The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (28 page)

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.