The Devils' Dance

by Hamid Ismailov

  Everyone has their own habits,

  Therefore we have no will.

  There is no scorpion without a sting of stone,

  So you have no cause to be amazed.”

  ‘The tortoise said, “I have heard a saying of the sages: Don’t trust a friend, he’ll flay you alive. And now, my friend, you must walk like straw on the water. I myself must take a look at the precious stones on this seabed.” Saying this, the tortoise plunged down like a pearl-diver, and the scorpion gave up the ghost. The moral of the fable is this: “You can’t mistake a genuine friend; and a false person has no friends”. These words stay in the mind, but the goal slips from the hand. We’ve left these words to have their effect…’

  Uvaysiy set the book down on the table, next to a burning candle. Privately, Nodira wondered: What did Navozanda have in mind when she told that fable? Was it a hint that two hands are stronger than one, or was she warning herself to be on guard against a rival, a senior wife? Who wrote that fable? It can’t have been Uvaysiy, the language is too simple and crude, more like the language of the street…’

  Her thoughts once more revolved around her own verse: giving voice to them, like a flickering candle. Nodira sang:

  If there were any quarry, hearts would hunt in pairs,

  Keep your state single, save your locks of hair as a trap and a net…

  —

  From time to time, Umar, Emir of all Muslims, liked to fling some well-worn garment over his shoulder and wander the streets, pretending to be a dervish. Tucked into a leather bag hanging from his belt he always kept some much-used knucklebone dice and five or six gold coins, while by his side was his most reliable guard, the handsome strongman known by the name Gulxaniy. Unarmed, they set off for markets, tea-houses, merchants’ inns and gambling dens. The Emir’s pretext was that he wanted to study what the people really thought of their government; despite Islam’s prohibitions, he loved to spend his time on wild pleasures.

  Umar could have stayed in the palace to smoke a hookah or drink opium syrup, but he felt the urge to go to a gambling house for a game of knucklebones. With his guard by his side, Umar saw no need for restraint: if the mood took him, he was as ready for a fight as for a game.

  But on this particular day, he was just about to change his clothes when the chief mulla happened to come to his council chamber. The matter was this: the inhabitants of Kokand, too fond of trade, had stopped visiting the mosques, especially for afternoon and evening prayers, which were now attended only by the imam, the muezzin and the charity heads. Running out of patience, Umar hastily dictated a decree to his clerk: ‘As for anyone who fails to attend prayers for our Prophet Mohammed the Messenger, peace be upon him, especially the afternoon and evening prayers, let them be given fifty strokes of the lash.’ After dealing with this, Umar changed his clothes and, accompanied by Gulxaniy, headed straight for the gambling den.

  Umar threw his well-worn knucklebone with a cry ‘to Lady Luck!’, but the die refused to fall concave side up; at best it landed concave side down, and at least managed to avoid hitting another die. His hand was out of luck; he lost all but a single gold coin. As his fingers felt in his purse for the coin, he suddenly exclaimed, ‘Let’s play a different game!’ Some of the players looked at him with disapproval, others with eager anticipation. ‘Let’s go on with this game,’ some said, ‘we’re enjoying it.’ But Umar had Gulxaniy by his side: the strongman’s arms, crossed over his chest like two big weights from a set of scales, made the gamblers reconsider.

  ‘What kind of game?’ they asked.

  ‘I’ll spread out my satin waistband here in the middle, then each of us will line up behind it and put two knucklebones down. Then we stand back five paces and take turns to throw a knucklebone. If you knock a knucklebone off the waist-band, you win it and can throw another one; anyone who knocks off two knucklebones, gets both, the one he first hit, and the one he threw.’ The players scratched their heads, convinced that this was a child’s game, but after one or two more questions they started playing. With a shout of ‘Lady Luck’ a man stepped forward to throw a polished knucklebone. It landed six inches short of the row of knucklebones on the waistband, bounced off, touching one of the others, then settled down in the middle. Biting his dirty fingernails, the man moved away.

  The next player to throw gave a cry of ‘Help me, saint!’ His knucklebone struck the first, then rolled away off the cloth.

  ‘As much use as a fan for an orphan girl,’ Gulxaniy laughed.

  It was the cobbler’s turn. This thickly bearded man, before taking his knucklebone, stepped back and asked Gulxaniy: ‘Do I throw it flat side down, or concave up?’

  ‘Do I look like an expert in bones? Would you ask a butcher “Will this boot fit my wife?”’ Laughter shook the ceiling of the gambling den.

  Embarrassed, the cobbler threw his knucklebone, but it didn’t get anywhere near the other bones: it even fell short of the waistband itself.

  ‘No wonder he can’t reach a waistband,’ Gulxaniy commented, ‘he’s a cobbler, after all’; the gamblers’ laughter was like a marsh full of croaking frogs. Two more players took their turns. The second had some cunning and knocked out two knucklebones, but his next throw ended badly, for it struck the remaining bones too hard, ending up in a pile with the others.

  Then Umar had his turn: he brought out of his pocket not a small sheep’s knucklebone but a bull’s ankle bone, the size of a man’s fist. ‘Cheat!’ somebody hissed. ‘Crook!’ another growled. ‘Why shouldn’t I take advantage?’ Umar said, grimacing nastily as his strongman quietened everybody down by raising his ten-kilo hands and saying, ‘Is my fist as big as your father’s grave, or a courtroom? One of you, come up and see me!’ And he called upon Niyozcha the Councillor.

  ‘Say something,’ he told Niyozcha, as he pointed to his boots. ‘If I chuck this boot of mine, will it fall heel first, or top first? If you get it right, you win; if not, my pal here does.’

  The gamblers argued amongst themselves, some saying ‘top first’, others ‘heel first’. Niyozcha inspected the boots very carefully before giving his verdict: ‘The boot has a heavy heel, so it will fall with the heel furthest away’. The Tajik strongman kicked his boot up to the ceiling; as it fell, it span round two and a half times and landed neatly heel first. Gulxaniy then instructed Umar, ‘Throw your bone!’ Crying ‘Lady Luck!’, the disguised Emir hefted his bone by its side. The mud-brick sized missile scattered the other knucklebones like sparks in all directions. The big ankle bone turned over once before settling on the waist-band. First of all Umar got it into his head to crush the cunning player’s knucklebone, then he finished up by knocking off the others, two by two. When only one bone was left on the satin cloth, the call to evening prayers came.

  Some heard it, others were too busy throwing knucklebones. But the bang with which the gambling den’s doors were thrown open dwarfed the clatter of the bones, as did the voices of the dozen guards who rushed in with their whips flailing.

  Thus, Umar barely escaped the fifty strokes he himself had ordered that morning. Gulxaniy, living up to his role as strongman, had managed to get him out of trouble after wounding four or five of the guards.

  Now he was sitting in his library, still wearing his old dervish garments, and with Gulxaniy still with him. ‘Tell me a story,’ Umar said.

  ‘This is one I’ve heard,’ Gulxaniy began, in his rather rough Tajik accent, ‘a man smoked a bit of opium syrup, and when it was time for evening prayers he came to someone’s living-room, where they were eating a meal. The table was laid and people were sitting around it, then the call for prayers sounded out. The people said, “Let’s pray first, and afterwards go on with the feast. Anyone who doesn’t pray doesn’t get any dinner.” The man felt that he had done nothing wrong as far as prayers were concerned. He got up, performed his religious ablutions, said his prayers, then looked reproachful, and sa
id crossly: “Oh, this damned desire to eat! Despite my having smoked opium, you’ve made me dip my hands, as decency demands, in cold water, made me turn the colour of resin, and finally you’ve told me to pray”. You are like him. Do the decent thing: renounce either your passions, or the ruler’s power. “Two liquids can’t mix in one heart,” they say. And another thing the sages used to say, “If you board two ships, you drown; to cross the sea safely you have to take only one.”’

  The Emir didn’t know whether to laugh or to curse.

  —

  The bride’s first forty days of marriage had passed and Oyxon was getting ready to visit her father in Shahrixon. It was a convenient coincidence: Umar was preparing to go hunting nearby, on the Syr-Darya river. Umar’s sister Oftob had visited for the wedding ceremony, but that visit, too, had run its course, and she was returning to her house in Shahrixon. Umar had her accompany his young bride and appointed to go with them a few old maidservants plus his eldest son Madali, his nephew Hakim, and his most reliable guard, Gulxaniy.

  The weather had turned cold; there was a touch of frost in the air, and hoar-frost lay on either side of the roads; the men were wearing leather coats, the women fur-lined gowns and woollen headscarves. Everyone’s breath was visible, except for that of the usually talkative Gulxaniy, for whom the cold had dampened the desire for speech. The snorting horses couldn’t yet go slow enough for the cart; they were pulling hard so as to warm up more quickly. The ladies and the elderly maidservants had arranged themselves in a circle as if sitting around a table, their legs covered with one big quilted blanket; the men were on horseback on either side of the cart, adjusting the pace of their wild mounts to that of Gulxaniy’s draft horses.

  The weather was so harsh that under her veil Oyxon’s two cheeks turned bright red, like apples; she remembered with affection and with bitterness an earlier cart journey. At times it seemed as if it was her beloved Qosim, not Gulxaniy, in the driver’s seat, and her loving young brothers, not strange old women, who were sitting pressed against her. The cart wheels creaked, like two heavy millstones grinding her sweet dreams into flour…

  Day and night I see shadows, I spy something behind me,

  Haunting my solitude, they follow me like day follows night.

  My horror and fear are as shallow as a sigh,

  Every step on my path heads towards the grave’s abyss.

  Oyxon composed this poem, but didn’t set it down on paper, for she was wary of her rebellious thoughts. Like threaded pearls under a high-necked dress, she kept her verses away from other people’s eyes, reserving them for her burning heart. Dreams, dreams, dreams… if only there were an end to you, or some good could come of you. You are like a road that goes straight from early spring to autumn. I see a field of stubble instead of a bed of tulips, an apricot grove now gutted by autumn, the boundless sky tumbling down, its blue darkened by thick clouds. The cart wheels go screeching on without end.

  Like arrows of wood, like the blades of mountains and rocks

  In sight of the emptiness, fear of light stabs me in the back.

  There was another difference from the cart journey of Oyxon’s melancholy memory: Gulxaniy didn’t sing, as Qosim had. Instead, his deep voice was employed in stories to amuse the women, stories as miserable as the mood of the day:

  There was a drover down Fergana way

  Well, his old she-camel gave birth one day.

  The drover’s wife was very pretty

  But their house was a hovel, mean and dirty.

  ‘The camel and the baby camel were the drover’s only possessions. One day, he saddled the camel, loaded it up with heavy bags and set off. The camel calf was upset by being separated from its mother; it trotted off after her. Some distance away, in the desert, in the shade of a solitary tree, the drover made the camel kneel down.

  That young calf trailed far behind its mum

  Panting with the heat and overcome.

  “Hey, mum,” it said, “Give me a break!

  I’ve had as much of this heat as I can take.”

  “If you moved slower then I’d be happy

  You could just give me milk on tap.”

  The mum turned and looked at her daughter

  And soon was shedding tears like water.

  “See – this man holds my muzzled head

  And his eyes are fixed one way – ahead.”

  “But if he let me just a little bit free,

  For dust, he wouldn’t see you and me!”

  When she heard these words, Oyxon felt so humiliated that she could not freeze the tears in her eyes: they almost splashed through her veil.

  By noon they reached Marg’ilon, where everyone knew Gulxaniy and was eager to invite him in. ‘Wouldn’t you like to sit down and have a bowl of tea?’ Choosing the most respectable house, they halted, performed noonday prayers and had a bite to eat before setting off again, not waiting for the dish of plov that had been cooked for them.

  They had covered about ten miles when they realised that the weather had turned quite bad. Madali dismounted, tied his horse’s reins to the cart and declared that he was ‘frozen stiff’ before promptly climbing up into the women’s cart and getting under their blanket.

  Oyxon noticed that under the blanket he was constantly touching her legs with his own, but avoiding meeting her eyes. At first she thought he might simply be showing affection to her as his stepmother, but there was something sensual in the way he intertwined their legs. She asked Gulxaniy to stop the cart and let her ride one of the horses instead. Hakim helped her mount Madali’s riding horse. The horse was apparently bored of hauling the cart: kicking up its front legs, it now cantered ahead. Hakim whipped his own horse to follow. The daylight was fading as the two riders quickly vanished out of sight. Gulxaniy followed them, driving the cart at a cautious gallop, but no sooner had they reached the next settlement than two spokes on the right-hand wheel broke.

  Fortunately, Gulxaniy was well-known here too. While the travellers drank tea the wheel was repaired, but Oyxon and Hakim seemed to have disappeared. ‘Before the twilight fades, we can get as far as a place called Nayman and stop there overnight,’ said Gulxaniy. But when they reached Nayman, there was neither news nor sighting of the two riders. ‘Well then, God is great; even if they do get lost, there’s only one road, they’ll end up here,’ the others decided; they spent the night with the village elder.

  Now for what happened to Oyxon and Hakim. Once they had left the cart behind they made their horses gallop ahead, one after the other without looking back. Oyxon felt free at last, having emerged from the dark; she was drunk with freedom, rushing like a fire in the cold air. Chasing after the girl intoxicated Hakim, and he didn’t lag behind his sister-in-law. As they galloped together, thick clouds unexpectedly covered the sky, a squall started and the world turned dark. In this pitch-black darkness only the horses’ flowing manes were still visible. Snow began to fall, the wind howled. They found themselves in the middle of thorny scrub, the path had now become hard to make out. Who panicked? Young Hakim. ‘Let’s turn back,’ he pleaded, but his sister-in-law wouldn’t listen: she urged her horse into a gallop.

  But their mounts had come to the end of their endurance, and could no longer bear the cold air that filled their lungs: panting hard, they pulled up. Hakim tethered both horses by their legs to the handle of his sword. Oyxon was the first to find a way into a gap that cut between two flat rocks. Fearing for their lives, expecting death, they huddled there. Then their ears were struck by a noise that came out of the icy darkness, the grunting and ferocious roars of wild animals. Right by the lair where they were crouching, a herd of wild boars passed by. As soon as they saw the horses, the boars broke into a run, so that everything under their hooves was trampled down and destroyed. Frightened out of his mind, Hakim clung to Oyxon and prayed, ‘La hawla… There is no power and no strength except wi
th Allah…’ Then, when the horses regained their breath, Oyxon again rode hers at a gallop towards the light of distant lamps: it was the settlement of Nayman, where their cart had halted…

  It was these lamps that Abdulla’s sleepless eyes saw when the cell elder ordered everybody to turn over onto the other side. He had been considering for some time which of these three scenes to include in his narrative; still unable to decide, he turned over like the others, and fell asleep.

  —

  In the morning the order came in Russian, ‘Get up!’: everyone rose at once, and Abdulla saw that there were roughly fifty men there. In the years when he had been a gardener, he had kept a bee-hive; now he had the impression that there were as many men in the cell as bees in that hive. When he was arrested the first time, there hadn’t been so many in the cell with him, only about twenty, and if there hadn’t been an elder among them, there would have been nowhere to wash or urinate, no food to eat, and no arrangement for sleeping. Here, the elder was a fat red-bearded man, who let the prisoners know in a menacing way whose turn it was to go to the bucket in the corner to urinate and wash. After Muborak had taken his turn, the elder glared at Abdulla: ‘Who are you? Why don’t I know about you?’ he roared.

  Abdulla had an answer on the tip of his tongue, but little Sodiq spoke up for him, ‘He’s the greatest Uzbek writer!’ he said, parroting Muborak from the day before. ‘They brought him in at midnight, ‘ he added. ‘We didn’t dare wake you, Mr Jur’at, sir.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Jur’at demanded of Abdulla, just as overbearing, but a little gentler.

  Somewhat awed by the elder’s imposing figure and booming voice, embarrassed to have so many pairs of eyes on him, Abdulla spoke shyly: ‘Abdulla…’

  ‘Hey, it’s Abdulla Qodiriy!’ a couple of prisoners exclaimed.

  ‘We already have a poet with us, he’s called Cho’lpon; they’re sending you lot here to improve your minds.’ Jur’at’s tone could have indicated either pity or sarcasm. ‘All right, you can tell your fairy stories later; for now, go and relieve yourself.’