Abdulla remembered the hospitable household of a friend who lived in the same quarter, and who, when he came across Abdulla’s son Habibullo in the street, used to tell him, ‘Go and tell your dad: “The drums are banging, to say that for those who have money things are fine; for those who haven’t, too bad to tell.” He’ll understand.’ As soon as Habibullo passed this on to his father, the latter would stop work, because he knew that the message meant this friend was coming back from work at the theatre with a group of friends: poets, singers, lute players and comedians. Abdulla had an image of himself going to the house, seeing the pond in the middle of the yard, a weeping willow by the pond and a burnt-clay bench surrounded by peonies. Then someone would pick up a tambourine and, after Abdulla had shaken all the assembled guests’ hands, the singer, tightening the cummerbund around his waist, seemed to project his voice not into the air, but inside himself:
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.
Everyone found his words heartbreaking. Who but an Uzbek could understand it?
Two days ago, Abdulla had started to weigh up Nodira’s sufferings and torments. From the day she had ended up in the palace as first wife, she’d been seen by the whole world to be in a relationship with a nonentity. Her husband Emir Umar had impregnated her three times, in quick succession; taken two other wives; and made her a widow at thirty. All she had experienced with her husband was some ten marriage feasts and fifteen banquets. His departure had smashed her responsive heart, like a porcelain bowl, in two. If only she could see his offspring turn out like the husband whom she could no longer see. But they couldn’t stand the sight of one another; they were at daggers drawn. She sent them on errands in different directions: she was a loving mother.
The eldest, Madali of the blazing eyes, persecuted all those close to him and repelled all good men. ‘Don’t interfere! I know best!’ – he refused the advice of all but intriguers and prostitutes. Scholarship died out, poetry faded. As if that wasn’t enough, he had to have whatever he saw. When a viper-like passion burned his soul, nothing could restrain him from forbidden vices: he drank wine, he smoked hashish, he gambled, he raced pigeons, he fornicated with his former wet-nurse and married a woman who had been his father’s wife.
His mother was shattered. To whom could she complain? Who was there in this world who might listen to her? Nodira could confide the pain and the misery that had befallen her only to Kokand paper.
Oh heaven, you killed my very soul, you did.
You made me weak by leaving me, you did.
My cries are deadly arrows, each one –
You turned my body to a bow, you did.
Heaven has not been loyal to you, my soul –
Though you tried and questioned it, you did.
You stained with tears each inch of my cheeks.
You whitened my face with grief, you did,
You turned a tryst into a parting, oh heaven.
You made spring die into autumn, you did.
You have suffered so in secret, Nodira.
Your lonely heart from strangers, you hid.
—
The next day, when Abdulla was expecting a confrontation or an interrogation, and trying to follow the thread of logic in Nodira’s poem, a thought occurred to him that made him shudder inwardly. After two and a half months in prison, with nothing but time on his hands, there was one topic he hadn’t even considered to himself, let alone discussed. Uzbeks have a custom of never calling a scorpion a scorpion: instead, they call it ‘the thing with no name’. Was that why they could talk freely about Emirs Nasrullo, Umar and Madali, Shah Dost Muhammad and even Queen Victoria, but wouldn’t dare mention his name? In the first draft of Obid the Pickaxe he did mention his name in two or three unimportant passages. The interrogators did not hesitate to bring up the names of those ‘notorious enemies of the people’ Ikromov and Xo’jaev, but they never once let their mouths utter his name. Yet he was the heart and soul, the beginning and the end, of all the things taking place around him. It was he who had sent Abdulla here, he was the reason why the interrogators were questioning Qodiriy, it was because of him that friends turned into enemies, and conspiracies were dreamed up by the interrogators. What was his mysterious secret? When Abdulla had gone on a trip to research Nasrullo’s history, the Tajik writer Sadriddin Ayniy had passed on the following anecdote. At one of the ceremonies in the Kremlin, he had got up, lifted his glass and proposed a toast: ‘To the great Tajik nation, its extraordinary art and literature, to Omar Khayyam, Rudaki and Firdousi…’ Ayniy was so gratified at this rehabilitation that he shouted out in broken Russian, ‘Bravo. Old literary critics caput!’ Everyone was dumbstruck. But he seemed not to have noticed anything: he lifted his glass and said again: ‘Because of Omar Khayyam’s, Rudaki’s, Firdousi’s and Jami’s literature…’ And Ayniy, filled with pleasure and enthusiasm, again shouted out, ‘Bravo. Old literary critics caput!’ The rest of the gathering was as silent as the grave. The learned Ayniy boldly strode towards him. Utterly bewildered, he began to back away, pretending to be suddenly occupied with something he had dropped, and vanished under the table.
Two burly bodyguards seized Ayniy and twisted his arms behind his back. He pretended to have found what he was looking for and returned to his seat. Later he sat down next to the Tajik Party secretary and asked, ‘Who was that old man? What was he shouting?’ The secretary explained, ‘He was a former elder. Up until today, the poets of old were said to be feudal reactionaries. He was so pleased and inspired by what you said, that he applauded “Bravo!”’ Then he stood up, went up to Ayniy, and gestured at the guards to let him go. ‘What is your name?’ he asked. Ayniy bowed. ‘I am the impoverished Sadriddin Ayniy.’ Then he gave Ayniy his hand and said, ‘Let’s get acquainted: Jughashvili.’
—
‘That man of yours was a coward. A cowardly heart and a pock-marked face. The coward raises his fist first, as they say.’
Ayniy considered other writers to be mere scribblers, beneath contempt, but he was fond of Abdulla: he wouldn’t even offer tea to the others, but when Abdulla visited his house in Bukhara he laid on generous banquets. In a sense, he considered Abdulla his teacher, as the latter had helped him polish his Uzbek. Given the man’s sarcasm, it was just as well that he’d migrated to the rocks and mountains outside Stalinabad. If he had stayed here, wouldn’t he now be confronted with others, who would certainly remind him of his indiscretions: ‘What rubbish you used to come out with!’
Abdulla got no sleep that night. By morning, his whole body was shaking, small blisters breaking out on his hands: finally, he realised what was going on. It was the return of an old illness, which he’d had when he used to keep bees. His flesh itched, then it turned red; after that, it was covered in a khaki-coloured rash which finally hardened into watery blisters.
‘It’s because you’ve been eating too much honey,’ the local Uzbek doctor had told him at the time. But what honey could he have been eating now?
Ever since Muborak had become chief storyteller to Gena of Tashkent, scuttling nervously at the thieves’ beck and call, Abdulla had barely been able to share a word with him. Yet wasn’t that Muborak standing over him now, hands on hips in his unmistakable Bukharan style?
‘Is something wrong, brother? You’re awfully quiet – perhaps a story would cheer you up? I’ve got one about Emir Nasrullo; one of our people wrote it. “The Emir was handsome, quite impressive, with black eyebrows, though he was of middling height. His cheek sometimes twitched, he had a low voice and a forced smile. He dressed like anyone else. He took away the mullas’ authority and put himself in charge. When he came to the throne he killed all his brothers, exce
pt one who ran away.
‘He issued a fatwa: “The Emir is the shepherd, the people are the sheep. The shepherd does whatever he likes, including taking a man’s wife if he wants her, for the shepherd is shepherd to the ewes, too.” The Emir had four wives, and four hundred concubines.
‘It’s said that the Emir was born to a Persian concubine of his father Emir Haydar. The Turkmen have a saying, a horse and a donkey give birth to a mule; an Uzbek and a Persian give birth to an Emir.
‘The Emir had concubines of all nationalities, but he never touched women descended from Moses.
‘The Emir’s power was unlimited. No letter came into or out of the Emirate, not even one between husband and wife, without the Emir being aware of its contents. He even recruited poor street urchins to tell him what was being said in the markets. What husbands said to their wives, what masters told their servants: everyone started to spy on each other.
But the Emir was also spied on…’
Either Muborak was called back to Gena, or he finally noticed the severity of Abdulla’s situation; at this point, Abdulla himself was not able to tell. By nightfall he felt he was on fire, by morning he was becoming delirious. He could respond neither to Gena’s orders nor to Sodiq and Muborak’s care. Someone banged on the door to summon the doctor; it took more than one injection for Abdulla to regain consciousness. When he opened his eyes, he saw the prison doctor taking his pulse.
‘You writers are a rather fragile lot,’ the doctor commented. ‘Diabetes, tuberculosis; though I’d say you were a bit tougher, Qodiriy, judging by your pulse. It will all go smoothly for you now; here’s some Brilliant Green ointment for you to put on your sores. But keep them away from water.’ He turned and whispered something in Sodiq’s ear.
Writers with diabetes? Cho’lpon was diabetic: what was happening to him in this place? Abdulla struggled to remember what he’d been thinking about before he fell ill. Was it about poetry as the bedrock of Uzbek literature, and how he’d planned to demonstrate this by including a lot of poetry into his new novel? His mind jumped ahead: ‘Who tricked all those people? Cho’lpon, of course: a poet. Using those people’s language for their slogans and panegyrics, he laughed out loud at them. Abdulla began to remember:
Interpreter for millions – a new kind of poet
Dedicated to today
Every year, he makes a new melody
Everywhere, every farm, every factory
Every worker is singing this melody.
At the start of every worker’s shift,
He sings all the words out quietly
And a pioneer – who never met a poet –
Is praising the lyrics eruditely.
And in another poem, ‘Remembering the Sun of the Caucasus’, he says something that hints at a certain Caucasian:
The lord of this land is an entirely new man.
Will his pride let him ask help heaven’s help? No!
He’ll order the heavens to work – that’s his plan
If you’re angry, yes, light your fire – go!
But he’ll make the flames dance to his tune
You’ll follow his ways, all too soon.
So here it was, the bountiful harvest of everybody, put away into the state’s innumerable prisons. Oh Cho’lpon, shouldn’t you have left your last line as:
He’ll make you his prisoner, soon.
Again, Abdulla remembered with regret his intention to write a novel about Cho’lpon. Even after Cho’lpon had returned from Moscow, the Red writers gave him no peace. Abdulla could still picture the unfortunate poet at the Uzbek Writers’ Union meeting of spring the previous year, left to the mercy of the dogs.
‘Comrades, forgive me, but for reasons beyond my control I am always made to speak when I have a headache. It may be because of this that I can’t express my thoughts as I wish. Firstly, I must answer three questions posed in comrade Beregin’s speech. Then I’ll say what I have to say. Comrade Beregin was right to point out my mistakes, I freely admit these mistakes to everyone here.
‘I must settle my accounts with respect to G’ulom Zafariy. This man once came to look for me in the Union’s garden. I shall explain why this person came to see me. I have diabetes. I have been to Moscow and other places for medical consultations, seeking treatment for my illness, but not finding any good medicine anywhere, I turned to folk healers who recommended black mulberries as a medicine. Although I consider myself an intellectual, I trusted this advice and asked Zafariy to bring black mulberries with him. He came after I’d gone to bed, when it was night, and so he went to see So’fi-zoda.
‘The next day I was invited to So’fi-zoda’s, and that’s where we talked. It was then that Comrade Shams informed me that this business was wrong. His rebuke was justified. That was when I stopped meeting the two men. After these words, Comrade Shams summoned me for a reprimand. I then told Comrade Shams that I needed people’s criticism and help in order to correct my own mistakes. This is the second time that I’ve been advised about correcting myself.
‘If anyone thinks that we can correct our old mistakes in just two or three days, then you are wrong. You can correct us by summoning us, helping us to understand and then bringing us into the fold of society. We carry on with our path to life. But if there are obstacles on that path, you are answerable.’
Sitting among those people Abdulla saw that Cho’lpon was mocking them, and he himself laughed without showing it. This poet, monumental in his originality, was greater than the rest of the Writers’ Union put together, yet they behaved as if they were the wise fathers and Cho’lpon a wicked child. In one of his satirical articles of the 1920s, Abdulla had wished that Cho’lpon were more devilish; now the poet appeared to have taken this advice to heart.
‘How have you been educating me over these past twenty-one years? I’m still not a member of the Union of Writers, who knows why: I applied to join a long time ago. Because of this, my works have to be closely analysed. A month after my arrival here, my poem ‘The Lute’ was published. If I am a nationalist, if I am so reprehensible, then why have you made this work available without a foreword? A foreword is clearly necessary to give me a rap on the knuckles, and establish the proper context so young people won’t be led astray. And then there was my novel. It sold out, but try to find anyone who owns a copy! That novel, too, came out without a foreword. That was six months ago, and still no one has picked up their pen to write about it. I did read one article in Young Leninist, but that was nothing but praise, which is obviously no good to me. In Moscow, we were meant to read this work at the Union of Writers so I could get some constructive criticism. Eleven people came to the first session, seven to the second, and by the third we were down to four. None of the Union officials bothered to show up. And as a society we should be educating a former nationalist! Mistakes aside, I simply can’t continue working under these conditions.’
Some of the simpletons claimed that Cho’lpon had sided with the Soviets. True, when Abdulla first read a poem from the much-denigrated A Capella, his hair had stood on end. After everything that had happened, Cho’lpon had dedicated it to the Party’s XVIth Congress. But then, after a dozen lines of Party waffling:
For the sixteenth time, we’re gathered here
We have grasped the very roots of life!
We are the power that moves life!
The living will not turn around
The dawn will not turn red
Death will bless us on the ground
Darkness will salute from the poor instead
To the lords of the lie.
‘You’re skating on thin ice, friend!’ was Abdulla’s immediate thought, but to himself he said, ‘Good for you, poet!’
And these were only what had been published. There were also unpublished poems, one of which Abdulla memorised:
Here you see a map of Moscow:
Grab it by the handful now!
Hey, look there’s Moscow’s daughters’ hips.
The capital’s fake and luscious lips.
Can’t swallow, ‘til you give a piece.
Her plan is grasping and increase.
Bit by bit, she pockets more.
What will she give back? She’ll make you sore.
Moscow’s not the place for you, man
Oh, the thirst of ‘Cotton-stan’!
Sixty years you’ve been her friend
But ‘take, not give’ is Moscow’s end.
A’lamov wrote Ikromov a letter
But it was lost under a car, they say.
That’s why your life will never get better.
But what’s wrong with A’lamov’s way?
Make a space for the new Uzbeks’ game:
They’re all overjoyed, to ‘Make Their Own Way’.
As for you, there’s ‘Reproof!’ and ‘Shame’
If you’re breathing… just die today.
Who told you to be born Uzbek in the end?
Why, ‘Misfortune’ is the Uzbek’s dearest friend.
—
On 20 March, Abdulla – barely alive – was taken again to Trigulov’s office. This time he was confronted with an irrigation expert who worked in Kazakhstan. After the revolution, Abdulla used to encounter this man now and then at gatherings of friends in Tashkent. But it was the same old record, the same old song: ‘I have known Abdulla Qodiriy since 1919 as a dyed-in-the-wool nationalist. He and I were both members, first of the ‘National Union’, then of the ‘National Independence’ organisations’.
The Devils' Dance Page 20
