The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (29 page)

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?”