The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (13 page)

“Monica Lewinsky leaves me feeling bad, too,” I said.

Raisa shrugged. “For you in America, it’s a big drama, but for us, it’s just funny. Your Clinton is a young, healthy, good-looking man! Where’s the misfortune? Look at our half-dead Yeltsin . . . if we found out Boris Nikolaevich was sleeping with a young girl, we would declare a national holiday.”

Meanwhile, at the university, the smaller of the two Igors turned out to be a friend of Anatoly Chubais, the privatization czar who was at that point in charge of the entire, collapsing economy, and even got him to come and give a speech to the advanced Russian class. “You know who must have a lot of free time,” I remarked to Rustem later, “is this guy Chubais. He’s going around to universities, talking to foreign students.” It took several minutes to convince Rustem that I wasn’t joking. “She’s seen Chubais!” he marveled. “And what did he say?”

Unfortunately I couldn’t remember anything he had said, except that he had used a lot of participles.

I ended up going to Central Asia in the company of one of my classmates from the university, a Taiwanese mathematician called Alex. We got to Tashkent in the pouring rain and started to walk from the bus station to our hostel, making our way through a maze of courtyards, ignoring all the dogs that were barking at us from behind chain-link fences, crossing a huge puddle on a bridge made from a rotting plank.

“Tashkent is the Venice of the East,” Alex announced, in his peculiar monotonic voice.

My recollections from this trip are scattered but vivid. We lived on some kind of chocolate spread, which we ate from a jar using a souvenir Uzbek scimitar. We constantly had to bribe people. At one point we spent twenty minutes wandering through a pool hall near a bus station, trying to identify the guy we were supposed to bribe. I had to do all the talking because nobody could understand anything Alex said. To my dismay, I also had to do all the financial calculations.

“Aren’t you the math major?” I asked Alex once, in the middle of trying to sort out who owed what for a Kirghiz visa.

“I only deal with numbers on a theoretical level,” Alex intoned.

We spent three days each in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. We spent a lot of time in bus stations, where Alex made us do calisthenics, “like the Germans.” “We are wasting minutes!” he would shout, attempting a German accent. Sometimes, the buses turned out to have been requisitioned by soldiers—there was a war in Kyrgyzstan—and then, even if there were empty seats left, we had to wait for the next bus.

“Couldn’t we take this bus, too?” I asked once.

“What—with the soldiers?” exclaimed the station attendant. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

In Bukhara we visited the emir’s palace, which was overrun by peacocks. Some of the rooms had been filled with cement. “That used to be the conservatory but the Soviets objected to grand pianos.” In the Kirghiz mountains, we visited a thermal bath, where we sat in wooden cubicles, immersed in sulfurous water. The sulfur blended with the sickly sweet smell of horsemeat, which someone was boiling outside over an open fire. In Bishkek we rode a Ferris wheel that marked the place where Tamerlane had allegedly once
expressed the wish to be buried. He hadn’t been buried there. The Ferris wheel stood in an otherwise empty plaza, where a little boy with several gold teeth was riding a bicycle in circles; another boy, dressed in a gray suit, was shooting at a lone shrub with a toy machine gun.

But the city that left the strongest impression on me was Samarkand, with its abandoned Soviet department store, and the astronomical observatory where, in the fifteenth century, Ulughbek had mapped the coordinates of 1,018 stars, and the deserted medieval university. The Lion Medrese’s mosaic lions—half tiger, half clock—were clearly the work of someone who had never seen a lion. Samarkand is where Tamerlane was actually buried, under a six-foot slab of jade taken from a temple in China. It crossed my mind that I might like to come back someday, when I was less tired, dirty, and confused.

Shortly after I returned to the United States that summer, the Russian ruble crashed. Many of the banks, including Menatep, collapsed overnight. Rustem liquidated his rubles by buying fax machines; he occasionally sent me faxes at my summer job, in the copyediting department of a big New York publishing house. Eventually the faxes stopped; the summer came to an end.

Back at school that fall, I started studying the “Russian Orient”: I read Soviet realist stories by Uzbek and Kirghiz writers, Pan-Slavic treatises by Soviet linguists, Pan-Turkic treatises by Kemalist Turks, “Caucasian” poems by Russian poets. I signed up for a beginning Uzbek class, which was taught by a graduate student, a Samarkand native called Gulnora. I was fascinated by the language, which seemed to me like a harsher, more naïve, more Russian version of
Turkish. Where Kemalist Turks had borrowed French words (for things like trains and ham), the Soviet Uzbeks borrowed Russian ones. At that time I happened upon a book about Pushkin by Stanford professor Monika Greenleaf. According to Greenleaf, Pushkin’s journey to Arzrum was actually a substitute for a journey to Paris: a city Pushkin had dreamed of all his life—“In a week I’ll definitely be in Paris!” begins an unfinished play—but had never visited.

Pushkin’s travels began at age twenty-one when, on the basis of some radical political verses, he was banished from Petersburg on a civil service assignment to present-day Dnepropetrovsk. There he made the acquaintance of the 1812 hero General Raevsky, with whom he traveled for three months through the Caucasus and Crimea, accumulating material for
Prisoner of the Caucasus
and
The Fountain of Bakhchisaray
. Pushkin was transferred next to Moldova, and then to Odessa, where he fell desperately in love with the governor-general’s wife, fought several duels, and was obliged to leave the civil service. Meanwhile, the secret police had just intercepted a letter in which Pushkin mentioned “studying pure atheism” from a deaf Englishman in Odessa who had conclusively disproven the immortality of the soul. On the pretext of these heretical lines, Pushkin was exiled to Pskov.

In 1826, the new tsar, Nikolai I, allowed Pushkin to return to Moscow, and even undertook the duty of censoring his works. Unfortunately, the tsar turned out to be Pushkin’s most annoying censor yet. Worse still, he made Pushkin directly accountable to Count Benckendorff, the head of the secret police, who had to approve all his travel requests. (By this point, Greenleaf observes, Pushkin’s “loudly lamented exile in the early 1820s” had already begun to “represent the peripatetic freedom of his youth.”) When Benckendorff denied Pushkin’s request to travel to Paris, in 1829, Pushkin decided
to slip across the border to Turkey. And so the Orient, which was supposed to represent “the open spaces of adventure and personal reminiscence,” actually represented the opposite of freedom: banishment from Paris, the center of the world, to the most meaningless peripheries.

When I returned to Stanford as a second-year graduate student, I had to start taking a Russian-language pedagogy class, to prepare for my mandatory year of teaching Russian to undergraduates. The class was taught in Russian by a Soviet-trained linguist called Alla who advised us, among other things, to treat our more stupid students with sympathy, “as if they had cancer.”

While I was in pedagogy training, a scandal erupted around one of my classmates, Janine, a non-native Russian speaker who was at that time teaching first-year Russian. Dropping in on one of Janine’s classes, Alla had seen her write on the blackboard the phrase
vasha imia
(“your name”)—which would have been fine if
imia
(“name”) were feminine, but in fact it is an irregular neuter, so the correct form is
vashe imia
. Janine’s class was immediately reassigned to another graduate student (who now had a double teaching load); for the rest of the year, all Janine was allowed to do was grade homework papers, using an answer key.

I thought a long time about Janine’s situation. Granted, “name” is a pretty common word in first-year language classes, so the teacher should probably know what gender it is. On the other hand, what we were really talking about here was a one-letter spelling mistake on an irregular noun. Who among us was safe from such a misstep?

As I was having these thoughts, UC Berkeley announced a search for an Uzbek language instructor—a clear gesture from
the “invisible hand.” I had had only one year of Uzbek language instruction, but the professor conducting the search—author of a famous semiotic study of suicide—said that if I took an intensive all-summer course in Uzbekistan, I could have the job. The director of the Stanford special-languages program also said I might be able to teach Uzbek at Stanford: either the Berkeley or the Stanford Uzbek class would count for my language teaching requirement. This seemed like a great idea to me, because who was going to refute my spelling of Uzbek words on the board? Nobody.

The only U.S.-accredited intensive immersion program in the Uzbek language was run by the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR) and cost seven thousand dollars. “I wonder why it’s so expensive,” I remember remarking to the Berkeley professor. “Airfare is a thousand dollars . . . and after that, you’d think the overhead in Uzbekistan would be pretty low.”

The semiotician counted off on three fingers: “One thousand for instruction, one thousand for room and board, and four thousand for the body bag to send you home.”

I got the seven thousand dollars, most of it from Stanford and the rest from the U.S. Department of State, but then came a new development. It suddenly turned out that the salary for the Berkeley job was paid by a government grant for which only native Uzbek speakers were eligible. Bizarrely, it also turned out that the director of the Stanford special-languages program had told the grant-awarding committee that I had
fabricated the entire conversation and e-mail exchange
in which she told me there was a possibility of my teaching Uzbek at Stanford. I still have the e-mail to this day. It says: “I would be delighted to have you teach Uzbek in the Special Languages Program.” “I never told that woman anything,” the special-languages director apparently told the grants committee.

I didn’t take the news too badly. Maybe, I reasoned, it was all for the best that I wasn’t being encouraged to run away to Uzbekistan with a four-thousand-dollar body bag, just because I was afraid of being caught by Alla in a spelling mistake. I made an appointment with the administrator in charge of Newly Independent States (NIS) region grants, to explain that I wanted to return the money. As I told her my story, the administrator’s expression grew more and more distant.

“This doesn’t look good,” she said finally. “You’re backing out of your research proposal just because you aren’t eligible for this particular job at Berkeley, this particular year?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t look good. I like you, Elif, and I want you to succeed. That’s why I’m telling you that, if you back out of your proposal now, the likelihood of this committee ever awarding you a grant again will be very small.”

Of all the circumstances that contributed to my ending up in Samarkand, this ultimatum was the most unexpected. Go to Uzbekistan now . . . or you will never get departmental funding ever again? My first instinct was to tell them exactly what they could do with their departmental funding. But three things changed my mind. First, departmental funding and departmental goodwill are really, in the cold light of reason, nothing to sneeze at. Second, I was at that time greatly under the sway of
The Portrait of a Lady
, a book in which one finds the following line: “Afterwards, however, she always remembered that one should never regret a generous error.” As a result I was constantly rethinking all my conservative decisions and amending them in favor of “generous errors,” a category which surely included going to Samarkand to learn the great Uzbek language. Third, I was unhappy in love and wanted to get some distance.

The plan backfired somewhat because one of the people I wanted to get some distance from, my college boyfriend Eric,
insisted on coming with me, for his own set of reasons (concern for my safety; his belief—accurate, as it turned out—that it would give us things to talk about later; and some obscure geopolitical ambitions that entailed a quest for total world knowledge). Despite myself, I was moved. I said I would ask what it would entail for him to come with me. As it turned out, it entailed almost nothing at all. Just a couple of hundred dollars added your significant other to your homestay arrangement, and even to your accidental death and dismemberment policy, which I received in the mail a few weeks later:

LIFE
: $25,000

TWO OR MORE MEMBERS
: $25,000

ONE MEMBER
: $25,000

THUMB AND INDEX FINGER
: $6,250

COMBINED MAXIMUM OF $50,000 FOR EMERGENCY OR MEDICAL REPATRIATION, OR REPATRIATION OF REMAINS.

REPATRIATION OF REMAINS: COVERED SERVICES INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, EXPENSES FOR EMBALMING, CREMATION, MINIMALLY NECESSARY CASKET FOR TRANSPORT AND TRANSPORTATION
.

“Orientation” took place in Washington, D.C., at a midrange hotel decorated completely in mauve. There were thirty-five students in the Russian Language and Area Studies program, thirty-three of them going to Russia.

At dinner the first night—“spring vegetable pasta” served at mauve tables in a mauve ballroom—we listened to an address by a linguistics professor who had invented a system of rating second-language proficiency. The genius of this system rested on the concept of rating second-language proficiency on a scale from one to four.