‘One is for your father, the other is for you,’ she said, setting the bowls on the tablecloth. ‘Take it while it’s hot. I’ll see to the master myself.’
‘How about yourself, aren’t you going to eat?’ asked Oyxon anxiously.
‘I’ll eat later, with Uvaysiy.’
‘Where is Uvaysiy?’
‘On the veranda, writing.’
‘Haven’t you called her to come and eat?’
‘She said she’d come when she’s finished.’
‘Father can sleep,’ Oyxon decided, ‘I’ll feed him later myself.’
She and Gulsum had begun to drink their soup when Uvaysiy came in and whispered, ‘Is the master asleep?’
Oyxon nodded.
‘Madam, I’ve written a poem for you. Take it and read it.’ Oyxon moved her bowl aside. Gulsum left the room to fetch Uvaysiy some food. Uvaysiy began reading in a deep voice:
To be loyal to those who’ve suffered, it is good.
To nurse those hurt by love, it is good.
But be merciless, hunter, to the injured heart:
Aim straight for the target, it is good.
If I meet you on the road, take my life;
Part my soul from my body, it is good.
You robbed me of your lovely eyes, oh my buyer
You made me cheap and my loss dear, it is good.
You knew beauty all too briefly, oh my heart;
Now fade quickly in the winehouse, it is good.
Stop this strife and noise, Uvaysiy, for your lover,
Only row when God is judge, it is good.
Just then, G’ozi-xo’ja trembled and woke up.
—
On the seventh or eighth day Sunnat again brought breakfast to the cell. Abdulla sensed that the Uzbek soldier had something to tell him, so was in no hurry to queue up when he went for his food. Bending over the jerry-can, Sunnat whispered, ‘There’s a letter,’ then shouted, ‘Hold your bowl properly!’ as he handed Abdulla the letter which he clutched close to the bowl. The bowl of rice and milk was lukewarm, yet Abdulla felt as though his hand had been burnt. This was the first time since his arrest that he had a letter from the outside world. He felt like one of those students who came to an exam with a crib sheet, that drops off the desk in sight of the teacher: Abdulla worried his clumsy fingers might drop this note at the wrong moment: he could feel everyone’s eyes on him.
He told himself he was being ridiculous. His cellmates were busy eating their morning rice and milk, heads bowed, spoons scraping against their bowls. Still, he had a problem: you couldn’t just roll a cigarette at mealtimes. If he’d been back in his old cell nobody would have paid the blindest bit of attention, but here…
Abdulla managed to slip the piece of paper into his pocket, but his heart would not stop racing. Who is this letter from? If it’s from Rahbar, is everything all right? Has anything happened to the children? His thoughts expressed themselves in wild shapes, his mind gave rise to countless thoughts, he couldn’t taste the bland rice and milk he was eating, and swallowed it without chewing. He downed the brick tea in two gulps. Some of the prisoners around him were still eating, some had finished. He looked at Muborak.
‘Muborak, is there any of your tobacco left?’
Muborak first pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and offered it to Abdulla; then he began searching his other pocket for tobacco.
Abdulla was in a fix. He had taken out his own letter, but he couldn’t read it because Muborak was offering his own piece of paper! Abdulla could hardly insist on using his own paper; that would be sure to excite suspicion. He had no alternative but to accept Muborak’s offering. He stiffened; would it be more from those Englishmen? And if so, what would that prove – that he was going mad, that he was being gulled, or neither? But the letter was written in Farsi:
With greetings and prayers, we wish to make known that your kind letter has indeed reached our hands, and that its content is as clear as day. The news of your imprisonment in the dungeon of darkness is a cause of endless pain and torment to us. Thanks to the intrigues of enemies, we too are expelled from our palace to the house of our father. Searching for a way to relieve you in your difficult situation, we have decided to ask the greatest of Sayids for support, in the hope that his reverend opinion should hold sway with your captor.
Being apart from you grieves us, so that our days seem overcast; the smoke of the evening dusk is made darker still by our sighs. Have pity and come quickly, as soon as you can! With frank hopes, Your Oyxon.
This document might seem a forgery, but the Farsi was faultless: nobody today could forge such elegance. For that reason, instead of asking, ‘Where did you get it from?’ or ‘Who passed this on to you?’, Abdulla merely said: ‘Who’s it to?’
‘To an English spy,’ Muborak replied with a wink.
—
Abdusamad hated war with all his heart. There were quieter ways to make money: extracting bribes and taxes from foreigners who came to Bukhara, collecting ransoms for freeing prisoners, profiting from selling slaves… why put his life at risk, when the gold piled up?
And instead of that, he had to put his life at stake, and go and do battle. Fortunately, Abdusamad didn’t have to get on a horse and head the charge against the enemy. Here it was hard to find anyone who knew about guns, so Abdusamad was much in demand. So now when thousands of soldiers were moving from O’ratepa to Khojent, Abdusamad could remain in the rearguard, in relative safety, with the draft horses pulling heavy gun carriages.
What a life he had led! A tyrant in Tabriz had threatened to cut off his ear, so he ran away from his home to serve someone else. From there he was forced to flee his country for good, to India. He stuck to the English. He learned a lot, but he realised he would never become a man of importance with them, and set off for Afghanistan, where he’d had to endure a spell in prison before earning Dost Mohamed’s trust. He was over forty now, getting on for fifty; much of those years had been spent wandering the world, with little time for life’s pleasures. But he had landed on his feet in Bukhara.
The people here were so outstandingly backward, he had found a position and a rank befitting him! But what Abdusamad thought of as the Bukharans’ barbarism was a double-edged sword. When the Emir’s blood boiled and he called out ‘Sentence!’, whether you were a vizier or a governor, or minister of foreign affairs, the executioner would have your head off its body before you had time to protest, leaving your convulsing corpse attempting to say, ‘I’m innocent, I’m innocent!’ The Emir was beginning to fall into frenzies. Abdusamad had witnessed these summary executions too often. If he got back safe and sound from this war, then he had to start thinking about his future. In Bukhara he had amassed considerable wealth, squirrelling the money away in an English bank. Now the time had come to settle in some quiet corner of India, where the people were as simple as sheep and nobody would bother him. Maybe just one or two local English governors, with whom he could find a common language…
Abdusamad approached the Khojent oasis as if it were a reflection of these dreams. What great man had not besieged this city: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Timur Lang, Shah Babur. And now it was his turn.
But Abdusamad’s thoughts of a leisurely siege were interrupted when a messenger rode up from the vanguard: ‘The enemy’s not in the fortress, he’s waiting in open country. Get ready for battle!’
So that’s it, thought Abdusamad. He had neither the endurance, the energy, nor the desire to go into open battle. The odds of being badly injured were far too high for him. He had to think quickly, and send his own messenge to the Emir: ‘His majesty should hold back the troops, and prepare the right and left flanks for battle; meanwhile the artillery should advance to the front and fire cannon at the enemy army. When they begin to panic, then let our army attack.’
The Emir quickly responded, ‘Excellen
t!’ Abdusamad moved his gunners to a hill on the western side of the battlefield, stopped the horses and aimed the line of cannon at the enemy. ‘Fire!’ The Kokand soldiers were overcome by confusion and panic. Ash and dust on one side, smoke on a second side, fire on the third, shrieks of despair on the fourth. At this point, the right and left flanks of the Bukharan army flung themselves onto the Kokand soldiers with cries of ‘Kill! Kill!’ Hand-to-hand battle began. At first, arrows snatched from the quiver and fixed to the bowstrings flew whistling through the air, then came the clash of Yemeni swords, ringing as they hit each other, hammering against shields and crunching human bones: the noise drowned out everything. Abdusamad held back his gunners, then prayed to God that the Kokanders, though much reduced in number, would not break out of their encirclement; it would only take a few to split off from the main battle and make their way over to the artillery for Abdusamad and his gunners to be hacked to pieces; they might even turn the abandoned guns against the Bukharan side.
No, Abdusamad had been right to keep the Bukharans close to one another, and to move against the left wing, where apocalyptic panic was moving eastwards to the Syr-Darya. Arrows and swords made sparks fly from helmets, screams were heard as spears pierced men, there was shrieking and whinnying when a horse was speared, headless corpses hacked in half were trampled under the hooves of maddened horses. The battlefield became a slaughterhouse, the green grass was turned red, the ditches were filled with a mixture of clay and blood. A soldier came up to Emir Nasrullo, who was watching the battle’s progress from a hill, and flung down a decapitated head. ‘Gadoy-bey, Keeper of the Seals,’ voices announced. Less than a minute later, another head was thrown at the Emir’s feet, like a carcass in a game of bozkashi: ‘Bahordir-xo’ja, Receiver of Petitions’. In a short time, the Khojent Chief Minister’s head was lying at the Emir’s feet, and it was obvious that the scales of victory were weighed in favour of the Bukharans.
Now Abdusamad bowed to Emir Nasrullo like a horse that had won a race, and the Emir, in high spirits, applauded him as one. Soon the Khojent commanders who had been wounded in action were brought from the battlefield. Fixing them with a look of furious hatred, the Emir called out ‘Sentence!’ The executioner beheaded them on the spot, and the battle was settled.
—
Abdulla was in a state of panic. Unable to read the letter he was clutching, his eyes turned in one direction, then another, his mind was in disarray, directed elsewhere; he struggled again to focus it. He recalled the annihilation of Passion in the eighteenth-century Uzbek poet Nishotiy’s Beauty and the Heart. The old poets knew everything. Every generation says, ‘We have come anew to the world, we shall create the world anew!’ But the world is the same old wooden tub built over the freezing cold. Just a little worse, you might say, the old men, like the prophet Jonah, had also been in the whale’s belly. But every new generation begins life like the previous ones, banging its head against a rock until its neck is firmly out of joint. Philosophers were all very well, but how was Abdulla going to read the letter? If he had wait until evening, his heart would burst. He thought up a dozen ploys, but greater than any human ploy was Allah’s, as it appeared; before dinner, Abdulla’s name was called and he was taken out of the cell.
At first, Abdulla was taken aback: was it really him they were summoning? After all, the interrogations were over. If he was being taken out to be shot, they’d wake him just before dawn. And there were a lot of people in the queue ahead of him.
Only when his name was repeated did he stand up and move to the door. The soldier-guard, instead of taking him upstairs, hurried him along him to the prison interrogation room. The door to the room opened, and Vinokurov was standing there. He sent the soldier off and whispered to Abdulla: ‘It’s Trigulov who’s summoned you. He’ll be down in a minute. I thought I’d see you first, brother. Today it’s our Easter: “Christ has risen!”’ He then bent towards Abdulla, embraced him and kissed his cheek.
Abdulla had known this ritual since he was a child. Every Easter five or six Uzbek and Kazakh children from his Russian school would go to the New City Russian quarters, knocking at all the doors and saying in broken Russian, ‘Christ has risen!’, just as people used to go from house to house at Ramadan. It was the custom for smiling grannies and granddads to open their doors and, when they saw the children dressed in their school uniform, respond tearfully, ‘He has truly risen!’, offering the children colourful painted eggs, never boiled, and sweet, slightly burnt Easter cake.
Remembering the custom, Abdulla responded reflexively, ‘He has truly risen!’ Vinokurov’s eyes shone. Taking painted eggs from his inside his tunic, he put them into Abdulla’s pockets.
‘You can eat them in the cell, brother,’ he said, and hurried from the room. Abdulla looked around in amazement, then put an ear to the door. He could hear only Vinokurov’s departing footsteps. He thrust a hand into his pocket, and pulled the letter out from under the eggs… no, the wrong one! Ah, this one… The fumbling gave him a burning feeling, and sweat broke out on his forehead. Yes, this one… now to unfold it… how clumsy his fingers had become… he should have played cards with the thieves. He opened it; graph paper, the kind from a school workbook, and his son Habibullo’s angular writing; so he had recovered!
Greetings, father dear! Are you all right? We’re fine, so don’t worry. Mother is in the country. I’m taking care of the garden. Your son, Habibullo.
Steel-tipped boots could be heard approaching down the corridor. Abdulla hastily crumpled the letter and thrust it into his pocket just as the door swung open.
‘Ah, Qodiriy, still alive?’ Trigulov went to his side of the desk and sat down, gesturing to Abdulla to sit at his own place. Abdulla sat on a stool that was fixed to the floor. He had allowed himself to get worked up; sweat had broken out on his forehead at the sight of the interrogator. He quickly took himself in hand. Trigulov sat there looking at Abdulla through narrowed eyes, then lit a cigarette and blew the tobacco smoke at him.
Enjoying yourself, are you, you scoundrel? Abdulla said to himself.
‘I thought you were supposed to be a national writer? Funny how the entire nation is against you.’ Trigulov tossed a pile of newspapers at him.
‘Death to the traitors!’, ‘Uzbekistan’s workers demand that the enemies of the people be shot!’, ‘No mercy to the rogues,’ shrieked the headlines. In one or two places he saw the names ‘Cho’lpon’ and ‘Qodiriy’. Abdulla’s heart sank. As if this wasn’t enough, Trigulov passed him yet another piece of paper, the size of a human hand:
The Uzbek SSR Chief Administration for Literature and Publishing, Uzbek Literary Administration.
No. 287. 15 April 1938.
to Comrade N. Trigulov, 4th section of Uzbek SSR NKVD State Security Administration.
We inform you that all books and pamphlets by the unmasked enemy of the people Abdulla Qodiriy have been, on the basis of the 1937 inventory, removed from circulation.
Head of the Uzbek Literary Board, Askulov.
‘Your writing, your life, will vanish without a trace. Didn’t I tell you to listen to what I said? You refused. So you have only yourself to blame.’ He puffed stale smoke in Abdulla’s face, apparently relishing every moment.
‘Our novel is getting along fine without you,’ he said suddenly. Yes, he really did say ‘our novel’. ‘Everyone’s sold you down the river: your pupils, your friends, your colleagues, your readers. I’m the only one who hasn’t changed my attitude. I myself will write what you’ve refused to.’
Abdulla looked at Trigulov with astonishment, and the interrogator tried to make himself clear:
‘About your life,’ he explained. ‘Come on, let me read you a bit, so you see the line it will take.’ He put a few sheets of paper into a copy of the magazine The Earth’s Surface and started reading directly from them, or so it seemed:
‘The following words were written in this lette
r: “As you said, I’ve rejected both worlds, and I’ve renounced my religion. Now an avalanche of problems is falling on my head. I haven’t got a single confidant or close friend left. Come, let’s leave this town and this region for good!”
‘After reading the letter, the wife, without waiting for the man who had brought it, wrote a reply: “My depraved husband! Have you really not read A Wise Man’s Spring? Have you never cast an eye on Barxudor Turkman’s Assembly of the Beautiful? At least you’ve studied The Parrot and Four Dervishes, and I’ve seen you handling a copy of The Doors of the Main Mosque. In all those books, at times when men had authority, what good did they get from women; what kindness can you expect when you are empty-handed? That’s what they think. Knowing all this, how can you call upon me to join you?”’
As Trigulov’s voice grew steadier and his reading became more professional, the blood rushed to Abdulla’s eyes, and breathing became progressively more difficult. The moment Trigulov came to the words, ‘When he received this letter from his wife, who was hiding in the country…’ Abdulla hurled himself across the desk.
‘I’ll kill you, you son of a whore!’ But the papers slid under him and Abdulla’s outstretched fingers missed Trigulov’s throat, grasping instead a fistful of empty air.
Trigulov howled for the guards. Two soldiers burst into the cell, flung themselves on Abdulla and twisted his arms behind his back, then started slamming his head against the desk as papers flew everywhere.
Abdulla tried to resist, until Trigulov’s steel-tipped boot struck him in the head.
When Abdulla, barely alive, was flung back in his cell, Muborak and Professor Fitrat used wet rags to wipe the blood from his face and head. They burned all the papers they could find, including the letters they found in Abdulla’s pocket, and rubbed the ash into his wounds. At midnight, when everyone had lain down on their sides, Abdulla dragged himself to the latrine bucket in the corner, took the crumbs of the smashed eggs out of his pocket and emptied them into the bucket.
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