I got in the car. Inom drove me to the university, where the social worker called Matluba—the one who had forbidden me to leave Gulya’s house at night—announced that I had overpaid my bill. The seven thousand dollars had been distributed among all the proper parties, and one hundred dollars were left over.
“It’s a lot of money—your money,” she said. “You can decide what to do with it. You can give it to Vice-Rector Safarov, as thanks for using the university facilities, or to Gulya, who has been your host for all this time . . .”
Matluba said that Vice-Rector Safarov had already received one thousand dollars from my tuition, and she thought it was enough. But Gulya had received only two thousand dollars for our room and board. “Maybe you should give the money to her,” Matluba suggested.
“What about Muzaffar and Dilorom?” I asked.
“They have already been paid. They received one hundred and fifty dollars.”
I stared at her. “Do you mean fifteen hundred?”
Matluba smiled pityingly. “Fifteen hundred? What for? You didn’t stay at their house. You met them in Safarov’s department.”
In other words, as payment for meeting with me one on one, ten hours a week, for two months, Muzaffar and Dilorom had received seventy-five dollars each. I asked for the hundred dollars to be divided between them.
“You really don’t want to give this money to Gulya? Did she do something to offend you?”
Matluba eventually drove me back to Gulya’s house, in a Daewoo hatchback. The two women sat awhile talking in the kitchen. I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
In the evenings, Eric and I watched a lot of television: Bollywood movies, Russian variety shows, Kazakh war epics, Uzbek music videos. One video showed an overwrought young man in a car singing a ballad while purposefully parking the car in a bush. “Why did he park his car in that bush?” you wondered. Then you saw the singer lying on the ground with blood coming out of his nose, amid the flashing lights of ambulances, and you realized that he was supposed to have crashed his car into a tree and died.
The World Cup was still going on—incredibly, the same contest we had seen on televisions in California and Frankfurt. Against all expectations, the Turkish team had advanced to the semifinals. The match against Brazil aired on the Uzbek national channel, in a dubbed Russian telecast. I was dismayed, even hurt, to see that all the Uzbek people were rooting for Brazil. “Show me the Brazilian girl who came here to learn about your national literature,” I remember thinking.
As the Brazilian soccer team defeated the team of my ancestral homeland 1–0, as people in the streets of Samarkand shouted, “Ronaldo! Ronaldinho!” I became aware of a deep flaw in my understanding of the world and human knowledge. I had previously thought of knowledge as a network of connections that somehow preserved and safeguarded the memory of what they were connecting. But of course it was only people who remembered things; words and ideas themselves had no memory. The Uzbek language truly was related to both Turkish and Russian, by either genetic origin or secondary contact . . . but that didn’t make it a reconciliation between the two. When you studied Uzbek, you weren’t learning a history or a story; all you were learning was a collection of words. And the larger implication was that no geographic location, no foreign language, no preexisting entity at all would ever reconcile “who” you were with “what” you were, or where you came from with what you liked.
The Uzbek soccer fans’ lack of identification with the Turkish national team was what finally made me see that Uzbekistan wasn’t a middle point on some continuum between Turkishness and Russianness. Uzbekistan was more like a worse-off Turkey, with an even more depressing national literature. Even I, who was always making fun of Orhan Pamuk, could see that if Pamuk were somehow magically ceded over to the Uzbeks, they would have cause for a national holiday.
Toward the end of our stay, Gulya’s husband, Sharif, started confiscating our furniture, item by item. One day a chair would go missing; the next day, another chair or the nightstand. In their place, he left us cassettes of the tranceinducing Swedish yogis. Soon all we could do in the evenings was sit on the floor where the chairs used to be and look at the square where the television used to be, taking turns listening to the Swedish choir on my Walkman. Turkey won the third-place match versus Korea, but I’m not sure it was even shown on Uzbek TV.
Like a dying star, the summer in Samarkand swelled and grew more luminous toward its end. More and stranger melons appeared at the market. The classroom where Dilorom and I met was being repainted. We moved to a room with no windowpanes, the air filled with the gentle gurgling of pigeons, the surfaces splattered with guano. Some mornings we found pigeons standing on the table, gray and rose-colored with geological-looking markings, looking around importantly with their beady academicians’ eyes. “Kisht—out you go,” Dilorom would say. Looking offended, they would grudgingly hop away.
In that last week, Dilorom told me about the colonial period of Uzbek literature. The tale began with Peter the so-called Great who, noticing that the English had colonies in India, decided that Russia had to have colonies in Central Asia. Peter availed himself of a book on governance and military strategy written by the Timurids: “That’s how our own grandfathers’ writings sold us to slavery.”
In those days Russian muzhiks bathed once a year in the Volga, without even taking off their shirts. Central Asians steamed themselves daily in marble bathhouses. So who should have been colonizing whom? Dilorom told me about the time in 1868 when the tsar relocated an entire Cossack village to Surkondaryo. “Now it’s yours,” the tsar told the illiterate Cossacks, who were good for nothing but digging up mud and spoiling the riverbeds.
The Russians were very different from the English, who had sent to India not muzhiks but aristocrats. “Things would have gone better for us if we had been colonized by the English,” Dilorom said. It was one of their idées reçues; they all thought of India as their missed fate—even little Shurik, when he came over to borrow my Oxford pocket Russian-English dictionary, which he said was the best dictionary he had ever seen in his life, and I believed him. “If we had been colonized by the British, I would already speak English,” he said apologetically.
At the time of the Russian incursion, there were two groups of Uzbek writers: the aristocrats, who loved beautiful women, nature, and kings; and the democrats, who loved mud and head colds. Some Central Asian intellectuals were taken in by the promises of socialism and progress, and by the appearance of lycées, trains, theaters. The poet Furqat (1859–1909) wrote poems called “Piano,” “Hermitage,” “Gymnasium,” “Science,” and “Suvorov.”
Dilorom gave me a photocopy of Furqat’s ode to the Tashkent Exposition of 1890.
She said that the poem was actually critiquing the artificiality of the concept of exposition, since the Uzbeks had had beautiful things, bazaars, and the Silk Road for thousands of years. The Russians, evidently not sensing this critique, had applauded Furqat and invited him to a banquet—where Furqat expressed his Eastern courtesy by declaiming some extemporaneous verses to one of his hosts’ wives. The Russians banished him to China, where he eventually died.
Furqat had a friend named Muqimiy, who wrote in every genre: lyric, satiric, and comic verse, and ghazals composed in folk language. Muqimiy spent fifteen or twenty-five years studying in the madrasa. There was supposed to be a banquet for his graduation, but it never took place, because his parents had died. Muqimiy had no capital and no craft. Somehow he became a calligrapher and got married, but was unable to integrate himself with the conditions of life. He abandoned his wife and never remarried, though he always remained in love. In Dilorom’s opinion he was never happy. He began to help his friends by writing legal requests to judges, in verse. These verses were so delightful that they smoothed the procedural way. In his middle age, Muqimiy revitalized the Uzbek epistolary and travel genres. “I went from village to village,” he wrote. “In this one the women bathe naked and the men all watch; in that one the dogs bark all night, a woman sings me a song worse than a donkey’s braying, and meanwhile three boys are catching a noisy bird . . .”