Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  Inside was equally manic. Diamonds and wheels were spinning in the spandrels and racing up the squinches to parade around the cornice. Light was seeping around them, pouring through squares and crosses and coupling with the shadows to conjure a play of penumbra over the tomb. It was like being in some kind of expressionist light-box, where the activity of the shadows was almost as adventurous as the extraordinary sculpturework.

  The building is widely known as the mausoleum of Prince Ismail, the most revered of the Samanid amirs, who was welcomed to Buk - hara in 874 CE with a scattering of coins over his head. But according to a barely legible inscription on a lintel in the doorway, the tomb is actually the resting place of Nasr, Ismail’s grandson, who ruled the Samanid empire in the mid-tenth century.64 Which gives another layer of meaning to this remarkable building—because it was in Nasr’s reign that Bukhara rose to its eminence as the cultural center of the Islamic world. His patronage of many of the region’s best poets turned Bukhara into the Parnassus of its day. A new literary culture was established, snowballing around the Eastern Islamic world—a phenomenon that scholars call the “New Persian Renaissance.” It was arguably the most significant cultural flowering the Persian-speaking world would ever witness—culminating in the composition of the Persian language’s most important single work: the Shahnameh.

  What is extraordinary about this beautiful mausoleum is how vividly it expresses Nasr’s cultural philosophy. He was especially keen on his Zoroastrian heritage, which is reflected by many of the motifs. The box shape of four arcaded walls is cribbed from Zoroastrian fire temples, while a triangle outside the doorway suggests the Zoroastrian motto of “good works, deeds, thoughts,” and the wheels framing the spandrels are the Zoroastrian symbol for eternal life. In hints and codes, the pre-Islamic culture whispers over the mausoleum like a half-revealed secret, just as it did at the court of Nasr. His poets wrote elegies in praise of Zoroastrian festivals like Nowruz and addressed him by the old royal Persian name of “Khusraw.” When he was toppled in a coup, this brief cultural fireball started to fizzle out, but its embers would make their way across the Black Sands Desert to inspire Ferdowsi.

  While I was looking around the mausoleum, a group of women in striped pantaloons and colored shawls was squatting near the tomb. Sitting at their center, like a mother hen among her brood, was an ancient-looking lady, with wiry silver coils peeking out of her headscarf. She was mumbling a prayer, but the clack of a skewer-like heel on the floor made her turn around.

  The newcomer was wearing a knee-length skirt and her arms were bare under a denim camisole. She looked like some starlet beamed over from the French Riviera. Her face was pinched with an anxious expression as she made a triple circuit of the tomb, before placing her hands in a hole at the end and murmuring a prayer. When she finished, the old woman gave her a handful of pomegranate seeds and floated her hands over her face (the amin ritual that Central Asians perform on religious occasions and whenever they eat—I would come across the same ritual in Afghanistan). A smile flickered across the lady’s lips, but, like a bird looking for the right branch, it vanished before it could settle.

  I was intrigued by the hole, so when the group had dispersed I asked the old woman what it signified. She looked at me, one brow tilted and the other one straight, as if they were weighing up my credentials, and finally the words came out of her small, parched lips in the disembodied tone of a sibyl:

  “When a woman wishes to have a child, we believe she must place her hands inside the tomb. If earth falls on them, it is a sign that her wish, God willing, will be fulfilled.”

  “And did that lady? . . .”

  “Tchkk!” A spark flashed in the old woman’s eyes. “I can see you are a nosy young man! The answer to that question does not belong to you.”

  Nowadays, Uzbekistan’s dominant language is Uzbek, which is related to Turkish. But this isn’t the case in Bukhara. Here, the population has retained the Persian language, as well as the culture that goes with it. They are Tajiks—a Persian-speaking ethnic group who dominate the neighboring country of Tajikistan. Along with the Iranians and the Dari-speaking population of Afghanistan, they are one of the three pieces of the Persian jigsaw.

  Among them was a copper-chaser called Sadriddin. I met him across the street from the mud-brick guest house where I was staying, in a converted caravanserai where he was displaying his work—ghoulish men hobbling across the dishes, lovers sipping wine under plane trees, and the ancient Persian shahs riding out on the hunt, surrounded by intricate borders of geometric strapwork and elaborate gadrooning. He was holding his knife over his work as we talked, brown eyes blazing on his face, which was as clearly cut as if he’d etched it himself out of one of his plates.

  “There is no one like me,” he whispered in a tone of tremendous secrecy. “I have a gift from God!”

  He shook his knife at the stone ceiling of his workshop, the blade’s edge catching a spark from the dusty light outside.

  “Most of the artists have a master,” he said, “but I studied with no one. Why should I? I did not need to!”

  Sadriddin’s straightforward confidence was disarming—I warmed to him at once. He seemed to be intrigued by my Persian, so he was happy to meet again, and over the next few days we made a habit of hooking up by the Labi Hauz—where men in padded chapan coats were clicking their backgammon counters on carpeted bedsteads around a water tank. We would stretch out our legs on the bedsteads, dipping Russian dumplings in sour cream or eating Persian-style kebabs, with a bottle of Shohrud wine between us.

  “Ibn Sina recommends wine in his Qanun,” said Sadriddin, “so why should we disagree?”

  He was referring to the eleventh-century physician and philosopher, 65 who wrote: “When wine is taken in moderation, it gives rise to a large amount of breath, whose character is balanced, and whose luminosity is strong and brilliant.”

  “He also says mulberries are good for the stomach,” I added, plucking a couple off the branches over our heads and passing one across, to a laugh from Sadriddin.

  Chatter like this was par for the course, but occasionally the talk would take a darker tone. Like most Tajiks in Bukhara, Sadriddin had an identity crisis, which he was keen to tell me about.

  “My passport says I am Uzbek,” he explained one evening over a bottle. “But I am not Uzbek—I am Tajik. This is the same for most people in Bukhara.”

  “Would you prefer to live in Tajikistan?” I asked.

  “No! Tajikistan is a disaster, the economy there is really bad and there is no security. But I am not a Turk, that’s for sure! The government here hates the Tajiks—they force us all to speak Uzbek and they say the Tajik symbols are not really Tajiks. For example, you know about Ibn Sina, of course. Well, the Uzbek government—they are saying he was a Turk. You see? They want to take away our culture. 66 And they make it difficult for people in Tajikistan to visit us, or for us to visit them. You know they plant mines around the border? There are thousands of them. So to be a Tajik in Uzbekistan is hard. Tajikistan is a disaster, Uzbekistan is not our country. So where do we go?”

  This connection to figures from the medieval Persian past was a way for Tajiks to keep their sense of identity. Apart from Bukhara, there were few ancient sites they could claim as examples of their people’s former glory—and certainly nothing on the scale of Persepolis. So they linked themselves to the personalities instead, turning figures like Ibn Sina, the scholar Biruni, and the minstrel Rudaki (who was the superstar of Prince Nasr’s mid-tenth-century court) into totems of Tajikness. This obsession with figures from the Persian-speaking past would strike me even more forcefully when I made it to Tajikistan itself, but it was present in all sorts of little ways even in Bukhara. It would be reinforced, in fact (in what at first glance was the most unlikely of settings), when Sadriddin took me to meet his “girlfriend.”

  The idea of meeting an Uzbek-Tajik’s girlfriend intrigued me—Central Asia wasn’t exactly brimming with couples ou
t for a romantic promenade—so I was curious to see how the ritual of courtship was acted out. Was it as secretive, I wondered, as the separated lovers I’d left behind in Tehran?

  Inside a concrete block on the outskirts of Bukhara, a noxious combination of gas and rotten food followed us up the banister. A man was fixing a lock on a door, behind which was a cozy, domestic scene—fresh fabrics and a hint of peppermint—while Alpine landscapes hung on the walls and between a pair of sofas was a walnut table where the tea bowls were already set. It was the kind of place you’d expect to be introduced to somebody’s aunt.

  “So,” said the only lady who could fit this role (she wore a shimmering silver dress and a mouthful of gold teeth), “which of my girls do you want?”

  “Ahhh!” Now I got it.

  The guest room was being used, so Sadriddin’s “girlfriend”—a matchstick in a tiny black skirt and nothing under her vest—pinned a sheet to the walls in a corner of the room. The sheet only vaguely covered their modesty—once they had undressed, the corner of the room became a cross between a blue movie and a shadow play. I felt embarrassed—especially when I caught the aunt figure’s hawklike eyes. A couple of girls were coming in and out of the guest room, both in their underwear, and one of them in a pair of fishnet tights. The latter spent a few minutes on the sofa opposite me, smoking a cigarette with an expression of utter boredom, before leaping off the sofa and springing back into the guest room.

  “The Soviets gave us this,” declared the aunt figure, pointing a sharp red fingernail at the guest room door.

  “Gave you what?” I asked, slightly confused. “Fishnets?”

  “No, you fool! This. Oh, I know,” she added, flashing her gold teeth as she laughed, “we had pleasure-daughters before—but they were only for the khans. This is what the Communists taught us—if a man has two thousand sum (about five dollars at this point in time), he can have a pleasure-daughter too.”

  There was another girl, cross-legged on the floor with a glass of Coke, whose expression—studious and a little severe—didn’t go at all with her black boob-tube and shiny red microskirt. She looked up at me, without smiling, and turned back to a book she was reading: a short story collection by the Tajik author Sadriddin Ayni.

  “Is it good?” I asked.

  She lifted her shoulders noncommittally and turned back to the book.

  I wanted to ask her more, but Aunt was eyeing me from the other side of the table.

  “You want her?”

  “No.”

  “So why are you talking to her?”

  I felt awkward. I wasn’t sure whether I should wait for Sadriddin or make my excuses and leave, and feeling somewhat fidgety I turned to a backgammon board on the table, moving the counters absently while I was working out what to do. But Aunt was more decisive: She leaned across the table, setting the counters in place, and challenged me to a game.

  “I am a good player,” she declared.

  She was right: In five minutes I was beaten.

  “Now you have to give me something,” she said.

  It was like a slap in the face. She was going to take all my money! She was going to call on the man fixing the lock (surely it didn’t take that long to mend a door—he must be here for something else), and if I didn’t cough up she’d get him to beat me up. But it wasn’t my money, apparently, that she was after.

  “Take off your shirt,” she instructed.

  The girl with the book was nodding. “This is correct,” she said—like it was enshrined in the national constitution.

  I don’t think it was the wine I’d drunk at dinner—I don’t think it was even the fact I was outnumbered. I did consider maintaining my position as the lone prude in the room, but the words “to hell with it” were whizzing through my head and before I knew what I was doing I had unbuttoned my shirt, handed it over to Aunt, and was squaring my naked shoulders over the re-set board. Barechested backgammon in a brothel—don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

  The fear of having to discard anything else concentrated my mind, as all those games with Tahmineh started to bear fruit. Thanks to a few lucky turns of the dice, I marched my counters along the rows, blocked five of them ahead of the twenty-fourth, and secured my home area. Soon I had two of Aunt’s counters imprisoned in my corner, with no way out.

  “So why do you come to Bukhara?” she asked.

  Hmmm—a cheap delay tactic if ever I heard one!

  I mentioned my interest in Persian culture and the Shahnameh, but I felt silly doing so; poetry seemed out of place in a brothel (although, in retrospect, that was stupid—prostitutes and poets have always gotten on rather well.)67

  “Rukhana knows many poets,” said Aunt, smiling at the girl with the book.

  So it appeared. Rukhana looked up and, in a soft, weary voice, started reciting. Her voice was so flat and her expression so blank that I didn’t pick it up at first, but a few lines in I realized it was a poem I knew, a poem written more than a thousand years ago.

  According to the story, Prince Nasr was neglecting his court, holidaying in Herat and enjoying himself so much that his courtiers were in despair. To their rescue came Rudaki, Nasr’s favorite poet. He set off with his harp and sang the verses Rukhana was now reciting, which so inflamed the prince with love for Bukhara that he was on his horse and riding back home before he even had time to put on his boots:The Ju-yi Muliyan we call to mind,

  We long for those dear friends long left behind.

  The sands of Oxus, toilsome though they be,

  Beneath my feet were soft as silk to me.

  The moon’s the prince, Bukhara is the sky,

  O sky, the moon shall light thee by and by.68

  It’s hard to imagine an English equivalent: a Soho call girl quoting from Beowulf? Momentarily startled, I tried to focus on the game. Aunt conceded defeat well before it was certain, swiping the counters and folding her arms over her chest. I waited, wondering if I would get my shirt back. But she turned to Rukhana, who crossed her arms behind her neck and slipped out of her top.

  “Rukhana is my body,” exclaimed Aunt, her gold teeth flashing as she laughed.

  Rukhana wasn’t laughing. She sat motionless, like an artist’s model. She was well formed, and I had a feeling that her state of undress was an act of gamesmanship by Aunt, or part of a ploy that would end up with the magical disappearance of my wallet. As the next game began, I tried not to look at her, to concentrate on the board, to make sure I didn’t lose any more of my clothes. . . . But before I could make my first move, there was an interruption. I noticed it before it happened: I was trying to keep Rukhana out of my line of sight, and my eyes had latched onto the sheet at the back of the room.

  The pin holding it up was wobbling, as if it couldn’t contain its excitement over the activity it was concealing. It fell in a dive, but the sheet’s descent was more graceful: a gentle flutter, as it draped itself over Sadriddin’s girl, so that for a moment she turned into a pantomime ghost. Then, as she pulled herself up, the sheet slipped down. She reflexively crossed her hands over the most notable details of her nakedness and raced across the room, barging through the door to the guest room and provoking a furious growl from behind it.

  “So, Nicholas,” said Sadriddin, yanking up his trousers as he swaggered toward the table, “did you win?”

  It’s September 1991. All over the Soviet Union, the old system is falling apart. In Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, crowds are gathering on Prospekt Lenina, the main thoroughfare. They make their way toward the government headquarters: farmers, factory workers, the disenchanted. They throw a lasso around the giant statue of Lenin and, with the help of a crane, drag it to the ground. And what do they set up in its place? A poet. A man made of bronze, with a long wild beard and a flame in his hands.

  Ferdowsi.

  After decades of Russian hegemony, Tajikistan’s Persian identity has been reignited.

  “It was a living hell,” said Bahriddin Aliev.

&
nbsp; Plump and swarthy skinned, he was seated in his office in central Dushanbe over a table scattered with papers and scripts from his different jobs as journalist, radio playwright, political analyst, and historian—as if the table itself were illustrating the chaos he was describing.

  “It was Tajik against Tajik,” he said. “We had the Islamic movement and the nationalist movement against the Communists against the Uzbeks. You couldn’t go outside for fear you’d be beaten up or killed by the looters. They even came into our houses. Once—you remember?”

  He turned to his colleague—a tall, lean man with little hair and a grave, earnest manner.

  “Dr. Qasimi and I were working in my house,” continued Aliev. “Soldiers came in. They beat me on the head with a Kalashnikov, so hard I lost consciousness. Then they turned to Dr. Qasimi and put a knife to his neck.”

  “I couldn’t eat for two weeks,” chuckled Dr. Qasimi, as if it had been a minor accident.

  “But why? Had you written something against them?” I asked.

  “No!” Aliev snorted. “They just wanted our money.”

  “At day they were soldiers,” said Dr. Qasimi, “but at night they were thieves.”

  The cost of the Tajik civil war was still being counted. It told in the city center, in bullet-scored apartment blocks that looked like they’d been patterned on water crackers, in missing pedimenta on the pastel stucco buildings, and in the earth mounds between them, buzzing with construction cranes. Having managed to survive the Soviet era, it was only now—when power was back in the hands of the native Tajiks—that the indigenous culture was being ransacked. As one of the country’s most prominent novelists explained, it was left to a few brave individuals to keep it alive.