by Frank Wynne
We go through the graveyard gate. The village turns in on itself, smells of fir and fern, chrysanthemums and trickling tangles.
Ahead of the steps I take, walks little Sepp.
The village is black. The clouds are black damask.
Grandmother rattles the wreath with the small white stones. Mother crushes my fingers in her hand.
Father is our dead soul. Today is Father’s feast day and so he dances past the village.
Mother’s suspender belt cuts deep into her hips. In the oppressive tango, Father presses his thighs against a cloud of black damask.
THE STONE GUEST
Hamid Ismailov
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Hamid Ismailov (1954–) was born in 1954 in Kyrgyzstan. Ismailov moved to Uzbekistan as a young man. He writes both in Russian and Uzbek and his novels and poetry have been translated into many European languages, including German, French and Spanish. In 1994 he was forced to flee to the UK because of his “unacceptable democratic tendencies”. He now works for the BBC World Service. The Railway was his first novel to be published in English in 2006, followed by A Poet and Bin-Laden in 2012. His work is still banned in Uzbekistan today. The Uzbek secret service, on reading a lightly fictionalised account of a savage police beating in one of Ismailov’s novels, contacted him through an intermediary and, concerned about accuracy but not about reputation, corrected some of the bloody details.
Suhrob Surataliyev’s friends used to tease him by calling him Zurab Tsereteli. Suhrob was a sculptor by trade, but he was somewhat less of a household name than the popular Tsereteli, whose oversized monuments loomed over so many Moscow squares. Our sculptor Suhrob, instead, was a serious artist, and quite well-respected among the elite of Moscow’s art community. It had been forty or more years since Suhrob had come to Moscow, so he often imagined he was a child of this metropolis, forgetting that he had in fact been born on the banks of Andijan’s fetid Kutan canal in provincial Uzbekistan. He felt as if the clay of his own statue, so to speak, had been gathered from this land, not that one.
Virtually all fine art is premised on building and adding on, but the art of sculpture, as the great sculptor Michelangelo taught, consists of nothing but carving out and discarding. He once famously said that his David had always been there in the marble, and his job was solely to chip away everything unnecessary. Step by step, I think, that kind of habit works its way into you: this carving-out and discarding seems to seep into your very life, and you start to look at everything from this point of view, with a critical eye. What is empty or incidental or useless has no place in your heart, and you find yourself always striving to reach the essence of things, the stone at the center, the very core of things. Well, some people are just built that way, aren’t they?
Our Suhrob took that approach, and because of that, some of his acquaintances would have characterized him as an arrogant, crude man, while only those very few close to him knew that was only true superficially.
But come with me, please, and let’s take a closer look ourselves, remaining faithful to Michelangelo’s rule within this story of ours. We will shun the useless side roads and delve straight to the heart of the matter.
Recently, aside from all the other immigrants here, poverty-stricken Uzbeks and Tajiks, Kyrgyz and Azeris, have been leaving their hopelessly poor homelands and converging in hordes on Moscow. Back in Soviet times you would have found them only out at Kazan Station or the big exhibition grounds on the outskirts of the city. But one time back then, during intermission at the Kremlin ballet, Suhrob spotted a collective farm worker, a real hick-from-the-sticks, conspicuous among the crowd, and the sight of him cast Suhrob the sculptor, far into that night, deep into a state of shock. He was so overwhelmed by feeling that he was moved to create his masterpiece, the Gir’ya, his very own Uzbek Pietà. In that sculpture, over a Jesus just taken down from the cross, there hovered his mother the Virgin Mary and his beloved Mary Magdalene, weeping, and both of them were now the very image of Uzbek village women, crafted as if from the purest white bread dough; and there, just a bit removed from the mourning women, that same collective farm worker stood sentinel.
But now people straight from villages in the old country were crowding in everywhere in heaps, they squeezed into corners and swarmed like ants, they peeped out of every small house and apartment building in Moscow, and Suhrob the sculptor felt lost for a time. Perhaps an uncommon sort of jealousy stirred awake in his heart, but Suhrob, who once took pride in being one of those rare people who claimed both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane as their ancestors, now started to feel like a worthless, worn-out old penny. Now he was a little embarrassed to call himself an Uzbek or to put on his golden duppi to go to a party or a banquet.
What’s more, Suhrob’s enlightened and refined friends, as they complained of their daily troubles, naturally would turn to Suhrob when they whined about all these people flooding through the city’s open gates, as they put it, as if to say, “You’re one of us, after all,” expecting Suhrob to sympathize. That kind of thing tended to make Suhrob a bit hot under the collar. At home he used to take all his bitterness and anger out on his gentle Russian wife, his Mashenka.
“Look,” Suhrob would say, raging, “It’s not as if they came here for a laugh! If life was so great in their homeland they would never have thrown out their families and left their warm homes, tossed out the fruit and come to this freezing weather, to live like filthy dogs! The other day I read in the newspaper that the apartment-block basements are lined with cardboard boxes, it said they’re living there in the hundreds. In another place a Russian sold his house, and he sold along with it four hens, two geese, and all sorts of old household junk, plus an Uzbek servant. Can you imagine? It’s the twenty-first century, you know?!”
Poor Masha could only shake her head, but the truth was that when the sculptor was angry no blood flowed to his brain, only his fist; so into that fist he would take a chunk of plaster, or failing that a pulp of raw bread dough, and set to work passionately kneading it, putting out all kinds of shapes known only to himself and his wrath.
Suhrob the sculptor simply got down to work. But I feel obliged to remind you, now, of this rule of Michelangelo’s. Please do not use your imagination to put the pieces together and deduce that Suhrob was some sort of patriot, thinking only of his homeland and the people in it. His Uzbekness, I must say, did not go much deeper than the way he wore his golden duppi on his head once each year, and the way he placed before each guest who visited his studio a ceramic dish of raisins atop a tablecloth of embroidered silk. If you need more proof than that, consider, please, a letter he once wrote me in what you might generously call Uzbek, an excerpt of which I humbly submit here.
“Salamalaykum my friend! Those things about Toir, the artistes that I know they have the same problem. Maybe to combine them with Rashidov regimen. Just now the words of the deceased Konchalovsky, they are hitting my memory: the artistes, they can not to take part in big lyings. Otherways, how great may they be?”
God knows I do not bring this up to mock him—I only want to show you what I mean. In any case, Suhrob’s Uzbekness had been shrinking and shrinking in his almost half a century of Moscow life, even to the point, as I mentioned before, that he had practically been renamed Zurab Tsereteli.
But now let’s extricate ourselves from this short preface, and get to the story itself.
One winter day, Suhrob was working at his studio on Kievskaya Naberezhnaya when the telephone rang. Fortune had it that it was his wife Masha.
“Is everything all right?” she asked. “Just now somebody called from your old village and asked for you. I told him you’d be back this evening, and he asked whether you had a cell phone, because he had something important to discuss with you,” she reported. “He’s going to call again in five minutes, so I’m calling to ask you what I should say.”
To tell the truth, Suhrob wasn’t actually working on anything very importa
nt at the time, but he still didn’t like being distracted at work, usually.
“Who was it who called? Did you ask his name?” he asked.
Masha replied with her usual kindness. “No, it didn’t occur to me. But he’s just about to call again, so I’ll ask then. Is everything all right there?” she asked her husband again.
“Well, if you really want to know, you’re the one who talked with him, not me, so would I know if everything was all right there, or would you?” demanded Suhrob.
“No, just asking, I’m worried,” Masha answered, to which Suhrob replied,
“If he calls, you can give him the number at the studio. But don’t tell him it’s the number at the studio. Say I’m out somewhere and give him the number,” he told her.
After that conversation, all the bits and pieces of things he had been working on seemed to have slipped from his fingers. Suhrob, lost in thought, took a few black raisins from the ceramic dish on the embroidered tablecloth. Who was he, the man who had called? Who was even left in that village? His mother had died when he was a child, and after his father was released from prison, he took a new wife, and they had two or three children together. Suhrob had grown up and served his time in the military, then left for good for Moscow to study and live there. He learned from his stepmother’s letters that his father was later arrested again and disappeared somewhere in the system. But at one point he stopped receiving news from his stepmother about herself or his younger stepbrother and stepsisters. Just like water dries up from the canals in the summertime, the letters also broke off, and Suhrob never did return to his old village, and nobody from there ever appeared to inquire about him.
But now there had been this phone call …
These shapeless thoughts had his heart beating full and heavy, and then the telephone rang, once, a local call.
“Hello!” Suhrob’s voice was a bit gruffer than usual.
“Get me Suhrob-aka!” There was nothing Russian in the pronunciation of the voice barking out the order.
Suhrob kept silent for a moment, and not because he was pretending somebody was calling him to the telephone; that unrefined voice had thrown him a bit off balance. But finally, he answered, “Yes, this is he,” and then forged ahead. “And who is this?” he asked, answering rudeness with rudeness.
The voice on the telephone instantly grew warmer. “Salamalaykum, Uncle! This is your nephew Sangin. Your sister Farrah’s youngest son.”
“Mine sister Farrah’s?” interrupted Suhrob, in his awkward Uzbek. “Who …”
“Well when you were kids you called her Faya. Her son.”
“Ah, yes, Faya … Yes, I know. Where you are?”
“OK, so we came to Moscow to work, right, and the FMS grabbed us, the cops are after us, saying we don’t have any papers. You gotta tell them, you have to prove, right, that I’m your nephew.”
“Where you are right now?”
“Hold on, this jerkoff here wants to talk to you.”
Suhrob was relieved to hear some sort of captain’s voice come on the line, in Russian.
After a bit of questioning he learned that this nephew of his, Sangin, along with another friend from back home, had been stopped by Federal Migration Service officers in an outdoor market without the proper identification documents. Since they had no money to pay the fine, they were being subjected to administrative detention and were then to be sent home. Sangin had apparently announced he had come to see a highly respectable relative, and offered up Suhrob’s name from a scrap of paper he had kept tucked safely away. The officer wanted to check, just in case.
“If you accept full responsibility for these kids, we are prepared to let them go. But you will have to come to the station to fetch them,” the officer finished up. And whether obeying this order or out of some other sort of enthusiasm, ten seconds later Suhrob was rushing to the Kievskaya metro station, to ride out to Altufyevo on the very outskirts of the city, to pluck from jail a nephew he had never met.
Ordinarily Suhrob avoided taking the Metro to the Moscow city limits. The subway system was none too safe, lately, for Uzbeks. No, with his gray hair, Suhrob had never had any serious problems with the riff-raff and skinheads, but he was sometimes taken for a Georgian or a Chechen, and people would casually swear at him, or the younger ones would call him Bin Laden.
This time, maybe due to the bitter Moscow cold that night, he rode the train all the way to Altufyevo without incident. The handful of young drunks fooling around didn’t even give him a glance. Up he went and came out at ground level, where snow was falling softly down and down, as if the very greatest sculptor of all had been heedlessly flinging white plaster dust over all the bits and pieces of creation.
Suhrob asked the way from a snow-covered old woman walking by, and when he entered the FMS room at the police station, he saw two skinny young men sitting there, wearing cotton knit tracksuits here in the depths of winter, squeezed into a corner in front of a police officer. In a single glance with his discerning eyes, Suhrob recognized the form and figure of his own father in the one on the left. The boy’s face suddenly brightened, and up he leapt into Suhrob’s embrace.
“Uncle, Uncle, look what this asshole tried to do! You’ve rescued us, Uncle!!”
One hour later, after all the bits and pieces had been entered into the computer and a statement had been signed, those two young men, Suhrob’s kin and countrymen, were in his own home. His Mashenka was flummoxed by the sight of them wearing only their tracksuits against the harsh winter cold. She was a mother, after all, so she gave them warm coats and bustled about making tea; but as the cold started to melt off their bodies, unwashed for months, a putrid smell began to spread, and poor Masha’s sensitive sentiments were overwhelmed. Suhrob quickly felt the same. What I mean is that Suhrob shared Masha’s kind feelings, but he also could not ignore the terrible stink of the young men’s horselike sweat.
Perhaps the sculptor’s heart had been hardened by too much stonework, or perhaps it simply had no room for silly sentimentalities, and so finally Suhrob spoke up, in his clumsy Uzbek again.
“Your tea, are you all done? Here, put on these coats, we will go,” he told the boys, hoping to hurry them along. “I take you somewhere for the night. We discuss everything in the morning.”
That same evening, Suhrob took his nephew and his friend to his studio, and put two benches together for a bed, and a wool rug from off the ground over them for a quilt, and then he took the very last metro home at one o’clock in the morning. Masha wasn’t asleep yet, having waited up for his arrival.
Another time I might have told you in great detail about the bitter conversation that took place between them, and how Suhrob’s troublesome thoughts kept him tossing to and fro all night long, but there is this law hanging around my neck like a noose: the sculptor’s method demands that I not let the small bits and pieces distract me on my bumpy-thumpy road.
The next morning, groggy from lack of sleep, Suhrob finally woke up in the wintry weather, and once he made his way to his studio he entered it with a clear mind. He entered, and that clarity vanished completely: those two good-for-nothings had turned the whole place upside down! Maybe they had been looking for another quilt last night or for a samovar for this morning’s tea—but no matter. Books had been tossed into the outstretched arms of some statues, and other statues’ heads were crammed onto bookshelves, and as if that weren’t enough, the ceramic dish lay on the embroidered tablecloth broken in four pieces, mixed with a scattering of black raisins. And this is only what I can see through Suhrob’s eyes, leaving aside the hellish smell, and the sound of their shameless snoring.
And then an insult that was left over from his adolescence sprang to Suhrob’s mind and tongue, and he had a strange, irrepressible urge to say something like “Motherfuckers!” But when he stormed over to the corner where those two soundly sleeping small bodies lay he mixed up his Uzbek insults, and instead of “motherfuckers” he ended up with, “Hey, you whoresluts, g
et up!”
It came out quite pitifully. His voice was hoarse and tight with excitement, and he was screaming like some sort of madman. “You still lie there in your shits!?” he shouted, another mixed-up echo from his childhood.
The two boneheads turned over unwillingly, slowly. “The fuck you yelling for, asshole? What?” said one, and rolled over to go back to sleep.
At that Suhrob grabbed the coats covering the two of them with both hands and pulled them away. “Get up, motherfuckers!” he finally yelled.
Shuddering from the cold, the two tried to wipe the sleep from their eyes. “Damn, what’s with you, old man, talking like that?” they asked, standing up.
“Here is two thousand for you. Go to Kazan Station and go home!”
The two of them seemed to relax at the sight of the money. “OK, old man. Hey, got any clothes?”
“Go! Get out!”
And so Suhrob, having offered them not a drop of tea, and after finding two good Scottish sweaters to thrust upon them on top of the money in their hands, and seeing them straight to the door, and shutting the door behind them, found himself alone. And right away he got to thinking. Had he done the right thing? Who knows? What was done was done. Maybe he should have kept in touch with his friends back home, or sent them presents once in a while …
The day was already ruined. And what remained of it did not look too promising. Suhrob busied himself cleaning up the mess they had left behind, trying to put his studio back in order, filing the books neatly back on their shelves, wiping up plaster dust, and gluing the four ceramic pieces back together—and as a result ending up with five where once there had been four. But wasn’t his heart broken in teeny-tiny pieces, too?
He was secretly blaming his own meanness; it was eating him up inside. The telephone rang. He picked it up, and it was his nephew Sangin.
“You’re gonna be pissed, Uncle,” he said, “But there’s no fucking train tickets. These guys here say there’s a plane. They say they can set us up, OK? But we need some more cash. So now what, Uncle?”
