The Devils' Dance

by Hamid Ismailov

  ‘On the first day of Ramadan, the vizier told the Englishman, “The Emir wants to see you; go on foot, past the fortress to the Registon public square.” Stoddart said, “I don’t go on foot to see my Queen, so why should I go on foot to see your Emir?” He set of for the Registon on horseback. The Emir had just emerged from the mosque when he was met with the sight of a European on horseback and in uniform saluting him.

  ‘The Emir didn’t say a word, but sent a trusted aid to enquire: “Why is that European on horseback blocking my way?” “This is the English way of doing things,” Stoddart replied. “Very well,” said the Emir, “proceed to the petitions chamber.” Stoddart obeyed, but when the aide told him, “Bow to the ground when you come to petition the Emir,” Stoddart angrily replied, “I bow only to God.”

  Then two guards came up and grabbed the Englishman by the armpits: he shook them off. When he saw this, the chamberlain thought he would have Stoddart searched. Stoddart slapped his face and stepped up by himself to the Emir’s presence.

  A courtier was standing by the door, reciting a prayer in honour of the Emir. When he saw this prayer, Stoddart too turned his palms upwards in prayer and recited a prayer in Farsi. When the prayer ended, the Emir too turned his palms upwards to recite the first surat of the Qu’ran.

  ‘“You have a message for me?” asked the Emir.

  ‘Stoddart handed over the English ambassador’s letter.

  ‘“Have you anything else to say?” the Emir added.

  ‘Stoddart had a lot more to say.

  ‘Then the audience was over and the Colonel returned to Rais’s house.

  ‘On the second day of Ramadan, the chamberlain came up and said, “Rais wants to see you!” Stoddart began putting on his uniform, but the chamberlain said, “No, go as you are.” When Stoddart came into the courtyard and saw twelve men waiting there, his suspicions were aroused. The men went for his chest, twisted his arms behind him and tied them with a noose. To his dismay, Rais appeared: “You’re a filthy spy. You betrayed Kabul!” The vizier pressed a dagger to Stoddart’s breast, and Stoddart uttered a prayer in Farsi.

  ‘“Take him away,” Rais ordered. Stoddart was dragged out into the street, in the rain, for all to see; he was so humiliated, he wished he was dead. But they dragged him down the street and threw him into a dungeon.’

  At this point Muborak broke off, leaving the prisoners gasping. Abdulla didn’t know what to think. Who knows whether it was the novelty of the story that had captured them, or Muborak’s simple but cunning storytelling? There was nothing fancy about it, he couldn’t stick to the point, but it was still somehow bewitching. One or two prisoners, like small children listening to a folk tale, implored ‘More! More!’

  Abdulla himself had found something in some Russian journals about two English spies sent to Emir Nasrullo’s court: they had apparently been captured and beheaded. But this was the first time he had heard such a detailed description of their adventures in Bukhara, which Muborak claimed to have read in English books. But was it credible? There were stories gushing out of Muborak like a fountain! But if they were true, they would be invaluable for Abdulla, for the story he was devising. After all, there were no books for him to consult here.

  As ever, Jur’at summed up for the group: ‘A heron tried to act like a falcon and ended up stuck in the mud!’

  —

  After Muborak the Bukharan, nobody told a story. Their minds apparently dulled by the rice and mung beans, the prisoners took advantage of the holiday regime by dozing off as they studied the criminal code. With no talk to distract him, Abdulla let his mind wander where it would. Again, he recalled his wife and children, and that led to thoughts of Nodira and Oyxon. Quite possibly, Abdulla had paid more attention to Nodira than he had to Oyxon’s love for the young Qosim. The more he thought about it, Nodira was not such an unhappy woman. She was Emir Umar’s first wife, after all. How happy their life must have been, at first! They were one flesh, one soul, one spirit, as firmly bound to each other as two lines of a couplet:

  Though she is famed for being unique among beauties,

  There is one who dares to beg for her, like my mad self.

  Umar loved Nodira as Nodira loved herself: what more can a woman ask of a man? Who destroyed their happiness?

  Oh angel, my poor hovel has fallen under a black enchantment,

  If nothing else, it was time’s shadow on the wall.

  You shouldn’t put down on paper everything that comes to your mind. Who could have known that the ‘shadow on the wall’ would darken even the radiance of Nodira’s bright life, and not for a brief time but forever? One day or another, what you wrote would come back to haunt you. If only Nodira could have guessed how her words would prove to be prophetic.

  Where, Abdulla wondered, had he written about the dark days he was now experiencing? Did Oyxon’s position as second wife have anything in common with his own imprisonment today? Was this what he had been secretly longing for, when he’d wished for a winter of uninterrupted work? Abdulla lay on his side as he mulled this over. His eyes weren’t aware of anything now.

  Abdulla had a dream in which his own mother Josiyat turned out to be in charge of Umar’s harem. ‘Where have you been?’ she grumbled, ‘We’ve not seen hide nor hair of you since you went off to that damned Kazan!’

  Abdulla sought to placate her. ‘Wherever I’ve been, I’m here now: but what are you doing here?’

  ‘Oyxon’s become like a daughter to me, she needs me to protect her. Your Madali doesn’t impress me, not at all; he’s a shitty sleeve, but look at him talking as if he were a man!’

  ‘I’ve told him often enough,’ Abdulla said defensively, ‘that I’ll tell his father. That seemed to frighten him.’

  ‘Of course it didn’t. Why should he be frightened of a dead man? Just now he came up to the door, that arrogant boy of yours, and said “At last, we can safely drink tea served by you.”’

  Still dreaming, Abdulla made an effort to remember that Umar really had died and that his teenaged son, dressed in white garments, had been put on the throne by the mullas and scholars.

  ‘Well, it’s time I was off.’ Abdulla wasn’t sure where he ought to go; all he knew was that it was incumbent on him to leave Oyxon; he averted his eyes from his mother’s apprehensive face.

  ‘No more slipping off to that ghastly Kazan, son!’ Josiyat begged.

  Oddly enough, after he left the palace Abdulla seemed to be heading for his house on Ko’bariq Street. It took him exactly two hundred and seventy seven steps to get to the front door. When he looked inside, there was nobody in. He dreamt that he called for Rahbar and the children, but there was no response. They must have gone to a wedding feast, he reassured himself, then went through into the garden, halting when he got to the summer house. It was beginning to get dark, and he was worried. This was no time for the children to be out! Then he spotted soldiers behind the wall, amusing themselves by lighting fires: they seemed to have surrounded the house and the yard. Who could they be? Abdulla began to panic. Perhaps it was just as well that his children weren’t at home. But suppose that was because they’d been taken away?

  But of course, they were Madali’s guards. These guards seem to have taken Abdulla into custody, and to be keeping him under house arrest. Apparently, his recriminations against Madali’s behaviour toward Oyxon had infuriated the young Khan. But now Abdulla was under lock and key, Madali was free to do whatever he liked.

  —

  When he awoke, Abdulla tried to order the scenes from his dream one by one: his mother, Oyxon’s door, Madali, the way he counted his steps, his deserted yard, the guards surrounding his house… Some of these cheered him, others chilled his heart. Then he began looking for a way to interpret them. Dreaming of his mother Josiyat might mean her ghost had been badly upset. She no longer figured largely in his prayers or in his memory, nor had he per
formed any graveside rituals for her. He was her debtor in this world and the next. Two days after she died, before her body was committed to the grave, he’d gone eagerly off to Kazan like a dog wagging his tail. ‘Have you got something boiling over there, you writers? To hell with writers!’ her ghost called after him. ‘When you were a baby, I pierced only one of your ears; I should have pierced both and put rings in them, then you’d stay where I can see you, like a pet calf, nice and obedient.’

  But what did Oyxon have in common with his mother? Might she possibly be a stand-in for Rahbar? Except that, with her auburn hair, Rahbar was more like Nodira. And Nodira was the senior wife, above Kumush, Zaynab and Ra’no – the other women of the harem, his heroines. One day, when he was sitting weeping on the summer terrace, his son Habibullo had come over with Josiyat and Rahbar, saying ‘Look, daddy is crying!’

  ‘Hey, son, calm down, have your eyes been somewhere wet?’ Josiyat asked.

  ‘I’ve killed her! I’ve just killed her! I’ve killed Kumush with my own hands…’ Abdulla was unable to hold back his tears.

  ‘The boy is possessed!’ his mother declared, reciting the prayer ‘La illah’ before taking her daughter-in-law and grandson away.

  But that night, it was Rahbar’s turn to weep. ‘You don’t love me, you love Kumush and Zaynab!’

  ‘Listen, Rahbar, they’re not real, they’re just figments of my imagination. Come on, stop it now.’

  ‘Whoever heard of a man crying over someone he’s invented?’

  And now he had Oyxon as well. By this time, Sunnat from Qumloq must have gone to Abdulla’s house and handed over his letter. Then Rahbar would find the manuscript, run her eyes over it and upset herself again! This was certainly no time to bring more worries down on her. ‘Hey, don’t bother yourself about it, daughter-in-law, my son has always been rather stupid!’ his mother would have said, God rest her soul. Perhaps Abdulla should have thought more carefully about the contents of the letter. Mightn’t Rahbar be thinking, even when he’s sitting in prison, all he worries about is a manuscript!

  To Abdulla, his soul seemed polluted, turbid, soiled. All his thoughts were of Oyxon. Had he turned into her young cousin Qosim, had he fallen in love with her? Or had he cast Qosim aside so he could have her to himself? Or a third possibility: was Oyxon herself a stand-in for Abdulla, imprisoned in her gilded cage, walking a tightrope with every step she took?

  When Umar was summoned from this world to the world of eternity, Oyxon’s immediate thought was to rejoice; she was free! Was it possible that Qosim might overlook the fact that she had been married, since she had not borne Umar any heirs? After a great deal of thought, Oyxon decided to consult her father’s close aide and the late Emir Umar’s former bodyguard, her fellow-countryman Gulxaniy.

  Using the wake as a pretext, she invited him to her quarters and was as frank with him as she would be to an older brother. ‘As the saying goes, what a deaf man hears won’t strike the eye,’ Gulxaniy warned her, but undertook to negotiate with Qosim on her behalf. Even though she was outwardly in mourning, Oyxon’s heart now knew a series of bright and cheerful days. Her black garments seemed to make her face paler, for now, truly, in beauty, the heart’s house finds its radiance.’

  She allowed her thoughts to linger on things of the past; a ladder propped against the vine stakes, the squeaking cart passing down the street, the warm, free breeze. She would go to Shahrixon on the pretext of seeing her siblings; she would leave with Qosim and start life afresh.

  But then despair would set in again: Qosim would still be a young colt, while Oyxon was a widow, a barren flower. What reaction would they face if they sought to become man and wife? After all, Qosim’s parents would have their own wishes and desires: they would want their son to set his heart on an blossoming virgin: could she spoil their happiness?

  Just let the persuasive Gulxaniy come back after talking to the young Sayid.

  All of a sudden, Abdulla realised what the cause of all these emotions was: hadn’t he himself sent Sunnat to his house as a messenger, and weren’t his emotions correlated to an expectation of good news? Once again Abdulla was plunged in his own thoughts, but this time Jur’at’s harsh voice made the whole cell tremble: ‘Get up, all of you! Why are you lying there like women in labour?’

  —

  ‘We have a Russian professor in our midst,’ Jur’at announced, ‘an archaeologist, one of those people who goes about digging things up. But he speaks decent Uzbek; let’s hear something from him. Surely you can’t be robbed twice of the same property? He can talk about Russian history, or ours, whichever he likes.’ Jur’at clapped the rather frail old man on the shoulder as he offered him the floor.

  ‘It’s easier for me if I speak in Russian, but I’ll have a go at Uzbek,’ the old professor began. ‘As the elder just said, I’m an archaeologist, which means I interpret the ancient world, but I do know a few things about more recent times, particularly the history of the “Great Game”. Russia defeated Iran in 1828 and Turkey in 1829. And then Britain had the idea that if Russia came any closer to India there would be a rebellion in India, and that Russia must be preparing to invade Afghanistan.

  ‘In the years 1829‒30 the English spy Arthur Conolly travelled from Moscow to Afghanistan, and then went as far as the border of India to see which route the Russians might take. The routes according to him went through Khiva and Balkh as far as Kabul, and then via Khaibar to India. Shah Babur is known to have used this route. Afghanistan was then undergoing civil war. Dost Muhammad was in Kabul, Komron-Shah in Herat, and I can’t remember who was in Kunduz, Balkh or Kandahar. And Ranjit Singh was the ruler of Kashmir.’

  Listening to these words, Abdulla was utterly absorbed. Not only by the content of what the professor was saying, but by the way he expressed it. His language, with its loan translations from Russian, was like falling rain and rarefied air. In any case, even if it seemed at first to be too dense, it was, compared with Laziz’s confused language, rather pleasant to listen to. Abdulla went on listening, as the professor’s tongue pricked up men’s ears.

  ‘In 1832, the English tried to lay hands on Afghanistan. First they found Shuja Durrani, who was then in the Punjab. Shuja was allied to the English and the Sikhs when he besieged Kandahar. But Dost Muhammad came to his younger brother’s assistance, and together they forced Shuja back to the Punjab.

  ‘In 1836 the Afghans got into direct contact with the Russians. Jan Witkiewicz, who had come to Bukhara to gather information, had a meeting there with Dost Muhammad and his spokesman Hussein Ali, whom he accompanied all the way back to Orenburg.’

  Abdulla had studied Jan Witkiewicz’s fate very thoroughly. He had even included some of it in his story, but as the tale of yet another errant man’s unhappy fate, rather than as an aspect of the Great Game the professor was talking about. The professor’s speech, however, took a rather broader view.

  ‘In 1837 Hussein Ali received a letter from Tsar Nicolas I addressed to Shah Dost Muhammad; he set off with Witkiewicz for Afghanistan, but fell ill and died on the journey. Witkiewicz decided to deliver the letter himself, and arrived in Kabul on Christmas day. The British spy Alexander Burnes invited him to supper, and the two spies took a liking to one another over whisky and a quiet conversation. It became clear that what had collided in Afghanistan were not merely two men but two countries.’

  Abdulla didn’t listen much to what the professor said afterwards about the war between England and Afghanistan, and Russia’s subsequent decision to invade Turkestan. He was preoccupied with the last scene: the two spies having a Christmas supper in Kabul. Abdulla would have written that scene up wonderfully. Not just their conversation, but the silences and what was left unspoken; everything that was understood, consciously or unconsciously, about the ‘superiority’ of the English over the Afghans and of the Russians over the Uzbeks. About the intellectual arrogance and cunning practices that both
sides put such stock in in.

  Abdulla had begun to bring this scene to life when the doors clanged open and the prison’s miserable supper was brought in.

  —

  The reason he had thought of the food as ‘miserable’ became clear to Abdulla when the Russian soldier-cook called out, ‘Come and get your miski!’ Yes, eating from metal bowls really did mean a miserable supper. Who knows if the professor’s Russified Uzbek might have suggested the thought?

  The Uzbek language certainly is odd. You can hide yourself as a pronoun at the end, but that’s also where the emphasis lies: it is marked. But if we look at the language of Navoi or Babur, which was influenced by Farsi, we find pronoun and predicate changing places, all much earlier than the Russian influence. Abdulla’s thoughts reverted to Professor Zasypkin’s narrative, or, to be precise, if one committed sacrilege, to Zasypkin’s narrative reverted the thoughts of Abdulla.

  Without a doubt, the meal they’d just had was very different from the Christmas Eve supper that Burnes and Witkiewicz enjoyed, but when you considered that all the prisoners were sitting in pairs, enjoying a barely audible chat, you couldn’t help feeling that they were spies conversing.

  Abdulla now focussed on the prisoner sitting next to him. The auburn-haired lad was nibbling away at his food like a marmot, and in between bites he was sniffling just like a marmot, or in a way, whistling. Abdulla nodded to him, saying ‘Enjoy your meal!’ as he pointed to the lad’s bowl. The lad smiled between two noisy mouthfuls and said in Tatar, ‘We’re eating!’