If so then now was the time, while the Emir was drunk with victory, celebrating his slaughter of the Kokand Mangit dynasty with beer and flirtatious Fergana boys. Should Abdusamad make his escape via Kashgar? But he was loathe to abandon Rohila now that he had her in his power. And what about the Englishmen, still locked up in his palace? Might they not still prove of some use? There was more to be got from them, Abdusamad was sure.
The older one was clearly ill; if they took him with them, he would only slow them down. And two was unnecessary. Abdusamad would find some way to prompt the Emir to sentence Stoddart; then Conolly would be easier to persuade.
Did Abdulla need to let Abdusamad meet Oyxon? With Conolly in his power, his communication closely monitored, there was no way that the Iranian could have failed to learn of the Englishman’s connection with Madali’s wife; as with every other piece of knowledge that came into his hands, he would have been thinking carefully about how to put it to the best use. But logic was one thing, and Abdulla’s approach was another: he was fiercely protective of Oyxon. About a week earlier, when he imagined Conolly’s journey over the Jizzax steppes, he had planned to ‘rhyme’ Conolly’s thoughts with Oyxon’s as the novel approached its finale. But now these plans had changed. He would not elaborate on the Jizzax steppes, nor on Oyxon’s thoughts, nor on that devil Abdusamad’s ever-grasping hands. At the very most, he would write: ‘Seventeen days after the defeat of Kokand, Emir Nasrullo rounded up all those in Fergana who had great intelligence or beauty and elegance, and herded them off to Bukhara for resettlement. He put on the throne of Kokand an utterly inept man.’
Abdulla was now interested in just one thing: solving the puzzle left by Muborak, which was every bit as tricky as the one that prompted Hafiz to say: ‘Whoever looks at this puzzle, their wisdom has never solved it, nor ever will.’
In one of the papers Muborak had left behind there was an extract from a letter written by Arthur Conolly in prison: ‘The Uzbeks make agreements without being accustomed to keeping them. So it is doubtful if they will carry out the obligations they have undertaken.’ Was there a hint in these sentences? If the Uzbeks were unreliable and untrustworthy, was the implication that, in relations with them, the best weapons were lies? If the Uzbeks couldn’t be trusted, why did Conolly’s ruler, Queen Victoria, nevertheless write a letter to Emir Nasrullo? Perhaps this was Muborak’s secret: was the letter which never reached Emir Nasrullo buried somewhere?
Her Majesty the Queen to the Ameer of Bokhara:
Victoria, by grace of God Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith etc., etc. to His Highness the Ameer of Bokhara — Greeting. These are to inform you that we learnt with great pleasure from our trusty subject Lieutenant-Colonel Stoddart that you desired to enter into friendly relations with us; and our pleasure was increased when we received your letter, conveying to us your wishes in that respect. We accordingly desired the Governor-General whom we had set over the countries of India, in order to rule those countries in our name, and to communicate on our behalf with the Princes and Lords whose dominions are near to India, and distant from our capital, to consider of the means by which your wishes for friendly intercourse between our States could be most effectually gratified, and to give you such proofs of our good will towards you, as might convince you of the regard which we felt for your person and Government.
But rumours have reached us that evil-disposed persons have suggested to your mind doubts as to Stoddart’s being really one of our servants, and as to the friendly object of his mission, and therefore we now acquaint you that Stoddart is indeed our servant, and that he was sent to Bokhara by our commands, to testify to you the interest which we felt in your welfare, and our desire to promote a good understanding between our servants in India and your Government. We expect that having this assurance from ourselves, and being convinced of our friendship, you will send back to us our servant Stoddart with all haste, and that you will authorise him to acquaint us with your wishes as to the manner in which friendly intercourse shall, in all time to come, be maintained between our dominions and the countries ruled by you. And as we understand that another of our servants, Conolly, is also at your capital, which he was invited by you to visit, we trust that, being now informed of our desire that he should return to our presence, you will dismiss him also from your Court, and direct that he, as well as Stoddart, shall be conducted in safety to the frontier of some friendly State. Our satisfaction will be complete when these, our servants, shall appear before us, and shall report to us that you are in the enjoyment of good health, and that the riches and prosperity of your house are on the increase. And with this we bid you heartily farewell.
Given at our Court of London, the 3rd day of December, in the year of our Lord 1842. Victoria R.
Why had Muborak not shown these letters to Abdulla? After all, if it hadn’t been for his intervention, those superfluous Englishmen would never have got into the novel in the first place! Was Abdulla aware of the novel’s ending, but ignorant of the true outcome of Conolly’s part in what he himself had called the Great Game? Were some devils twisting things to make Muborak seem an English spy? Wasn’t spying one of the accusations against Fitrat, who was now waiting for death? Abdulla’s head began to spin. Various scenes, ones that he had never heard of, began to emerge, like muddy liquid boiling over from a bubbling black cauldron. He suddenly recalled a story by the poetess Dilshod that he had read in her collected works: Emir Umar, when he finally conquered O’ratepa and broke down the city’s resistance, took revenge for that rebellion by hanging 1,213 men and driving another 13,000, barefoot and bare-headed, to Fergana. Among these, driven into the desert, forbidden to build themselves a house for seven years, was Sayid Go’zi-xo’ja and his unfortunate family, in which Oyxon was still a child. For the duration of seven years they could only live in an open hovel. After those seven years the deportees’ settlement of hovels turned into Shahrixon, the ‘city of the Khan’. Dilshod herself, with three other beauties, was taken into the Emir’s harem: one by one, they were washed, perfumed, dressed and presented to the Emir. The Emir had no idea that Dilshod was a poetess: he gave her a testing look. He showed her a pomegranate on a low table and asked her, ‘What do you have to say about that?’
Her blood boiling, Dilshod answered: ‘You’ve filled it with blood!’
The Emir was about to summon an executioner, but Nodira was lurking behind a screen, sensing a possible rival; she came out between them and hurried Dilshod away from the furious Emir’s palace. Then Dilshod recited this couplet to her:
Umar-xon is a tyrant’s name; famed as a poet,
This oppressor saw our beauty and became oppressed.
While Abdulla wondered what part of the novel this disruptive scene ought to be in, other scenes were uprooted, like weedy grass, from his brain. When Emir Nasrullo conquered Kokand, he ordered all the books that Nodira had spent years collecting to be burnt. The books were hurled out of the palace library and destroyed in an enormous bonfire. The librarian of the Bukhara palace, Junaydullo Hoziq, approached Emir Nasrullo, bowed down and pointed to one of the books, saying: ‘Your Majesty, if you will pardon me, that book The Secret Collection is very rare, the only copy in the world. Let the order be given not to burn it.’
‘Shit!’ the Emir told Hoziq, his inflamed eyes popping, and gestured for the books to be burnt. Hoziq backed away without a word.
That night, at a victory feast to celebrate the conquest of Kokand, the Emir addressed his chief librarian. ‘Recite a couplet in honour of our victory,’ he ordered.
Then Hoziq recited in Farsi:
You have dressed yourself in false witness,
You won’t be undressed until the day of resurrection.
Emir Nasrullo turned pale. He was on the point of ordering ‘Sentence’. Hoziq sensed this and, to save his life, produced another impromptu couplet:
God doe
s not touch the sinful joker,
King, God’s shadow, do not lay hands on him.
The Emir then had mercy on the poet and let him depart. Hoziq, with the help of friends, immediately fled to Shahrisabz. But the vindictive Emir, once he had returned to Bukhara, secretly included a thief among four revered clerics and sent them to Shahrisabz; in the depths of night these merciless executioners broke through a roof, and struck the learned man three blows with a sword, parted the venerable head from his pure body, and took it in a sack for Emir Nasrullo.
The season of death, indeed.
—
The closer the novel came to its end in Abdulla’s imagination, the more he began to dislike it. It couldn’t be said to be progressing in all its finery. Usually, a narrative begins to move towards its end after the climax, the knots have been unravelled, the complications have been simplified. But life around the novel (if only you could call it life!) was restoring the tangles and knots, and was doing all it could to make more and more obscurity out of the clarity. At the start of his imprisonment, everything was as crystal-clear as a winter’s day: who was a friend, and who an enemy. Hafiz had something to say about this:
Love seemed easy at first, but then the complications came.
Sunnat had vanished into thin air. Vinokurov had shot himself, Muborak had mysteriously disappeared. Trigulov had finally shown himself for what he was. Emir Nasrullo and Conolly, by coming back to life, seemed to have tainted Oyxon’s final stages. The work Abdulla had sketched out last autumn was now shrivelled up, and his impatient brain was seeking to bring it somehow back to life…
Fitrat came up to Abdulla. He seemed to know all about Abdulla’s thoughts.
‘My dear Abdulla, there’s a story I’ve been keeping for you’ he said. ‘It’s about how I nearly became an English spy. I wasn’t going to tell it to anyone, but now there’s no sense in keeping anything secret. Tomorrow or the day after, in a week or a month, they’ll get round to shooting all of us.’
Ever since his youth, Fitrat had learnt how to reveal the essence of what people said and what they kept hidden in their hearts. Effectively, Fitrat was the man who had introduced modern literature to Turkestan. His collection of poetry Clamour had raised an outcry such as no other book had done. When Abdulla was still a youth, he had secretly copied out poems from Clamour and learnt them by heart. And now Fitrat, out of the blue, was revealing his private thoughts about death, so that secrecy seemed to disappear: yes, indeed, tomorrow or the day after, or in a week, or in a month they would get round to shooting everyone, but each person took a different attitude to reality or inevitability. Anqaboy became unsociable, reproachful and absorbed in his own thoughts, as he finished thinking out his Divine Tragedy. But Fitrat – if only slightly – was more inclined to talk, as if there were hitherto unthought or unspoken ideas to be expressed, so as to unburden himself of them. And Abdulla, gritting his teeth, was prolonging his novel, as if that would stop him being despatched to the next world.
Fitrat suddenly looked at Abdulla’s pensive face: Should I tell him, or shouldn’t I? he wondered doubtfully, but then decided to speak, for his own sake, if not Abdulla’s.
‘It was late autumn in 1919. It was the time I was publishing the newspaper Freedom in Tashkent. Circumstances forced me to make a secret trip to Bukhara. So I decided to join a group of Afghan traders, pretending to be one of them. Among the people we trusted in Bukhara was a certain Mirbadalov, a Tatar. He had come from Russia as an interpreter with the Russian army. He married a Bukhara woman and stayed on.’
Busy at first with his own thoughts, Abdulla now began to listen with interest. But Fitrat – as if cutting a leather sole with a cobbler’s knife – was carrying on:
‘When we stopped at the caravanserai, I took the opportunity of secretly going to their house. I found out that they had some tricky guest at their house: an English spy, Frederick Bailey. That night at the Mirbadalovs’ house, over a meal of plov, we got to know this Englishman. At the time, as you know, I had published my articles ‘The English in Turkestan’ and ‘Eastern Politics’ in Hurriyet, and was absolutely opposed to the English. Feigning ignorance, Bailey asked me about English policies in India and Afghanistan, and, in passing, corrected me on some points. I spoke out about everything that I thought at heart. In those days I was obsessed with the idea of ‘Indian resistance’, so looking at that arrogant gentleman, I concluded by saying that India, Afghanistan and Turkestan should determine their own fate.
‘After that dispute, we decided to meet Mr Bailey again, face to face in the Nazarov passage. He was frank with me from the start. “I’m a British officer, I’m preparing to leave for home via Mashhad,” he said. “You seem an intelligent man, and you clearly know Bukhara like the back of your hand. If you help me with a few things here, I might be able to do the same for you in Afghanistan.”
‘“Well, what would you need?” I asked.
‘‘“First of all, can you arrange for me to meet the Emir?” he asked.
‘Of course, I was one of the Emir’s most bitter enemies; if he’d learned I was in Bukhara, he’d have had me bound hand and foot and thrown off the highest minaret. But I wasn’t about to blow my cover; instead, I affected to be humble: “I’m a petty trader, the Emir and I are poles apart.”
‘“Does the Emir understand French?” Bailey was disappointed, but after he asked if the Emir spoke French and I told him that yes, he’d learned it as a student in the Pages’ Corps in Russia, he seemed to think that would solve his problem. Before we parted, we fell to talking of other things; I don’t remember now quite how we got on to the subject, but he told me that he’d learned something quite extraordinary from some of the Bukharan Jews: apparently, Emir Nasrullo didn’t have the English spies Stoddart and Conolly executed at all. The older one fell ill and died of natural causes; the younger then converted to Islam and became a confidant of the Emir, who had him married off to some Kokand beauty. According to the Jews, you can find his offspring in Bukhara: they call themselves Xonaliev.
This contradicted everything I knew from the historical sources, which state that in June 1842, when Emir Nasrullo returned from conquering Kokand, he sentenced Stoddart and Conolly to death and had them publicly beheaded. Though no one seems to have witnessed this; the sources all re-tell the story from secondary accounts…’
‘Qodiriy, out!’ a loathsome voice yelled in Russian.
—
This time he was taken not to the prison interrogation room, but upstairs to the NKVD office, where the Armenian Major Apresyan had read out his indictment to him. Apresyan showed Abdulla where to sit, and when he was seated, Apresyan went to a piece of equipment that looked like a radio, and pressed a button. A crackling noise and a familiar voice sounded out: ‘But two days later we did meet, as we agreed, face to face in the Nazarov passage. He was frank with me from the start. “I’m a British officer, I’m preparing to leave for home via Mashhad,” he said. “You seem to be an intelligent man. You know Bukhara like the back of your hand. If you help me wherever possible with one of two things…’
At this point Apresyan pressed the button again: the familiar voice coming through the crackling sound stopped, together with the familiar harmony. The room was plunged into silence. It was a hot, sultry summer. The merciless sun was blocked out by the heavy white curtains; through the open windows behind them came loud offerings of praise for the Soviet people and their leader Comrade Stalin, followed by exultant cries of ‘Death! Death!’ Abdulla had seen gramophones and radios, but he knew nothing about this sort of equipment which could record voices, and in a prison, too. What else did these devils have up their sleeves?’
Apresyan gave Abdulla a condescending look. The sense of it was plain: you’re all puppets in our hands.
‘Did you understand?’ asked Apresyan. ‘We have information about everything. Everything about Bailey’s work in Tashkent, Fergana,
Chirchiq and Bukhara has been documented.’ He tapped a thick file on the table in front of him. ‘We are aware of his meetings with basmachi, jadids, counter-revolutionaries and social revolutionaries.
‘So, comrade Qodiriy, as for you,’ he said, changing the subject, and seeming to go back to his expositions. ‘You take pride in calling yourself a nationalist, and you have refused to collaborate with us,’ he said, giving Trigulov a meaningful look. ‘But imagine things as a writer, not as a citizen. We are going to use the words which that stinking old man Fitrat just said to you, but we shall say that what he said was passed on to us word-for-word by Abdulla Qodiriy, the pride of Uzbek national literature. In fact, apart from you, he didn’t say them to anyone else. Isn’t that so? Well, what did he say at the beginning?’ Apresyan pressed the button.
‘My dear Abdulla, there’s a story I’ve been keeping for you,’ he said. ‘It’s about how I nearly became an English spy. I wasn’t going to tell it to anyone…’ Another gesture, and the hissing and crackling and the familiar voice broke off.
‘This is a provocation,’ said Abdulla angrily. ‘I’ll inform Fitrat!’
‘You continue to underestimate us. We’re not going to give you another opportunity to meet your precious professor. A Thousand and One Nights goes on and on only in fairy tales. We can put a stop to all this here and now. And in Fitrat’s broken mind, all that will remain is the thought that the pride of Uzbek national literature has turned out to be a lying traitor. We’ll even let the old man go free for a year to spread the word for us. We can cast our rod quite far out, as they say.’
Abdulla knew that they were cunning, but this new plot crushed him. As his spirits sank, he felt for a while how incredibly tired he was. If Abdulla valued anything in this world, it was his honour. He owed his first term of imprisonment to that, when he demanded a death sentence to defend his honour. But now they had trussed him up like a puppet, hand and foot, and soiled his good name. What options were left to him?
The Devils' Dance Page 34
