The sufferings Qantak endured gave her a swollen goitre the following winter, and she developed a cough which she could not shake. G’ozi-xo’ja managed to get some deergrass to make an extract, which he gave her to drink. But nothing was of any use: by spring Qantak had departed this treacherous world, leaving behind five motherless children. There was a great deal of mourning and lamenting. The eldest daughter became her father’s sole support, a substitute mother to her siblings. Oyxon had been embroidering ten skull-caps a week; now she had to embroider twenty. Her doe-like eyes became as sharp as a blade and she herself as quick and nimble as a panther. She bathed, fed, nursed and taught the children, attending, also, to her prematurely aged father: her voice became as sweet as honey served in porcelain.
Her cousin Qosim was the first to notice the changes in her. He would come to Shahrixon to help his uncle’s family tend the vegetable plot. This time, with his uncle’s blessing, he put off going home, instead finding more jobs to do around the house: repairing shoes, patching up the mud-brick wall, setting up the bread-baking oven – there was no lack of things to do – any excuse to stay on.
G’ozi-xo’ja’s children grew fond of Qosim and lent a hand when he was working, or clung to his side and begged him to make them a clay toy. One of the girls – the youngest but one – insisted that she would be his wife when she grew up. Only Oyxon was reserved in her cousin’s presence, doing no more than what duty obliged of her: preparing tea, serving dinner, making up a spare bed on the floor.
At the beginning of spring, when everything else had been taken care of, Qosim stayed on to remove the winter covering from the vines and tie them to their stakes. He was so carried away by his task that he failed to accompany the elderly G’ozi-xo’ja, as he had intended, on his way to pay respects at the graves of the holy men in Eski-Novqat. At the time, Oyxon’s two younger sisters were staying with a neighbour to study more advanced reading and writing. The older boy was with his father; only the youngest, Nozim, was still at home. And, early in the morning, Nozim was still asleep.
Qosim fixed the loose cross-ties on the vine stakes and drove in new ones, before starting to rake over the dry reeds. He lifted the reeds carefully and saw that mercifully the frost hadn’t got at the vines: they could be tied to the stakes. The vine buds were already about to burst open: any day now the green shoots would break through.
‘Your good health, cousin!’ Oyxon greeted him, spreading a cloth on the ground and laying some flatbread on it. ‘Come and have some tea!’
‘As you wish,’ he replied. He moved to where she had laid out breakfast. Watching the girl get up to return to the house, her slender figure supple as a vine, he surprised himself by calling out, ‘I need your help!’
Oyxon looked around. ‘What for, cousin?’
She said the word ‘cousin’ so gently that Qosim couldn’t help missing a breath at the implications. He could barely whisper: ‘Would you mind holding the ladder? The crossbeams on the stakes are too thin, and I need to tie the vine branches firmly…’
Oyxon spun round to face him. ‘As you wish…’
The tea was left undrunk. His hands trembling with excitement, his breath quickening, Qosim picked up the ladder which lay near the vineyard and placed it against a strong supporting pillar. ‘If you hold it from this side, I’ll have the branches tied to the crossbeams in no time,’ he said.
Oyxon tensed her slim figure and gripped the ladder with all her strength. Imagining himself a tightrope walker, Qosim flew effortlessly up to the top. The spring breeze tickled his cheeks and hair; he felt he was flying not just over the vineyard, but the expanse of the whole world.
He used the reeds he had prepared to tie one branch and then another, but the third proved intractable, and had bent too far out. Qosim leaned out towards it, and while he swung out in one direction, the ladder went the other way: there was a high-pitched shriek and this time Qosim really did fly, only downwards, all the way to the ground.
‘Help!’ Oyxon cried as she rushed up to him and slapped his face, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him to see if there were any signs of life. A torrent of tears bathed Qosim’s face, but when her grieving lips touched his sweaty brow, a groan escaped the young man’s throat. Gripped by fear for what she had done, the girl cried out.
‘I saw it, I saw it, I saw the kiss,’ a small voice threatened her.
That night, putting Nozim to bed next to her, she stroked his head and whispered in a conspiratorial tone, ‘Don’t tell anyone what you saw this morning.’
Qosim was in bed in the next room. His entire body ached from the bruising, but his heart was intoxicated, like new green shoots in the wind.
At some point in the night, Abdulla raised himself up, dragged himself to a corner and slumped onto a black shape there. His body ached, but for some reason he felt at ease. How could that be?
—
Whether because Nozim had let slip the secret after all, or because G’ozi-xo’ja had spoken to his relatives in Eski-Novqat in the course of his brief pilgrimage, Qosim left for home as soon as he was able to. In the afternoon, G’ozi-xo’ja summoned his eldest daughter, intending to disclose his heart’s secret desire: to do so, he went back all the way to Adam and Eve, alluding to every Old Testament story there was.
‘Qosim is a good lad. He’s hard-working, good in the garden and the orchard, and he knows how to build things. Look at the extra space he built in our yard. He’s educated, too: his father has plans for him to study further in the Kokand madrasa. But I’m old now, my eyes don’t see as well as they used to, my hands have lost their strength, and I’ve lost my better half: there’s nobody to help run the household. If only your mother could have seen how you’ve grown up.’
Oyxon didn’t understand all this beating around the bush. At first she thought her father was rebuking her; she wept: ‘Father, forgive your unhappy daughter. It’s my fault, I’ve haven’t looked after you well. I’ve been too busy all the time, embroidering, or cooking, or laundering. I’ll give you more of my attention now. I can see I didn’t learn much from my mother…’
‘No, daughter, don’t talk like that: you’ve been both mother and father in this house, while I’ve been an old fool to express myself so badly. In the Qur’an, in the Surat Al-Hujur’at it says “O people! Verily, we have created you men and women, we have made you nations and tribes, so that you should know one another…” Marriage between a man and a woman is a directive of the Prophet: you’ve reached the marriageable age, so I have decided…’
Oyxon’s trembling lips didn’t dare form the response, ‘As you command!’ She merely nodded and bowed her head.
At the end of spring it was decided that Oyxon and her young brothers would stay for a week with their uncle in Eski-Novqat. Qosim came in his cart to fetch them. At dawn, after morning prayers and their father’s blessing, they set off. The cart had three thick rugs spread over a bed of reeds and hay. They jolted along a road, and towards noon they reached a Kyrgyz village. Here they broke for refreshment and, getting back into the cart after a bowl of real, icy Kyrgyz kumys both Oyxon’s brothers fell into a deep, sated sleep. The road passed through foothills, then mountains, following the course of a rushing stream. Sitting up front to drive the horses, Qosim broke the silence, speaking as if to himself:
‘How fresh the mountain breeze is!’ It could have been a question, or an exclamation by someone whose soul was brimming over with emotion.
Since the road they were travelling along was deserted, Oyxon removed her horse-hair veil, and, weary of the prolonged silence, responded: ‘Yes, the spring air is special, it’s different somehow…’
‘That’s what I felt when I was at the top of the ladder, standing over the vineyard.’ Qosim said quite without thinking, and immediately bit his tongue, for he could sense, even without turning round, that Oyxon’s heavy silence was one of embarrassment.
‘I was so clumsy,’ she apologised, ‘I couldn’t hold the ladder up…’
Qosim had the sense to change the subject: ‘Somehow, these mountains always make me want to sing.’
The bright greenery of the hills, the roar of the clear mountain torrent beneath them, the icy air and the aftereffect of the kumys combined to relax Oxyon’s guard: she nodded in agreement and added, overcome by reticence, ‘Perhaps you’ll sing something, cousin?’
Qosim didn’t wait to be asked twice. He filled his lungs, swelled his chest and began to sing:
Let the morning breeze hear my plea
Let the morning breeze hear my plea
Her eyes bright as Venus, her hair wild and free
The grace of a cypress, brows black as can be!
Let my prayers be heard by this shimmering beauty.
She vanished from me like some mischievous fairy
And left me to live with nothing but misery.
We made to each other an unbreakable vow
So if one of us breaks it, it’s in God’s hands now.
The young man’s voice rose higher and higher, as if competing with the winds that blew over the peaks. The high notes made his voice resonate, and the girl could not stop herself from quietly joining in.
They joined forces for a second song. Oyxon’s voice sounded less constrained in the open air. When Qosim sensed this change, he broke off and insisted jokingly, ‘Now let’s hear you, cousin Oyxon!’
She cast a glance at her brothers: seeing that they were still fast asleep, tipsy from the kumys, she sang verses which Qosim had never heard before.
If my voice starts to quaver, let strength come into it
If the flower is half-coloured, let blood fill it up.
If tears overwhelm me, flowing night and day
And Venus burns my eye, let the sun rise with a sigh.
The girl’s voice was as full of tenderness and shyness as the red poppies on the mountain slopes, as nimble and youthful as a vine, and as strong as the intoxicating sap of the earth. Apparently guessing what Qosim was thinking, Oyxon suddenly started singing sotto voce:
Though someone sets the ladder, don’t brush muck from the roof:
Let the leaves drop in autumn, or let your gardener lend a hand.
Every beat of his heart clearly confirmed to Qosim the authorship of this verse.
When you look at me, it means death in two worlds.
If I come alive in one, I die in the other.
Qosim nearly dropped the reins. Looking behind him, he saw that the evening sun, setting over the humped peaks, shone on the girl’s unveiled face, and that face seemed to him like a moon, shining desperately in the glare of the sun.
I tried to nail down today, and fix it forever
But it rips my heart – let it go now in peace.
Those words should have been sung by Qosim, not by her. The sun had half disappeared behind a mountain, leaving only a dim semi-circle behind. The girl seemed also to have waned, and she finished her song in a barely audible voice:
If my heart is full of holes, patched with repairs –
Let the sky be like Oyxon, and the breeze fly the kite.
The warmth of the sun and the song’s emotions kept the young people from feeling the chill now in the air, as they climbed onto the alpine pastures. Qosim recited the fourth prayer of the day crouching in a yurt, while a young Kyrgyz fed their horses. They took another young man along as a guide and set off again, so as to arrive before darkness fell. ‘There’s one small pass we still have to climb,’ said Qosim, translating for Oyxon and the children what his Kyrgyz friend had said. Oyxon found the pass terrifying. The road climbed very steeply, the horses fought for breath as they pulled the cart; Qosim and the young Kyrgyz dismounted, took the horses by the bridles and began pulling them up, while a third helper pushed the cart from behind.
As Oyxon had predicted in her song, the sun dropped behind the mountain and then seemed to freeze for a while. It couldn’t set fully, for their cart was climbing higher and higher, chasing the sun. Qosim pressed on as fast as he could, as if trying to hold back the sun, so that it would light up his cousin’s radiant face for longer, though that face was now concealed by the horse-hair veil. Wrapped in her black garments, Oyxon hunched fearfully. When they reached the top of the pass, the young man again felt the same soaring feeling that he had experienced in the vineyard. ‘Oh God, don’t let the cart collapse now as the ladder did then,’ he thought with a shudder, spitting for luck on his damp chest under his shirt. The mountain peak was still sunlit, but the first shadows of darkness had fallen over the lush valleys which flanked the pass.
Who knows what terrified Oyxon most, the descent from these mountains, or the start of the journey, but it was already getting dark when they reached a place where the numerous rivulets of a mountain torrent streamed everywhere like a young girl’s braids. It took only another hour to reach Eski-Novqat, where the magnificent night sky glimmered with stars.
Oyxon was never as happy as she was in the week she spent there.
But less than a month later her father’s humble house was pestered by Umar’s matchmakers, and by the end of summer Oyxon found herself the third wife in the Emir’s harem: caught in a palace, like a bird in a golden cage.
After filling his mind with these thoughts, Abdulla could not tell what he was groaning over: whether it was the pain of young Qosim’s fall – not just off the ladder, or the mountain pass, but from the star-spangled heavens – or Oyxon’s agonised heart, which was reflected in the eyes of Abdulla’s children, standing aghast in the snow as he was taken away. Where was he? What was going on in this world, in this endless darkness? Was there anything other than pain?
Dropping down behind the mountains, the sun suddenly fell away, like five sunset-coloured oranges, and Abdulla fell into an oblivious sleep.
—
In the morning the prison door scraped open. Opening his eyes to see the duty soldier, who had brought him a bowl of gruel and a mug of tea, it took Abdulla a few moments to recall where he was. The first time you wake up in a prison is unique. Abdulla could never forget it. At night, as you fall into a heavy, dreamless slumber, you feel you are in prison, but in the morning, when you wake up, your first thought is: might yesterday’s nightmare have been merely a dream? And then you realise that it was neither a dream nor a nightmare, and that you really are in prison. You realise that on the night of 31 December, three men really had burst into your house, called in the neighbours as witnesses, started searching the premises, handcuffed you while your Rahbar and your children, who ran out in the snow in their night clothes, wept. ‘Pick me up,’ said Ma’sud, who was used to being held. ‘Daddy!’ he called, stretching his hands out to his handcuffed father.
It was true: he had been beaten and kicked. Even raising himself up to a sitting position, Abdulla’s body ached so much that he stretched out again where he had lain. No, what next? He’d missed his morning prayers: he must gently get to his feet, shuffle over to the water bucket in the corner, wash his face, hands and feet, and recite – however late – the morning prayer. Fighting his pain, Abdulla got up, washed, then went back to bed where – not knowing which direction Mecca was – he prayed facing the wall. He couldn’t stomach the bowl of gruel, but took a sip of the bitter tea.
The tea sent his thoughts down another circuitous path.
It occurred to him that these walls might possibly be housing the scholar G’ozi Yunus, the teacher Fitrat, perhaps, even Cho’lpon, yes, perhaps. Hadn’t Cho’lpon written about a girl singing in a cart: who could portray Shahrixon and Eski-Novqat better than Cho’lpon, a native of the region? Abdulla longed to see him. There was an enormous amount to talk about, all stored up in his mind. How likely was it that their paths would cross here? Could he tell Cho’lpon about his wife’s troubles? The first day in prison is
always peculiar. Abdulla’s mind was constantly alert, listening to every scrabbling sound on the other side of the door. But for a very long time nothing happened. This dullness made him return to his idle, pointless thoughts. Again, you remember things; again, your soul is ground down between the heavy millstones of the mind. And all that results are conjectures. Guesses turn to dust if you blow on them.
—
It was like a heavy stone. But wasn’t the first time Oyxon awoke in her golden cage a hundred times worse? The girl had been raped, yet in the morning she came out to greet everyone – bowing to her own father G’ozi-xo’ja, and smiling at the other women, the aunts and wives of the Emir, the Emir who had raped her and left her with cramps in her throat and stomach. Momentarily pierced by the idea of this pain, Abdulla forgot his own grievances and directed his thoughts to the name of Allah.
The Devils' Dance Page 3
