“Are we visiting the Buranovs?” Muzaffar asked.
“No,” they said. “Just park the car . . . not here under the lamp; better under that tree . . .”
It turned out that Muzaffar’s parents had once asked him what he thought of the Buranovs’ daughter, to which he had replied, “How do I know what to think? I’ve never seen her.” Muzaffar himself had no recollection of this exchange, but now he found himself in a parked car on her street, where the entire family proceeded to sit for hours, awaiting a chance for him to form an opinion of the Buranov girl.
“I was really frightened. What if she came outside and saw us—my entire family sitting outside her house in a dark car? She would think we were criminals. Once I thought I heard her coming and my heart was pounding, but it was only a cat. I think it was very funny for my sisters. We sat in the car for two hours, and during this time my sisters made fun of me.”
“So did you finally see her?”
“No—we have to go back! On Thursday!”
We both started laughing, but after a moment Muzaffar became serious again. “My parents think I’ve been a student long enough,” he said. “I think they want to say, to the student Muzaffar, ‘Done with you!’ ”
It is impossible for women to be saints. On the other hand, Dilorom said, women may occasionally attain saintly qualities. Dilorom had both theoretical and empirical knowledge of such occurrences.
As a student in the 1970s, Dilorom was at the top of her class in scientific communism, scientific atheism, and Marxist-Leninism. She and her classmates had never read the Koran, the Bible, or the Talmud, which they had been told were full of empty superstitions. One day, one of her classmates asked the professor of scientific atheism, “If these books are just full of empty superstitions, why are we discouraged from reading them? As a scientist, you should want us to read them, so we will see for ourselves how empty and superstitious they are.”
“Who’s discouraging you?” the professor said, shrugging. “If you’re so curious, go ahead and take a whiff of the Opium of the People.”
Infused by the spirit of science, Dilorom and her classmates went to the library, filled out the necessary forms, and were given the Koran and the Bible. (The university library had one copy of each.) “We read parts of them,” Dilorom said, “but we lacked context. There was no commentary in those books. None of it made sense.”
I nodded. I was familiar with this phenomenon.
“We decided our professor was right: these books were full of superstition and nonsense. This is how scientific communism robbed us of our own enlightenment.”
In January 1992, Dilorom experienced a renewed curiosity about religion. She went back to the library and checked out the Talmud, the Bible, and the Koran, this time in editions with commentaries. She read each book all the way through, one after another, looking up everything she didn’t understand. She read nonstop for three months, during which she briefly acquired saintly powers.
Dilorom first became aware of her ability to communicate with animals on a bitterly cold and snowy night, when she had missed the morning garbage pickup and had to wait for the second pickup at ten at night. So she sat up reading the Talmud, waiting for the garbage truck. Silence descended upon the house. Her husband was away, and their five-year-old son, Boburbek, usually asleep at that hour, was sitting on the floor drawing a picture of the sun. He looked so happy that Dilorom decided to let him stay up. Soon it was nearly ten, and Boburbek still wasn’t sleepy, so she took his hand and they went out together to take out the garbage. They walked and walked through the snow, until they reached the Dumpster. (Why did the garbage have to be personally delivered to the Dumpster at the moment the truck arrived? I don’t know, but Old Uzbek does have one hundred different words for crying.) Standing near the Dumpster, alone in the snow, was a black dog the size of a lion.
“Are you afraid, my son?” Dilorom asked Boburbek.
“Yes,” he said.
“So am I,” Dilorom said.
Then an amazing thing happened. Instead of barking or running up to them, the dog calmly turned around and walked away from the Dumpster, to the other side of the street, where it sat down and regarded Dilorom and Boburbek—as if waiting for them to throw out their garbage, which they did. Only when they turned and began to walk homeward did the dog get up and resume its original position.
“The dog understood us,” Dilorom explained, “and I understood him. He was telling us: ‘I know you’re afraid, but don’t worry. I mean you no harm. See, I’ll sit here out of the way, until you’re ready to go back home.’ ”
A few months later, in that first long, hot summer of Uzbek independence, Dilorom had a second saintly experience. She and her sister Shirin were in a suburb near Urgut, attending a conference on religious literature. Every hour, the participants left the sweltering conference room and went outside to the drinking fountain, which tapped into a natural spring; according to local legend, those who were pure of heart could see Mecca in its waters. One member of the party, a sixty-year-old man named Musherref who was descended from a shayx, decided to look into the water. Everyone was sure that he would be able to see Mecca. But he didn’t see anything. Dilorom was so surprised that she leaned over and took a look—of course she didn’t see anything, either. But suddenly her sister, Shirin, gripped her arm, staring into the water. “Mana mana mana, look look look!—don’t you see the pillars?”
Dilorom realized that Shirin must have seen the two minarets that rise up behind the Kaaba. “God should forgive me, because I was so surprised!” she explained. “I love Shirin very much, but she is so small and thin and lighthearted . . . how should I say it? She doesn’t think about problems of the soul. But I understood that she must in fact be exceedingly pure of heart.”
I had once briefly met Shirin, who worked in a psychology lab at the university. She was indeed very slight and younglooking, with a pixie haircut, jeans, and an appearance of struggling to hold back uncontrollable laughter.
“Ey, Xudo!” Dilorom had said to the sky. “Hey, God! Forgive me for having misjudged Shirin! I will work harder to help you make my heart pure enough to see Mecca.”
But Shirin had said, “Big sister, I know you’ll be able to see it. Mana, here”—and lo, Dilorom saw the two minarets! This was one of the happiest moments of her life. She drew a picture of the minarets in my notebook, above the name of the suburb where the fountain was located: Chorchinor.
Dilorom wanted very much to bring me to Chorchinor. “I want to know if you’ll see Mecca,” she said, smiling faintly. “I think you will.”
“Hmm, I hope so,” I said, secretly wondering which would be worst: to pretend to see Mecca, to admit that I didn’t see it . . . or actually to see it. I was tremendously relieved when it turned out that, because of construction, the Urgut bus route was suspended all summer.
When I got home that afternoon, Gulya was waiting for me at the gate. “Emma, you can’t have lunch yet—you have to go back to the university. It’s very important. It’s about your bill. Inom will drive you.”
“My bill?” I knew for a fact that ACTR had already cashed the seven-thousand-dollar check that covered my body bag. “I’ll talk to them about it tomorrow,” I told her. But Inom had opened the door of his newly washed Opel, and Gulya was shrieking, “Emma, Emma, get in the car!”