“They deceived us,” said a woman nearby. She had Asian features, wore a snow-white ski suit, and spoke very precisely. “They promised that they would leave the palace standing until tonight. I bring my daughter to Palace Square for her art class every Sunday morning—we came an hour early, just to see it one last time. It’s hurtful, even.” Her daughter, about seven years old and missing several teeth, had joined some children who were clambering on the ice boulders, resembling, in their padded snowsuits, tiny astronauts. I remembered Krafft’s Description. He had written that, for its beauty and rareness, the ice palace was “well worthy of being transported to Saturn and of taking its place there, as among the stars.”
The next day, I met Gromov and Mikheyeva for the last time in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Europe. They strode through the metal detector with the dynamism of a figure-skating duo. I asked why they hadn’t left the palace standing through the weekend. They exchanged glances. “It’s complicated,” Gromov said.
“We tried to reach you,” Mikheyeva said. “We didn’t know until the last minute.”
When I told her about the disappointed citizens I had seen, Mikheyeva averted her eyes. “We didn’t go there the entire day. We knew everyone would be angry at us, so we went to Vyborg.”
“Why didn’t you just leave it up?” I asked.
“Well, you know, an ice palace is so beautiful at first. Then the sun shines, and it melts, slowly, slowly—it’s depressing. We wanted to end on a positive note.”
Leaving the hotel, I stopped by the Palace Square to take another look at the heap of ice, but it had already vanished.
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* Dostoevsky, who called St. Petersburg “the most abstract and premeditated city in the world,” chose it as the setting for Crime and Punishment. In Andrei Bely’s modernist novel Petersburg, a terrorist has to kill his own father using a time bomb concealed in an anthropomorphic sardine can known as Pepp Peppovich Pepp. In Gogol’s most famous Petersburg tale, “The Overcoat,” a gang of thugs steals the overcoat belonging to a miserable clerk; the clerk falls into a fever, dies, and himself becomes a ghostly thug, roaming the city and stealing overcoats.
* In fact, St. Patrick was born in Kilpatrick, Scotland, in the year 387. His father belonged to a high-ranking Roman family, and his mother was a relative of St. Martin of Tours. Patrick was kidnapped in his sixteenth year by Irish marauders, who sold him into slavery to a chieftain and druidical high priest in present-day County Antrim.
* An analogous balance of art and sermon also characterizes Ruysch’s dioramas. The decadent miniature landscapes, made of human lung tissue and kidney stones, are redeemed by their subjugation to self-canceling sermons about the vanity of human endeavor. Pointing at their own impermanence, the dioramas simultaneously condemn and justify themselves.
Summer in Samarkand (conclusion)
The housecleaning at Gulya’s house was attended to every few days by Delia, a cheerful and attractive woman in her forties with fair skin, dimples, and dark hair. Bent double, she swept the entire courtyard and all the steps using a little whisk broom with no handle. Why didn’t she have a normal broom? Probably the same reason Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying. Delia spoke perfect Russian, which seemed strange for a cleaning lady; the mystery was explained when it turned out she was one of Gulya’s old high-school friends. “I help her out,” Gulya said of her practice of hiring a school friend to clean her house.
I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia’s alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money.
“But Gulya told us that her husband was in California, studying to be a yogi.”
“California? No, he lives just two streets away from here; I saw him last week.” Delia thought a moment. “Maybe he was in a bar called ‘California’?”
Her version of the story was supported, some five weeks into our stay, by the reappearance of the missing yogi. Shinyheaded, with muscular shoulders and a paunch, Sharif indeed projected the impression of someone who had never lived in California, which he thought shared a border with New York. He did, however, frequently try to make us listen to some cassettes of a Swedish yogi choir that he said could induce trances.
Sharif’s dominant conversational mode consisted of repeating the same sentence over and over, for inconceivably long periods of time. One afternoon, when Eric and I were sitting in the courtyard drinking tea, Sharif came out with a stale lepyoshka and proceeded to tell us at least thirty times that Uzbeks love to tear up lepyoshka, put it in their tea, and call it “duck soup.”
“Have some of our Uzbek ‘duck soup.’ We love ‘duck soup’ here. This ‘duck soup’ is the best kind of soup—filling, inexpensive, and, above all, delicious. Uzbek people love to eat delicious ‘duck soup.’ We call it ‘duck soup’ when we put lepyoshka in tea.” Desperate to make him stop, I ate an entire bowl of the tea-soaked bread. It didn’t work. “You ate our ‘duck soup,’ eh? So you love our ‘duck soup,’ do you?” He himself didn’t eat any “duck soup.”
Another statement Sharif liked to repeat was that Satan wasn’t outside us, in the world, but within us. “You think Satan is out there” (pointing in the bushes); “but Satan is everywhere—above all, inside us!” (pointing at his stomach).
“What’s wrong with his stomach?” Eric asked.
“He thinks Satan lives there,” I told him.
“Tell him!” Sharif urged me. “Tell your husband! Satan is everywhere!”
“He wants me to tell you that Satan is everywhere, including his stomach.”
Eric narrowed his eyes, assessing Sharif’s stomach.
One day when I got back from class, the neighborhood water had been turned off. Sharif was sitting shirtless in a plastic chair in the courtyard. He started to explain to me that Uzbeks can live without electricity or fire, but they can’t live without water, because water is an essential need for Uzbek people. At that point, the gate creaked open and Eric edged in sideways, lugging three enormous jugs of water.
“Do you see what we have to do in Uzbekistan?” Sharif demanded, pointing at Eric, who had carried the water all the way from the fountain in front of Dynamo stadium. “We have to carry water because sometimes our water doesn’t come to our house, and we can’t live without it. We can live without electricity or fire, but we Uzbeks cannot live without water, which is necessary for the human organism.” The water dependence of the Uzbek human organism, like most subjects, eventually led Sharif back to the problem of Satan’s whereabouts. “Not somewhere out there—but inside every one of us!” he shouted, pointing at his stomach, just as Eric came out of the kitchen. “What’s the matter?” Eric asked, drying his hands. “Satan in his stomach again?”
In literature class, Dilorom was teaching me about the second greatest Old Uzbek writer: Timur’s great-great-great-grandson, Emperor Zaxiriddin Muhammad Bobur, founder of the Mughal dynasty.* At age twelve, I learned, Bobur had been caught up in a feudal war. He fell into a chasm with dovecotes. Bobur had an ignorant cousin, a soldier, who wasted all his time on revenge killings and on staging fights between chicken and sheep. At fifteen, Bobur conquered Samarkand and again made it the capital of an empire. During the blockade, Bobur’s army ate dogs, donkeys, and boiled trees. Bobur is the author of the Boburnoma, or “Book of Bobur,” which recounts his conquests of Kabul and Delhi, his learned conversations with the Indian aristocracy, and the planting of many gardens.