Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  I must tell you how I met this paragon among women. I was sent by the authorities to the ancient city of Osh, there to attend an historiographical symposium. Its organizing secretary was none other than Ranisa. I fell in love with her the very day the conference opened. So, I don’t doubt, did many of the other speakers at the event. But somehow it was me she favored. A miracle, you see!

  Although I was Kirghiz and she Uzbek, at least in part, we hardly paid attention to such distinctions in those days. The great thing was to be good Communists, and work properly for the community. Ranisa liked the way my speech had been properly prepared and contained facts, not empty rhetoric.

  Osh is a modern city now, I believe, but its history dates back to six or seven centuries before the birth of Christ. In Osh, with Ranisa, I ate the finest pomegranates I ever tasted. It had been an important city on the old Silk Road—which probably accounted for the lucid Chinese quality of my beloved’s face and body.

  So we were married in Kegeti. Ranisa was happy with the simple life of the mountains—a woman who sang at her work. I can say we were truly fulfilled in our lives. We slept together in a large wooden bed in which we could listen to the sound of the stream pouring down from the mountains and never drying—like a blessing, you might say.

  Ranisa bore me three children, a boy—Rejep—and two daughters, both of whom exhibited from babyhood their mother’s good humor and intelligence. Also living with us was Ranisa’s older sister, Evranileva. Then still in Osh, Evranileva had married a Cossack husband. This man was a powerful political figure, but privately a cruel and drunken brute. One night he beat Evranileva so badly that she fled from his house. After some adventures, she came to live with us in our mountain retreat.

  Because of this bad treatment, Evranileva was a haunted woman. She made no friends in Kegeti but at least she was kind to her nephew and nieces, and was a good cook into the bargain. And she adored her younger sister.

  Well, little can be said about a contented life. It can’t be recaptured in words, or even in the memory, so smoothly do years flow by. Besides, it’s really sorrow the world’s more interested in hearing about. Sorrow—well, that’s inexhaustible…

  Of course we had our excitements. Often I’d be away for days in the hills, investigating the archaeological sites. Rejep came with me when he was old enough, riding in front of me in the saddle. I tried always to make sure that the museum in Frunze did not hear of any new finds we made. It stole from us what it could, just as Moscow museums stole—I should say “requisitioned”—from Frunze.

  It was wonderful up in the hills—almost as wonderful as down at home with Ranisa, and game was plentiful. Existence in Kegeti was as good as it can be on Earth, I’d say.

  At this juncture, Dr. Haydar sighed and looked about as if awakening from a dream. He had been staring straight ahead as he talked, his right hand resting on his Nieman Marcus bag. Now he looked with heavy-lidded gaze down at the floor, as though disinclined to continue further with his narrative.

  The singer Elmira had appeared to listen as raptly as Burnell, as if so addicted to story-telling that it held her even when in a language incomprehensible to her. Her two boys clutched each other and by so doing had turned themselves temporarily to stone. As for the Russian couple, they swathed themselves in cigarette smoke and kept their own counsel.

  His hands clasped in his lap, Burnell looked about him as he listened to Haydar’s tale. Studying the faces of the others making the journey to Krasnovodsk with him, he realized he was half lost in the story and half in his own musings.

  The express fled on its way, passing indistinct Geok-Tepe. Lights had come on in the carriages, to cast a flickering illumination on the cold dead ground over which they sped.

  Haydar took his silver flask from his pocket and swigged at it. He sighed, wiped his mouth slowly and thoroughly, and then began to speak again. As he talked he looked into the dark eyes of Elmira.

  I said this was a story about an illiterate. So it is, and the worse for me that it should be so.

  Ranisa and I ran the little Kegeti Museum between us. When I was on an expedition in the mountains, my wife was left in sole command. The only assistance we had was an Uzbek. The Uzbek’s name was Pikuli. And Pikuli was an illiterate.

  Now everyone in our town knew Pikuli. He was always about and I should explain that he was a kind of standing joke. A lumbering, ill-formed young man, very dark, and uncouth in his speech.

  Children always teased Pikuli. The bigger ones threw stones. There was something about Pikuli. He was a Caliban, a thing apart. Yet surely as he looked, he was harmless. You might say that basically his nature was so mild that others took advantage of him; or you might say that he knew if he struck anyone the whole of Kegeti would have been angry. Fighting did not happen in Kegeti.

  Pikuli was the odd-job man at the museum. He was our sweeper. Any heavy work, any dirty work, any extra work—Pikuli did it. I realize I regarded him as a beast of burden. I took advantage of him. So did Ranisa. But we were never unkind. Indeed we felt sorry for him. Ranisa would often reward him with a mutton bone or a slice of apricot tart. Then he would look at her with such an intensity of gratitude she was sometimes frightened.

  You can say only that Pikuli was one of society’s victims. He was an orphan. His mother was a mountain woman of an Uzbek tribe, who had been violated and died shortly after giving birth to her son. He lived on the west of the town, in what had been a winter shed for goats. At the time of which I’m speaking, Pikuli would be maybe eighteen or nineteen.

  Day after day, Pikuli did whatever work was given him to do, without complaint. If someone hit him with a stone, he would bark like a dog—but never attack.

  As I have admitted, I took advantage of him, and was contemptuous of such an unschooled creature, who had never shown the slightest interest in learning anything. Yet—I admired Pikuli. Yes, for all his sullen looks, there was something saintly about him. He walked with a slouch, his black hair hung over his slant eyes, but there was innocence, I thought, in his rare smiles. He reminded me of one of Dostoevsky’s holy fools. So I treated him decently, of that I’m sure, though I had to kick his ass a few times to get him moving. More than once I stopped Rejep throwing stones and mud at him. Ranisa seldom raised her voice to the fellow.

  And so life went on its smooth course, until we heard new names in that world beyond Frunze, the names of Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin. News came that Communism was worn out, that the great Stalin had been mistaken, and—most amazing—that the Soviet Union was collapsing. Imagine! It was like hearing that the sun had gone cold! I stood up in our local council and denied that such a thing could happen. It must be a propagandist lie. I had been educated—as had everyone in Kegeti—to believe that we would probably take over the whole world when Capitalism fell apart. Instead, somehow we had ourselves fallen apart. Our leaders had deceived us.

  Now, we cannot understand how such foolish understandings filled our remote valley. But so it was. Everything we had been taught had been wrong. Every word we had read in our books at school had been a lie…

  To this day, I have nostalgia for the old order. Like everything, it had its blemishes. But at least it had laws, under which we enjoyed peace. It is true that in President Leonid Brezhev’s day, when I was a boy, there were difficulties—the war with Afghanistan may be criticized in retrospect—but at least society was stable and everyone knew what was what. That’s the secret in life, to know what’s what. No sooner was President Yeltsin in power than troubles began everywhere and society became disrupted.

  Still, you try to continue to live life as before. The kids must be brought up properly. You imagine that the troubles will pass…

  Up in the mountains, close by the Kashgar road, excavations were taking place on the site of a twelfth-century bastion. The archaeologists were having problems getting their salaries paid, but still they kept working, being dedicated men. They had dug down into a cellar and brought up vari
ous buried objects, including a bronze instrument, which we identified as something used by Chinese camel-drivers to blow pills down the throats of sick camels. An inscription on the instrument had still to be translated.

  When the archaeologists radioed me to announce that they had found a grave with a coffin which seemed to contain someone who had been of high rank in this world, I saddled up Scoundrel, my mare, and rode into the mountains. What happened while I was there, in the encampment under the ancient pines? Why a riot broke out in Kegeti!

  A riot? I had always imagined that riots were things which happened in distant parts of the globe, Milan or Los Angeles or even Moscow or Osh. I had imagined that a riot needed at least a thousand people, or let’s say five hundred. And there had to be an important building to besiege, a palace or a TV station or a police headquarters. In Kegeti—so I believed—we had not enough men to start a riot. And no important buildings…

  Yet there was Ranisa on the short wave, telling me she was besieged in the museum, with a mob yelling outside.

  I saddled up my mare at once, and started for home.

  Night was falling by the time I arrived back in Kegeti. Mist was gathering. I approached warily from the south.

  The town lay silent. The square was deserted. Although the street lights were shining, no other lights showed. Son-Kul, the main food store, was closed. The Korean cafe and the Naryn Restaurant had their shutters up. No cars moved. No one was about at all.

  I reached the museum, my museum. The heavy glass door was shattered. A pool of blood lay on the marble steps leading up to the entrance.

  This sight woke in me a great fear for my wife. Also a fierce anger at this violation of our legality.

  Climbing into the museum through the broken door, I called to Ranisa. In the silence which followed I had an image of my elegant and demure spouse lying dead on the floor. I searched the place. She was nowhere there. The exhibits all remained undisturbed.

  I left the museum and my horse and ran home. There was silence except for the burble of the stream. Then a few shots, distantly, in the woods. Rifle fire.

  Happily, Ranisa was safe. She greeted me unharmed in the house. She was nursing my shotgun, and her sister and the children were huddled by her. She told me that when the rioters had broken the museum door, the leader had severed an artery on the falling glass. This accident had saved her. The mob leader had collapsed and had had to be rushed to the hospital in Frunze. A couple of his friends had driven him away. The rest of the rioters, subdued by the sight of blood, had simply dispersed.

  “It was not serious,” Ranisa said. “I should not have radioed you, but I was frightened at the time. The noise they made was so scaring. The mob gathered on the bridge and then came along the street.”

  “But what did they want?”

  Ranisa gave an uneasy laugh. “They shouted that they wanted their independence.”

  “Independence from what? For what? Who were these madmen?”

  “Uzbeks.”

  So that was the start of it. Of general disaster. The history of nations rushes on like a river, beyond individual control. Suddenly we were no longer Soviet citizens. That was all past. We became Kirghizi and Uzbeks. Ethnic distinctions opened up like terrible wounds coming unstitched—wounds of which we had scarcely been aware.

  It’s true, as I said, that Kirghizi lived on one side of our stream and Uzbeks on the other. But this arrangement had always been regarded more as a law of nature than any kind of political division. Now it became a political division.

  There had been plenty of intermarriage between the two races. We also had some Russian businessmen in Kegeti, and possibly the odd KGB man. Also a handful of Koreans. Even they had intermarried.

  All these marriages, like marriages elsewhere, had been happy or wretched in various degrees, the degree rarely depending on racial stock. Of course there had been jokes—but jokes without a sting in them. Now there was a sting. The time for jokes was finished.

  I was a responsible member of our community. As a Kirghiz married to an Uzbek, I resolved to talk to the Uzbek community. The morning after the riot, Pikuli turned up for work as usual, looking no more disheveled than he usually did. I set him to sweeping up the broken glass and repairing the museum door with some planking. He worked without comment or complaint. Leaving Ranisa in charge, I walked over the bridge to see my friend Turav Serov.

  Turav Serov had the compact build of an Uzbek. He was a bright intelligent young man of my own age. His deep-set green eyes were generally alight with humor. We’d sat on the same bench at school together, and he often accompanied me into the hills.

  He was sitting in the teashop with some companions, engaged in earnest conversation. Serov did not greet me in his usual amiable fashion. No humor showed on his face, while the others fastened their gaze on the table and did not look up at me. More abruptly than I had intended, I asked him what had happened on the previous day.

  “What is it?” I asked. “I see you’re angry, Turav. Is it anything serious?”

  To this day I can hardly credit Serov’s reply.

  “Serious, you ask? I’ll say it’s serious. At the end of the Afghan War, when bread went on ration for a year, you people, you Kirghizi—you got twice as large a ration as us Uzbeks.”

  I could not believe I was hearing correctly. The Afghan War had ended years ago. As for the question of rationing…it was true there had been a famine elsewhere, man-made, because good Kirghizstan grain had been despatched to feed the soldiers returning from the war. At that time, a lorry had driven up from Frunze to Kegeti every day, loaded with loaves of bread which were fairly distributed. So I had been told, although I had been posted away from Kegeti at that period.

  I said to Serov, “Why are you talking about this bread rationing? What has it to do with the riot yesterday?”

  He stood up and faced me. “We were cheated over the bread ration. You think that’s nothing, do you?”

  “Look, bread was distributed daily during the time of shortages. No one starved, did they? Every family in Kegeti got its fair share.”

  “How do you know? At night, a second lorry came, delivering bread only to you people, you Kirghizi.”

  “That’s a lie. Obviously a lie. In any case, why bring up this ancient rumor now? It’s all past history, not at all important. What is important is that a mob—a mob, Turav—tried to break into the museum yesterday.”

  Then the other men started shouting at me. They said the bread ration was just one of many ways in which the Uzbeks had been cheated throughout history. They were not prepared to stand for it any more. They demanded their independence. That was the word Ranisa had heard: Independence. Just to pronounce it seemed to drive them mad. They banged the table, spat in my face, bellowed the word in chorus. Independence, Independence!

  In the end, I left the teashop in fury. To reason with them was impossible.

  Next day, by the way, a notice appeared on the teashop door saying “Uzbeks Only.”

  Back in my house, I strode about and cursed until Ranisa calmed me. When we discussed the problem, we decided we should call an urgent meeting of our Kirghizi friends.

  That very evening, seven close friends came. They were shouted at on the way by Serov’s clique. A stone was thrown. Nothing particularly serious, but the seven arrived in angry mood. Most of them were carrying their shotguns.

  “We must talk about this calmly,” I said, as they crowded into our small living-space. “Please leave your guns by the door. This is not a shooting matter. We need to talk and consider. We can’t have trouble in Kegeti. It’s always been peaceful and we must keep it that way. If our friends the Uzbeks have a grievance, then we must meet it honestly.”

  Grinko was our schoolteacher, a tall man, tall as a bulrush and as mild, with a neat white beard. He spoke now in his piping voice which generations of children had imitated. “We cannot discuss anything with your wife in the room. She’s an Uzbek too.”

  When he lo
oked round for support, heads nodded in agreement.

  “Don’t be daft,” I said. “You all know Ranisa. She’s my wife and she’s certainly not going to be sent out of her own living-room.”

  “Oh, I’ll go rather than be a thorn in anyone’s flesh,” said Ranisa, looking embarrassed. “I’ll go and make some tea for you all.”

  “No, you stay,” I told her. “Principles are principles.”

  “Yeah, and an Uzbek is always an Uzbek.” That was Penukidze, a man who worked in the Naryn Restaurant. “I’m not stopping here. We don’t owe the Uzbeks a thing, so it’s no good you being weak with them. We’ve got to show them where they get off.”

  Someone else said this, if you can believe it: “And what about what happened in 1916? A million Kirghizi were slaughtered, by Russians and by these same Uzbeks.”

  “That’s a million years ago, you fool!” I shouted. But they shouted louder.

  That was how it went. There was no rational way out of the cruel dilemma in which the history of the previous century placed us. It had to be war or peace. In a life-threatening situation, instincts from pre-human days revive. Most terribly, shadow projections make us see in those who oppose us all the dark things we suppress in ourselves. On either side of our little stream, enemy territories sprang up, in which Uzbeks saw us as cheats and oppressors and we saw them as murderers. No intellectual bridge could span that crude division. By the week’s end, shooting started.

  Of course the new enmity fed on past glories and defeats. Hate was a poison in the bloodstream. Old memories rose to choke us, and made men mad.

  Where all the guns came from it is hard to say. I was told there were Germans in Frunze who sold armaments to both sides, and gun-runners in the hills.

  I never thought to see the rather weedy Grinko manning a machine gun. But so it was. Soon the whole town was armed. And Ranisa and I were not trusted by either side.