The Devils' Dance

by Hamid Ismailov

  When he surfaced, not knowing which world he was in, Sergei was standing over him, and Serik was sitting there smiling, ‘Well, diver, were you looking for pearls at the bottom? You could have called for us!’

  That summer, their studies over, the two of them left: Sergei for Murmansk, Serik for Magadan, and they vanished without a trace from Abdulla’s life. After their departure, before he met Cho’lpon, Abdulla was left on his own.

  One by one, the prisoners began to wake up. Fitrat was one of the first to rise. As soon as he saw Abdulla, he leapt to his feet and rushed forwards; the two men embraced, too choked to speak. That dawn, this noble person washed his face and hands with his transparent tears.

  Then he sat down facing Abdulla, regarding him without saying a word, only shaking his head. His heavy sighs woke Muborak.

  ‘Hey, teacher, are you here too?’ he said on seeing Fitrat; then he spotted Abdulla: ‘Thank God, we’re all together again.’ A simple man, he hadn’t realised that this cell was for prisoners under sentence of death. ‘When I was in London, I saw a museum where they make men out of beeswax. Just like real live people. There was Stalin with his moustache, there was Churchill smoking a pipe, and our Joseph Wolff, too. Now we look as if we were made of beeswax, too.’

  Muborak rubbed his eyes and fell silent for a while; then asked: ‘Why aren’t you talking?’

  What would the two of them have to say? Everything about their situation was perfectly clear, so what need was there for words? As Cho’lpon put it:

  I have no sleep like you in my eyes, oh cloud,

  I want a lifelong silence like death!

  —

  As the other men woke up they started to gather around the new arrival. Everyone in this cell seemed to have their own way of preparing for their execution: there was no appointed elder, so they got up and lay down as they liked. The men around Abdulla began questioning him, asking about life outside, assuming he’d only just been arrested. After informing them that he had been in prison for three months, Abdulla talked about life in Tashkent before then. As they talked, the iron door scraped open, and they were brought the usual thin millet gruel and pale brick tea. When everyone was busy with their food, Abdulla turned to Muborak.

  ‘We Uzbeks have a game with a calf’s carcass called bozkashi; the Indians have invented chess. You were saying once that the English have their own game, cricket: what’s the Jewish national game?’

  ‘Debating,’ Muborak replied without having to think about it. ‘Where you have ten Jews, you’ll have eleven points of view. And storytelling, of course! How about it? I could tell you more about the English spies Stoddart and Conolly; it’s a curious story, oh yes, very curious.’

  ‘When Conolly arrived in Bukhara from Kokand, Emir Nasrullo insisted that he was a spy like Stoddart, that the two of them had turned Khiva and Kokand against Bukhara. He had them both locked up in a pit in his palace, the Ark – a terrible place, much worse than what we have here! Soon there were rumours that the two men had been beheaded. But nobody had seen their corpses, so nobody could be certain. One year later, Joseph Wolff arrived in Bukhara. An extraordinary man, a brilliant mind: he’d studied Near Eastern languages and spoke fluent Farsi. He was a Jewish Christian – one of the converts – and he travelled all over: Egypt and India, Ethiopia and Yemen, Afghanistan and Bukhara, wherever our people lived, preaching to them as a missionary. A real man of the world! So when a committee formed in London to try and help Stoddart and Conolly, he volunteered his services. Joseph Wolff was warned not to go – Nasrullo was known as ‘the Butcher of Bukhara’ – but he was a brave man, and obtained letters of recommendation from the Ottoman Sultan and the Shah of Iran. In the end, though, he was lucky to escape with his life – some say Nasrullo would have had him executed if the Persian government hadn’t intervened; others, that the Emir was so amused by his outlandish dress (he presented himself in full clerical garb, which really must have looked quite funny) he decided on a whim to let him go free.’

  —

  While Muborak was describing Joseph Wolff’s reception by Nasrullo, rattling away in a breathless rush as though he was under some strange compulsion, his food had grown cold and one of the prisoners had taken the bowls away, so that he was left with only a few mouthfuls of tea with which to sustain himself.

  Only half-listening to Muborak’s flow of talk, Abdulla was trying to make sense of what was happening to him. Whether it was all a dream, a piece of theatre, or the visions of a deranged mind; how had he not made the connection at the time? Didn’t the older one say ‘Ameer’ and ‘Nasrulla’? But even that hadn’t rung the smallest bell in Abdulla’s brain. And he called himself a writer? You’re nothing but a naïve idiot, a simpleton, a ninny, just as your mother always said! Abdulla cursed himself, then stuck his hands in his pockets: one had a handkerchief folded in four, the other a letter folded double. Yes, both of them were safely where they should be.

  In the novel that Abdulla had planned, all the knotty sections were now loosened up; there were just one or two things that remained ambiguous. To shed light on these, the Englishmen would have been handy; at the time they were in prison, Emir Nasrullo was readying his troops to march on Kokand.

  By then Madali had been living as his stepmother’s husband for several years. Why then did the Emir decide to act only after Captain Conolly had arrived in Bukhara?

  After breakfast, when the soldier-warders had left, Fitrat came and sat with Abdulla: he looked anguished, and was reluctant to talk – until Abdulla asked the question he seemed to have been expecting.

  ‘Have you seen Cho’lpon?’

  ‘We were taken to a confrontation,’ Fitrat said. ‘They tried to set us up against each other. What times are these, Abdulla, dear fellow? Is this the revolution we fought for?’ Fitrat heaved a deep sigh. ‘Cho’lpon is ill. He’s got diabetes. And heart trouble, too. They’ve destroyed him. Everything we wrote in our books is coming to pass.’ In the most melancholy voice imaginable, he recited a poem of his that had once been popular:

  Do you have amongst you, disguised as humans,

  Tricksters and deceivers, two-faced demons,

  Leeches that suck the blood of their kin

  Tigers that feast on their comrades’ skin

  Do you have tyrants who burn their own land

  As fuel for the fire of their cooking pot stand?

  Do you have traitors who make their living

  Selling their nation, their people and everything?

  Abdulla responded with another of Fitrat’s poems:

  Why do they live, when they are unmoveable,

  Why have they been given wings, when they cannot fly?

  For some minutes the two men lapsed into silence. Then Fitrat felt the need to speak:

  ‘I’ve been classified as an English spy. Have you ever even set eyes on an Englishman?’

  —

  Nasrullo took a liking to Conolly; the red-headed giant reminded the Emir of the local Badakhshan Tajiks, a sharp contrast to the jaundiced, asthmatic old Stoddart. His knowledge seemed just as good, yet he was much more easy-going, more like a Muslim, with none of Stoddart’s arrogance or stiffness.

  So far the conversation had been about the Emir not sending Stoddart away. On the one hand, Stoddart had proved very useful, he had brought order to Bukhara’s soldiers and armaments. He had made a third-rate army into a passable one, and from passable it had become first-class. He had exposed the weak points not just of the English, but of the Russians, Persians, Afghans and Indians. And the benefits he had brought to mineral extraction, the gold deposits he had discovered near Samarkand! Now that the gold had been panned, the treasury was stacked with ingots.

  But more important still, Emir Nasrullo was keeping that dry stick Stoddart hostage. The Russians were pleading for him, and because of the Russians’ vulnerability, he could now be friends with
them. Meanwhile the Persians and the Ottoman Sultan were also showing favour to the Emir.

  Now, with Stoddart’s help, he would rein in the arrogant English. ‘If you want me to release you,’ he said, ‘then insist on an agreement between your Queen and Bukhara.’ The English were rushing about all over the place, firing off letter after letter.

  But once Captain Conolly had been lured to Bukhara, Nasrullo’s plans altered slightly. The Emir now had a choice: Conolly’s a good man, the Emir thought to himself. But he must be good in the future, too. He can replace at one go that arrogant pale-face, and that Iranian crook Abdusamad. For now, though, the Emir would keep these thoughts to himself.

  Emir Nasrullo questioned Conolly several times, sometimes with Stoddart, sometimes alone. He gave Conolly hard but furtive looks, studying and testing him. Now he was pleased with his very satisfactory plan.

  Conolly had come with a well-meaning study of the weak points of the Kokand khanate.

  In face-to-face conversations with Conolly the discerning and sharp-witted Emir had detected one other thing. That sturdy colt of an Englishman talked a lot about Madali the Fornicator marrying his stepmother Oyxon. And every time the red-head talked about her, his blue eyes blazed under his bushy eyebrows. She had hooked that dervish’s heart, and since it was hooked, then Emir Nasrullo knew very well how to keep this giant fish hooked to his rod.

  For the time being, as insurance, he would put both the Englishmen in prison – not his own, but Abdusamad’s. His chief artilleryman was a volatile, slippery character, but also useful, at least for the time being; likewise, the English could be kept as potential bargaining chips, or even freed if they proved their good intentions. But if they stepped out of line, writing any letters they shouldn’t, Abdusamad would also be implicated – and ultimately blamed for their demise, in case any foreign powers were to get involved. The Persian was said to be fabulously wealthy, and the royal coffers could always do with some additional lining. Two birds with one stone – or, as the Uzbeks say, the calf bleats until it gets to the straw barn. For now, Nasrullo would give them all plenty of rope. Then, once Madali had been dealt with, he could decide whether to take up the slack.

  —

  If anyone knew the history of Bukhara, it was Fitrat, a native of the city… He had even written a tragedy, Abdulfayz-xon, based on Bukhara’s history. Abdulla had drawn on this book for a great deal of information about the Emir’s court and its intrigues; he had first read in this tragedy about the endless plots and constant bloodshed in the fight for the throne. It also taught him about the time-serving and pompous religious servants and noble-born clerics. Fitrat had read writers like Shakespeare: ‘There you have passion in the oriental style, tragedy in the oriental style,’ he said, when attempting to write something grave, but there was something missing in it. There wasn’t one single proper hero in it. There was an Abulfayz-xon, but he was overshadowed by a Hakimbiy-atalyk. While Hakimbiy seemed to be the hero, he in turn was destined to be overshadowed by his son Rahimbiy, and then there was the rather weak young princeling Abdumo’min’s story. But as well as all this, the language and the staging was heavy going… Yet there were the games played to get the throne, the Forty Daughters’ Dungeon…

  Fitrat seemed to have guessed what Abdulla was thinking: ‘My dear Abdulla, I heard that you are thinking of writing a novel about Bukhara’s history: how will it end?’

  Having written a work on Uzbek morphology and syntax, Fitrat always structured his phrases faultlessly.

  ‘Yes, I’ve started writing it. Actually, it’s more about the Kokand khanate, the period of Emirs Umar and Madali. But there are parts which deal with Emir Nasrullo, too. I’ve started it, but my work’s been badly hit.’ Abdulla smiled wanly and pointed to the windowless walls around them.

  ‘They haven’t taken the manuscript, have they? Is it somewhere safe?’

  ‘Apart from one or two final chapters, I’ve saved everything.’

  ‘Well done. In these uncertain times one can’t be too careful.’

  ‘Professor, there’s one thing I was going to ask you. In your Abulfayz-xon you show both Hakim-biy and Doniyol-otaliq. Didn’t they live at a different time from Emir Haydar and Emir Nasrullo?’

  Professor Fitrat raised both hands, as if to say, ‘I admit it’. Then he said: ‘You’ve studied history thoroughly, my dear Abdulla! Good for you! You know very well what being a writer involves: you add some things, you patch up a few places. With Abulfayz-xon, what I had in mind was to write about the Great Game, not just about the Shah of Iran, but also about the Russians and the English squaring up over Turkestan. Unfortunately, the times are wrong for it. So this tragedy exists only in fragments.’

  Abdulla was ashamed of his early opinions. Before this conversation, he had been thinking that there was no single hero, that it was a bit of a mess.

  ‘Stick to the point, talk about your novel, what’s the novel about?’ asked Fitrat. ‘According to Musayyana, you said “If I write this book, nobody will bother to read Past Days or The Scorpion under the Altar.” Is that true?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Abdulla shrugged. ‘I had big plans, but I forgot to say inshallah. What’s the novel about, you ask? About an unhappy woman who was wife to three rulers.’

  ‘Oyxon?’ Fitrat shivered.

  Abdulla nodded.

  ‘It looks as if you’re writing about yourself,’ the professor concluded.

  Suddenly Abdulla felt engulfed by a wave of resentment: ‘How is that?’ he asked, trying to be as formal as he could.

  ‘So I’ve hit the nail on the head,’ Fitrat smiled faintly, ‘When you respond to a question with another question, that’s a sign you’re at a loss for an answer. That incomparably beautiful lady was betrayed on all sides. And isn’t the same true of your incomparable literary talent? It’s been betrayed; is there anyone left who wouldn’t sell it down the river?’ he said, like a surgeon inserting a probe in someone’s eye, and with repeated stabs of the knife, bringing out what had been concealed deep inside Abdulla.

  —

  If there was anyone in the world who knew Oyxon’s secret, it was Uvaysiy. All the love that she had felt for her late daughter Oftob-oyim was now devoted to Oyxon: she loved her like a daughter. But she had no idea what was going on in Oyxon’s soul.

  After Conolly left Kokand and set off for Bukhara, a deep and irreparable crack opened up in Oyxon’s heart. She could not settle anywhere. ‘What can you tell me about the foreigner who’s become your follower? Whom have you recommended him to?’ she asked her ailing father, trying to trace his movements. At other times, without letting the women of the harem know, she visited Uvaysiy, but she could get no relief from her distress.

  She felt like submerging herself in wine and beer, but alcohol could only cloud what she was feeling, not abolish it.

  Then, using a hundred different ploys, she had one of her father’s followers disguised as a dervish and sent him to Bukhara with a note for Conolly, and, just as she had once waited for Gulxaniy to return from Eski-Novqat, all those years ago, she began to wait for this young wandering dervish to return.

  For a woman getting on for forty, such passion was fraught with disaster. Vague desires were all very well for a young person falling in love for the first time, but for a woman of her age passion could no longer be thought of in the abstract; it was deeply entangled with the realities of life. Only now, in that relatively late stage of her life, was Oyxon truly able to relate to those verses by Nodira and Uvaysiy. After she had spent two months burning with a mix of love, fear and desperation, a young man came from Bukhara to G’ozi-xo’ja’s house, dressed in the patchwork shirt and conical hat of a wandering dervish, where he informed Oyxon that the English Captain Arthur Conolly had been thrown into the Forty Daughters dungeon.

  —

  ‘There is still a lot we don’t know regarding Nasrullo’s campaign against K
okand,’ said Fitrat. ‘Historians usually refer to a letter he had from Sultan Muhammad, Madali’s younger brother. Supposedly, this letter was what led the Emir to attack Kokand, overthrow the infidel Madali and restore the proper rule of Islam. But a question arises: Emir Umar passed away in June 1828. Not long after, his heir Madali married both his wet-nurse and then stepmother, the khan’s widow Oyxon. Why didn’t Emir Nasrullo start his campaign then, after these outrageous actions; why did he wait ten years? No, there must have been something else behind it.’

  Abdulla wasn’t sure whether to voice his own conjectures. If Professor Fitrat had asked, ‘My dear Abdulla, what is your conclusion?’ he would have poured out everything in full. But Fitrat went on talking as if he were back in the university giving one of his famous lectures.

  ‘In Ibrat’s History of Fergana, war between the two khans broke out due to a dispute over the Lashgar fortress. In Xudoyorxon-zoda’s Historical Collection, this event is linked with something more remote. Madali’s younger brother Mahmud was caught plotting against him, and fled to Shahrisabz. There he wrote a plea to Emir Nasrullo, complaining that Madali’s depravity made him unfit to rule. Emir Nasrullo invited Mahmud to come to Bukhara and received him with great honour in Samarkand, and gave him Urmeton and Falg’ar to govern.’