G’afur G’ulom, the “Uzbek Maxim Gorky,” wrote anecdotes, prose, journalism, and narrative poems, and was known all over the Soviet Union, even in Ukraine and Moldova. He received an Order of Lenin and could produce a poem “at any moment.” He carried his problem inside him. Like his country, he appeared to be free but wasn’t. He wept at home, in solitude: “The words I want to say are left in my heart.”
G’ulom’s best friend, Abdulla Qahhor, was the son of a woodworker specializing in the production of hammer handles. Qahhor wrote in the style of Chekhov, but at a one-thousand-times higher level. The authorities would print one tiny book by him every year and say it was all he wrote, to deceive people. In fact, he was always writing, writing. Because so much writing is bad for the health, Qahhor suffered from diabetes and heart attacks. He died in a Moscow hospital in 1966, but actually the hospital was a jail where Communists practiced the mass hypnosis of society.
In Qahhor’s most famous story, “Pomegranate,” a woman craves pomegranates. A man comes in with a cloth bundle. He stands in the doorway for a moment, then drops the bundle with a thud. Pomegranates roll out. “Where did you get them?” asks the woman. The man stares at her, wordless, trembling.
Then the past caught up with the present, and we reached the literary-historical landmark I had been waiting for: the emergence of an indigenous novel form. Abdulla Qodiriy’s Past Days, considered to be the first Uzbek novel, was serialized in the magazine Inqilob in 1922–25. The action is set in Tashkent and Fergana in 1847–60, years of infighting among the khanates of Turkestan, who formed various volatile alliances with and against Russia. The hero of the novel is a young man from a Tashkent merchant family dealing in shoes and housewares. He goes to Fergana, falls in love, gets married, but is denounced by a rival as a spy. Years later he is released from prison, and his mother forces him to take a second wife, who poisons the first wife out of jealousy because the first wife bore him a son. The boy goes to Fergana to live with his mother’s parents, and the father goes to war and dies. Qodiriy wrote a second historical novel, The Scorpion from the Pulpit, set during 1865–75, the last decade of the reign of the last khan of Kokand. Qodiriy called the khan the last representative of feudalism, oppressor of the farmer and small-craftsman classes. Compatible with Soviet ideology as these views may sound, Qodiriy was executed during the Great Purges.
On our last afternoon in Samarkand, Eric and I went to the park to meet the janitor Habib, the towering, light-haired youth who had befriended me at the university and insisted on taking my husband and me to the amusement park with his wife and seven-year-old daughter. But when we got to the park, there was no wife or daughter—just Habib. We invited him on the Ferris wheel, and then he invited us on a ride where we sat in a rotating swing suspended by chains from the rim of an enormous disk that simultaneously spun and tilted on an axis. The mechanism was jerky and irregular, accelerating and stopping, and seemed to run on forever. Overcome by nausea, I held my breath, willing myself to lose consciousness, but it didn’t work.
“Did you like it?” Habib asked in Uzbek, when we got off. (As a young working-class Uzbek, he didn’t speak Russian.) “Shall we do it again? No? Good.” Habib looked relieved. “It made me really sick. Some things you want to do more than once. But with this particular thing, once was enough.”
We began to walk back to the university. Habib asked how old I was. “Twenty-four? You’re only two years younger than my wife, and you don’t have any children! I thought you were seventeen or eighteen! Are you sure you’re twenty-four? . . . I have to have some words with your husband. Don’t worry, I won’t say anything bad. I’ll just explain to him, as one married man to another, what he has to do.” Suddenly bethinking himself, Habib lowered his voice. “Does he know what he has to do? And when he has to do it?”
“Well, I think so . . .”
“I’ll talk to him anyway,” he decided. “You wait here and look at the flowers.”
We had reached the garden in front of the nine-story building, where rows of waist-high, thick-stemmed, wild looking plants had sprung up seemingly overnight, from the dusty earth: flowering thistles, foxgloves, and gigantic flat purple asters the size of soup plates.
“But he won’t understand you,” I told Habib. “He doesn’t speak Uzbek.”
“He’ll understand enough.” Habib pulled Eric aside and started explaining something to him, gesticulating earnestly. Eric put his right hand over his heart and looked very polite. After a few minutes of conversation, Habib clapped Eric on the shoulder and they walked back to me. “He understood, right?” Habib said, shaking Eric’s shoulder. Eric nodded. (He hadn’t understood anything.)
“Now we have to get you some flowers,” Habib told me. “You wait here.” Squinting into the orange late-afternoon light, Habib walked to the entrance of the university, spoke a few words to the security guard, then waded into the sea of flowers and began hacking away at the stems with a penknife. “I’m choosing you some really good flowers!” he called. And when I voiced some objection: “Don’t you worry—didn’t you know I’m the head gardener here? Who do you think planted these flowers? Who, if not me, has a right to pick them?” He wrapped the bouquet, thick as a human leg, in a discarded newspaper and presented it to Eric. “I can’t give them to her, because I’m not her husband—you have to give her flowers,” he said to Eric, speaking slowly and loudly, as if to a deaf person.
“He says to give them to me,” I said.
“That’s right, my dear,” Eric said, handing me the legsize bouquet.
• • •
When we had parted from Habib, we crossed the street and walked down the leafy median to the Amir Timur Monument, to meet Muzaffar. By some sculptural economy, the Amir Timurs of Samarkand bore a strong likeness to Lenin: the bald dome, the narrowed eyes, the V-shaped eyebrows, mustache, and goatee. All these things are the signs of God’s conscious creation.
We had waited ten minutes when we heard the faint pounding of footsteps. A white blob glimmered in the distance—Muzaffar’s shirt, like the Cheshire cat’s grin, joined now by the rest of Muzaffar.
“I’m sorry I’m late; I couldn’t leave the house. My parents had a special dinner. I didn’t know, because it was a surprise. But I brought you a gift.” Muzaffar handed me a heavy box made of unfinished wooden slats, with a metal handle. Between the slats, you could see a plaster figurine of a kneeling bearded mullah, a turban on his head and a book in his lap. The mullah wasn’t looking at the book; his eyes were staring straight ahead, transfixed by anxiety.
“It’s an Uzbek whitebeard,” Muzaffar explained. “You can take it to America, to help you remember Muzaffar.” He asked how much longer we would be in town. Our plane, we replied, left Tashkent in three days.
“I see,” Muzaffar said. “So you’ll miss my wedding.” At these words, I felt a jolt of physical shock. The first thing that came to my mind was a line from Chekhov: “So you won’t be at my funeral?” “It happened very fast. My parents brought the girl to dinner tonight, and it’s all arranged. The wedding will be very soon, in the fall. But you will already be gone. I’m sorry about this. We have very nice weddings here.”