As he saw Rajab off, Umar ordered his son and nephew to go to the caravanserai, find Ernazar immediately and bring him to the palace. He himself laid his heavy head down on the quilt.
We know not how long the Emir lay there in this drowsy state. The young men found Ernazar attending some feast at the caravanserai, and made him come to the palace. Umar then ordered his son and nephew to leave, and held some secret discussions with Ernazar.
What these discussions were, we do not know. What we do know is that, following the Emir’s decree, Ernazar was relieved of the governorship of Qurama province, and was given instead the distant and less prosperous provinces of Turakurgan and Namangan, while Rajab the vizier was to assist the new governor in coping with these new responsibilities. The two of them set off: after crossing the River Saixun, they stopped for the night at a village. At midnight, four executioners strangled Rajab with a rifle fuse, put his body in a sack and threw it into the muddy waters of the river.
Abdulla’s brain incorporated these scenes at such lightning speed that the thought of all the pruning and debris left in his mind – Vinokurov’s whispering with Jur’at, and in his own home, the letter, alas, that he had mentally composed for his wife Rahbar – lost its sense as panic overwhelmed him.
In the background, the sound of the midday meal being guzzled rang in his ears.
—
Another day in his cell, anguished by the waste of a short winter’s day, Abdulla was at the same time impatient for nightfall, when he could use the piece of paper and the pencil stub he had kept safe in his pocket.
Thankfully, Abdulla’s thoughts were interrupted by Muborak’s friend Sodiq, who clapped him on the shoulder. ‘The man over there used to sleep next to the man you call Cho’lpon.’ Abdulla looked to where Sodiq was pointing, and saw a rather grim and ill-tempered prisoner.
He greeted Sodiq’s friend.
‘Laziz,’ the man introduced himself, somewhat stiffly. ‘You were asking after Cho’lpon. We used to share the same bedding.’
With a marked lack of enthusiasm, Laziz chewed over the usual scenes of prison life; with a bitter pang of regret, Abdulla remembered how he had always intended to write about Cho’lpon’s life in Moscow; intended, but never followed through. It was an unconscionable omission. Moscow, the centre of the world, a world that had flown off its axis, with revolution in every sphere. Botu and Fitrat had come to Moscow earlier, where Mayakovsky, Tatlin, Bakhtin and the Meyerholds were regular visitors at their apartments. Each one of those men had revolutionised their sphere of activity: they were geniuses who were doing everything anew. What Cho’lpon was doing in Uzbek poetry was just as original, but could any of these geniuses see the genius of the others?
Which of them did Abdulla make friends with? With the aristocratic nobleman Aleksei Tolstoy. What united them was a love of history. As for revolution, a poet had the right words:
From the old, formless
Chaos,
Creating the new,
This may perhaps come to life…
Both of them came to exactly the same conclusion expressed in that idea. But Abdulla remembered Cho’lpon as well as he did Tolstoy, as a poet missing his homeland:
I don’t know what can comfort my heart,
The mountains, the rocks or the white-foaming waters…
Had Abdulla lost courage at the coming of the day?
If the seas should boil, if the waters should flood,
If the traveller’s chosen paths should be cut,
If both right and left should swirl back to the sea,
Will tear-filled eyes be then consoled?
When Laziz mentioned Cho’lpon’s pebble-lensed glasses, Abdulla felt a fresh pang of shame.
When Abdulla was in Moscow as a student, someone brought a copy of Cho’lpon’s Awakening from Tashkent: this book was immediately passed among the Uzbeks from hand to hand. Abdulla had known Cho’lpon for a long time. In 1919 the anthology Young Uzbek Poets had been a sensation, and had made Cho’lpon’s name. They met each other a couple of times at Professor Fitrat’s famous evenings, the ‘Chaghatai Symposiums’, but Cho’lpon was then already a famous poet, while Abdulla was merely a little-known writer who had published a couple of stories. Consequently, they settled on ‘You go your way, I’ll go mine’.
But when Abdulla got his hands on a copy of Awakening, his eyes were opened when he read two lines on the cover: ‘Why have my eyes opened, where has my sleep disappeared to? / Into this awakening my griefs have burst their banks.’ Nobody had yet written in this language; compared to it, literature hitherto was like faded rags, tattered and decrepit. When Abdulla looked at the Moscow sky, he was almost intoxicated as he quoted: ‘Is it my thoughts that are so dark, or is it a cloud over the homeland?’ He was struck by the urge to find the poet and express his heartfelt love and respect in person, his pride and his desire to emulate him.
He still remembered this Moscow encounter. Two ‘red’ poets, Ziyo Said and Ayn, came out with a proposal to hold a two-day seminar of young Uzbek prose-writers and poets at a dacha belonging to the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. ‘Let’s make plov in the forest,’ Cho’lpon, Abdulla and quite a few others suggested, eagerly joining forces. The seminar opened with an analysis of one of Cho’lpon’s poems:
The heart is quiet. In the cold night
The haloed moon and stars overhead
Looking down with icy light.
From each direction, all around
Loud cries of ‘Bread!’ and ‘Gold!’
From thieves and tired mongrels sound.
The silent heart hearing the cries
To the furthest distance is led,
To the chill reaches of the skies.
One of the ‘Reds’ was the first to begin; practically foaming at the mouth, he laid into what he called the poem’s ‘ideological decrepitude and bourgeois individualism’. After reading the poem in a translation made by the second ‘Red’, the first denounced the poem’s incompetence and lack of logic from the standpoint of Marxist ideas. ‘To test the conclusion I have arrived at, I have turned the poem upside down. But nothing has changed: it’s still hopelessly vague!’
To the chill reaches of the skies,
To the furthest distance, is led
The silent heart that hears the cries.
Thieving, troublemaking people
Noisy cries of ‘Bread!’ and ‘Gold!’
From all around in each direction.
Looking down with icy light
The haloed men and stars overhead.
The heart is quiet. In the cold night.
After that, a couple of Russian proletarian groups joined in the attack. During the interval, Cho’lpon slipped away. In the second half of the seminar the experts praised Oltoy and encouraged Abdulla in his own efforts, but Cho’lpon’s absence made the latter feel uneasy. Abdulla went to look for Cho’lpon in the next break, and found him lying on the iron bedstead in his room, with his hands behind his head. Only his spectacle lenses gleamed.
Abdulla went and sat on a corner of the bedstead. There was a silence. Then Cho’lpon spoke sadly: ‘It wasn’t me who wrote that poem,’ he sighed heavily, ‘I was translating Blok. I’ve had to pay for a pie I never even ate…’
Abdulla couldn’t help bursting out laughing, then immediately reproached himself for his insensitivity. But then, to his surprise and relief, Cho’lpon laughed along with him.
Once the ice was broken, the two of them were able to have a frank conversation. Abdulla recited Cho’lpon’s ‘The Desire to Comfort’:
Thoughts alone will not comfort the soul,
Thoughts alone will not sate its desire,
They say no candle will light up this darkness
If men of integrity do not strike a match…
‘I was at Jumabozo
r station and desperately wanted to smoke, but couldn’t find a match,’ Cho’lpon quipped, deftly puncturing the mood of impassioned solemnity. They both nearly bust a gut laughing again.
It was thanks to the intrigues of those proletarian writers that the two became dear friends.
—
It was not in Umar’s council of ministers that the deepest intrigues surfaced, but in his harem. Oyxon’s installation as a rival to Nodira had sparked a desire in the harem’s first mistress to demonstrate how it felt when the boot was on the other foot. Had she not said in a poem:
A ring of your curls, the turban’s end on my neck,
While I hunted for the moment of the dream.
Thus did quarry turn to hunter. Unlike Nodira, Oyxon was not the daughter of a Beg, but she ranked rather higher as a daughter of a Xo’ja, a fighter for Islam. None of the ‘blue-blooded’ aristocrats, even the descendants of the Caliphs, could be compared to her, except for Sayid or To’ra girls descended from the Prophet. The harem knew no lack of scheming old women, with time on their hands and minds sharpened by intrigue. Two of them were now put to work: they searched high and low for a girl unadulterated by any ‘dark-faced’ race, and they found her behind the immaculate curtains of the reverend Sultan Xo’ja. Descended on both her father’s and mother’s side from Sayids, the chaste Zubayda was silk woven from the purest thread. In addition, she was extraordinarily elegant, as beautiful as the moon. All in all, Nodira concluded, it was only fitting that news of this lovely offspring reach the ears of the Emir of all Muslims.
It was at this time that a descendant of the Prophet, Mahmud, threatened trouble if he wasn’t made governor of O’ratepa: every other day he travelled to Kokand to present himself to Emir Umar. Nodira despatched one of the best female Qu’ran reciters to suggest to Mahmud, via his wife, that the rule of O’ratepa would only be his if he could arrange Umar’s marriage to the Sayid Sultan’s virgin daughter.
During his next audience with the Emir, Mahmud carefully expounded on the importance of an alliance with a family descended from the Prophet.
‘In this world, our Creator has provided more than enough for you; but to become one of His most treasured creatures in the next, now is the time to make your preparations.’
A verbose man, and a persistent talker who spoke very forcefully, Mahmud seemed to say ‘I wouldn’t say this to anyone other than you…’
‘Your high rank as Emir of all Muslims makes this a suitable goal.
Doesn’t the garden’s most beautiful flower automatically belong to the gardener? Our heavens have room for only one sun; how could the rose-bud’s pearly dew not be its property? In the words of the poet:
When ‘if’ is paired with ‘whereas’,
Their child will be named ‘probably’.
By putting forward one thing and another, he got Umar to agree. In no time at all, the matchmakers were beating down the very reverend Sultan Xo’ja’s door. The Sayid family was thrown into confusion: the local people buzzed about the house like wasps. Noble Sayids and Xo’jas presented themselves to Umar: the Sheikh of Islam and his deputies, revered judges, begged him to renounce this depraved and unseemly enterprise. ‘Rebellion!’ said one judge, ‘Mutiny!’ said another, but the Emir of all Muslims dug his heels in. In rather bad taste, he recited to these ‘blue-blooded’ visitors verses which Nodira had composed the previous evening:
The turban with a flap is granted as an honour
To him who demonstrates himself a fine spiritual leader…
The furious Emir was then visited by Mahmud: the visit – mercifully – was like balsam to his heart. These were the words which Umar devised as a reply to the Sheikh of Islam:
Aggrieved, I will silence him with an angry sigh,
Though his speech be fast as fire, and blaze as high.
In short, the Emir of the Muslims’ will was hardened. He sent Mahmud in person to Sultan-Xo’ja’s house as a matchmaker. Once again, in his breathless, confiding tone, Mahmud lauded the match to the revered religious leader. At first Sultan-Xo’ja could not believe his ears, and was forced to doubt the distinguished visitor’s good intentions: as the conversation proceeded, his bewilderment changed into wrath. Only the thought that Mahmud was a relative, and a Sayid like himself, kept the Sultan from speaking his mind.
‘The Emir of all Muslims is God’s shadow on earth. Sayid G’ozi-xo’ja, a relative of both of us, behaved in a sensible way, gave in to destiny and the needs of the times and lifted his daughter’s veil of chastity…’
‘What exactly did G’ozi-xo’ja do?’ the Sultan asked sharply, refusing to let the discussion be mired in metaphors and fine phrases.
‘He has had the pleasure of allying himself in marriage with the Thousand Noblemen, whose descendant is the revered Emir of all Muslims.’
‘Everything you have said is highly improper,’ the Sultan interrupted, ‘I don’t care if it’s a Thousand or a Hundred Thousand, I will only give my daughter to someone of blue blood, and that’s my final word!’
He had dared to refuse Emir Umar and his relative Sayid Mahmud, but these fortifications of a repeated manly ‘No!’ would ultimately prove no match for the intrigues of the Khan’s harem. Didn’t Sultan Xo’ja also have wives? The fortifications collapsed due not to missiles from outside, but undermining from within.
In a month or so, according to the high-flown chronicles, ‘Emir Umar-khan was presiding on the throne of happiness in his majestic wedding tent, at a celebration in honour of his marriage. And his merrymaking was shared by his worshipful Begs, whose foreheads shone in the radiance of his glory. Bowls of dark red wine and enchanting juices mingled with the lights reflected on guests’ faces, dazzling their eyes. The silver-bodied cup-bearers with their radiant faces gave pleasure by lighting up the banqueting area. Sweet-voiced musicians sang enchanting songs, giving pleasure and enjoyment to the ears and hearts of the drunkards…’
In truth, Emir Umar had spurned his junior wife Oyxon in favour of a younger and more nobly born bride.
Who knows why Abdulla chose these particular scenes? Laziz was still droning on about things that had nothing to do with Cho’lpon. The two tufts of hair over his ears and the beginnings of a bald patch on his crown made him the caricature of a Party boss; his craggy face showed very well how irritable he was, and his fussy movements indicated a Party member’s mindset.
‘Didn’t I myself pester him for news of Cho’lpon, then allow myself to be distracted by secret plots from a hundred years ago!’ Abdulla reproached himself. ‘Who knows what I might have missed?’
‘It’s the turn of our Sheherazade,’ Jur’at interrupted. Rattling his knucklebones in one hand, he took Abdulla by the elbow and dragged him back to the other side of the stinking cell.
—
‘Let’s play knucklebones with Muborak the Jew until suppertime, and you tell us a story, something like Sinbad the Sailor,’ Jur’at said, appending a proverb from his inexhaustible supply: ‘You can sweet-talk a snake from its nest, but bitter words can make a Muslim renounce his faith.’
This rankled with Abdulla. Was he a radio loudspeaker, reading out fairy stories while two gamblers played knucklebones? But Jur’at was not bullying him. Rather, he was depressed and felt he needed to hear the written word. As the man himself would say, ‘What does a horn-player have to do? Just puff!’
‘As you wish,’ Abdulla agreed after a little consideration. ‘But you know the proverb, “If you want it hot, you may get burnt”: writers like me are hot-tempered…’
‘You say “down”, we say “up”. So let’s not spoil our friendship. “The hat that was lost was too small anyway.”’ Jur’at threw his knucklebone onto the pile. The knucklebone span round and round, hit the ground and rolled first flat side up, then on its concave side, finally ending up on its winning convex side.
‘Throw, Muborak!’ the elder g
estured. ‘You can knock your father down, if you don’t visit him.’
Abdulla began his fairy story:
‘O blessed are the common people! The story goes that in days of old an Emir called Umar-xon used to reign in Kokand, and that he had three wives. The first was called Nodira, the second was Oyxon, and the third was called…’
‘Ah, you’re telling us the story of Nodira!’ said Muborak, distracted for a moment from his unsuccessful gambling.
‘Wait a bit,’ Jur’at remarked brusquely. ‘“If you wait long enough, green fruit will ripen.”’
Abdulla continued:
‘The Emir was fond of his wives, but he loved games of knucklebones even more, and more than knucklebones he loved hunting.’
Jur’at gave Abdulla an ironic glance. ‘Sheherazade had nothing on you. You’ve skewered us, right there in our sore spot! All right, you can’t put a stop to straight talking, so carry on.’
‘One spring, he offered to take his harem ladies on an excursion to see the tulip fields, but the real reason was to go off hunting with his gambling friends. The best place for hunting was the reed beds on the banks of the Syr-Darya. They left Kokand in a convoy of carts and cavalry: intoxicated by the soft spring breeze, the women in the carts sang solo and choral songs, while the men darted about on their horses, catching quails and shooting hares with salt-shot.
‘In the villages where they stopped, the people kissed Umar’s stirrups; in each place there was feasting, at each staging post there was pleasure for the senses; the joys of spring determined every step. In one town, the celebrations went on for four days in great splendour, and the Emir treated his subjects to a feast of plov. In the next, they made a pilgrimage to the graves of the great, distributed alms to the people, and gave feasts.
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