Dancer from Khiva, The

by Bibish

  In the evening everyone sat and prayed to be made well. And in the morning they asked what you’d seen in your dreams. And they told me: wait, you’re sure to have a dream.

  And then at last I did have a dream. I saw an old man with a gray beard. He was wearing a long velvet robe. In one hand he was holding a stick and in the other a white bundle. He put the bundle down beside me and said: “Wake up, daughter, I will reveal your calling to you. You must dance. Here, take your clothes!” And with those words he unwrapped the bundle. There was a dancing costume inside it. And that was all.

  I woke up feeling as if it wasn’t a dream and I’d really seen the old man. This Muslim saint is called Hazrati Hizr and you have to do everything he says. It’s fate. And so that was that.

  At about that time there was a rift between the families of the two brothers—Siddik and Sadulla. This is how it happened:

  The Story of the Magic Book

  The brothers had decided a long time ago to marry their children to each other. In Muslim countries close relatives marry each other—male and female cousins marry. In our parts it’s simply thought of as the way of things. When a family wants to marry off a daughter, her father first gathers together his close relatives and says: “Look, they want to betroth my daughter. What do you think, shall I give my daughter in marriage to a stranger, or will one of you take her for his son?” If his brother or sister doesn’t want to take her for their son, then they say: “No, my son isn’t planning to marry yet.” Or they’ll say: “Don’t give her to strangers. I want to marry my son to your daughter.” In any case, relatives and close friends have to be asked. When people want to marry off their sons, they ask their relatives and friends first too.

  And so the two brothers had decided to reinforce their family ties, since they themselves were already old. Siddik had an unmarried eldest son and a daughter to give away, Sadulla also had a son and a daughter. Soon afterward Siddik married his son to Sadulla’s daughter.

  You remember I told you that my grandfather Siddik wrote a book on magic in Arabic. He never let anyone read it. He hid it. Siddik’s children knew about this. They all wondered how they could get hold of this book and take possession of the experience and knowledge that were in it. Sadulla’s daughter, who was now Siddik’s daughter-in-law, knew Arabic too, because when she was a little girl she used to visit her uncle Siddik and his children and so learned Arabic. She wanted to get hold of the book as well. My father was the only one who made no claims. He knew his half brothers and sisters wouldn’t give him the book. And he comforted himself by saying: “I don’t want anything from my father. I’m grateful to him for finding me a wife and for building us a house.”

  Soon after this my grandfather Siddik-makhsum died. After the funeral a scandalous argument broke out beside his house over the book. The problem was that Sadulla’s daughter had managed to steal the book and hide it, but so far no one knew that she’d stolen it. Siddik’s children almost went crazy.

  One was shouting:

  “Papa was going to give me that book!”

  Another said:

  “No, he loved me best! If I find the book, it’s mine!”

  They began searching the entire house. They didn’t find it.

  But Sadulla’s daughter gave herself away somehow. They began to suspect her and they followed her. She realized it was dangerous to keep the book at home. She decided to hide it in her father Sadulla’s house. At night she got up and crept out to the cowshed, where she’d hidden the book. But her husband wasn’t sleeping, he followed his young wife. When she came out of the cowshed, he seized her by the arm and grabbed the book. He shouted:

  “Thief, you have no right to our father’s book!”

  At the sound of the shout everyone came running and a real fight began. Everyone wanted to have the book. Sadulla’s daughter wouldn’t give in. She was envious because people called all Siddik’s daughters halifa. That’s a mark of great respect. Girls and women took special lessons with tutors to become a halifa. They were taught to read and write Arabic, they studied customs and traditions. And they also had to have an immaculate voice. Halifas were always in demand, especially at funerals. They were paid lots of money for reading the holy book during the rituals.

  People called Siddik’s sons makhsumams. All my father’s half brothers and sisters earned good money and were respected by people.

  Sadulla’s daughter wanted to be the same as they were. She was obsessed with the dream of being a halifa. When she got her hands on the book again she said furiously:

  “May this book never be yours or mine!” and she burned it quickly. After that she was thrown out of the house with her child in her arms.

  When he saw his daughter, Sadulla was furious and he told his son:

  “Send your wife back to her parents!”

  “Why, papa?”

  “Because my brother’s children have thrown your sister out. So now their sister can leave here!”

  “But everything is fine between us, there’s a little baby . . .”

  “All the same, if you’re my son, you must do as I say!”

  And so for no reason at all, the poor woman was sent back home with her child. That was how the family ties between the two brothers were destroyed. Forever. And a priceless book was lost.

  Our family began living its own life. My older brother had a job. My younger brothers were studying. I fell in love, like all girls. But, alas, it was pointless. I had no chance of getting married. In our parts, if you’re not a virgin then there’s no question of getting married. Every path was closed to me. If only you knew how much I suffered! Why were there only dark times in my life, where were the bright periods?

  I put up with all the attacks at home in those years, just so that I could finish my studies. I went on tour round the district with the folk music ensemble, and I took part in the cotton harvest.

  And that’s a separate story:

  The Story of the Cotton Harvest

  I want to tell you about it in detail. Uzbekistan is famous for its cotton.

  In summer all the Uzbeki women go out to harvest the cotton, generation after generation.

  Students from schools, colleges, and universities used to be sent to harvest the cotton too. They didn’t study much, except in winter. Most of the year they were busy in the cotton fields.

  From February onward they water the cotton fields. In March they sow the seeds, and when the cotton grows, they weed it by hand. Then they heap the earth up around it with mattocks—they do that by hand too. It’s painstaking, heavy work. The weather starts to get very hot. They go out into the fields from early morning until late evening. After they heap up the earth around the cotton, they water it again. And so when they collect the harvest, their feet are always in water, and their heads are in the hot sun.

  In June and July the cotton blossoms with beautiful pale yellow flowers. In the middle of August they start topping the shoots: they pull a prickly shoot off the cotton—if it’s not torn off, the seed capsule won’t form and the cotton will all go into growth. The shoot is very sharp and you get your fingers badly pricked.

  Soon the cotton bolls open up one by one and the fields turn snow-white. Then they start gathering the harvest.

  My mother used to go out into the cotton fields from morning till night. She took a sack with her and an apron to collect the cotton in. She bent down, gathering the open bolls with both hands. She filled the apron and then tipped it into the sack. They took these sacks to someone called a tableman at a special weighing point. For this slave labor they were paid a pittance. But there was no other work in the kishlak.

  When I was studying in the pedagogical institute, they used to send us out to the cotton fields too. The professor used to be very angry if we didn’t fulfill the daily norm. But how could we fulfill it, when cotton is so light it hardly weighs anything at all, and everyone was expected to gather eighty or a hundred kilograms a day? The professor’s wife had a long, thin swi
tch. In the evening she used to gather us together in a room and shout:

  “Hold your hands out in front of you!”

  When we held our hands out, she began beating the fingers of the ones who hadn’t fulfilled the daily norm with that switch of hers. And I wasn’t interested in fulfilling and over-fulfilling the plan. So I often got beaten on the fingers. And believe me, it really hurt.

  Perhaps those “front-rank workers of socialist competition” really did exist. But I think a lot of the time the records were doctored. In Brezhnev’s time Uzbekistan’s plan was five million tons! Just imagine anyone fulfilling that!

  For picking cotton they paid you a few kopecks or they didn’t pay at all. Our labor had no value. But the plan always had to be fulfilled. If a brigade, a collective farm, or a district fell behind, then they made them work at night as well. They tied rags round sticks, soaked them in kerosene, and walked round the fields with them so that people could work in the dark. And no one dared to protest. Everyone worked and said nothing. Just like in the days of serfdom.

  If anyone didn’t show up in the cotton fields and they didn’t have a very serious reason, a militiaman would come and make them go.

  Sometimes they kept us in the cotton fields until the beginning of December. The fields were already empty, but they wouldn’t allow us to go until the order came down from “on top.”

  And then later I learned that this cotton used to rot in the big warehouses in Russia. All our appalling effort went to waste. Then who needed it? Was it all just so that the bosses in Uzbekistan could report back to the bosses in Moscow, was that it?

  That was the way things were.

  True, after the cotton harvest, they used to hold big celebrations for the people, they were called pakhta-bairam. There was a stadium in Khiva, they used to set up a stage there and bring in all sorts of performers. There were even ram fights, cock fights, and horse racing. The whole republic used to celebrate.

  Then my last state exams began, my final days as a student in the college.

  One day I was walking along the sidewalk in the college and I saw a group of young men coming toward me.

  These young men stopped me and asked:

  “Miss, can you tell us where the bazaar is?”

  I pointed out the way to them with my finger. I couldn’t answer. Because I only knew Russian in theory, only some elementary words from school. I’d never had to use Russian. Because where I lived was just a big backward village! And who could I talk to in Russian, if there were no Russians in our parts? I remember, when they talked to me, I was like a deaf-mute. I could more or less understand them, but I could hardly answer. I spoke hardly any Russian. I just nodded my head, and that was all. But we understood each other all right anyway.

  And then they asked me:

  “Where’s the municipal executive committee?”

  I took them there. They turned out to be students from Leningrad. They’d come to Khiva to write about Uzbeki customs and rituals.

  They had their professor with them, their supervisor, a Georgian woman called Genriko Sergeevna Kharatishvili. A beautiful woman, educated, cultured, and not at all affected. She told me they had nowhere to spend the night, because Khiva was a museum city, the hotels were almost always full.

  I wanted to take them home with me. Only I lived in such a terrible old house, it didn’t even have a normal floor or ceiling. I felt ashamed about it. Of course, my father wasn’t prosperous. While we were little he worked to support everyone on his own. When we grew up, my brother and I went to college to study. So my father hadn’t been able to build a new house.

  Then I decided to put them in our student hostel. I took Genriko Sergeevna to the director of the college. The director immediately made time to see them and gave them a room where they could rest and spend the night. I got to know them better. We agreed to meet in the morning so that I could show them the interesting sights of Khiva. I came early the next day, and we set off on foot round the museums and saw everything.

  At that time we were having class parties at college. Every Saturday and Sunday the students went round the districts visiting each other. And then one girl student invited us—my guests and the students in her year—to a party. She lived forty kilometers from Khiva.

  I paid for them to get there—the Russian students, I mean—out of my thirty-rouble grant. I didn’t mind spending money on them. We had a really good time at the party, no one slept. They only fell asleep early in the morning because they were tired. Everyone came back pleased and in a happy mood.

  Genriko Sergeevna was happy with our hospitality too. She was really pleased that her students had a good time and enjoyed themselves so much.

  A week later they left to go to another town. Of course, I saw them off at the railroad station. Before the train came we sang songs, and they gave me their addresses. They were studying the Afghan language and Arabic at Leningrad State University—they were future orientalists. Two of them were from Germany—Lutz (that’s a short form of Ludwig) and Tibor. Giya (that’s short for Georgii) was from Leningrad, Victor from Gatchina, Zarina from Kazakhstan, and Svetlana from Gorki, and Oleg was from Kaliningrad. They invited me to visit them in Leningrad. Their invitation gave me strength and made me believe that I would get away from my kishlak somehow.

  When they left, I pulled myself together: I had to get out of there as soon as possible. I’d dreamed about it all the time before. Only I hadn’t known where to go. But now I knew.

  After I graduated from the pedagogical institute, I got my diploma and rushed straight home. When I got here, I told my mother:

  “I’m going to go away to Leningrad, I’m not going to stay in this rotten hole any longer, there’s nothing here but vicious rumors! I’ve had enough!”

  My mother was frightened:

  “Don’t do anything stupid, you’ve caused us enough trouble as it is. Don’t go away, daughter, you’ve got your diploma now, you work in the school with your father, all right?”

  It was all pointless. She talked to me and tried to persuade me, but I didn’t want to listen to her anymore. I had only one thought in my head—how could I run away? I had to choose a time when my father and brother weren’t at home. It was all I could think about.

  And then one day I got up early in the morning and saw my father had gone to the school and my older brother had gone to work. After college he found a job in the municipal house of culture as a specialist on teaching methods. And in his free time he played the accordion at weddings as well. My father saved up the money for that accordion.

  There was no one at home apart from my mother and me. So now was the best time to run away! I had breakfast and began collecting my summer things. I took out my father’s “hundred-years-old” suitcase. But what about money? You can’t run very far without money. There was only one place in the house where money was kept—my father’s trunk.

  I opened the trunk and took out exactly five hundred Lenin roubles. I remember how my heart was trembling in fear. After all, five hundred roubles was a lot of money for a poor man. It was four times my father’s monthly pay.

  I took six bread cakes for the journey, but on the way to Moscow they turned rock hard, so that it was impossible to eat them. If my father had been at home, I couldn’t have opened the trunk, and I wouldn’t have taken the five hundred roubles. Then I would probably have stayed at home.

  I remember my mother crying and saying:

  “What shall I tell your father? And other people?”

  I didn’t answer, I was in a hurry to get away while my father and brother weren’t at home.

  I took the bus to Urganch—twenty-five kilometers from our town—and arrived at the railroad station. The train was due any minute, and there weren’t any tickets for Moscow. Yes, during the summer, tickets for Moscow were always in short supply. Melons, watermelons, tomatoes, cucumbers, green herbs—you understand, everybody goes to Moscow to sell their fruit and vegetables.

  When
the train arrived at the station, I agreed on a price of seventy roubles with a conductor, when a ticket to Moscow cost only twenty-two roubles! But there weren’t any left in the ticket office.

  Three days later I was in Moscow, standing in line for the ticket office at the Leningrad Station. I was terribly tired after the train journey. After all, it was the first time I’d traveled a long way on my own. I spent half an hour getting ready to say two words to the ticket clerk: “Leningrad please.” Then my turn came and I got confused. The ticket clerk said:

  “Where to? Speak up.”

  I didn’t say anything. She tried to hurry me:

  “Come on, speak up, which way are you going, where to?”

  “Leningrad please,” I said.

  She said:

  “There are tickets to the Finland Station, will that do?” (This is the name of the station, which I didn’t know.)

  “I don’t want Finland!” I said, frightened.

  “To the Finland Station, I said!”

  “I don’t want Finland! Leningrad please!” I repeated like a parrot: “Leningrad please, Leningrad please!” I was almost crying.

  But the ticket clerk said:

  “Move away from the window. Don’t block the line!”

  I was almost hysterical, I moved away, still thinking to myself, wondering: Why does she keep saying Finland?

  I couldn’t understand, I had no idea at all what she was talking about.

  My turn came round a second time. The ticket clerk said:

  “You again?”

  I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  Anyway, she gave me a ticket. When I got the ticket, I went to the platform, then I looked at the ticket to see what was written on it. When I read it, my hair stood up on end. What it said on the ticket was Moscow–Helsinki. My God! Leningrad wasn’t on it! I thought the ticket clerk must be either deaf or blind. I began to cry, but I kept on walking. I remember I showed the ticket to someone on the platform and they told me which train was mine and which track it was on. And now it was already time for it to leave. I ran up to the car and gave the ticket to the conductor at the door, went into the car, and straight into my compartment.