The Devils' Dance

by Hamid Ismailov

  Witkiewicz’s account of Hakim runs: ‘A cross-eyed, cunning, mercenary old man, the owner of a large capital, richer than any other Bukharan, even the Emir. He is responsible for the kitchen and stables, the court and its administration; he is everything: the courts, the police, the water-supply and the officialdom – he is first vizier in all spheres, He also controls the customs, which are wholly answerable to him.’

  Witkiewicz visited the Chief Minister eight times. He openly hinted that a bird in the hand was better than one in the bush: in other words, the English were far beyond the mountains, whereas the Russians were nearby; thus, it was with them that Bukhara ought to trade. He tried to get some Russian prisoners freed, hoping to take them back with him, but Hakim was too cunning to take the hint: ‘The Russians are perfectly happy where they are; they’ve kept their religion, and they get drunk as lords on holidays.’

  One particular aspect of Witkiewicz’s tragedy occupied Abdulla’s thoughts. Before shooting himself, the Pole must have thought, ‘Here I am, trying to do good for those backward Asiatics, and I’ve been turned into an agent of the Tsar’s government. And for what? That same government has focussed their politics on Turkey and Iran; nobody cares about Bukhara or Afghanistan. As a youth I swore to liberate my motherland from Russian colonisation; now here I am sticking the heads of other nations into that same noose…’

  Abdulla discussed his ideas at length with Fitrat, recalling other nations which had somehow ended up enslaving the foreign peoples they claimed to want to make happy, from the Russians in Uzbekistan to the British Raj in India.

  ‘My dear Abdulla, one thing can’t be denied: we’ve allowed ourselves to get sucked into a quagmire. I’ve written a lot about it, as you know. Not the Reds’ rubbish about Soviet times: the times of the Emir of Bukhara. I’ve thought a lot about why the West forged ahead, while our Islamic East lost the advantage and let itself stagnate.’

  ‘And what was your conclusion?’ Abdulla was genuinely interested.

  ‘There were a number of causes,’ said the Professor. ‘Firstly, during the period known as the Enlightenment, they agreed to a certain distinction: give God what belonged to God, and man what belonged to man. Though this is by no means alien to us. As far back as the 1300s, in Bukhara itself, the Sufi His Majesty Baho-uddin Naqshband’s motto was “The heart for God, the hands for labour.” And people say something similar now: “Yours is the effort, mine is the prosperity.”’

  ‘So why did it work for them and not for us?’

  ‘They backed up their motto with a system of education. They founded universities, they developed humanitarian studies, they made inventions and discoveries. Until the jadid schools came along, we only had religious studies. I spent fifteen years in a madrasa, I know it inside out,’ said Fitrat.

  ‘Later, they began to acquire a sense of freedom, first in reasoning, and then in their personal life. Something called initiative awoke. It was the era of heroism, and of enterprise: some men discovering America; others went to the North Pole, some grazed sheep or produced milk. The main thing is that this gave rise to constant competition. A rational process became the basis of the economy.’

  ‘Would that be right for us? We’re an Islamic people in all respects. We value the family, we value our local neighbourhood, the city… the motherland, the nation…’

  ‘This is precisely what I’m talking about,’ Fitrat said impatiently. ‘All right, what I’m saying seems to go against your views, but take a look at yourself, at your books! What made your Otabek unique? Forget about what he says, which is directly opposed to public opinion; pay attention to his actions. He married Kumush without telling his parents! What would you have said if something like that happened in your neighbourhood, in your society, among Uzbeks?’

  Fitrat’s sharp eyes glinted as his stare held Abdulla.

  ‘My friend, the thing that made you Abdulla Qodiriy was precisely that inner freedom, a free sense of identity. But the West’s defeat of the East has another basis, too.’

  ‘What basis?’

  ‘The strength of its laws. To stop other people’s freedom encroaching on your own, equality before the law is necessary. Needless to say, I’m not talking about the law which has led you and me to be sitting here today.’ Fitrat permitted himself an ironic smile. ‘But not the sharia law of the days of Islamic judges, either. Did you know that in the time of Emir Nasrullo, whom you’re so interested in, those same Islamic judges and mullas issued a fatwa in favour of pederasty?’

  ‘But that’s not so bad,’ Abdulla joked, ‘compared with the fatwas in Kokand that allowed Madali to marry his stepmother.’

  ‘Equality before the law is the foundation for equality of opportunity. Combined with personal initiative, as I said, this is the step which would take us from yesterday’s poverty to tomorrow’s prosperity.’

  Abdulla meant to say something about Obid the Pickaxe and Berdi the Tatar, but decided to keep his objections to himself. A man can be lectured to, but as a result the thought would die.

  —

  What kept Abdulla alive was his novel. Otherwise, his state of mind would be no better than that of the NKVD officer Vinokurov (whose first name Abdulla had never asked about) in Room No. 42. True, Abdulla had no weapon with which to shoot himself, but if a man is tired of life, he will find some means or other to end it. All he needed was willpower and the wish to die.

  Just as Professor Zasypkin was in a hurry to finish his game of chess, so Abdulla wanted to finish his novel, even if he didn’t finish writing it, but just thought it out to the end. Why? Because when you bring something to a conclusion, things you don’t know will be revealed to you, and then you will no longer regard the work as something you did personally, a part of yourself: you will accept it as if it were a revelation from the blue. ‘Was it really me who wrote that?’ you will ask, staring at your handwriting in disbelief.

  Mahmud-xo’ja Marg’iloniy, who had tricked Madali into setting off for Kokand, gradually dispersed his companions and associates; by the time they got to Marg’ilon, Madali was completely alone, deprived of both his horse and his golden gown. A man who used to keep thousands of thoroughbred racing horses in his own stables now lacked even a donkey; forced to ride in a cart, wearing an ordinary striped gown, he finally grasped the full extent of his woes. As they were approaching Kokand, he begged and pleaded, ‘Don’t take me into Kokand by daylight, Haji! Let me enter under cover of darkness!’ But the treacherous Mahmud-xo’ja turned a deaf ear to his pleas. In broad daylight, he paraded yesterday’s Khan of Fergana through the streets, for all to see his destitution. Even those who had once complained of Madali’s tyranny wept out loud when they saw state to which their Khan had been reduced. Mahmud-xo’ja Marg’iloniy delivered Madali to the blue pavilion that the latter had built, where Emir Nasrullo awaited him. Once the two rulers had set eyes on each other, Nasrullo waved his hand: ‘To the prison!’ Imprisoned in his own palace, the Khan said not a word, absorbed in his own dark thoughts. When the time for night prayers approached, he lifted his head and addressed one of the guards, who was sitting nearby: ‘Not a thing has passed my lips for three days. Could I trouble you for a bite to eat?’ ‘Ask your father to satisfy your whims! This is all you’ll get from us.’ The guard thrust a brass ewer of icy water forward. The Khan fell silent.

  As Madali raised the ewer to his lips, about to slake his thirst, two executioners loomed up in the dark, grabbing him by the armpits, so he could offer no resistance. They dragged him off unwashed and unrelieved, to be questioned or tortured.

  —

  After night-time prayers, Abdulla’s name was called out, and once again he was taken outside. Has the sentence come from Moscow? he wondered as he was led out. Yet again he was taken to one of the prison’s interrogation rooms. As usual, Trigulov was sitting there with his revolver on his belt and his sergeant’s stripes on his collar. Apart from his rem
ark ‘This time, if you go for me, I’ll shoot you on the spot,’ everything was the same: the thick criminal file in front of him, and on the other side of the desk the stool fixed to the concrete.

  Abdulla abruptly realised that he harboured no resentment, hostility or desire for retribution towards the man watching him. He sat down on the bench that Trigulov indicated with a receptive look that said right, I’m ready.

  Trigulov seemed to be in no hurry, taking a deep draw on his cigarette as he perused the papers in front of him. It didn’t look as if a sentence had come. That devil couldn’t have held back from saying so straight out. Was he going to boast about his writing exercises again?

  ‘You must know what happened to Vinokurov?’ Trigulov asked.

  Abdulla nodded.

  ‘They say the two of you had a relationship: is that so?’

  ‘He was a warder, I’m a prisoner, that was our relationship,’ Abdulla said brusquely.

  ‘The soldiers saw him give you a cigarette.’

  Haven’t you done the same? Abdulla wanted to say, but instead he came out with a scornful: ‘Didn’t you see him beat me till I bled, knock the living daylights out of me?’

  ‘That was his job,’ Trigulov sneered. And since we’re on the subject…’ Here we go again, thought Abdulla, but resolved to be patient.

  ‘Has it never occurred to you that an interrogator and a writer have quite a few things in common?’

  Only we don’t lock people up, but Abdulla began to have his doubts as soon as this thought popped into his head: unless prison is something invented, a work of art. Trigulov seemed to have heard this: he continued.

  ‘Don’t both seek to uncover the secrets of a person’s soul? Why does your Berdi the Tatar take an axe and split Shodmonboy’s head in two? Why does Obid the Pickaxe join the collective farm, when he is so dissatisfied? That’s something an interrogator has to investigate.’

  It occurred to Abdulla that if the sergeant managed to get inside the world of his books, he would lock up practically everyone he met there – both Berdi the Tatar and Shodmonboy.

  ‘There are differences, of course, but a novel is an enquiry into a human being’s spirit, his identity, in much the same way as a prison interrogation – isn’t that so, my learned writer? This isn’t one of those interrogations, of course, just a friendly chat, so you don’t have to answer now. Let me just tell you a story, and you can draw your own conclusions. Ah yes, I meant to say, here’s a cigarette, here are the matches, go on, make yourself at home.’

  If there had been any fly on the wall, they might have thought that here were two friends having a heart-to-heart about some lofty matter. The fact that one was an executioner, and the other his victim, would not have been immediately apparent.

  Abdulla smoked, and went on listening. Trigulov’s voice was low as he began his story:

  ‘In the Russian province of Penza, on the Sura river, lies a village called Delino. It’s mainly settled by Tatars. But these are baptised Tatars; in other words, forcibly converted. The story of their conversion goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century, but it might have happened even earlier. In the 1830s a priest was sent to this village, and he called upon the Muslim Tatars to convert. He promised money to some, allotted plots of church-owned land to others, and he tried to frighten the rest with deportation to Siberia or imprisonment behind stockades. The village elder may have been frightened, or he may have been greedy; in any case, he was the first to convert. A few of his relatives followed suit, and these men then united to persecute the rest. First, they demolished the village mosque and built a church in its place, then they began levelling the Muslim cemetery. People endured this as long as they could, but one night they set fire to the priest and the village elder’s houses, killing them and all their relatives.

  ‘After that, mounted Cossacks came from Penza to attack the village. It was a massacre; the village was drowning in blood. Those who escaped fled to the forest, but it was winter, and many died of exposure. Those that were caught were sent to Siberia. The chief was a young man called To’raqul; sheltered by kind-hearted people, he eventually made it through the forests, where he joined a caravan than was on its way to Bukhara.

  ‘Here he married a Jewish widow called Rohila who had converted to Islam; they had children. But Rohila the Jewess died. When the Russians invaded Turkestan, the roads to Russia were open, and To’raqul, near the end of his life, returned with great difficulty to his home village of Delino. He took his eldest son Ishoq with him. Nobody in the village recognised him, everyone had long since accepted Christianity, except for a handful of old men. He kept himself to himself and prayed at home. Time passed: his son, influenced by boys his own age, changed his name to Isaac and decided to marry one of the baptised girls. His father drove him out of the house. Around then, the son of the village elder who had been murdered in the insurrection, now a man of high rank, returned to Delino, recognised To’raqul and handed him over to the police. The old man was sent to Siberia.

  ‘When Isaac heard about this, he took his wife and his only son Nurlin and fled to Bukhara.’

  When the tale reached this point, Abdulla realised whom this story was about. ‘Ah yes, I’ve got it. The man facing me is State Security Sergeant Nurlin Ishoqovich Trigulov.’

  —

  For the first time, Abdulla felt a surge of pity for the interrogator. It didn’t matter whom you stuck a needle into, they all bled and suffered. For instance, Vinokurov, whom he considered more a devil than a human being, had shot himself. And just now Trigulov seemed to have told Abdulla that the stories and the suffering the latter spent his time inventing had nothing on real life. And yet, wasn’t there something suspicious in his mentioning the Bukharan Jewess Rohila? Could it be that this was all a game? As Mayakovsky himself had said: ‘We were born to make fairy tales reality.’

  Why had Trigulov told him this story? Was it to assert his claim to be a writer? Or was it a reproach: ‘You’ve been ignoring me?’ Once again, the end of the thread seemed to be missing, and Abdulla’s thoughts were hopelessly confused. He could no longer trace them back to their beginning: they had drifted in various directions, they overflowed like dough in a bowl. If you turned the tray upside down, you’d squash the dough, crumple the tablecloth, and dirty the seat covers. The best thing was to look after your own affairs, not to stray from your familiar pastures, not to stumble away from your tether.

  Now that Mahmud had abandoned his mother Nodira and fled Kokand, renouncing his crown and throne, he reached Shahrixon with his suite. From Shahrixon they were heading for Andijan, where, by getting reinforcements in the fortress, they could rouse the Kyrgyz against the Bukharans. But the citizens of Shahrixon were enraged that their Emir’s wife Oyxon had been expelled from Kokand back to her native city, and when they found out that Mahmud had arrived in their city they swore that they would hand him over to Emir Nasrullo. At night, when the Khan and his noblemen had gone to sleep, the people fell upon them when they least expected it, and bound them hand and foot. They ripped the Khan’s clothes off and covered him with an old blanket. ‘See, I put that boot on the throne, now you’ve untied it,’ said the Khan, regretfully, his hands and feet oozing blood. But was anyone listening? Alas, no: they put him on a cart and sent the horses galloping off towards Kokand.

  Once he arrived in Kokand, when the people of the city saw the newly dethroned Khan in such a lamentable state, they sighed sadly. They groaned at the world, the treachery of perfidious fortune. The captors quickly dashed to the palace to get their rewards. Emir Nasrullo merely caught a distant sight of Mahmud: he spat and gave the order, ‘To prison!’ Mahmud-xon was taken to the same place where the young princes, Oyxon’s two sons by Madali, were already languishing in captivity.

  Looking around in the pitch darkness, Abdulla felt them there: Madali and Mahmud, Nodira and Oyxon, all awaiting an answer. Their eyes all asked th
e same questions: what have you done to us? Why have you put us in this setting? Reproaches and warnings echoing off the walls.

  I’m just like you! Abdulla wanted to say. There’s no difference between us! but his tongue refused to form the words. He could have played the omniscient author, told them that this was just a foretaste, only he could not meet their flashing eyes. As for them, did they have any idea of what awaited him? Why then did they all stay silent?

  —

  When the men who had handed Madali over to Emir Nasrullo returned to Shahrixon, they showed everyone the gifts they had received and told the story of those who had been imprisoned in the palace. Oyxon became pensive when she heard what they had to say. Had she done the right thing in rejecting her husband? In refusing to protect Mahmud from the citizens of Shahrixon? In not helping Nodira, the senior wife, to flee here? Didn’t Oyxon have a hand their imprisonment? Or, as Hafiz put it:

  My heart is a treasury of secrets, yet the hand of destiny,

  Slamming its door, gave the key to the tormentor of my heart.

  Was this hand of destiny their way of avenging themselves? No, Oyxon was tormenting herself needlessly with these questions, she had been born unlucky: whatever she set out to do in this world, nothing but harm ever came from it. She had found joy in the hilly steppes of O’ratepa, and her father, destitute, was exiled to Shahrixon; she had loved the young Sayid Qosim, and had been forced to marry Emir Umar. But the ‘predator’ who violated Oyxon had not lived for long. He passed away at the age of thirty, as if Oyxon’s silent curses had reached the ear of God. Just as she was rejoicing in her new-found freedom, her stepson Madali, a still more brutal predator, had cast aside religious teachings to marry her. As if that were not enough, he had Gulxaniy, who had done no wrong, drowned, and the innocent Qosim stoned to death. Now the executioner must be sharpening his sword over Madali’s head. May none of this be blamed on Oyxon! She’d had two bastard sons by Madali. Only recently had she developed any affection for them, then that jealous jackal sent one as a hostage to Emir Nasrullo, and locked the other one up in the palace. Now both of the innocent princes were in prison in Kokand, waiting for death. If only Oyxon were not held accountable for all these deaths in the next world.