—
One peculiar thing about Uzbeks is that even if you are a leading writer there will be plenty of people who don’t recognise you, and, of those who do, plenty who don’t give a damn about you. On those rare occasions when you do come across someone who recognises you, it’s you who has to do the bowing and scraping. That was the position Abdulla found himself in. He was over forty now, but compared to Kosoniy he was a young man, an apprentice, a student: to put it in a nutshell, he felt half-baked. Once prayers were over, he sat there nonplussed.
Kosoniy ended his prayer with the brief invocation and then looked at Abdulla.
‘Allah, hear our prayers!’ he said.
‘May He receive them!’ Abdulla responded in kind.
‘May I ask sir, what sins have brought you here?’
‘Who knows?’ Abdulla shrugged. ‘I haven’t been told yet. It must have to do with my writing. And you?’
‘I opened a schoolroom to give lessons in the Arabic script,’ said Kosoniy. ‘Children don’t get taught the old script in school these days. Our language and our history are being erased…’
‘Language and culture is one thing, but there are a few things in our history that might indeed be better forgotten.’ The words were out of Abdulla’s mouth before he realised that this could be construed as the opening salvo in a familiar argument.
‘You sound like one of those jadid – the new Uzbeks, as they call themselves. We had one in here before, Fitrat, his name was; we argued with him about the dispute between Europeanisers and traditionalists until our throats were dry. He’d even written a book on the subject, A European’s Dispute with the Bukharans. A reputable scholar, but a bit too acerbic, a bit too highly-strung. Come on, let’s drop it; you’re obviously a proper Muslim, there’s no need for us to disagree.’
‘As you wish,’ Abdulla sighed. Indeed, meetings at the Union of Writers had taught him the hard way that the saying ‘Truth is found through argument’ led to nothing but headaches and concealed hostility.
‘It’s best if we confine our conversation to historical topics,’ Kosoniy suggested.
‘Very well,’ said Abdulla. ‘You were saying that the English sent spies to Bukhara: what about Khiva and Kokand?’
‘Oh yes, they sent their spies there too. The English first arrived in 1840 and presented himself to the vizier Mirzo Rahim as an ambassador. In their meetings, he tried to show Britain as well-disposed to Muslims, unlike treacherous Russia. “Russia has been at war with Turkey and Iran,” he said, “and now the Tsar may well have evil intentions against you.”
‘After listening to what this rogue had to say, Mirzo Rahim wrote a letter to Emir Nasrullo, demanding he set Colonel Stoddart free. But this wasn’t because he was at all intimidated by the false ambassador’s empty threats to move the British armed forces from Afghanistan to Bukhara. He was more worried by the Russians; it was in the hope of establishing relations with them that he offered to help Stoddart. He sent an envoy to Bukhara. But the reply he got from Emir Nasrullo said, in essence: “The kindness and humanity which Stoddart would be shown in Khiva, he is here receiving tenfold.”
‘That was when the English took the decision to send their own Arthur Conolly via Kokand to Bukhara…’
—
Oyxon had been raped, her spirits trampled down. Now, at her wits’ end, crying with pain, she heard from her father in Eski-Novqat that the anniversary of the martyred Qosim was being commemorated. Then, as winter gave way to spring, she realised that she was pregnant. She tried to weep, but had no tears; she wanted to kill herself, but she had long ago turned into a living corpse; she thought of fleeing, but her legs were too heavy, as good as shackled. She became addicted to beer and wine. ‘My head is all dark,’ she said as she drank. ‘I’m living in a poem.’ At other times, to get the delirium out of her brain, she would sit for hours with her maid Gulsum moving the pieces in a game of chess.
Nodira was disturbed to see her junior wife, a lady more nobly born than herself, surrender to fate in such a manner. She did her utmost to restore Oyxon to a fulfilling life: she held splendid poetry evenings, put on brilliant banquets, but none of this was of any use.
As soon as Madali heard that Oyxon was pregnant, he made the decision to marry her. He summoned his loyal council of clergy, and proposed a fatwa that would permit the marriage. But even among those lax and corrupt mullas, there was a one who had the courage to say: ‘Your highness, sharia law holds a special provision for this affair. If you were to enter into marriage with your stepmother, then in the view of all four versions of Islam you would become an infidel. It would be better to carry on your former habit, fornicating with this lady in secret: it is permissible to get carried away. If your secret is revealed, you may be accused of fornication, but that is preferable to an accusation of apostasy.’
However, another mulla came out with a contrary opinion. ‘Many clerical councils look down equally on fornication and apostasy. Be it great or small, a sin proven by fact is unforgivable and equal to apostasy.’
Madali could see that the clergy were making it impossible for him to get his own way. ‘I summoned you to find a way around these stupid prohibitions. All you’ve done is shower me with pious rubbish, wasting my time. Idiots! Dried-up turbans!’
That same day, he went to a gambling house, one his father had frequented before him, where his friend the Chamberlain, a gambler and hashish-smoker, saw that the Emir was in a bad state.
‘Ah, why make a mountain out of a molehill?’ the Chamberlain said after Madali had told him of his trouble. ‘Fine asses they are, your clergy! After all, when we were in our mother’s womb, didn’t we have a prick? And when we were being born, that prick touched our mother’s vagina. Why is it permitted then, but forbidden later?’
This irreligious talk was like balm to Madali’s ears. ‘Thank God! Nobody’s ever before said anything so apt to me,’ he said, taking the gold-embroidered gown off his shoulders and giving it to the Chamberlain.
A few days later Madali summoned the newly appointed Sheikh ul-Islam, clerical judges, muftis and other clerical lawyers, and again proposed the question of his marriage. This council was new to sacred beneficence and loyal to Madali. ‘In our opinion, this proposal is acceptable: based on the sharia, we issue a new fatwa in the name of the venerable mufti of the clergy, in the name of the venerable Kokandi, in the name of the venerable Qu’ranic teacher.’ They issued it reinforced with seals and enormous flourishes of signatures.
True, according to popular rumour, one furious sheikh rode up on horseback to the Emir’s palace, all the way in to the throne room without dismounting, where he told Madali to his face: ‘You’re a dog, you fornicator!’
The palace courtiers expected Madali to call for the executioner, but the young Emir restrained himself and only said, quite softly: ‘If I am a dog, sir, then kindly leave this dog’s land!’
After all this had happened, Madali acquired the nickname, whispered in the wind, of Madali the Motherfucker.
Chapter 5
Pigeon Racing
Madali the Fornicator had made the art of pigeon racing his hobby. It is generally known that since time immemorial this hobby has been popular with the rulers of Fergana. Shah Babur in his Babur-nama, writing about the death of his father, the great Umar Sheikh Mirza, says this:
At this period, the uncanny event I mentioned occurred over Axsi fortress, which overlooks a deep ravine; there were buildings around the fortress. On a Monday, the fourth day of the month of Ramadan, Umar Sheikh Mirza was pursuing his hobby when he, with his pigeons and dovecote, fell into the ravine and in mid-air was turned into a gyrfalcon. He was then thirty-nine.
Madali the Fornicator collected pigeons in any province where fine specimens were to be found – Kashgar, Bukhara or Shahrisabz – and kept busy flying them. He was so devoted to this hobby that he left state affairs to his C
hief Counsellor, while he had a decrepit-looking dovecote reconstructed with porcelain and silver nails, each compartment lined with ceramic tiles.
He was especially fond of two fluffy-legged pigeons, one white, the other black. The other pigeons were given ordinary grain, but these two he looked after himself, spoiling them with shelled pistachios and ground almonds with millet. This diet made their plumage shine, and the sight of them somersaulting in the air was irresistible.
Madali called the black pigeon after himself, and the white one ‘Oyxon’; he delighted in watching them coo at each other, and would order his servants to bring him his side drum with the fish-skin head, gold rings and a hoop made from vines and ivory, on which he played an accompaniment.
The Emir devoted a great deal of time to training these two doves. He tied a silk thread to their legs, first teaching them to fly only over the roof. When they could be made to return to their perch by blowing a whistle and jerking the thread, he gradually lengthened the thread. The doves soared and tumbled like kites, but like kites, they were never truly free: after a while, Madali would always blow the whistle and reel the thread back in. That was it. The doves would fly back to their pistachios, their sunflower seeds and crushed almonds.
The doves must have been quite devoted to their master; he could send them off from as far away as Shahrixon or Axsi, and still they came back to the palace in Kokand. How strange, then, the Emir thought, that he could not manage to win Oyxon’s affection! She had borne Madali two sons, but no motherly feelings towards them had been aroused in her breast. When she got drunk, she would scornfully berate Nodira, ‘Look after your bastard grandsons!’ Once or twice, when Madali had beaten her and dragged her around by the hair, it took all Nodira’s strength to pull them apart.
Perhaps that was why Madali found consolation only in his doves, so beautiful, so biddable. Only when he sent them flying into the heavens could he forget the woman he told himself he loved and who he cursed for not loving him.
The last and coldest week of winter passed: it was early March. Abdulla had begun to lose count of the days he had spent in prison: he knew that it was now March only because he’d heard so from the others. What he’d lived through in those days, who his companions and neighbours had been, what he had talked about and to whom, how many dreams and thoughts he had mulled over, all that God alone knew; but one day after his evening prayers, he heard his name called out. After waiting for two months, anyone might be expected to conclude that nobody had any need of him; now, after being summoned when he least expected it, Abdulla was in a state of panic. Why had they summoned him? Had his hour struck? Might they possibly be setting him free? Nice surprise, hey, Qodiriy? His heart was racing. Unable to feel his legs, he stumbled towards the door. ‘Hands behind your back! Follow me!’ But surely, if he’d been going to be released, the young soldier wouldn’t have used the familiar form of the verb?
The door slammed shut behind him. It was the first time in two months that Abdulla had left his cell. The soldier made him walk ahead. The corridor was much less dimly lit than the cell, and Abdulla was dazzled. The corridor was unbelievably long: on his first day he hadn’t realised this, probably because of the beating he’d had at the hands of Vinokurov. He couldn’t help clenching his fists. The soldier may have noticed, for he poked Abdulla’s arm with his rifle: ‘A step to the left, a step to the right, and I shoot.’ Along the corridor there were more prison guards with weapons at the ready. Not a single Uzbek face among them. When Abdulla was almost at the end of the corridor, the soldier deftly pushed a side-door open. ‘In!’
If he hadn’t seen the table and two chairs there, Abdulla might have assumed the room was a slaughterhouse, but those familiar objects meant the nightmare eased, his heart slowed and he felt calmer.
‘Stand in the corner!’ a guard ordered. Abdulla meekly obeyed. Suddenly he recalled his Russian-language school, where he had first encountered that same expression. The memory aroused a smile which he had trouble suppressing.
At certain moments, time seems to show you its silhouette. Like a nimble snake, time moves from the caged lamp on the sloping concrete ceiling, down the pistachio-green walls to the cement floor, where it slithers away, swift as if scalded, out past Abdulla through the open door.
‘Isn’t time a bloodthirsty dragon?’ Abdulla thought, before the sound of steel-tipped boots broke the silence. Crunching the cement floor as they came, the steps became more and more unmistakable, until Abdulla heard behind his neck a familiar voice: ‘Abdulla Qodiriy? Prisoner Qodiriy, sit down!’ it yelled. Abdulla quietly turned towards the voice, and saw, next to the warder holding his weapon at the ready, the interrogator Trigulov. Nodding at him as if to an old acquaintance, Abdulla sat down. Trigulov went round to the head of the table and sat on the opposite chair. He stretched and yawned.
‘Good: are we going to confess?’ he asked.
‘To what?’ Abdulla asked in genuine amazement.
‘You can drop the naive act for a start!’ The interrogator brandished the thick folder in front of him. ‘The proof’s all here. Talk about your counter-revolutionary anti-Soviet nationalist activity!’
‘What counter-revolutionary activity, what anti-Soviet activity?’ said Abdulla, uncomprehending.
‘I’m the one that asks the questions here, not you! You’re here to give the answers, you nationalist swine!’
‘Show some respect!’ Abdulla ventured, thinking to appeal to the interrogator’s sense of reason. ‘There are laws for everything…’
‘I’m the law here! Don’t you understand? You haven’t seen what I can do to you yet, you counter-revolutionary filth! I crush people like you and throw out the bits! Hey, fuck your long tongue up to your blue veins!’
It was plain to see that here in this place, sense and reason, justice and faith would get Abdulla nowhere. However much this humiliation pained him, he had to observe the Russian saying, whip lashes are nothing to a sledgehammer. Abdulla shut his mouth and locked himself away in his own thoughts.
Madali the Fornicator dragged Oyxon about by her hair, slapped her face twice. ‘Say you’re sorry! Say you’re sorry!’ he said, forcing her to kneel to his mother Nodira. Oyxon froze: ‘You bast…, you bast…” she whispered. When Madali heard this, he became hysterical and started kicking her. ‘Shut your mouth! Shut up!’ he roared, while Oyxon rolled about where she lay, her raven-black hair dishevelled. ‘Infidel… Fornicator…’
‘Come on, you’re a sensible man. A prominent writer, no less! You want to get back to your children, your family. If you cooperate, I’ll see to it personally that everything gets straightened out. You were arrested in 1926, too, and released safe and sound. This time we’ll do the same. But only if you cooperate. Come on, let’s begin with 1926. What were you arrested for then?’
Only Satan has no hope, Abdulla told himself, and began giving brief, succinct answers to the interrogator’s questions.
—
Abdulla was left in peace for a few days. Knowing that he had been summoned for interrogation, the cellmates that he had become friends with came up one by one to see how he was. Abdulla didn’t divulge anything to them. They tried their best to distract him, but Abdulla, in his nervous state, kept silent: he was waiting for his name to be called out again, and pondering what answers to give to the questions. What had they put into that folder? Who had been writing anonymous letters about him? What was he being accused of? He remembered reading articles in Red Uzbekistan and Pravda of the East about Cho’lpon, Fitrat and others, before they had been arrested. ‘Enemies of the Uzbek people!’, ‘Death to the Traitors!’: the titles had stuck in his mind.
Ever since 1936, his once devoted acolytes had been writing about him in ink of the deepest red: ‘Abdulla Qodiriy’s creative path’. Accusing him of not understanding the people, of being ignorant of the latest ‘literary devices’, they said his images were ‘atypical’,
petty-bourgeois, and not proletarian. That was bad enough, but they also accused Abdulla of plagiarising his novel from the Arab writer Jurji Zaydan.
These thoughts numbed Abdulla’s mind. Then Kosoniy, who had been sick and had just come out of the prison hospital, came groaning towards him: ‘Friend, you look as if you’re in the dumps…’ Abdulla suddenly felt ashamed. Instead of sitting there looking sorry for himself, he should have gone over to the old man and asked how he was. Just because of a scoundrel of an interrogator, he had forgotten how to show human sympathy. In all sincerity, he asked the learned man for forgiveness.
‘We can take a spoonful of bile out of your blood,’ the old man joked. ‘Come on, let’s have a frank talk, otherwise you’ll be sulking, and I’ll be getting anxious. Last time you were wondering about the English spies. I’ve made a note of what I wanted to say about Conolly. The Chorasmian historians were knowledgeable people: they didn’t leave out the tiniest crumb of information.
‘When the English saw that Stoddart was sometimes free and sometimes imprisoned in Bukhara, they decided to send one of their cleverest and most skilful spies, Captain Arthur Conolly, to rescue him. But this time they had Shah Shujah’s ambassador accompany him and, secondly, they planned to get the Ottoman sultan, Russia and the khans of Khiva and Kokand to exert pressure.
‘Mirzo Rahim of Khiva received Conolly, but in the middle of the conversation he put a provocative question to him: “Tell me, who is more powerful, the English or the Russians?”
‘“Both states are extremely powerful. England is older and wealthier, but Russia is now a great power and is constantly getting mightier.”
‘“What are their relations like?”
‘“We are trading partners. Friendly relations are in the interests of both states.”
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