‘You fancied yourself as someone who determines the fates of others, an engineer of human souls,’ Apresyan continued in perfect Uzbek. ‘But our works have turned out to be stronger than yours.’ He gave Trigulov another meaningful look.
‘Usually we work to a “Storm and Stress” formula. But because of our respect for you, Qodiriy, we can give you time on your own to think over what we’ve said. What do you think, comrades?’ Apresyan looked at Trigulov, who nodded his assent.
‘Good, we have an agreement.’
Chapter 10
Chasing the Wind
Abdulla was now put into a solitary cell. In the confusion of his thoughts, he didn’t know what to give priority to. Should he think about Fitrat, or himself, or Apresyan and Trigulov? Which one to begin with? If he pulled one thread, the others would be tangled. So Abdulla had no choice but to say to hell with the lot of them.
But his thoughts returned increasingly to his own situation. What did Apresyan want from him? What were they playing at? They had already drawn up an indictment, which bore absolutely no relation to whatever Abdulla did or said. Or was the indictment too shaky on its own, did they need a confession to make it stick?
He had already admitted responsibility for being a writer who had written nostalgically for the nation. All right, he had as good as conceded he was a nationalist. In that sense, Shakespeare, Hafiz, Cervantes and Tagore were all nationalists. This amounted to proof that they were members of an organisation. But if there was no organisation, then how could Abdulla be considered a member? Surely a group of people having a chat in Moscow’s Pushkin Park or Tashkent’s Dormon Gardens wasn’t sufficient to constitute an organisation, was it?
If it was, then a morning meal of plov would have to be renamed a National Union, and plov in a teahouse, The National Bloc. ‘On the occasion of our son’s circumcision, we invite you to a “National Union”.’
Their game was clear, Abdulla felt. They were less concerned with making the charges stick, and more with making everyone betray one another, Uzbek betraying Uzbek, Kazakh – Kazakh, Russian – Russian, until no group was left uncontaminated, building a Traitors’ Nation, a Renegades’ International, a humanity of double-dealers… If they broke Abdulla, what hope was there for the nation, or even humanity itself?
What purpose did Abdulla have in mind when he first sat down to write his novel? Wasn’t he inventing a new sort of fairy tale, like Takhir and Zukhra, the Turkic Romeo and Juliet? Once upon a time there lived a just king, Umar, a lover of hunting and of poetry. On one hunt, a member of the royal family, a military commander called Mahmud-bek, was shot by a stray arrow: the King came up to him, and put the commander’s bleeding head on his knees. As his strength failed, Mahmud-bek said, ‘My lord, my wound is serious, and now I must depart this world. May I be so bold as to make a bequest to you: my beloved only daughter, who is old enough to marry. Take her into your palace and have her educated, so that our family connection is not broken…’ Thus he breathed his last.
After burying his friend and minister with the highest honours, Umar honoured his bequest by taking his daughter Oyxon into his court and entrusting her education to his senior wife, Nodira.
A number of years, full of splendour, passed in Umar’s life: feasts every other day, poetry contests, night-long banquets with wine. Wild parties at their zenith. One day, Umar slipped away from one such orgy to the harem. Stumbling slightly from the drink, he went to Nodira’s chamber. There he found her, sitting with an angelic young girl of between ten and twelve, who was learning a poem by heart. As soon as they saw the King standing opposite, the two of them bowed to him in greeting. Umar couldn’t take his drunken eyes off this slender maiden: he was bewitched by her peerless beauty. Nodira invited Umar to take a seat and gave the girl permission to leave. When the girl had gone, the King wiped his cracked lips and asked, ‘What girl was that?’
‘How can you have forgotten?’ Nodira replied readily. ‘She’s the girl that your late relative Mahmud-bek bequeathed to you, his daughter. Your majesty has been so busy with palace affairs that it’s not surprising if he has forgotten his harem.’
‘Excellent,’ said the King. ‘In three or four years’ time this girl will be a perfect beauty. Then I shall marry her.’ And he recited this couplet:
The face of a noble flower, eyes that slant like narcissi,
No rare jasmine nor moon-lit tree is like her.
At this, Nodira was left in distress, biting her lips till they bled.
This Takhir and Zukhra fairy tale was one thing; the fruit of his shaken mind, the novel he now was writing, was another. What an ending he had arrived at: hadn’t it all come to an impasse, the tragedy of a wretched woman betrayed by her father, her family and her beloved? Wasn’t the concoction of endless misfortunes that made up Oyxon’s life (Umar’s and Nodira’s betrayal, Madali’s infidelities, Nasrullo’s latest passion) a reflection of the nation? When and how had Oyxon’s tragic life-story turned into Abdulla’s own? Abdulla’s father used to say, ‘Devils will possess your mind, son, if you let yourself be swept away by whatever thought blows into your head. Don’t ever forget the story I told you about the devils’ dance.’ His mother Josiyat kept nagging him, ‘Child, if the devil gets your mind one day, you’ll only have yourself to blame.’
He remembered how Gogol had burned his manuscripts. Had it helped? All it had done was to deprive him of his senses. If the NKVD hadn’t burnt Abdulla’s manuscripts yet, it was doing so now. But what could that do? Temptations were not to be found on paper, but inside one’s heart and mind.
During his preliminary work on the novel, Abdulla had come across a legend among the chronicles. A certain king had married a girl much younger than himself. One day, the king returned from hunting, and a servant was waiting for him:
‘Your majesty, have mercy on me, but her ladyship is behaving suspiciously,’ he said. ‘She has locked herself up in her room with a large trunk, big enough to hide a man. This was your grandmother’s trunk. What her ladyship is doing with it, we do not know.’
‘A lot of things were kept there…’
‘If you look inside the trunk, it would not be surprising if you found something rather bigger than various things, sire…’
The king found his wife in her room, staring sadly at the trunk.
‘What’s in the trunk?’ asked the king.
‘Is your question due to the servant’s suspicions, or because you don’t trust me?’ the king’s wife countered.
‘Talking about it is a waste of time, wouldn’t it be easiest if you simply opened the trunk?’ asked the king impatiently.
‘No,’ replied his wife.
‘Is it locked?
‘Yes…’
‘Where is the key?’
‘If you dismiss the servant, I shall give you the key,’ said her ladyship, to cut the conversation short.
The king summoned the servant and dismissed him. Her ladyship gave the king the key and left the room with a regretful sigh.
The king, left on his own, thought long and hard. Then he called for four slaves, ordered them to pick up the trunk and take it to the garden, dig a deep pit and bury it there.
Neither the king nor his wife ever referred to the matter again.
At one point Abdulla had intended to incorporate this parable into one of his chapters. Now he didn’t know if it was suitable. Perhaps its import was quite different. ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I buried the novel somewhere secret without ever finding out quite what’s inside it, just like that trunk?’ But, instead of the trunk, he himself was the one who had been buried.
As a boy in the Russian-language school, Abdulla had been taught by a man named Pugovkin. One day this teacher brought a gigantic mirror to the class for the children to draw their reflections. When Pugovkin stepped out of the classroom, a couple of boys, wondering what the other sid
e of the mirror was like, clumsily swung the mirror round. When they took hold of the back, the glass crashed down and smashed to smithereens. Leaping up to try and hold it, Abdulla was the last to see his reflection in the mirror; that reflection shattered into pieces, one holding an ear, another his neck, and a third his mouth, and yet another an eye…
Abdulla was left amazed; the sum total of the shattered pieces seemed somehow to preserve the whole of his face. The merging of the oneness, he would call it now.
Perhaps the previous scene should be moved to Bukhara? Oyxon and her property brought to the fortress, when Nasrullo goes to Oyxon’s chamber and bursts in on her sitting next to an enormous trunk. ‘Give me the key, you bitch!’ he tears the key from her hands, and opens the trunk. Inside, he sees with horror the enormous mirror and his vicious, ugly face in the mirror multiplied by three. In fury he draws his sword and hacks, hacks, hacks at this looking-glass… The shattered fragments reflect nothing of him, only Oyxon’s melancholy face…
—
Or was it his father’s story that tempted him?
‘I was trying to cross a square where a celebration was going on, and so I jumped over a clay wall. The square was as bright as daylight, with lanterns hanging from the tree branches and silk carpets on the ground. On one side there were big brass samovars, and opposite them enormous cauldrons of food, still bubbling and seething. In the middle of the square about a hundred men of various ages were sitting in a circle, feasting and making merry, while musicians were playing lutes, viols, side-drums and kettle-drums.
‘Right then a man runs up and shouts to the merrymakers, ‘Brother O’sar has just come!’
‘All the merrymakers looked at me. “You’ve come, you’ve come, brother O’sar, have you got rid of the stakes?” they asked.
‘I can’t remember now how I answered: I was so badly taken aback.
‘They dragged me against my will, and made me sit in the place of honour. Usually, when someone new joins a group of men sitting together, prayers are said. But nobody thought of prayers, it was nothing but questions and greetings. When I had gathered my wits, I passed an eye over the people assembled there. I seemed to have seen some of them somewhere. Yet, when I looked closer, they seemed to be strangers that I had never seen or known in my life. Yet they treated me as if they knew me, called me by my name, asked what I was doing, and they even knew I had been going to cut reeds that day: all that astounded me.
‘One of them, I don’t know who, evidently the host, said, “Serve some food to brother O’sar!”
‘Someone objected: “First let’s have our party, then we can all start eating.” Then he looked me in the face and asked, “You must be longing for a song and dance. Shall we have our party first?”
‘I had an empty stomach, but being a guest, all I could do was to go along with their wishes.
‘The lute-players were beginning to tune up. I recognised most of the instruments – lutes, viols, fiddles, mandolins, cymbals, trumpets, tambourines – but there were some I’d never seen or heard of. Once the lutes were tuned, they started playing a restrained, solemn sort of music.
‘That music was bewitching; I was rooted to the spot, ecstatic, crushed, captivated to such a degree that I began to sigh with all my heart for reasons I didn’t know. The musicians played on, very gently reaching a climax. Finally, I could hold out no longer. I started sobbing. I wept for a long time. The music finally ended. It finished, but it had nearly finished me off, too. I was crippled, like a man crushed between two millstones. I didn’t have the strength to move. I opened my eyes. The entire gathering was watching me with the same sarcastic look on their faces. Prostrate, I looked down at the ground.
‘The lutes were about to start a second piece of music. But, just as before, I couldn’t endure to listen. My heart was pounding. If I were to listen to any more of this music, I would collapse in mortal agony.
‘The second piece began. As it began, the water of life raced into my entire being. I felt such bliss. The music was extremely joyful. I couldn’t put a name to it.
‘A girl of about fifteen or sixteen then appeared, wearing a light, straight, green velvet gown. She took a few steps into the middle, and the bells on her ankles jingled. The girl began to dance to the rhythm of the music.
‘The music continued, the subtle waves of sound from the lute seemed to urge the dancer on to further efforts. A joy and a spirit was descending to this world, as if to resurrect the dead, to make the earth quake, to move mountains and rocks, to send the stars flying and make the tops of the trees shake.
‘My joy went straight to my heart. Some force raised me up from where I was sitting. Whatever happened, I badly wanted to dance with the girl. The girl danced with me for a short while, and then moved away. But I couldn’t stop dancing, I couldn’t even think of stopping. People were standing there applauding; they seemed to be making fun of me, pulling faces at me, but I didn’t care, I went on dancing.
‘After a time I tripped and fell down. I recovered, and made a move to start dancing again, when I collapsed again, completely.
‘Quite a lot of time passed before I recovered; when I opened my eyes I looked all round me.
‘There was nobody there, no lutes or anything else: nothing and nobody! The square was in total darkness, and I was up to my waist in a ditch.’
Wasn’t Abdulla’s present situation like his father O’sar’s, sinking into the filthy ooze?
—
When he was a young man, Abdulla used to write down his dreams. Later, perhaps because he slept too deeply after spells of hard work, he stopped dreaming, or, if he dreamt, he couldn’t remember the dreams. Today his dreams were chaotic as before, but lately… wait, wait: what had he dreamt of? The dream began with nothing that was clear: it seemed to be happening in water, like a fish flashing past, as you glance at the current. But however hard Abdulla tried to trace that smooth current back, there was no getting to its source. There were vague thoughts about his Moscow life, for some reason, those who came later into his life, his neighbours in the dormitory, Sergei Berezhnoy and Serik Saktaganov appearing for no good reason, and, wearing vest and shorts, doing acrobatics with them in an enormous stadium. Abdulla stood on the bare ground of the courtyard, and the two of them stood on his broad shoulders, lifting up a blood-red flag with a star and sickle. Abdulla couldn’t imagine how these two burly men could climb onto his shoulders. But they jumped down before Abdulla collapsed onto the ground, and before Abdulla’s eyes they were smashing the star, one with a hammer, the other writing something in the grass with the sickle… Abdulla was trying to make sense of this, when the man holding the hammer turned into Vinokurov, and the man with the sickle into Trigulov, who began questioning Abdulla in front of a thousand spectators.
‘Are you a writer?’
‘Yes…’
‘Do you consider yourself a creative person?’
‘Yes…’
‘Do you invent lives of people who don’t exist?’
‘Yes…’
‘Do you yourself believe in your inventions?’
‘Yes…’
‘Do you know that nothing in this world disappears without a trace?’
‘Yes…’
‘Do you believe in the Day of Judgement?’
‘Yes…’
‘Do you know what temptation is?’
‘Yes…’
‘Are you not afraid that on the Day of Judgement all your invented characters will go for your throat?’
No reply.
‘Do you compare yourself to God?’
No reply.
‘Do you know what the punishment for that is?’
No reply.
‘Then let us show you!’ And on that Day of Judgement his head is cut off, like a sickle mowing the first grass, and the head, as it rolls off his body, is knocked into the b
are ground with blows of a hammer. That must be Munkar and Nakir, who question the dead in their graves…
As he lies in his vest, prostrate on the rough ground, a beautiful Uzbek woman descends, utterly inappropriately, from somewhere in a Moscow sky. She can’t be a stranger; her movements seem familiar. Abdulla doesn’t recognise her, but the woman knows him well.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye to you,’ she says. There is a charming quality in her words, which one only ever comes across in books. Abdulla feels ashamed to be in this situation, but thinks, ‘This is how my heroines Kumush and Ra’no might be.’
‘Where are you going?’ Abdulla asks, conscious of his own awkwardness and ineptitude.
‘I’m being separated from you…’ The woman’s soft speech betrayed bitterness and suffering, rather than teasing or reproach: certainly not flirtatiousness.
‘Will you remember me?’ she asked.
For what? Abdulla meant to ask, but once again he was silent, ashamed to be so coarse and uncouth, lying there in just a vest in the presence of a woman.
‘Well then, I’m off, I suppose,’ she said hesitantly, fiddling with the fringes of her silk headband. She pulled a folded piece of paper from a bundle, and offered it to Abdulla. For a moment Abdulla was at a loss, not knowing what to say or to do. Then someone tapped him Abdulla on the shoulder. He shuddered and turned round: it was his wife Rahbar.
‘Are you going away?’ she said with something between desire and pain, putting all her feelings into one word as only women can, and pointing into empty space.
Abdulla stretched out in that direction, then woke up.
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