The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (31 page)

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.