The Devils' Dance

by Hamid Ismailov

  What could she do, sleepless at midnight? Her prayers went unanswered because of her sins, and now God would not listen to her. Perhaps she should go and surrender herself to Nasrullo? She could say, you started a war against Madali, but I, not he, am to blame for his apostasy. Kill me, and let the others go! She could say this; yes, this was what ought to be done. That would bring about God’s mercy, and if the Emir’s wife’s prayed to the Almighty for her children, perhaps he would allow her life after death!

  Abdulla awoke at midnight, soaked in cold sweat. Why was he trembling? What had he been dreaming of? Where did the nightmares and delirium come from? However hard he tried, he couldn’t remember the dream that had reduced him to this state. The shade of his mother Josiyat seemed to have appeared from afar. ‘Child, you’ve seen the devil!’ his mother had said one day, when Abdulla was sitting on the veranda, weeping bitterly after ‘killing off’ his heroine Kumush. But he hadn’t killed anyone off today, he hadn’t even intended to make an attempt on anyone’s life. He looked about him. He was lying in a row of men, each waiting for his death. What unconscious thought had woken him? Should he yell out? Call for someone? Call for help? It was pointless; Vinokurov himself had known it. It was all in God’s hands. If an earthquake struck that same day, prisoners and guards would meet their deaths together. ‘One single Shout!’ as the Qu’ran says. And this concrete prison might be the only hole left in town. A mouse-hole is worth a thousand shillings, after all.

  But this wasn’t why Abdulla was trembling. What then was the reason? Was it the deaths? Vinokurov; Jur’at, the lover of proverbs; Professor Zasypkin; Kosoniy’s and Muborak… Wasn’t Abdulla in some way to blame? But how? Had his own wretched fall from grace brought down these other men? Was that what Trigulov had been hinting at? The dying die not for themselves but for others; that was why it was easier for whoever died first. What should Abdulla do? Confess all his crimes, existent and non-existent, and ask to be shot as soon as possible. But who would be saved by his death?

  In trodden mud the horse leaves behind,

  In marks on grass you sometimes find,

  In the darkness of words to which I’m blind –

  There is nothing more than chance.

  Substance and nothingness made and remade,

  The shade of a tree and a sketch of the shade,

  An image’s reflection, a reflection displayed –

  Are just coincidence’s dance.

  Strange relics from a Stone Age site,

  Moths scattered by the light,

  Signs in the stars in the black of night –

  Are false spirits that lead us on.

  Cast off, we seek your name in all –

  In drops of rain or how crumbs fall

  Or a wandering dervish’s death call

  Which are flawed when found, flawless when gone.

  —

  ‘My dear Abdulla, you’re a writer. And the sort of writer, as Cho’lpon liked to say, that would not be born to an Uzbek mother in a hundred years. Why don’t you write about all this?’ Fitrat exclaimed the next day.

  ‘About all what?’ Abdulla replied.

  ‘The situation here, of course,’ Fitrat replied, waving his hand around him.

  ‘It’s not as if I’ve been sent here on creative leave,’ Abdulla demurred.

  ‘Well, that’s fair enough. But if you had the opportunity to write about it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Who knows? Anyone who’s gone through something similar himself will take it with him to the grave. Anyone who hasn’t will simply say “There but for the grace of God!” I’d say that there’s nothing here one can make literature out of.’

  ‘You’re giving an answer from a professional point of view; my question was from a human one.’ In any conversation with Fitrat, even an ordinary exchange would run into difficulties. Meanings would multiply, merge and divide, and the result, like any equation, would end as a zero sum.

  ‘Very well, from the human point of view: there is death here, but no love. It’s hard to make literature out of nothing but death; that’s why I wouldn’t write about this place.’

  Abdulla said all this impromptu, but when he thought about it, all his books had been structured on the same basis. Even his old story, ‘Dance of Devils’, linked the horror of his father’s death with a beautiful angelic figure. You could not make literature out of meaningless death. Death had to interact with life. Life was not more expressive than love, because love was a life-giving force. Perhaps he ought to say these things outright to Fitrat, who valued logic and precision most of all. But then, there was no need to labour the point; a hint should be enough for an intelligent man.

  ‘So you don’t think there’s any mystery to all this?’ Fitrat asked.

  ‘There may be, but the mystery of waiting for death has nothing to do that of of being torn away from life: I’d say, rather, it simplifies it.’

  ‘You’ve convinced me,’ said Fitrat. ‘Think of da Vinci’s La Gioconda. It’s a portrait of a woman. She’s not exactly a beauty, but she’s certainly not ugly. Her hair is neither curly nor straight, you can’t tell if her smile is amusement or reproach, whether she wants to embrace you or push you away. Her breasts are neither exposed nor concealed, the spectator can call her hands, folded on her chest, delicate if he wants, or if he prefers, he can call them rough. So wherever you look, you find – as our leading literary figures would say – a mix of earthly and divine love… If only one picture were to be left in the world, then this is the one to be set aside as the most perfect and the most full of life. This is the secret of painting and literature: the blend, the balance…’

  Belatedly, Fitrat appeared to realise he wasn’t in a lecture hall; he looked around and fell silent.

  ‘It must be the same with literature.’ Abdulla added pensively. ‘Words not only reveal and proclaim, they also keep things hidden.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Fitrat, animated again. ‘The heroes’ actions, the author’s narration, it all has to keep to this dictum, isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes,’ Abdulla agreed, but that affirmation didn’t lessen the grimness of the scene he had for so long been sketching out in his mind.

  On Saturday, just before early morning prayers, four executioners entered the room where the Khans and their offspring were imprisoned, took Madali, Mahmud and Madali’s son Madamin by their hands and wordlessly led them out. Outside was still as dark as inside, too dark to distinguish a white thread from a black one. So the Khans stumbled and tripped as they crossed the brick courtyard towards the garden, following their executioners, the commander of the army and the Chief Minister, who was holding a lantern and a lamp. They cringed as the night air numbed their flesh; they had gowns over their shoulders to ward off the cold breeze, but still it bit in to their bones. The pitch-black garden was utterly soundless; then the Chief Minister appeared, holding a lamp, frowned at the dark and stood there as if to meet them. The branches and twigs were motionless, somehow expectant. In the quivering light of the lantern the only moving things were the shadows of their legs, even the shadows of the trees were still invisible: a pitch-black wall rose up to the heavens. They guessed that they had reached the edge of a pond. Suddenly the stars seemed to have fallen at their feet. The heavens now opened like an overhead hatch. Then the Chief Minister put the lantern on the ground and rapped out a single word: ‘Sentence!’ Two executioners threw themselves on Madali, knocked him to the ground like a fettered sheep and executed him, parting his head instantly from his body. The spurting blood spilled onto the garden soil.

  Although Mahmud didn’t see his brother’s death, he sensed what was happening by the convulsions of the body and began to recite the shahada of repentance. The young Sultan Madamin, standing behind him, uttered a scream. Then two other executioners fell upon him, making a martyr of a flower that had not had time to bloom. Mahmud pra
yed even more fervently. Heads and bodies were mingled with earth and blood on the ground, and when the executioners tried to grab Mahmud, they were confused as to who would hold him and who would axe him, but the head, parted from the body, hit the lantern with a thud, and the light went out, leaving everything totally dark.

  Only the executioner’s rasping breath broke the silence of the darkness before dawn. From afar, like the shriek of a soul, a solitary cockerel crowed.

  —

  Does your hair and your beard somehow stop growing in prison, or, like a pale potato thrown into a pit, grow, but turn white as they do so? Back in the hands of Moshe the barber, Abdulla could not help but wonder. As before, Moshe huffed and puffed as he sharpened his razor, as if he was about to cut Abdulla’s head off his body; again this huffing and puffing seemed to express all his feelings, and from time to time he would turn to the soldier standing by the door and look at him askance, as if to say, what are you hanging about there for? You could tell by his face that he wanted to say something to Abdulla, but the soldier was an obstacle, forcing the barber to limit himself to even more stertorous puffing. Moshe’s strange movements had an effect on the soldier, who abruptly announced that he was ‘going for a piss,’ and left Abdulla in Moshe’s care. Abdulla pricked up his ears: well, now, out with it! But Moshe simply went on puffing as before. When Abdulla saw that Moshe looked unlikely to speak, he himself hurriedly asked, ‘Excuse me, did you know the late Muborak?’

  Moshe shuddered. He had never been seen or heard talking to the prisoners. First of all, he furrowed his eyebrows, as if to say, what did he say? Then he seemed at last to have understood, though he responded with a question instead of an answer. ‘Why?’

  Abdulla was too hasty to be logical: ‘What do you mean, why?’ he replied.

  ‘Why “the late”?’

  ‘Have I got it wrong?’ said Abdulla, wasting time.

  ‘Why do you call him “the late”?’ Moshe asked politely. ‘And what makes you think I don’t know him? He’s my nephew,’ he said, and was about to say more, when the flip-flop of the soldier’s boots was heard, and the barber reverted to his huffing and puffing. Abdulla became deeply thoughtful.

  If Muborak was a close relative of Moshe, who knew Muborak himself as his nephew, could he possibly not have been informed of his demise? He worked here, after all! Would they have fought to keep his execution a secret from him? Certainly not; Moshe’s response was so natural and astonished, as if he had seen his nephew only an hour before, and he seemed stunned that Abdulla should call him ‘the late’. What did this imply? Could Muborak be alive?

  Then what did it mean that they came to take him away, to be shot? If only he could have questioned Moshe just now. But all he got from him was that huffing and puffing and Moshe’s furtive glances at the soldier.

  As Moshe was finishing his work, Abdulla’s thoughts were still confused. If only Vinokurov were still alive, perhaps he could have asked him. But this was pointless speculation; when he’d had the chance, Abdulla had lacked the courage.

  Once he was back in his cell, Abdulla was unable to solve the puzzle Moshe had set him. Should he tell Fitrat about it? But, for some reason, Fitrat had never liked Muborak. At first, he had interpreted this as professorial jealousy, but later he saw that the rivalry ran deeper than intellectual one-upmanship and the fact they came from the same city. Abdulla didn’t enquire into the source of this animosity. For that would have required some deep and painful thoughts.

  But Fitrat was a perceptive man. He approached Abdulla, and deliberately began with a joke: ‘Did you give a tip for your shave? You look younger now. It’s a pity that, according to your theory, there are no women in here: you’ve become an eligible young man again.’

  Abdulla was confused: ‘What theory was that?’ But then he recalled their earlier talk, and his conclusion about the search for a path – about a novel not succeeding if it was about death without love. These patterns seemed to have trouble forming in Abdulla’s brain, and Fitrat, sensing this, went on:

  ‘I’ve thought about what you said yesterday, and you’re right. Death on its own doesn’t amount to a tragedy, it must involve love and life as well. I too have thought a great deal about Nasrullo’s murders. If the Emir had killed only the Khans, that wouldn’t have amounted to a historical event. But here we have Nodira’s story. According to the History of Fergana, the executioners slaughtered Madali first, then, when they seized his son Madamin, the lad shrieked and wept, wanting to say goodbye to his mother. Nodira couldn’t bear this, and said to Nasrullo, “You monster, his father committed a sin, but what did this innocent boy do to you? You merciless hangman, you have drowned Kokand in blood. I curse you before God, may you go blind, may you be deprived of everything! May you drown in your own blood, may you lose your royal status and be destroyed.” Foul curses came to Nodira’s lips, and all these words rebounded on her. Nasrullo then sentenced them all, including his pregnant daughter-in-law, to be beheaded.

  These were scenes that Abdulla had saved when he was beginning his novel; he was jealous of the account as Fitrat had set it out. Stop it! he felt like blurting out, cutting the Professor off in full flow. This was for him, Abdulla, to tell, these tragic scenes needed to be expressed differently. But he told himself to be calm. How could he be jealous of a story, as though it belonged just to him? Even if he wrote it his way, this would only be one way of treating it. For that reason, seeing that Fitrat had become pensive, Abdulla responded, ‘What’s interesting is that a poet called Fitrat, a contemporary of Nodira’s, wrote a poem about those deaths:

  Fitrat, tender-hearted by nature, wanting one night to tell

  The history of this royal death,

  Said in his tipsy state: ‘Now is gone

  All joy in the land of Fergana.’

  Fitrat responded with a grim laugh, ‘Who will there be to write history for us?’

  —

  Abdulla did not tell Professor Fitrat the final part of the scene, which he was saving for the novel’s climax.

  Early one day, before morning prayers, Oyxon was speeding in a cart from Shahrixon: she entered the outskirts of Kokand when the call to prayer was sounding out. She was determined to see the Emir, to confess herself guilty of every sin committed, in the hope of saving the lives of Kokand’s ruling family. But at heart she was worried. The sun was rising in an overcast sky – the cart was moving at a gallop – like a decapitated head soaked in blood, the sun was rolling along the horizon, and its rays were like swords with blood-stained blades, making Oyxon anxious. ‘Faster! Faster!’ she urged the driver on. Just as she realised she was entering Kokand, she felt herself to be in as ravaged and hopeless a state as the streets. From the clutches of one predator into the presence of another… Now the Shayxon district where her father had lived was below her; she left it behind. As they neared the Emir’s harem, the sun, still on the horizon, vanished behind trees and buildings. She had to get there faster, faster!

  At first they wouldn’t let her enter the palace. She tugged the rings off her fingers and gave them to the guards. ‘Only as far as the harem,’ they said, as they opened the gate. Once inside the palace, there wasn’t a corridor or a hatch that Oyxon didn’t know. She sent Gulsum, who had accompanied her in the cart, to find out what was going on, while she meant to cross the garden that linked the palace chambers to the blue kiosk. Cherries were ripening there, beginning to take on the colour of blood: everything was a reminder of war and haste, the leaves and the fruits now had a covering of dust, in the flowerbeds along the garden edges. Some of the flowers had faded, some had withered.

  ‘They’ve been neglected,’ Oyxon thought sadly, as she headed through the trees towards the pond. This had once been the legendary bottomless pool of paradise: from it, through the trees, an invisible bright-red sun emerged. Oyxon’s vision blurred. It seemed to her that on the opposite side of the pool some people w
ere lying fast asleep. What lazy gardeners, instead of tending the garden, they’re lying asleep without having even washed! When the cat’s away, the mice can play, so that’s it! The shout was ready on the tip of her tongue. Then, as she approached the edge of the pool, the slumped figures solidified into the headless bodies of men and women. She shrieked, and collapsed unconscious.

  Imagining this episode, Abdulla found himself wanting to defend and protect Oyxon; at all costs, Gulsum had to be the one to find her unconscious, not the soldiers and the Chief Minister who would take her to Nasrullo. ‘Why have I started interfering with their business?’ he asked himself. ‘My task is only to give a picture of actual events, as described in history.’ But at heart he was against this approach, and searched for pretexts to avoid handing Oyxon over to that butcher. ‘It’s strange,’ thought Abdulla. ‘I began the novel by showing Nasrullo as a bozkashi player: wasn’t that the aim? And now, when we get to the end, who gets the prize carcass but him? So why am I deluding myself? What has changed in the meantime? Is it history, my heroes, or myself? Why am I so firmly in Oyxon’s camp?’

  —

  In his youth, Abdusamad had an ear cut off by the ruler of Tabriz; in India, the English had sought to imprison him for misappropriating government money, and he had been forced to make his escape to Kabul; there, Dost Muhammad had threatened to blind him for treachery, and he had only just got out in time, disguised in a woman’s burka. The siege of Kokand had proved extremely profitable for him, but Nasrullo’s volatility was worrying; Abdusamad’s mouth still smarted from the Emir’s boot. Was it perhaps time for another moonlight flit?