by Banine
Religious observance was often rather mechanical or simply a social affair, like for example the celebrations for New Year or the end of Ramadan. As for me, I enjoyed them very much.
For children, New Year, celebrated on 21st March (to coincide with the first day of spring), was a holiday that yielded great financial return. All day we would run from house to house to pay ‘congratulatory’ visits. First we would be force-fed; it was both awful and delicious. Everywhere tables bowed under the weight of all the food; one could judge the degree of civilization of a household by the variety of dishes adorning the table. The primitive families had only local sweets, plates of dried fruit and hard-boiled eggs, while the more evolved families had all sorts of dishes that owed their existence to the civilizing genius of the Russians: eggs were painted, marbled or drawn upon, reminiscent of Easter celebrations; cold turkey was not only a tasty white meat but also a sign of progress; fine chocolates made in Moscow brought us a breath of holy Russia.
Once we’d been force-fed, the head of the household—an uncle or aunt or grandfather or other relative, close or distant—would take from a purse blessed by Allah a gold coin bearing a Slavic profile. After feeling its weight, they would—somewhat regretfully—slip it into our hands, an act usually accompanied by a loud, sloppy kiss. So by evening we would consider ourselves rich, though plagued by indigestion.
The Ramadan holiday was quite different. In my childhood it always fell in high summer (it’s a movable feast), so was celebrated in the country. We ‘civilized’ people did not keep the fast, except sometimes for the last few days. We did so entirely by choice; no one obliged us to fast. For my part, I didn’t do it to please Allah, but to blackmail him: I made wishes in the hope that, touched by my piety, he would grant them all.
We were not to eat or drink during the day; it was even forbidden to brush one’s teeth lest a drop of water spoil a dry palate. Smokers had to abandon their cigarettes that day. Husbands did not have the right to touch their wives (during the fasting hours, I should make clear). But the appearance of the first star of the evening heralded a gluttonous stampede for food; tremendous quantities disappeared down famished gullets. Then one would pause to allow for digestion. Then one would eat again. Then another pause for digestion. This would continue all night until the first light of dawn. Those who went to sleep would make sure they were woken up several times so they could fill themselves with as much food as possible.
At the end of Ramadan, sheep’s throats would be slit and their innards cooked outdoors over a wood fire. We had sweet orgies of tripe—the best food memories of my childhood (though far removed from the sauerkraut of the Frauenverein…). Fat ran everywhere—we would lick our fingers and under our nails so as not to lose a single drop. The aroma hung heavy in the air. Oh, those fatty feasts!
I also loved another religious observance—the annual commemoration of the tragedy at Karbala where in 680 Ali’s son Hossein and all his family were massacred. This was the point of departure of Shiism, enemy of Sunnism,† which my grandmother never failed to celebrate at home. That day the drawing room, furnished in the local fashion with only carpets and cushions, would acquire numerous additional cushions; they would be placed in a line along the wall, then, depending on the number of guests, they would form second, third and fourth rows. On the busiest days the entire floor would disappear beneath the cushions. A single chair, high and severe, like a throne, for ‘Madam Mullah’, rested against the wall in the middle of the room.
Swathed in chadras (called ‘chadors’ in the West), the guests arrived; their slippers clattered; their full silk skirts rustled; their shrill voices and the swirl of conversation were dizzying and the whole combined to create a considerable racket.
National costume, at its finest on holidays, had a stylish look and a richness that was wholly oriental. A low-cut jacket, worn over a white blouse, revealed a veritable walking jeweller’s shop: necklaces of pearls, necklaces of gold coins, gold chains, pendants, brooches of every kind. The jewellery was often of poor quality, but it shone, jingled, bobbed up and down and pleased the eye, which was enough for these ladies. The costume’s pièce de résistance, if one can use that expression, was the skirt, or rather skirts, as they were layered, one on top of the other. Their quantity and their fullness were a sign of the wealth of the wearer: ‘Show me your skirts and I will tell you who you are.’
The commemoration of Hossein’s death, however, was a day of mourning: on this occasion ladies wore black and no jewels adorned their chests, which were in theory burdened with sadness. The women arrived and the cushions disappeared under the cascade of skirts. The chatter and shouting did not stop, though, until Madam Mullah, installed on her throne, began to read the Koran. She soon progressed from reading to holding forth in Azeri on the tragic subject of the death of Hossein.
Everything would go well at first as the women listened quietly. But soon one woman would start to cry, then another, then another, until the whole room joined in. There were terrible sighs, sobs, groans, cries of ‘Yah Allah’, and the despair would grow more bitter, the grief become unbearable and the situation seem hopeless. Suddenly the Mullah’s voice would fall silent and just as suddenly, without any transition whatsoever, the women would start to gossip, their eyes still full of tears. Armed with glass bottles, we children would circulate among the cushions, pouring rose water onto outstretched palms; the women would moisten their faces and wash their eyes; this was the interval. Then the reading and commentaries would start again, and with them the full gamut of despair, kept in check until the time came for release. How did the audience cry to order? I do not know. Professional mourners, sort of grief hostesses, would always be invited to these gatherings, and to burials too. They would be the first to cry; helped by the eloquence of Madam Mullah, the contagion would soon spread and the other women would follow their lead. These hostesses of a very special kind would ensure that the gatherings were suitably emotional. In truth, the grief was not very sincere, which perhaps explains the disconcerting swings in mood.
Be that as it may, my sisters and I were better attuned to the comic aspect of these brisk changes in mood than to the dubious charms of melancholy. So we had tremendous fun, all the more so since an elderly great-aunt, a veritable artiste of pain, was an inexhaustible source of joy for us. Her gestures, her shamelessly exaggerated cries, the alternation in her moods, in a word her hypocrisy, delighted us. When she would let out a sigh as powerful as a gust of autumn wind or pretend to rip her clothes, while taking care not to do so, rolling her mischievous little eyes to see the effect of her outbursts, we would choke beneath our veils, stifling our laughter. With our heads covered by these veils—obligatory at such gatherings—we were shielded from suspicion; when our shoulders shook with laughter, the women thought we were moved by noble tears. Ungodly though we were, we did not miss an opportunity to simulate devotion, which earned us the fond indulgence and support of our grandmother. So when Fräulein Anna came down to return us to our home and our beds, she would encounter the stern disapproval of the whole family and Grandmother in particular. She usually had to return alone, leaving us laughing beneath our capes, or rather our veils, and on those days we would go to bed deliciously late.
As a child I loved my grandmother very much; the things that were to separate us later did not yet matter to me. When they did become important, I cut myself off from her completely: she seemed to me to be from another world; indeed, she was from another world. Is blood thicker than water? I must confess that I’ve never felt that about anyone. Is it an optimistic invention of humanity or am I a monster? Impartial observation seems to show that in families where interests diverge, hatred between relatives is constant and widespread; where interests are not divisive, affection sometimes exists. But most often there is only indifference mingled occasionally with a sense of duty towards the clan, which one could, with a little imagination, take to be love. To be honest, indifference appears to me to be the natural stat
e between the members of a family. When one thinks of the number of people one must know in order to find some friends, to discover an affinity in the small group that is the family would be something of a surprise.
Over time, the differences between us and Grandmother grew ever more marked. The gap separating her, whose life was a continuation of that of the first Muslim women of the Hegira, from us was not one of a few dozen years but of fourteen centuries. She wanted to know nothing of the ‘civilizing force’ of the Russians, and did not even know the language, because it was not compulsory when she was young. She saw Russians only as colonizers, secular troublemakers, men of another race and another religion—in a word, infidels—for whom she felt hatred tinged with contempt. Her hatred is easy to understand: the life she loved was slowly disintegrating around her; her husband had abandoned her for a Russian woman; her daughters, whom she had brought up to lead a life similar to her own, gave up the veil as soon as they were married, dressed in European style and began to chatter in an astonishing mixture of Russian and Azeri.‡ Though this is as far as their innocent initiation into civilization went, it was too much for Grandmother and a cause of considerable distress. It was even worse with her sons: after a brief sojourn in a Russian school, where their father had enrolled them, and especially after several tours that he made them take, they began to reject the tiresome constraints of religion, maintaining only the least restrictive. The discovery of oil wells in Baku greatly accelerated the liberation of the Muslims of the Caucasus: fortune suddenly put vast resources into their hands, allowing them to enjoy all the pleasures of civilization and taking away their taste for the strict, simple life of their forebears.
But if Grandmother wanted to monitor the effects of all these changes, she needed to look no further than us, her granddaughters. She had brought up her children herself; they had lived more or less in the Islamic style until their majority and this had left a clear mark. But we who were growing up in an atmosphere totally alien to hers embodied denial of the past. We scarcely spoke Azeri—though while lacking basic vocabulary, we did have an admirably rich repertoire of insults, thanks to her. I remember her most of all swearing, cursing and fulminating. Sometimes it was just for show and on those occasions Grandmother would merely mutter some half-hearted insults to maintain her prestige. At other times her ire was real and her imprecations would reverberate throughout the house.
Her enormous size, both in terms of girth and height, made it extremely difficult for her to move, which added to her majesty. The habit, already engrained, of commanding a whole army of children and servants combined with this extravagant corpulence to give her an air of grandeur which she never lost, not even when a torrent of foul insults escaped her mouth. She was a strange mixture of the imperious and the vulgar…
Although my relationship with her was fundamentally good, it was rather ambivalent and was easily drowned in a flood of insults and bad language. I would often try to tease her in a myriad ways or to beg something from her; she took teasing better than requests for material gain, as she was astonishingly mean.
We would go downstairs to see her almost every day, but she rarely came up to us. When she took it into her head to come, she would climb the stairs one by one, pausing for long rests after two or three consecutive steps. It was hard to watch as she clung on to the banister, puffing and panting. She would arrive in our rooms exhausted, struggle to squeeze herself into the largest armchair, put her chubby hands, palms and fingers painted with henna on her knees and watch our lives. She saw us busy doing things in which she saw neither purpose nor pleasure, listened to us speaking a barbaric tongue that she did not understand, nor wish to; instead she pitied us. Without analysing her impressions, she must have felt that her life and those of her peers, primitive and narrowly confined, left less scope for disappointment, while ours, rich in various possibilities, was thereby full of potential pitfalls too. She would have been right: liberty often comes at a heavy price.
Veiled women did not seem unhappy on the whole. I’ve never encountered so much merriment and laughter, so many dances and jokes (often dirty), as they enjoyed. Their life was simple and so were their desires. As for the oft-criticized polygamy, it was not a burden for a Muslim woman, to whom her husband was not a lover or even a companion, but a master who gave her children. She did not see much of him, and the fellow wives were her friends, home helps and childminders. I can tell an amusing story on this subject about something that happened in our own family.
My grandmother’s brother, a man of around sixty, had only one wife, who was infertile to boot. She was troubled by the thought of dying in her solitary home, without a fellow wife or children. One day she decided she could bear it no longer and decreed that her husband would have to marry again.
One morning when Grandmother was colouring my hair with henna, Begum arrived in a fury and began to air her grievances.
‘I said to Abbas: “Hey, Abbas, you have to take another wife.” And do you know what he said to me?
‘“I don’t want to,” he said.
‘I could have killed him.
‘“So that’s it—you don’t want to!”
‘“That’s it—I don’t want to! One wife is enough for me. More than enough.”
‘“Now look here!” I said to him. “The Prophet (peace and prayers be upon him) had several wives, and you can’t even have two?”
‘“The Prophet does not oblige anyone to have several wives,” he replied, proud of his wit.
‘“Yes,” I said, “but I do—I’m making you take at least a second wife. First of all, so she will give you a child. Second, I’ve had enough of always being on my own. You think it’s fun having to run from house to house to find company? I am the only one of my friends who is condemned to solitude and boredom. I want you to get married, Abbas.”
‘He tried to make me pity him.
‘“You know my declining powers…”
‘“There’ll be enough for the wedding night and to produce one child.”
‘Then Abbas got angry. “Leave me in peace, unbearable woman. I’m sixty years of age and master in my own home. I don’t want to get married.”
‘Then he insulted me. I shouted: “You shall get married! You shall get married!”
‘“Never.”
‘“You’re a heartless eunuch, an apology for a man. He calls himself a man and can’t manage two wives.”
‘I told him some home truths. Then Abbas marched out of the room. He tried to look proud, but that doesn’t work with me. And now?’
Begum was close to tears.
‘What can I do?’ she asked Grandmother.
My grandmother continued her majestic application of walnut leaves to my head, which was already covered with a thick layer of henna. Then she said, ‘Look for a girl that you like. When you’ve found her, I’ll think of a way to force Abbas’s hand. The stubborn fool! Perhaps he wants to imitate the Russians (may leprosy eat away their flesh). No children and just one wife! That’s a fine state of affairs! Go and find yourself a companion, then we’ll see. Wait a minute—you know Aslan the hunchback, whose sister married my cousin Mohammed? Well, he has a granddaughter who’s just reached puberty. She’s pretty and they say she’s sweet; go and see her, I think you’ll like her. She’ll make an agreeable companion.’
Begum followed her advice; she liked the young girl. Grandmother summoned Abbas. At first he categorically refused to get married. There were endless talks, entreaties, discussions. Then scenes, lots of scenes, a huge number of scenes, and finally, his resistance exhausted, the poor man had to give in. He never had children, but his Begum had a companion and no longer pined away in an empty house.