The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (20 page)

In the national mythology devised by the Soviets, Uzbek statehood was retroactively dated to the era of Timur (Tamerlane),
whose grave was located in Samarkand. The Timurids were declared to be the Uzbeks’ ancestors—even though, in real life, the people known as Uzbeks had been enemies of the Timurids. A statue of “Amir Timur” replaced the Karl Marx monument in the center of Tashkent; previously condemned by Marxists as a barbaric despot, Timur suddenly turned out to have understood all the forms of socioeconomic life: nomadic, agricultural, urban. He was declared to have been not only a military genius, but a great chess player, and even the inventor of a game called Perfect Chess, played on a 110-square board.

I was particularly intrigued by Perfect Chess, which reminded me both of Eric’s delirious ravings and of
The Knight’s Move
, a book by the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. In
The Knight’s Move
, Shklovsky proposes that the history of literature proceeds not in a straight line, but in a bent one, like the L-shaped path of a chess knight. The authors who influence one another are not always the ones you would expect: “the legacy is transmitted not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.” Furthermore, literary forms themselves grow by assimilating foreign or extraliterary material, veering off in new angles.

Shklovsky would probably have liked Perfect Chess, in which each player has, in addition to the standard pieces, two giraffes, two camels, two siege engines, and a vizier. The camel moves in a “stretched” knight’s move—one square diagonally and two squares forward—while a giraffe moves one square diagonally and at least three squares forward. The Soviet invention of an Uzbek national identity reminded me of the giraffe’s move, a move two steps further than anyone would normally think of. They assimilated the Timurids, circumnavigated Genghis Khan: the legacy twists and turns, passing from the great-uncle to the great-nephew of the one who sacked his palace.

As Amir Timur was declared the father of Uzbek statehood, so was the greatest Timurid poet, Mir Ali-Shir Navai (1441–1501), declared the father of Uzbek literature. Alisher Navoi, as he became known in Uzbek, was born and died in Herat, in present-day Afghanistan, and had previously been claimed as a shared patrimony by all of Chaghatay literary culture. The Soviets reclassified him, along with the Chaghatay language itself, as Old Uzbek. “Chaghataysm” was declared anti-Soviet. The term
Old Uzbek
gradually expanded to denote any human achievement that had ever taken place within the boundaries of the UzSSR, including the composition of Avicenna’s medical textbook and Al-Khorazmi’s treatise on algebra.

I learned many of these historical circumstances only later. They helped me understand the feeling I so often had, while studying Uzbek literature in Samarkand, of being a character in a Borges story, studying a literature invented by a secret cabal of academicians.

Every day for two hours, after my language class with Muzaffar, I studied “Old Uzbek” literature with Dilorom Salohiy, an assistant professor at Samarkand State University. Dilorom, who held doctoral degrees in both Russian and Uzbek literature, was a beautiful woman in her early forties, with high cheekbones, olive skin, and slightly Asiatic eyes outlined in kohl. She wore small gold hoop earrings and long silk dresses printed with tiny, amazingly variegated flowers. One dress had so many colors that I wrote them down in my notebook: brown, fuchsia, green, yellow, white, pink, purple, black, and orange-red. Unlike Muzaffar, Dilorom spoke perfect Russian, but she didn’t know any English at all. Her voice was soft and regretful, as if she were gently breaking you some terrible news.

Dilorom spoke in Uzbek most of the time, very slowly, often addressing me as
qizim
(“my girl,” “my daughter”). She didn’t like to speak Russian, and used it only as a last resort. Nonetheless, to my surprise, I understood most of what she said—or at least I understood something, continuously, most of the time she was talking. The Chaghatay texts we read together in class, on the other hand, were almost completely impenetrable. I recognized about three words in ten, which, due to the metaphorical style of the writing, wasn’t enough to get even the most basic gist. You would understand
man
,
snake
, and
evil
, and the poet could be talking about anything, from politics, to love, to snakes. At the end of each class, Dilorom loaned me a Russian or modern Uzbek translation to read at home. Sometimes the books seemed to confirm what she told me in class; other times, they seemed completely unrelated.

It was, furthermore, impossible to find any external confirmation of anything Dilorom told me simply by walking into a bookstore:
no Uzbek literature
was being printed in book form while I was there. The bookstores sold only romance and detective novels, Russian editions of
Windows for Dummies
, newspapers, and endless manuals about pregnancy and child-rearing. The state had recently declared the Uzbek birth rate to be in a crisis, and baby propaganda assailed you from all media outlets. One television commercial showed the spotlessly clean free maternity clinics open to all those who fulfilled their civic duty of procreation. Rosy babies lolled beatifically in individual glass basins. The resemblance of these basins to casserole dishes was accentuated by the maternity nurses’ white aprons and tall white hats, which resembled chef’s hats. This commercial always made me think of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”

•  •  •

As nineteenth-century British people considered Napoleon to be Satan incarnate, so did Dilorom consider Genghis Khan to be the superhuman nemesis of the Uzbek people, the wrecker of the “First Uzbek Renaissance” embodied by the achievements of Avicenna and Al-Biruni. Shaking her head sorrowfully, she told me that Genghis Khan not only rode a bull, but he didn’t wear any pants. She said that God should forgive her for mentioning such things to me, “but he didn’t wear any pants.” Because the Mongols were too ignorant to make swords, they carried wooden sticks. In Samarkand, scholars were drinking tea from special porcelain teacups that rang different musical tones when you tapped them with a spoon. Genghis Khan destroyed every single one of these teacups, the secret of whose craftsmanship has been lost forever.

“In English we have an expression: ‘like a bull in a china shop,’ ” I remarked.

“That’s how Genghis Khan was—but even worse. He destroyed not a shop, but a whole civilization.”

Timur was the opposite of Genghis Khan. The Mongols destroyed eleven centuries in 130 years; but Timur rebuilt it all in seventy years. This “Second Uzbek Renaissance” reached its fullest expression in the lifetime of Alisher Navoi. At the time of Navoi’s birth, the people of Turkestan were already telling time using a chest from which a doll would emerge every hour. In Europe, people were still using the hourglass: a “sand clock.” Only the Turks had clockwork, which they used to make an escalator that lifted the king onto his throne every morning.

Navoi lived for four years in Samarkand: a city so deeply imbued with poetry that even the doctors wrote their medical treatises in verse. But before Navoi himself transformed the Old Uzbek vernacular into a literary language, all of this poetry was written in Persian. In his
Muhakamat al-lughatayn
, or
Judgment of Two Languages
(1499), Navoi mathematically
proved the superiority to Persian of Old Uzbek, a language so rich that it had words for seventy different species of duck. Persian just had
duck
. Impoverished Persian writers had no words with which to differentiate between a burr and a thorn; older and younger sisters; male, female, and infant boars; hunting and fowling; a beauty mark on a woman’s face and a beauty mark somewhere else; deer and elands; being adorned and being
really
adorned; drinking something down all at once in a refined way, and drinking slowly while savoring each drop.

Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound
hay hay
. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.

It was all just like a Borges story—except that Borges stories are always so short, whereas life in Samarkand kept dragging obscurely on and on. In Borges, the different peculiar languages yield up, in a matter of pages, some kind of interesting philosophical import: the languages of the northern hemisphere of Tlön have no nouns, a circumstance that immediately turns out to represent an extreme of Berkeleyan idealism whereby the world is perceived as a sequence of shifting shapes; the Chinese encyclopedia has different words for animals drawn with a fine camel’s-hair brush and animals who have just broken a flower vase, which dramatizes the impossibility of devising any objective system of classifying knowledge.

By contrast, whatever it was that you learned about Uzbeks when you studied their language, it was something long and difficult to fathom. What did you know about Uzbekistan once you learned that Old Uzbek had a hundred different words for crying? I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem to bode well for my summer vacation.

The earliest texts composed in the Turkic vernacular, Dilorom said, were fables and didactic maxims. Of the fables, I particularly remember the tale of the deer and the hammam. One day, the story goes, the deer went to the hammam. Afterward he felt so clean and comfortable that he lay down for a nap in a cool, muddy spot under some trees. He woke up and went to visit his friends, not realizing that he was covered in mud.

“Where are you coming from?” his friends asked. “From the hammam,” the deer replied.

“Can you guess the moral of this story?” Dilorom asked me.

I thought it over. “You can’t tell where someone comes from just by looking at them?”

Dilorom shook her head, smiling sadly. “No,
qizim
, the moral is this: Don’t resemble that deer!”

The greatest Old Uzbek didactic writer was the twelfth-century poet Adib Akhmad Yugnakiy. Yugnakiy, who suffered from congenital blindness, demonstrated in numerous ways his preternatural poetic vision—for instance, by molding a cooked bean into the shape of a ram, an animal he had never seen before. “A
ram
,” Dilorom repeated, and drew in my notebook a picture of a bean, followed by a picture of a ram. The ram had a mild, sickly countenance and huge curved horns. Who was the true genius: Yugnakiy or the nameless
one who first saw a bean mashed up by a blind poet and called it
ram
?

Dilorom told me, and I wrote in my notebook, that five copies of Yugnakiy’s masterpiece,
The Gift of Reality
, had reached our era. They were discovered in 1915 by a Turkish scholar named Najib Osim. “Osim” didn’t sound to me like a Turkish name—it violates vowel harmony—but I later found out that Turkish people call him Necip Asim “Yaziksiz” (“the Merciless”). Turkish people refer to Adib Akhmad Yugnakiy as Edip Ahmet Yükneki; they call his book not
Xibatul Xaqoyiq
, but
Atabetü’l Hakayik
. Their name for the language it’s written in isn’t Old Uzbek, but Hakaniye Turkish, or “the King’s Uighur.” Despite these discrepancies, I was relieved to learn that “Yugnakiy” corresponded to something in the consensus view of reality.

“
Mana, qizim
—here is a precious, rare thing, a very old book,” Dilorom said, reverently handing me a 1962 Soviet edition of the
Xibatul
in modern Uzbek translation. It was printed on newsprint and bound with yellowing glue. (Yugnakiy had been reprinted in a large edition under the Soviets, because he wrote about the dangers of wealth.) “This is a very precious, rare thing, but I will let you bring it home and read it tonight because I know you love books, and I know you will take good care of it.” As homework that night, I translated some of Yugnakiy’s maxims into Russian.

The world holds in one hand honey; in the other, poison. One hand feeds you honey, and the other—poisons you.

 

When you taste something sweet, consider it bitter. When the road seems easy, then come tens of difficulties. Hey, dreamer, so you want grief and ease: but when will hope achieve itself?

 

This world is like a snake: first it looks soft, but then it looks like a bitter draught. Even if the snake has a nice, soft appearance, nonetheless it has a bad character. Precisely when the snake appears to be very soft, that is when you should run away from it.

Dilorom, looking over my translations the next day, said that they were too literal. “You should think more about the meaning and less about the words,” she advised me.

The most popular fourteenth-century literary genre, sometimes composed in Old Uzbek, was epistolary poetry. Poems during this period took the form of love letters between nightingales and sheep, between opium and wine, between red and green. One poet wrote to a girl that he had tried to drink a lake so he could swallow her reflection: this girl was cleaner than water. “Most people, like you and me, are dirtier than water,” Dilorom explained. “That’s why we take baths to get clean. But this girl is cleaner than water. If she puts her arm in the water, maybe the water will become cleaner.”

Another poet compared his beloved’s upper-lip hairs to the feathers of a parrot feeding a pistachio to the beloved’s lips. To help me appreciate the richness of this poetic image, Dilorom drew a picture of it in my notebook. It was terrifying.