thought. But one day toward the end of his life, Mohammed came to him in a dream. “I died a long time ago,” Mohammed explained, “but that was my ghost, giving you training.”

Posterity has handed us a book of seven hundred lives of saints, and all of them achieved sainthood in the same way: through love and work. Saints never lie. They can travel from Samarkand to Tashkent in ten minutes.

“Tell me, qizim, how long did it take you to get here to Samarkand from the airport in Tashkent?” Dilorom asked.

“Four or five hours,” I said.

“And how did you travel—by bus, by car?”

“By car.”

“Well, saints can travel this distance in ten minutes . . . without a bus or a car.”

There are a total of seventy-eight flaws and two hundred virtues in the human character. Everyone has three cardinal flaws that they must battle throughout their lives. The most difficult flaws to overcome are sloth and guile. Saints have not only to conquer their flaws, but to master all two hundred of the human virtues, such as talking to animals and ghosts and exchanging ideas with vegetable life.

Some saints can cure diseases by prayer. One particular saint who had this ability himself suffered from hemorrhoids. “Why don’t you cure yourself?” someone asked him.

“Because it improves my character,” he replied.

A very holy pilgrim who lived in Mecca for thirty years didn’t defecate once the whole time, because it would have been sacrilege.

One saintly virtue is the ability to recognize thieves. A saint was once sitting by a window, reading a book, when a thief crept up outside the window and started unwinding the saint’s turban. “I see you want to steal my turban,” the saint said, not looking up from his book. “But, in fact, it’s so old and torn you won’t get anything for it at the market. Why not just leave it on my head?”

The astonished thief paused. But the saint wasn’t looking at him—to all appearances he was still deeply absorbed in his book. So the thief went back to unwinding the turban. The saint, still not raising his eyes from his book, grabbed on to one end of the turban while the thief pulled on the other. For a long time, the saint held fast and the robber tugged. Finally, the saint said, “OK, take the turban.” The robber took the turban and left . . . but the saint quietly followed him.

The patron saint of Khiva was named Pahlavon Mahmud, or “Wrestler Mahmud.” He was such a great wrestler that he ran out of opponents and had to go to India to wrestle the rajahs. Dilorom gave me one of his poems to read. I was able to decipher only one stanza:

On the streets, with nothing:

the fourth one is still little; he hasn’t left his family for the street.

The family juts out like the branches of a fruit tree;

those who pass by will take advantage.

Saints alone are free from the tyranny of human desires, which follow a precise timetable. From birth to age five, Dilorom told me, we desire affection and petting. From age five to puberty, we desire candy and sweets. From puberty to age twenty-five, we desire sex. Until age forty-five, our desires turn toward children. After age sixty, we desire quietude and remembrance. It is only from age forty-five to sixty that we desire fruits of the intellect. “In intellectual terms, age forty-five to sixty is the cream on the milk.” Dilorom looked down at her hands on the table, smiling faintly. “Soon I will be forty-five,” she said, raising her eyes. “I’m hoping to finish writing my book.”

“Today, we’re going to talk about love,” Muzaffar announced.

“OK,” I said.

“Love is a difficult condition . . .”

Muzaffar had fallen in love once, with a Bulgarian girl whom he met in Heidelberg, where he had been studying Kant. They had spent every minute together. He told her that if she loved him, she would quit smoking. She said that love and smoking were completely unrelated.

“We came from two different worlds,” Muzaffar concluded.

Muzaffar still dreamed of finishing his doctorate abroad, in Germany or the United States. For one of my Uzbek compositions, I decided to explain how to apply to the comp lit and philosophy departments at Stanford, stressing the importance of the personal statement and plan of study. It took three late nights to write; I submitted it in installments.

“This is interesting,” Muzaffar said cautiously, crossing out all the wrong verb tenses in pencil.

A few days later, Muzaffar came to class looking unusually pale, with shadows under his eyes. “I have had a funny adventure,” he informed me. After dinner the previous night, his parents had piled the entire family into the car and told Muzaffar to start driving. They said they were going to get some medicine for his father: an obvious falsehood, since the pharmacy had been closed for hours. They gave directions, and he drove, passing the closed pharmacy. They ended up on a dark residential street, near the house of some people his parents knew.

“Are we visiting the Buranovs?” Muzaffar asked.

“No,” they said. “Just park the car . . . not here under the lamp; better under that tree . . .”

It turned out that Muzaffar’s parents had once asked him what he thought of the Buranovs’ daughter, to which he had replied, “How do I know what to think? I’ve never seen her.” Muzaffar himself had no recollection of this exchange, but now he found himself in a parked car on her street, where the entire family proceeded to sit for hours, awaiting a chance for him to form an opinion of the Buranov girl.

“I was really frightened. What if she came outside and saw us—my entire family sitting outside her house in a dark car? She would think we were criminals. Once I thought I heard her coming and my heart was pounding, but it was only a cat. I think it was very funny for my sisters. We sat in the car for two hours, and during this time my sisters made fun of me.”

“So did you finally see her?”

“No—we have to go back! On Thursday!”

We both started laughing, but after a moment Muzaffar became serious again. “My parents think I’ve been a student long enough,” he said. “I think they want to say, to the student Muzaffar, ‘Done with you!’ ”

It is impossible for women to be saints. On the other hand, Dilorom said, women may occasionally attain saintly qualities. Dilorom had both theoretical and empirical knowledge of such occurrences.

As a student in the 1970s, Dilorom was at the top of her class in scientific communism, scientific atheism, and Marxist-Leninism. She and her classmates had never read the Koran, the Bible, or the Talmud, which they had been told were full of empty superstitions. One day, one of her classmates asked the professor of scientific atheism, “If these books are just full of empty superstitions, why are we discouraged from reading them? As a scientist, you should want us to read them, so we will see for ourselves how empty and superstitious they are.”

“Who’s discouraging you?” the professor said, shrugging. “If you’re so curious, go ahead and take a whiff of the Opium of the People.”

Infused by the spirit of science, Dilorom and her classmates went to the library, filled out the necessary forms, and were given the Koran and the Bible. (The university library had one copy of each.) “We read parts of them,” Dilorom said, “but we lacked context. There was no commentary in those books. None of it made sense.”

I nodded. I was familiar with this phenomenon.

“We decided our professor was right: these books were full of superstition and nonsense. This is how scientific communism robbed us of our own enlightenment.”

In January 1992, Dilorom experienced a renewed curiosity about religion. She went back to the library and checked out the Talmud, the Bible, and the Koran, this time in editions with commentaries. She read each book all the way through, one after another, looking up everything she didn’t understand. She read nonstop for three months, during which she briefly acquired saintly powers.

Dilorom first became aware of her ability to communicate with animals on a bitterly cold and snowy night, when she had missed the morning garbage pickup and had to wait for the second pickup at ten at night. So she sat up reading the Talmud, waiting for the garbage truck. Silence descended upon the house. Her husband was away, and their five-year-old son, Boburbek, usually asleep at that hour, was sitting on the floor drawing a picture of the sun. He looked so happy that Dilorom decided to let him stay up. Soon it was nearly ten, and Boburbek still wasn’t sleepy, so she took his hand and they went out together to take out the garbage. They walked and walked through the snow, until they reached the Dumpster. (Why did the garbage have to be personally delivered to the Dumpster at the moment the truck arrived? I don’t know, but Old Uzbek does have one hundred different words for crying.) Standing near the Dumpster, alone in the snow, was a black dog the size of a lion.

“Are you afraid, my son?” Dilorom asked Boburbek.

“Yes,” he said.

“So am I,” Dilorom said.

Then an amazing thing happened. Instead of barking or running up to them, the dog calmly turned around and walked away from the Dumpster, to the other side of the street, where it sat down and regarded Dilorom and Boburbek—as if waiting for them to throw out their garbage, which they did. Only when they turned and began to walk homeward did the dog get up and resume its original position.

“The dog understood us,” Dilorom explained, “and I understood him. He was telling us: ‘I know you’re afraid, but don’t worry. I mean you no harm. See, I’ll sit here out of the way, until you’re ready to go back home.’ ”

A few months later, in that first long, hot summer of Uzbek independence, Dilorom had a second saintly experience. She and her sister Shirin were in a suburb near Urgut, attending a conference on religious literature. Every hour, the participants left the sweltering conference room and went outside to the drinking fountain, which tapped into a natural spring; according to local legend, those who were pure of heart could see Mecca in its waters. One member of the party, a sixty-year-old man named Musherref who was descended from a shayx, decided to look into the water. Everyone was sure that he would be able to see Mecca. But he didn’t see anything. Dilorom was so surprised that she leaned over and took a look—of course she didn’t see anything, either. But suddenly her sister, Shirin, gripped her arm, staring into the water. “Mana mana mana, look look look!—don’t you see the pillars?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about Muzaffar and Dilorom?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We began to walk back to the university. Habib asked how old I was. “Twenty-four? You’re only two years younger than my wife, and you don’t have any children! I thought you were seventeen or eighteen! Are you sure you’re twenty-four? . . . I have to have some words with your husband. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything bad. I’ll just explain to him, as one married man to another, what he has to do.” Suddenly bethinking himself, Habib lowered his voice. “Does he know what he has to do? And when he has to do it?”

“Well, I think so . . .”

“I’ll talk to him anyway,” he decided. “You wait here and look at the flowers.”

We had reached the garden in front of the nine-story building, where rows of waist-high, thick-stemmed, wild looking plants had sprung up seemingly overnight, from the dusty earth: flowering thistles, foxgloves, and gigantic flat purple asters the size of soup plates.

“But he won’t understand you,” I told Habib. “He doesn’t speak Uzbek.”

“He’ll understand enough.” Habib pulled Eric aside and started explaining something to him, gesticulating earnestly. Eric put his right hand over his heart and looked very polite. After a few minutes of conversation, Habib clapped Eric on the shoulder and they walked back to me. “He understood, right?” Habib said, shaking Eric’s shoulder. Eric nodded. (He hadn’t understood anything.)

“Now we have to get you some flowers,” Habib told me. “You wait here.” Squinting into the orange late-afternoon light, Habib walked to the entrance of the university, spoke a few words to the security guard, then waded into the sea of flowers and began hacking away at the stems with a penknife. “I’m choosing you some really good flowers!” he called. And when I voiced some objection: “Don’t you worry—didn’t you know I’m the head gardener here? Who do you think planted these flowers? Who, if not me, has a right to pick them?” He wrapped the bouquet, thick as a human leg, in a discarded newspaper and presented it to Eric. “I can’t give them to her, because I’m not her husband—you have to give her flowers,” he said to Eric, speaking slowly and loudly, as if to a deaf person.

“He says to give them to me,” I said.

“That’s right, my dear,” Eric said, handing me the legsize bouquet.

• • •

When we had parted from Habib, we crossed the street and walked down the leafy median to the Amir Timur Monument, to meet Muzaffar. By some sculptural economy, the Amir Timurs of Samarkand bore a strong likeness to Lenin: the bald dome, the narrowed eyes, the V-shaped eyebrows, mustache, and goatee. All these things are the signs of God’s conscious creation.

We had waited ten minutes when we heard the faint pounding of footsteps. A white blob glimmered in the distance—Muzaffar’s shirt, like the Cheshire cat’s grin, joined now by the rest of Muzaffar.

“I’m sorry I’m late; I couldn’t leave the house. My parents had a special dinner. I didn’t know, because it was a surprise. But I brought you a gift.” Muzaffar handed me a heavy box made of unfinished wooden slats, with a metal handle. Between the slats, you could see a plaster figurine of a kneeling bearded mullah, a turban on his head and a book in his lap. The mullah wasn’t looking at the book; his eyes were staring straight ahead, transfixed by anxiety.

“It’s an Uzbek whitebeard,” Muzaffar explained. “You can take it to America, to help you remember Muzaffar.” He asked how much longer we would be in town. Our plane, we replied, left Tashkent in three days.

“I see,” Muzaffar said. “So you’ll miss my wedding.” At these words, I felt a jolt of physical shock. The first thing that came to my mind was a line from Chekhov: “So you won’t be at my funeral?” “It happened very fast. My parents brought the girl to dinner tonight, and it’s all arranged. The wedding will be very soon, in the fall. But you will already be gone. I’m sorry about this. We have very nice weddings here.”

As we congratulated Muzaffar and wished him every happiness, I tried to dispel my feeling of disappointment. So he would abandon his PhD—so what? Who had ever described grad school as the summit of human happiness? Wasn’t it presumptuous to assume that every smart young person in the world could reach self-fulfillment only by going to Stanford to participate in Hegel seminars? On the other hand, wasn’t it hypocritical to pretend I thought that any smart young person should ever leave his studies in order to perpetuate the family-centered culture of the East?

That evening, I carefully placed the box with the worried whitebeard in my suitcase. I realized only much later that the box actually opened if you moved the handle—at the time, I thought Muzaffar’s parting gift was a worried whitebeard in a sealed wooden cage.

Early the next morning, a car brought us to Tashkent: a city in which I had a special interest, since Luba had lived there until she was fifteen. I tried to call up some of her childhood stories so I could imagine them happening. All I could remember was that as a little girl she used to watch the great semiotician Yuri Lotman on TV and already knew that someday she, too, would be a literary scholar.

Tashkent, like a Russian city, had a metro, a circus, a puppet theater, paved sidewalks. In Samarkand the old men had beards and bright eyes and would often stare at you or try to educate you about something; in Tashkent the old men were fragile and ghostlike, wandering around carrying strange objects: a walking stick, a garbage bag, an accordion. I remember in particular one old man with a tray full of little plastic yogurt cups, each containing a tiny cactus plant as frail and delicate as himself.

At the Tashkent Zoo we saw a disconcerting variety of predatory birds, and a giant demented-looking porcupine that was gnawing with big white teeth on the padlock of its enclosure. An old jailhouse, an open two-story space lined on both stories by concrete cells, had been converted into a house for small monkeys. In one cell, a skinny capuchin was mashing a boiled potato against the wall, peeling pieces off, and eating them. Next door, a tiny macaque with a deeply expressive, literate face was picking chewing gum off of its diminutive person. I remembered the scene in the Tashkent Zoo in Cancer Ward: the monkeys, “all looking as if they had close prison haircuts, sad, occupied with primitive joys and sorrows on their board bunks,” remind the hero of all his fellow inmates.

In the Uzbek capital, I was seized by a mania to buy books—less in order to actually read them than to obtain tangible proof that they existed. In vain I scoured the city for Past Days and The Language of Birds. I made a trip to the bookstore of the Alisher Navoi museum, but all they sold were flimsy stapled booklets of lyrics. When I asked about The Language of Birds, the clerk said it was “in the museum.” I bought a ticket and went inside. There in a glass case, bolted down in the middle of an exhibit hall, were two volumes from the same 1970 ten-volume Russian translation that Dilorom had let me borrow in the evenings.

Eventually, in a used-book store, I found an old Russian translation of the Boburnoma, as well as the 1947 screenplay for Alisher Navoy, a biopic coauthored by Viktor Shklovsky. I had never heard of this movie, which was released in 1948.

The screenplay centered on the friendship between Navoi and the sultan Huseyn, portrayed as a weak man who ultimately lets the poet down. As a youth, Navoi helps Huseyn seize power from the evil Yadygar, who cuts off the water supply, hoarding water for the aristocratic beks and destroying the farmers’ livelihood. In one scene, during the military campaign against Yadygar, Navoi is shown dictating passages from The Judgment of Two Languages to a secretary. (“Verbs are particularly well developed in our language,” he says at one point, perhaps alluding to the hundred different verbs for weeping.) As far as Shklovsky was concerned, a writer was always a writer, even in a time of war. In his memoirs, he recounts a near-death experience he had while working on a Red Army demolition squad: “My arms were flung back; I was lifted, seared and turned head over heels . . . I hardly had time for a fleeting thought about my book Plot as a Stylistic Phenomenon. Who would write it now?”

In the screenplay, courtiers reproach Navoi for occupying himself with philology in a time of battle. Navoi counters that the point of the battle is to unite the people, and that the people will be united only when their language provides a material shape for their thought. “Writers who come from the people have an obligation to channel their talents and capabilities toward the people’s language,” Navoi says, describing his own civic sacrifice, as a poet. “It’s quite possible that nobody loves Persian words and works as much as I do . . . But one must speak in one’s own language.”

A Venetian ambassador turns up, hoping to broker an alliance against the Ottomans; he likens Navoi’s Judgment of Two Languages to Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia. Meanwhile, Navoi uses Ulughbek’s astronomy to refute his astrology, arguing that his charts prove the invariance of the stars—their essential disconnectedness from ever-changing human destinies.

The central drama of literary creation in Navoy surrounds Farhod and Shirin, which Shklovsky, like Dilorom, presents as a tale of social inequality and crop irrigation. As he composes his verses about Farhod’s civic accomplishments, Navoi vows to replicate them as historical fact: to build a canal solving the kingdom’s irrigation problems. But before he has time to finish the canal, Navoi falls victim to the plot of court intriguers, and ends up exiled far away. In the poet’s absence, Huseyn falls into dissipation, drinking vats of kumiss and wine, and betting on sheep fights. The canal is finally built, but all the water is given over to the aristocrats. Navoi returns from exile accompanied by a Sancho Panza figure, a baker who is also a poet: “I sing the glory of lepyoshka . . . I write of the love of yeast for flour . . .” The quixotic pair rides out among the people, Navoi on a white horse and the baker on a gray donkey, and Navoi recites a poem:

I wrote verses about Farhod,

About the mountain-dweller who split the stony crags

In order to channel a great canal,

About how man may achieve anything,

When he is governed by ideas.

The baker answers with his own verses:

Do not censure the honey cookie, O pure lepyoshka,

Because its dough will not be kneaded with your yeast . . .

Our plane left Tashkent at four in the morning. We were somber, tense, excited. Eric was practicing something he called his “Damn You Breakdance.” In the airport we marveled at the illuminated FIRE EXIT signs, which showed a white stick figure fleeing for safety. Good luck to you once you escape the burning airport, little man.

As the plane lifted off, the sky was just beginning to turn from black to deep blue. A few car headlights inched along deserted roads, grew smaller, dimmed, and disappeared. Six hours and thousands of miles later, we descended through leaden clouds. Square green fields unfurled beneath the hoar-frosted windows, like a huge chessboard, punctuated here and there by tiny square farmhouses. We skimmed closer and closer to the earth, almost grazing Frankfurt itself, the birthplace of critical theory and interdisciplinary materialism, with its silvery river, old churches, and the black glassy obelisk where they hold the book fair.

If I didn’t resist the circumstances that pushed me to Uzbekistan that summer, it was because I believed that out-of-the-way places and literatures are never wasted on writers. And yet, I didn’t write about Samarkand—not for a long time. Consequently, I didn’t think about it much, either. Like a Christmas ornament without a Christmas tree, there was nowhere to put it.

I found myself recalling this anomalous episode from my past only several years later, when I was reading “Onegin’s Journey,” the excised chapter of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, intended to bridge the three years that pass between chapters 7 and 8, during which Tatyana transforms into a Moscow grande dame, while Onegin wanders around Russia and the Caucasus, trying to forget that he just killed a man. Nobody knows exactly what Pushkin wrote in the first draft of “Onegin’s Journey,” since he burned the manuscript, publishing only some fragments which appeared, in later editions of Onegin, as a footnote or appendix after chapter 8. Pushkin is known to have rewritten these fragments in 1829, just after completing his own “journey to Arzrum.” On that journey, Pushkin returned to the lands he first visited at age twenty-one, when he wrote Prisoner of the Caucasus. Everything was different now: “Whatever feelings I harbored then—no longer exist. They all either passed or changed.” Pushkin turned thirty on that second trip.

I began to understand why it had been so difficult to write about my summer in Samarkand which, despite all the appurtenances of a new beginning, an exotic adventure, had actually been the end of something. It had been the kind of strange appendix that doesn’t make sense until later, out of order—as the surviving fragments of the “Journey” appear in Eugene Onegin only as a footnote following the final chapter.

When I came back from Samarkand, I almost entirely lost the ability to read poetry. It was like a language I didn’t speak anymore. What I used to enjoy in poetry was precisely the feeling of only half understanding—a feeling that is intensified, as Tolstoy once observed, when the poetry is written in a foreign language:

Without entering into the meaning of each phrase you continue to read and, from the few words that are comprehensible to you, a completely different meaning arises in your mind—unclear, cloudy, and not in accord with the original phrasing, but all the more beautiful and poetic. For a long time, the Caucasus was for me this poem in a foreign language; once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented, and many cases in which I believed the real poem was better than the imaginary one.

After Samarkand, the beauty of cloudy, poetical meanings conjured out of associations and half-grasped words—the beauty of things that don’t appear on the page—somehow lost its charm for me. From that point on I was interested only in huge novels. I started researching a dissertation on the hugeness of novels, the way they devour time and material. And although I suppose it’s just coincidence that Tolstoy compared the subjective charms of half-understood poetry to the Caucasus in particular, nonetheless, I was finished with them, too—with the Caucasus, the Russian East, and the literatures of the peripheries.

School started again, the endless cycle of seminars and coffee, coffee and seminars. Luba had spent the summer researching the life of the princess Dashkova in St. Petersburg; Matej had been in Berlin doing some kind of topographical study of Walter Benjamin. Those were cities with archives, university presses, libraries—cities where students went to learn from books, not from “life.” And they were right, those students: I had seen life, and it hadn’t added up to anything. For a while it was a departmental joke that I had spent two months in Samarkand intensely studying Timurid love poetry, but soon everyone forgot about it, including me. I was busy teaching first-year Russian and reading Balzac. I spent more and more time on campus, returning to the Mountain View apartment only to sleep. In the winter, shortly after New Year’s, I moved out. Samarkand was the last trip that Eric and I took together.

Muzaffar and I still e-mail each other sometimes. He and his wife moved out of his parents’ house last year—a difficult and controversial decision. At the present time, he works as an office manager and has two children: a little boy, Komron, and a baby girl, Komila. Sometimes he travels to Kazakhstan, near the Uzbek border, where he does translation work at a village clinic run by Americans.

For a few years, Dilorom and I exchanged letters and gifts. “Respected Elif qizim! I was not at all surprised to receive your letter—because I was expecting it,” Dilorom wrote in a card enclosed with a hardcover 1992 edition of Past Days, the novel I had looked for all over Tashkent. I think she hoped I would translate it into English, but I never even made it past page two. I dreamed about that book, not about its contents but about the physical book, its black cloth cover embossed with red wallpaper-like arabesques, indicative of the bourgeois character of historical realism. In my dreams, the cover was imprinted with “performative” blurbs ascribed to old school Anglophone literary critics:

“Kicking this book will cause pages nineteen and twenty to stick together. (In the paperback edition, the stuck pages will be fourteen and fifteen.)”

—F. R. Leavis

Northrop Frye has stated that, when addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, the book will clap itself over the nose of the reader’s worst enemy and remain there until the enemy has touched something that once touched a camel.

I would wake filled with relief, understanding that I didn’t actually have to read the book, that the book didn’t work that way (by being read), but rather by being kicked, or addressed in the form of a proper Arab gentleman, either of which was much less time-consuming than poring through the densely typed pages, looking up every other word in the dictionary. And although I am reluctant to say that what ended in Samarkand was my youth, nonetheless, this copy of Past Days brought home to me, with a kind of material immediateness, the truth of human mortality.

_____________

* Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, as he is known to Western scholarship, lived from 1483 to 1530. The Baburnama is the first—and was for a long time the only—autobiography in Islamic literature, and is one of the longest prose narratives ever written in Chaghatay Turkish. To this day, no one knows what motivated Babur to keep a written record of his life. He hadn’t finished it when he died—the narrative breaks off mid-sentence in 1529.