Of Strangers and Bees E-Book

Hamid Ismailov

• Herausgeber: Tilted Axis Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 514

Beschreibung

East meets West in a modern Sufi parable about the search for truth "Learned, strange and charming." –– The Guardian In the latest thrilling multi-stranded epic from the award-winning author of The Devils' Dance, an Uzbek writer in exile follows in the footsteps of the medieval polymath Avicenna, who shaped Islamic thought and science for centuries. Waking from a portentous dream, Uzbek writer Sheikhov is convinced that Avicenna still lives. Condemned to roam the world. Avicenna appears across the ages, from Ottoman Turkey to medieval Germany and Renaissance Italy. Sheikhov plies the same route, though his troubles are distinctly modern as he endures the petty humiliations of exile. Hamid Ismailov has crafted another masterpiece, combining traditional oral storytelling with contemporary global fiction to create a modern Sufi parable about the search for truth and wisdom.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Devils’ Dance

Winner of the EBRD Literature Prize 2019

‘[Ismailov is] a writer of immense poetic power.’

— Guardian

‘Ismailov shows that even under extreme duress, a writer’s mind will still swim with ideas and inspiration… Rebellious, ironic, witty and lyrical… A work that both honours and renews that rich tradition [of Central Asian literature]. For all its complexity, The Devils’ Dance is utterly readable.’

— Caroline Eden, Financial Times

‘Captivating… A rare example of Uzbek literature translated into the English language – in this case admirably so by Donald Rayfield.’

— Natasha Randall, Times Literary Supplement

‘With its spies, police, princes, poets and great plot, [The Devils’ Dance] is an Uzbek Game of Thrones. The storytelling style captures perfectly the prose and poetry of Central Asia while being incredibly readable in English.’ — Rosie Goldsmith, chair of judges, EBRD Prize

‘Might Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance open Central Asian literature to the world as Gabriel García Márquez’s novels did for Latin America? Probably not – things rarely work out like that – but perhaps it deserves to.’

— Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books

‘An intricate mixture of fact and fiction… Defiant’

— Jane Shilling, New Statesman

‘Brilliantly translated by Donald Rayfield… A rich and enthralling book’ — Tatler.com

‘Effective and moving… [Ismailov completes] his impressive portrait of the artist and his culture – and his dreadful times’ — Complete Review

‘A beguiling tale of khans, commissars, spies and poet-queens… feature in a rare English translation of modern Uzbek fiction.’ — Economist

‘Throughout these parallel stories, Ismailov finds moments of utter horror and of quiet relief.’

— Words Without Borders

‘A beautiful evocation of different Central Asian historical worlds… The Devils’ Dance is a powerful symbol of hope in Uzbekistan.’ — Calvert Journal

‘My book of the year.’ — Caroline Eden

‘A mesmerising – and terrifying – novel of tremendous range, energy and potency. This brilliant translation establishes Ismailov as a major literary figure on the international scene.’ — William Boyd

‘A great and timeless caravanserai.’ — Barry Langridge, Former Head of Asia Region, BBC World Service

Of Strangers and Bees

Translator’s Introduction

The novel you hold in your hands is not the first to boast the name Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Our present tale spans centuries and half the globe, but it is mostly the quite modern story of a writer in exile in the tumultuous waning days of the twentieth century. The very first Hayy ibn Yaqzan, on the other hand, was the eponymous protagonist of an eleventh-century allegory by the Persian philosopher Avicenna. Or shall we call him the Uzbek philosopher Abu Ali ibn Sino? However we think of him, this great thinker tended to write sweeping tracts covering all available knowledge on a topic: The Canon of Medicine; The Book of Impartial Judgment; essays on the nature of scientific inquiry, physics, psychology and Islamic theology; poetry, even. But one of his more neglected legacies is a short story called ‘Hayy ibn Yaqzan’, a name which translates to something like ‘Alive, son of Awake’. Ibn Sino’s ‘Hayy’ features a wise old sage telling a curious travelling narrator about the nature of life and the world around him. Major sections of Of Strangers and Bees – this current Hayy ibn Yaqzan – open with quotations from the original, as translated from Persian to French, then to English, and later revised by me with an eye to the Arabic-to-Russian translation by Artur Vladimirovich Sagadeyev.

The next writer to seize on the name and the title was the Moorish philosopher Ibn Tufail, in the twelfth century. This newer, longer, Arabic-language Hayy ibn Yaqzan posed a thought experiment: what would happen to a man raised by a deer on an island uninhabited by people? Ibn Tufail’s subject teaches himself science and logic. Later, when he encounters a castaway from the civilised world, he has the opportunity to compare his own pure way of life with the experience of most human beings as they interact with society and material things. The European Renaissance discovered Ibn Tufail’s tale and produced a Latin translation called Philosophus Autodidactus, published in 1671. This seems to have influenced a whole swath of Enlightenment thinkers who conjured up political philosophies based on their ruminations of mankind in a state of nature.

A Moorish physician named Ibn Tufail makes a passing appearance in Of Strangers and Bees, too (though there is a decent chance that this particular Ibn Tufail may simply be a double). More prominently featured is Avicenna, Ibn Sino himself, who, you are going to have to believe, did not in fact die in the eleventh century, but has instead been condemned to roam the world. The hero of this story – whose friends call him The Sheikh – is also consigned to wander as a writer in political exile from his native Uzbekistan. His search for Avicenna, combined with his attempts to earn a living and a little respect in the wider world, sends him on a quest through Western Europe and the United States. Everywhere he goes, he finds traces of Avicenna, and with them, traces of his own ambiguous cultural and religious heritage.

Hamid Ismailov’s imaginative iteration of Hayy ibn Yaqzan tackles big, important ideas of man and society, art and philosophy, but it is a deeply personal novel, too. It’s impossible to forget that this story of an Uzbek writer in exile was in fact written by an Uzbek writer in exile, one who has had to reconcile a Sufi upbringing with a post-Soviet political reality in a multicultural and materialistic Western world. The episodes in this novel that examine late twentieth-century life in exile are plainly written, full of small triumphs and humiliations, and remarkable for their strange mixture of absurdity and banality. Then there are the episodes in between, where the thinking, the magic, the passion in this novel are sunk into its fables and parables and brand new tales from the Arabian Nights. Here you will find talking animals, beautiful princesses, conniving kings, and, of course, a mysterious wandering Stranger.

And then there are the bees. Ismailov has an apparent affinity for the hive insects, and in this book, they take centre stage. Do the bees represent the swarming Soviet (or post-Soviet) masses? Are they humanity, working according to patterns and towards goals of which they have only a dim awareness? If we’re all bees in a hive, then who is in charge? On the other hand, the bees in this novel are part of a larger cultural and religious tradition. Avicenna (and Aristotle) wrote extensively on bees, with the Uzbek philosopher especially interested in the nature of bee venom and the healing properties of honey. The Quran has a whole chapter called The Bee. They must have something to teach us. But you will have to discover what that might be for yourselves.

On Sufism

Like Persian literature, alongside which it is often nonchalantly classified, Uzbek literature was once essentially Sufi in nature. Sufism was mostly born in the Persian and Turkic world, and expressed and transmitted from there in literary form. Ismailov tells me that Sufism was in fact a way of adapting Arabic-born Islam for the Persian and Turkic world. Great Sufi teachers such as Jalaluddin Rumi (Persian) and Ahmad Yasawi (Turkic) retold the Holy Quran and Islamic religious thought in a literary, poetic form in their own languages. There’s a famous saying about the Mesnevi, Rumi’s main work: Masnavii ma’navii Mavlaviy / Hast Qur’on dar zaboni Pahlaviy. Or, in English: The Mesnevi and its meanings by Mevlevi (that is, Rumi) / Is a Quran in the language of Pehlevi (Persian).

One could read this novel as Ismailov’s return to the roots of Uzbek literature with a multilayered Sufi parable, in which the narrator, Avicenna, and the bee called Sino are all on the path of searching for something bigger than themselves. In this Hayy ibn Yaqzan, Avicenna’s lonely spirit is present at the turning points in world history, inviting us to reconsider their significance while applying both logic and intuition, knowledge and emotions, the conscious and the subconscious, the rational and the mystic. Here, the ancient polymath’s presence as the Stranger serves one of the main maxims of Sufism: the idea of annihilating the ego and experiencing one’s own life through the eyes of the Other. That, in fact, is the core principle which shapes this Hayy ibn Yaqzan, just as the others which preceded it.

On dates

Time is marked in Hijri years, which begin with Muhammad’s move from Mecca to Yathrib in 622 AD and go on from there following the lunar calendar. Avicenna’s (first) death is dated here as 18 June in the year AD 1037. Contemporary passages take place in the mid to late 1980s; the first contemporary episode, dated Year of the Hijra 1409, is AD 1988.

Acknowledgments

This novel came to me in several versions, some Uzbek, some Russian. What you have here is a new English alternative that mostly follows the Russian, and which is more complete, and that has been checked against and altered to fit the Uzbek in which Ismailov originally conceived of the tale. This novel is arguably at least as Uzbek as Avicenna. The translation was partly financially supported by a grant from Arts Council England, and morally supported entirely by Hamid Ismailov, to whom I am eternally grateful for entrusting me with his work.

The quotations from Avicenna’s original Hayy ibn Yaqzan are adapted from those in Henry Corbin’s book Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, translated from the French by Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1960). A copy is available online at http://www.fatuma.net/text/Corbin-Avicenna-and-the-visionary-recital.pdf.

Lorenzo the Magnificent’s poem is entitled ‘Trionfo’, and the English translation provided is by Lomade Lucchi.

The line ‘I’d tear like a wolf at bureaucracy’ is from a Mayakovsky poem translated as ‘My Soviet Passport’ by Herbert Marshall.

One excerpt from this novel, ‘Events of the Years of the Hijra 1410–1414,’ was first published in Chtenia no. 40. Two fables, under the titles ‘The Fable of the Fox and the Flies’ and ‘The Fable of the Crow and the Bee’, first appeared in the online journal Underpass.

Shelley Fairweather-Vega

Seattle, Washington, 2019

For Professor Ilse Cirtautas, who taught so much to so many, and who set me on this path.

There are three regions on this planet. The first is the region intermediate between West and East. It has been thoroughly studied, and the things that take place there, and the motivations and reasons for those things, are all rightly understood. But two regions are unknown: the first is the region beyond the West, and the second is the region beyond the East…

Avicenna

Prologue

[Voice 1 starts]

There is one episode from my childhood that I will always remember. At that time we lived in a village called Afshona, in the Rometan region of Uzbekistan’s Bukhara province. On the particular day I cannot forget, they had sent us out from school to work in the fields again, though I can’t recall whether we were supposed to be picking mulberry leaves for the silkworms or whitewashing the trees to keep pests away. During a break, I wandered off alone, and I found myself in the garden of the collective farm.

I had never seen this garden before, and I thought it must be the paradise my grandmother had told me about. Clear water gurgled through a canal at my feet. Everywhere, fruit fell to the earth in a hymn to creation. The ground was so soft the fruit was unbruised and untouched by worms. Half of the expanse was a flower garden, and aromas warmed by the midday sun surrounded me on all sides, intoxicating even the air, not to mention so small a person as myself.

I wandered down the paths of baked mud through the roses and, as I had seen my grandmother do, I sniffed cautiously at first, then plucked just one bud and tucked it behind my ear. Before moving my sun-seared head back into the garden’s cool shade, I caught sight of the most majestic flower of all, and I thought I would pick that one for my grandmother. Suffering the pokes and scratches, I pushed further into the thicket of roses.

But when I reached that flower, I froze. It would have been a shame to pluck such a thing.

There are many shades of the colour red, but this red rose had none of the paleness of pink, none of the yellowness of orange, no velvety notes of darkness, and no deep shades of burgundy. This one was the clean scarlet hue of a young child’s blood.

It’s only now that I’m finding these words, of course. Then, as a boy, I saw all of this with unsullied eyes and a pure heart.

That was its colour. Now for the shape.

There are certain types of roses that resemble wide-open tulips, except with no seeds. There are others that look like mushrooms from the outside, or immature bolls of cotton. There are roses that resemble curved teeth, some are like sets of coquettish lips, and some look like something caught and splattered in a mill. But this rose was like a road leading to another world. Or into the very depths, the very core, of this one.

So, instead of taking a sniff, I tried first to penetrate that flower with my eyes, right to its magical centre. And that was when it struck: the most impressive instant of all… I remember seeing a nuclear explosion once, on television. This real-life blast hit my eye with the exact same sort of impact. I didn’t scream. I howled like a wild beast and flung the flower away, cast it straight out of that garden paradise!

I am no longer a young man, but every time I remember that moment, I feel a chill take over my body. I took off running at full speed, flying full throttle, but even then, my childhood curiosity won out and I opened my eye, the eye a bee had flown straight into, and I saw – this you will never believe! – I saw my own eye staring back at me.

Twice as terrified as before, I sprinted away even faster. My eye was starting to swell, making my head feel heavier on that side. Who can say which is more powerful: pain, or the fear of pain? When I think of it now, I also had no idea of where I was running to: if I went back to school I’d get a lecture, that was certain, but if I went back home I’d get a thrashing. So I fled instead onto the open steppe.

Who knows how far I might have run, had a white-haired old man not stepped out of nowhere and into my path?

‘Where do you run in such haste, my son?’ the old man asked. I removed my hand from my eye. My healthy eye was weeping, and the injured one was burning. All the time I was running, I must have been pressing to my eye the bee that had pierced my eyelid. The white-haired old man removed the creature, spread its wings, and blew a puff of air at it – and the bee, wishing me no more harm, soared off on the breeze. The man blew onto my eye, too, and as he led me home the lid began to open.

But I began to feel a surprising affinity, both bitter and sweet, with the bee that had flown away. Maybe our closeness stemmed from having beheld the same majestic flower, or from the moment our eyes had met. Or maybe it was sharing a love of free flight, over an open road…

I could articulate nothing of this at the time, and speaking it aloud seems beyond me even now. Maybe that failure is why I am a writer.

⁂

On the first Friday of the holy month of Ramadan in the Year of the Hijra four hundred and eight, the divine spirit of the bestower of all wisdom, Master of countless realms of secret knowledge, flew like a bird away from its nest, quit its sacred refuge, departed its bodily prison, and, submitting itself to the will of the Almighty, ascended to the heavenly paradise, that blossom of eternal purity. At the time, His Radiancy’s age was fifty-three years.

‘From now on the Creator of my body will be indifferent to my flesh, and for that reason no attempt to heal it will be of any use.’ After those words were uttered, in the Zambur district of the city of Hamadan, under the dome of the heavenly arch, a miraculous vision appeared in bright rays of light: an angel, which unfurled its wings, and proclaimed to the people that the mourning had begun for the death of Avicenna, the Sheikh-ar-Rais, and this news took flight throughout the whole world.

The death of His Radiancy was a staggering blow to all who were present at his departure, and they fell prostrate before his body. At this moment of truth, there was just one person missing from His Radiancy’s bedside: his colleague, student, and confidant Abu Ubayd al-Juzjani, who got there just a little too late. This true friend of His Radiancy, who was also a physician, had the audacity to bend over the hand of the Sheikh to remove from his lifeless fingers a sheet of paper, on which was inscribed not any secret knowledge of healing, but rather some remarks about life in the material world and the soul that, though residing in the body, remains always connected to the heavens, rushing back to that realm after it leaves the body behind.

This unfortunate physician, distressed, grieving, and feeling alone, repositioned His Radiancy so that his head pointed north and his face turned to Mecca, and looked again at the piece of paper. He took from a shelf several glass vials containing potions of reanimation, healing oils and creams, and he sat down at the feet of His Radiancy and began to rub them all in turn over the holy yellowing body of the Sheikh.

Lo and behold, the spirit of the man lying there revived. Tears flowed from his eyes, and his body produced a sound like a young soldier crying out in his sleep. This miracle roused everyone who had fallen prostrate there, but when they recovered and saw what was happening they bowed their foreheads to the earth once again. The blood had come back into the face of the corpse, and his eyelids had come alive.

The physician did not know whether to praise God or ask Him to forgive his sins, and he wavered between the comfort of the present company and his own solitude. Casting one final glance at the piece of paper, he was just extending his hand towards the last little glass vial, which held a floral nectar intended for a queen bee, when in swooped the brave servant of another queen, a villainous bee which thrust its stinger right into the physician’s hand. The priceless vial leaped from his grasp and shattered on the floor, splintering into a thousand tiny shards.

The devastated physician would have liked to take his own life, though what would be the point? He had very much wanted to bring His Radiancy back to life, but it had all come to nothing. The bird that was the Sheikh’s soul began to stir, and it sprang away from its shelter in that weakened body. But perhaps the doors of the everlasting abode had swung shut by the time it reached them, because it returned to the room in search of a new existence, and chose for itself the body of that lone, unfortunate bee.

⁂

This journey, in fact, began in a different place. It simply came to me in a dream one time that, reading between the lines, the news seemed to be reporting that the Sheikh-ar-Rais, Avicenna, was alive, and being held in a hangar in some Western country. The information felt so reliable that, as I slept on, I thought of how many centuries had flown by, and wondered how they had kept up the lie for so long. In my dream, I turned my attention back to the news. It seemed that even now they were holding him in prison under a code name, maybe Warsworth, maybe Huggins, maybe Vissens, in some outlying region of Provence, or failing that of Bavaria or Philadelphia, maybe, and doing experiments on him. You probably know the story of Hangar 18, where the Americans keep the UFO… Half-asleep, I was tormented by doubt: how could this wanderer, a stranger everywhere he went, have survived unnoticed all those years? And not just years, but centuries! Where had he hidden himself? Who had he pretended to be? And how on earth had he managed to bear it?

It was then, in that dream or half-dream, that I understood clearly that from now on this secret would not only occupy a particular place in my own nomadic life, but would actually become that life’s central meaning, as well as, incidentally, the contents of this book. So that’s that.

Events of the Year of the Hijra 1409

The one who walks before you is a deceiver and a windbag, who beautifies what is false and forges fictions. He will supply you with stories you never sought, made murky with falsity, in which the truth is overburdened with lies. But still, he will serve as your secret eye and your watchman.

Avicenna, Hayy ibn Yaqzan

[Voice 1 starts]

It was 1900-and-something AD when that dream knocked me off balance. Perestroika had unfurled its wings, and those wings were starting to stir up a storm, but all my thoughts were tangled up in that dream, leaving me with no interest or strength to pay attention to anything else. Eventually, I couldn’t stand it any more. I knew I had to find him, and that meant finding a way to travel – first of all to Provence. Only then did I get to feel for myself the refreshing breeze from perestroika’s wings.

And in fact, a way was found. One day in the autumn of that year, I was in Moscow on business when I got a phone call from Sabit Madaliev at the Writers’ Union. ‘Sheikhov! You speak French, don’t you?’ Sabit-aka asked.

‘Yes, a little,’ I answered, somewhat confused, remembering that it had probably been ten years since I last picked up a book in French. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It seems that we have some guests coming from France, and we need someone to go with them to Tashkent,’ Sabit told me with a sigh. ‘I thought of you.’

To make a long story short, two days later I set off for Tashkent with two Frenchmen. Since they had come to discover the world of Uzbek poetry for the benefit of the good folks back home, the big-name Uzbek poet and dissident Muhammad Solih met us in Tashkent. I won’t bother you with the details of the thorough inspection the KGB agents gave our visitors at the airport, nor how they tailed us throughout our trip. I’m sure you get the picture. Instead, I want to start with our arrival at the Solih family home.

We walked in, washed up, and sat down at a lavishly set and draped dasturhon. Then there began the snatches of individual conversations and the long exchange of polite comments, the simple meal and the extravagantly long sojourn at Solih’s table. Not to mention the endless toasts. First we drank to our guests’ safe arrival, paying them tribute for having arrived at all. Our visitors mumbled something just as florid in praise of their hosts. Ah, how fine and elegant was the French that flew from my lips that day! And how hard my tongue had to work, as though it was juggling a hot potato in my mouth, back and forth from one cheek to the other.

Once he was nice and drunk, Solih-aka summoned me quietly into the kitchen. ‘These guests of yours are serious about their drinking! They haven’t refused once! I pour, they drink, I pour, they drink… Is it some sort of national custom?’

‘The French, you know…’ I managed to say with a shrug.

The next day, Jean-Pierre – the one who woke up around one in the afternoon – called me over politely. ‘Such strange local customs you have here! Does everyone drink so much? The host kept pouring more, and we didn’t want to offend, so we kept drinking. We’re here in an unfamiliar country, with unfamiliar customs, after all…’

There you have it – the clash of civilisations.

—

[Voice 1 starts]

The next morning we left for Samarqand. Riding along in the Volga sedan that belonged to the Writers’ Union, we talked about how one day there would be a Sąjūdis here in Uzbekistan, too, just like they had in Lithuania. You can imagine how the mountains looked, just coming into autumn. The poplars standing straight and tall, their leaves plunged into a deep yellow like so many paintbrushes dipped in paint; the red, and saffron, and blue, and deep grey leaves of the apricot trees… Every five kilometres we got out of the car and were delighted all over again.

We visited Bukhara, and then Afshana.

And, believe it or not – we surely didn’t! – the French visitors promised to invite us to visit them. To assuage our doubts, they wrote out the official invitation letters before they left, and handed them to us right there and then.

Then the craziness began. As the founder of the Birlik movement, Solih was buried in work, so the job of making the return visit to Paris basically fell to me and Sabit Madaliev. It was true that the Frenchmen had issued strict orders not to come without Solih. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t talk him into it. In any case, we thought we could handle it ourselves. Sabit-aka agreed to talk to the Soviet Writers’ Union, and the Union finally gave us its blessing, along with two thousand French francs.

According to our calculations, and based on what our knowledgeable colleague Inga told us, it would cost three hundred francs per night for a decent hotel room – one hundred for each star in its rating. We made an agreement with the Hotel Lafayette, in some Paris quarter or other, for three hundred francs each night.

Finally the time came that made our hearts beat a little faster: in the bitter-cold Moscow winter – it was December – we got in a taxi and told the driver to rush us to Sheremetyevo Airport. And wouldn’t you know it, on the way there the car slid and spun on the ice and then, while it was getting hauled to the shoulder, ran into another vehicle that had been put out of action! We narrowly missed getting run over by yet another one as we sorted that out. Still, God took pity on us, except that when we were boarding the plane I realised I had lost my hat. Not such a catastrophe, I decided. At least my head was still in one piece; everything else would work itself out.

—

We landed in Paris pretty well sloshed. Paying to get on the bus sobered us up, just as if somebody had poured cold water on us. That was the effect of spending our first seventy francs. This, we told each other, was capitalism.

Sabit-aka had all the money, so he was the one to worry the most. We decided we’d let the bus take us into the city, and after that we’d get where we needed to go on foot. We got off at Place Charles de Gaulle. It looked simple enough on the map, but every passer-by we asked for directions shook their heads and told us to take a taxi. How the hell could we take a taxi, if even a bus cost us seventy of our two thousand francs! So we set off on foot, lugging our suitcases and draped in our Moscow winter coats. We trudged along for five hundred metres before stopping, thoroughly worn out. There were plenty of hotels on both sides of the street, and right in front of us we spotted a three-star place, less expensive than the already fairly cheap Lafayette room we’d reserved by phone. A room for two hundred and fifty francs. We thought we had better check to see if this was one of the hostels Inga had mentioned. It looked nice enough from the outside, we thought, and in we went.

‘Any rooms?’

‘Oui.’

‘Can we have one?’

‘Of course!’

‘Could we take a look first?’

‘Certainly, messieurs.’

We saw that it was no worse than the Hotel Rossiya in Moscow, where they put up the writers who come for the annual conference. A television, phone, refrigerator – just a regular room. We decided to stay.

First we arranged in the refrigerator all the chicken and snacks our wives had packed for our trip. To do that, of course, we first had to rearrange all the little bottles holding beverages of various potencies (the fridge was full of them!) to make room for our chicken, as snug as if in its own little nest.

Then we walked out into the city.

‘Listen. No more public transport! From now on we walk,’ Sabit-aka warned me. We crossed the street, strolled straight ahead, and came out at the river. Following the notes we had made on our map, we headed back to the hotel and the tea kettle we’d brought with us. We served ourselves boiled water sweetened with four pieces of hard candy.

Then we took a walk in the other direction, this time towards the city centre. We marvelled over the Tuilleries, and the Louvre, and all the narrow streets. Tucked away in a corner we came across a hotel offering rooms for one hundred and five francs. One star. (Only then did it occur to us that the cognac back home was labeled with exactly the same star system.) We ventured inside.

‘Excuse me, but would it be possible for us – two Soviet writers – to share one room?’ we asked.

‘Yes, of course,’ they answered. ‘Would you like to check in right now?’

‘No, tomorrow morning, please,’ we requested. Believe it or not, the gloom of evening had already set in.

‘All right, we’ll be expecting you. Just one thing!’ they said. ‘There’s one double bed, and one single.’

‘We’d be fine sleeping on army cots!’ we told them happily. But what could these silly Frenchmen know about army cots?

—

That night, tired, we returned to our hotel. Trouble awaited us. Those French hoteliers had decided to turn off the refrigerator! Two of our roasted chickens were sweating out water. The whole room stank. It was Soviet chicken, after all, so not the freshest. We toiled at it diligently, hoping to find some unspoiled pieces, but once that smell hit us (merci, messieurs!) we knew they were rotten head to tail. We had to throw it all out, wrapped up in our unwept tears. Again we drank our hot water sweetened by candy, dipping some biscuits in it this time.

We assessed the situation, and decided it couldn’t last. If we went on like this much longer, the Writers’ Union money would evaporate into the exquisite Paris air, and we would have to return home empty-handed.

‘Well, we’ve decided about the hotel. Now we need to address the problem of food,’ I said. ‘Let’s call Jean-Pierre. We’re here, after all. Could the two of us together really be worth less than Solih alone?’

We called. Jean-Pierre did not even sound surprised. He just told us that he would be busy tomorrow and the next day, and asked if we could meet him on Tuesday on the Champs-Élysées. All right, if we survived till Tuesday, we could go back home with a nice report for the Writers’ Union. Did you meet them? We did! Because we had an invitation!

Now we needed something to occupy us until Tuesday. There was a Jewish man from Tashkent who had given us the name and address of a Jewish man in Paris, and we telephoned him, too, just to say hello, of course. His wife was a millionaire, they had told us in Tashkent, another good reason for delivering our regards. Only after that courtesy was complete did the millionaire wife burp a little and pass the receiver to her husband.

This Yasha fellow was a Soviet, too – well, a former Soviet – but in any case, back in Uzbekistan, he used to translate Abdulla Oripov’s poems for pocket money.

Yasha asked about Oripov. ‘He always drank so much… is he still alive and well?’

‘Yes, he’s fine. Before we left he asked us to say hello, and he sent us off with a do’ppi to give to you. So we’ve been trying to find you,’ we said, hitting on a trick.

May God and Abdulla-aka both forgive us, but when Yasha heard we’d brought him everyone’s favourite Uzbek skullcap, he promised to meet us the very next day. In Abdulla-aka’s honour, we would dine at a well-regarded cafe called the Apollinaire. Yasha told us to be there at eleven sharp. With the revered Abdulla Oripov looming there between us, how could we refuse? Our agreement was taken for granted; we didn’t need to say a word.

—

When the sun rose the next morning, we decided to move to our new hotel. Our meeting with Yasha was at eleven, and we were resolved not to fall from the saddle, even if we fell off the horse; we would haul those heavy suitcases to the new place, and then make our appearance at the Apollinaire, before all those high-born people, with our hearts pure. So out we walked from that three-star hotel.

It’s not easy to describe in words the race we ran with our suitcases, and how we lost our way. Basically, after tramping along for seven or eight kilometres, dripping with sweat, we finally arrived at the hotel from the day before, at around ten thirty in the morning. It was a great street. The very centre of Paris, constantly teeming with people.

Gasping for breath, we managed to haul ourselves up the curved staircase to the second floor. ‘We’re here,’ we announced to the desk clerk.

‘Passports, please,’ he asked unexpectedly.

Sabit-aka and I exchanged glances. They hadn’t asked us for our passports at the last place. We handed them over silently. The clerk, busy with whatever he was writing, asked us another question without looking up. ‘This evening we’ve got a girl named Natasha coming from Russia. Two hundred francs. Shall I sign you up?’

Since I was acting as our interpreter, I translated what he had said to Sabit-aka, word for word. ‘Seems a Russian girl named Natasha is coming tonight, two hundred francs. Do you want to sign up?’

‘Well, couldn’t we do it without the two hundred francs? I mean, I meant to say, without the Natasha?’ stammered Sabit-aka. He was the official leader of our delegation, remember.

‘Without the two hundred francs…. no, the price is standard, there’s nothing cheaper,’ the clerk told me.

‘I meant, without the Natasha?’ I continued interpreting.

The clerk pursed his lips, offended, peered at us quizzically, and declared, ‘If messieurs want to do without Natasha, then certainly, as you like.’ Finally he finished drawing up our invoice for a three-day stay, handed us our passports and a receipt, and called a maid and told her to see us to our room. The maid led us to the third floor and opened a door there.

We were assailed by a familiar but mysterious odour.

‘This bed is for two, and this is for one,’ the maid told us as she went to open the window, muttering curses at the previous occupants. ‘Now the two of you can let your hair down a little!’ she told us, and bestowed on us a smile that made us exchange another glance, trying to figure out what exactly she meant it to signify.

‘Well, we haven’t got much time. We need to head downtown to meet Yasha,’ said Sabit-aka, and he started to fold the receipt the clerk had given us in half. But first he glanced down at the paper, and froze as though he had been struck by lightning.

‘What, did they cheat us on the price?’ I panicked.

‘Achhh, what have we done? Look at this!’ Sabit-aka told me, the sweat again pouring off his face.

‘What is it?’ I took the receipt and saw the price was what we had agreed, one hundred and five francs per day, saving us 600 for three days. Not bad.

‘Look at the top of the page, up higher.’

‘What? Oh, no! No fucking way!’

In the upper corner of the receipt, in red letters, there was the logo: SEX-HOTEL. So that’s what. Now I understood about the Natasha they were offering. And those smells…

Sabit-aka was a mess. He had gone completely pale and was drenched in perspiration. Just imagine it! The head of an official Writers’ Union delegation, submitting a receipt from the SEX-HOTEL with his expense report! I really felt for him. ‘Sabit-aka,’ I said, ‘It’s all right. We’ll think of something. We still have our receipt from the last hotel. Let’s leave our suitcases here for now, and after we meet Yasha, we can go ask them for an extra receipt.’

We stared at each other, and then, avoiding the quizzical look from the desk clerk, we whizzed like a pair of bullets out of that hotel.

‘Now the most important thing is not to get distracted. We meet Yasha in half an hour,’ Sabit-aka declared in his leadership voice. That meant it was time to run all-out. All seven kilometres! It turned out to be much easier to run without our suitcases, as we checked the street signs out of the corner of one eye, and kept the other eye glued to the map. Not to mention that the part of our gaze concentrating on the streets might just have caught, in some other alleyway, a hotel room for only a hundred francs.

‘Sabit-aka!’ I called to him. ‘Without our bags we can get there in ten minutes. Should we check out this hotel first?’

‘Onwards!’ my leader shouted in response. Maybe I interpreted his command incorrectly, but by that time, I was getting used to sprinting up spiral staircases to the second floor. Sabit-aka was close behind me.

As soon as we got the clerk’s attention, I panted out my question: ‘This isn’t a sex-hotel, is it?’

This young man gave us a quizzical look. ‘Would you prefer a sex-hotel? You may use—’

‘No, no!’ I interrupted him. ‘We need an ordinary, decent, simple hotel room.’

‘Then ours is just the thing!’

‘Can we move in right away?’

‘Certainly!’

The sheer joy evaporated the sweat off our bodies, and we sprinted back to the sex-hotel. ‘You know, a certain professor was supposed to have met us. We finally found each other, and now his car is waiting downstairs,’ we clamoured to tell the same clerk as before.

‘You’ve got a professor in the mix too, now, have you?’ he asked us, in a taunting tone.

‘No, not like that,’ we spoke over each other, getting ourselves even more deeply confused.

‘Messieurs, in this country, one does not act this way,’ he declared, finally losing his patience. ‘I don’t know what you did up there today, after you moved into that room, but you’re going to have to pay what you owe in any case,’ he said decisively. We could have eventually come to peace with the loss of the cash for one night’s stay, but what he said next to the maid – ‘Go look things over, and check these gentlemen out of their room!’ – was much too embarrassing. And sure enough, this pretty little maid had us stand at attention, staring bug-eyed while she inspected the bed sheets. Now there was no trace left of the smile that had been attached to her face only an hour ago. In the end, the stain she did not find on the sheets was etched into our hearts instead.

We trudged back downstairs with our suitcases and walked out into the notorious Rue Saint-Denis. As soon as we rounded the first corner, we tore the receipt with the SEX-HOTEL logo into shreds.

—

At a quarter to eleven we two humble writers strode out of our original three-star hotel with Yasha by our side. ‘Listen!’ he told us. ‘I’m taking advantage of perestroika and organising an international committee! You should join, too! Now we’re going to the amazing Apollinaire, in the Latin Quarter, you know.’ He talked non-stop the whole taxi ride.

When we finally got to the cafe, Yasha told us, ‘Today I’ll order my own favourite Parisian dishes for you.’ But wait, Yasha! First the wine! We swallowed the red down into our empty stomachs. Maybe after the sugary, syrupy, jam-like wine we were used to – the kind a fly would get stuck in if it happened to land in your glass – the French wine seemed much too bitter, or maybe it was just because my stomach had already broken down in hunger, but as we took gulp after gulp, we waited impatiently to see what kind of food there would be to chase it down.

Should I tell you or not?

For the main dish, they brought out raw snails!

‘Here it is!’ Yasha went on lecturing us. ‘The most beloved dish in all of France, look at it, here it is: a bit of sauce, then you swallow it just like that!’ We swallow them down, slime and all, like swallowing snot. My empty stomach had difficulty coping with this essential element of French cuisine but, at a loss for other options, we persevered. We were so ignorant and naïve, and things only got worse.

‘Here she is, my lady friend has arrived!’ said Yasha, and when we looked in the direction he was waving, we saw her – a pudgy Russian woman!

‘This is Natasha, from Abakan, in Siberia,’ Yasha was saying. All Sabit-aka could do was wipe something slimy onto his napkin. When graced with discerning taste, a poetic character, and a refined nature, and especially over a meal, one can only withstand so much. As if the movie were over, Sabit-aka asked, his voice tight, whether they had any ordinary potatoes in this place.

I translated, my napkin pressed to my chest.

Fortunately, the Russian mistress backed us up. Yasha was left with no choice. He ordered us potatoes. Then we ate our fill! And we finished off the French wine, too. That beverage, even after we had eaten the raw snails, complemented the potatoes perfectly, from the very first taste, and the next tastes came quickly, one after the other. Our tongues rejoiced, and so did our spirits! If only that persecuted Apollinaire could have been there with us.

⁂

[Voice 2 starts]

A time long ago, the city of Kyoto stood under the clear blue sky. This city was built on thirteen hills, arranged in such a way that one of those hills was always obscured from view. On those thirteen hills there were thirteen flower gardens and thirteen monasteries, one of which always remained invisible. In each part of this city there was one teahouse, and out of the thirteen geishas that served in those establishments, twelve remained in plain sight, while one was always hidden, though she made no attempt to hide herself.

One day a Stranger arrived in this city. He went to a teahouse to spend an evening with the geishas, and he heard this story of the seen and unseen from another foreigner, and he found himself burning with desire to find answers to these riddles. From then on, he took all the money he earned each day, from hauling heavy loads or sweeping dirty streets, and spent it on the geishas. Every evening a new geisha came to meet him, and she amused him all through the long night with clever conversation and languid gestures, from which he derived the pleasure of a short period of calm. Then he returned to his room, and compared this geisha in his head with the previous night’s geisha, and with many others, but instead of solving the riddle he wrapped himself up ever tighter in a sleepless knot. At first it seemed to him that that day’s geisha was just the same as the previous one; but they were different. Then it seemed to him that this was in fact a new one, but still just the same as all the rest. And the poor Stranger soon completely lost count.

One night, when he was returning from an evening with his latest geisha, he suddenly heard the sound of sobbing coming from under a tree in a dark corner of a rock garden. The Stranger hurried in the direction of the voice. What should he see under the weak light of the crescent moon but a weeping white-faced girl sitting by a corpse, trying as best she could to stifle the sound of her voice, but not able to hold back the sobs bursting from her bosom.

‘A samurai!’ she said, and nothing more.

The Stranger understood that there was no salvation for this brawler, stained all over in his own blood, his stomach ripped through with a dagger. That night the two of them carried the dead man to the foothills and buried him there among the sandstone, then turned over the top layer of gravel to conceal the blood-soaked side. The young geisha uttered not a single word, although the Stranger, who had come to be quite familiar with the people here, expected nothing else. He simply helped her, perceiving that was what she wished.

Whether shivering in the predawn cold or sobbing out again in fear, the geisha trembled from time to time, and when she did, crumbs of white powder fell from her face. Before they landed on the ground, they scattered onto the hem of her garment, and when they did fall, they mixed imperceptibly with the sand and the thorns. Who could know whether to laugh or to cry at all of this? When they returned to the stone garden, the geisha pulled a single long feather from her fan and handed it to the Stranger. And she herself, moving with her teeny, tiny steps, disappeared among the stones and the trees. The Stranger returned to his own humble quarters.

Now he held in his hand the plume from the fan, and saw it was decorated with a lotus design, perhaps one of thirteen blossoms; and in his soul, he held something which might be either a blessing or a sin. The strange events of that night stirred in him now anxiety, now hope.

By the next day, the whole city was overrun with samurai. They detained people, they interrogated people, and all the city streets and squares were overtaken with shouting and chaos. On that day, the Stranger did not leave his room. And he spent the night deeply worried, looking at the lotus decoration, frightened for himself and for the girl.

When the moon had risen high and the dim moonbeams reached his windowsill, he heard a quiet knock at the window. The Stranger, looking out in trepidation, saw that outside his window stood that very same girl, her fan spread wide. He quietly opened the window, and the geisha handed him a scrap of paper before melting away into the night, just as she had done the night before. The Stranger lit a candle and, still uncommonly agitated, directed his attention to her message. Among some mysterious characters there was a map charting a route through the city, to a destination the significance of which, no matter how hard the Stranger tried, he could not seem to grasp. How many guesses he made as he pored over these characters and this path!

‘Would she come to meet me herself?’ he wondered. Then he looked again at the perfumed paper, and tried to commit the route to his memory. He blew out the candle, slid the letter and the lotus ornament into his satchel, and stepped outside.

From not too far away he could hear the voices of the wakeful samurai, as cruel and terrifying as a sword being sharpened on stone; but the girl had known what she was doing when she sketched out his path, and the voices coming towards him from all sides gradually faded as he passed. Finally, having left danger behind, he walked out of the city itself. As morning dawned he came upon a bridge over a small river, draped with fog. He passed one more hill and soon stopped before the door of a monastery.

‘Have I lost my way?’ he asked himself, looking around him, but in that dawn hour only the unexpected voice of an owl gently rent the silence. In the haze of the fog, the sound seemed to be coming from the garden in front of him, and the Stranger, sensing something, moved in that direction. He drew close to the trees, and he noticed that emerging from the rocks was not a girl at all but a monk, who took him gently by the elbow and steered him towards the monastery. The monk said nothing, but his soft, careful movements won the Stranger’s trust.

He led him to a small house by a pond, and then in the same silent manner pointed him to a low table, laid with a woven mat and set with tea. And then the monk stepped outside, sat down on a rock near the water and, directing his gaze to an unmoving lotus, sank deep into his own thoughts.

That day passed, too, in the grip of thousands and thousands of different thoughts, worries, torments, concerns, fears, and expectations of the worst yet to come, in panic, in vexation, and in a darkness and turmoil of the very soul. But the monk went on sitting just the same. Evening came. The water, nourished by the last rays of the sun, took back its drapery of fog before the night set in. When the silhouette of the monk and the stone he sat on had blended into the trees all around them, there came the sudden sound of a horse neighing, and the door to the little house opened. Still without saying a word, the monk placed a crust of bread and some tree nuts into a small bag and passed it to the Stranger, then led him to the horse and handed him the reins. The Stranger heaved himself up into the saddle. Steering the horse by its bridle, the monk led them through the garden and the rocks to the gates. He pointed one hand at the road leading to the ravine, and at that instant he disappeared from view.

The Stranger froze still for a moment. The wind blowing from the hills filled his lungs. His stallion was prancing, impatient. So the Stranger set out. Where did he ride? From where had he departed? Or from what? And why was he riding at all? Everything he had left behind him, the thirteen hills, and the thirteen gardens, and the monk and that geisha, yes, the girl herself, and all the murky waters streaming forth from these things all crashed together, and blended, and dissolved in a stream of water that was pure and transparent, and then became fixed together in these incoming streams. What had the Stranger sought, and what had he found? Or was the road, now, the most important thing, the road and the silence which enshrouded this world, a world as abrasive, senseless, and mysterious as a dream?

One day on Earth, one day long ago…

⁂

[Voice 1 starts]

I kept my secret mission – find a way to Provence, and track down Ibn Sino! – in the back of my mind, and meanwhile the French went right on inviting Sabit-aka and me to visit them. We even gradually got used to French cuisine. The owner of the hotel where we had finally settled turned out to be a man named Hassan, originally from Morocco. When we put one of our souvenir skullcaps on his head, Muslim to Muslim, the consideration he showed us then was just as exceptional as that we had experienced from our Jewish compatriot Yasha. Hassan brewed our tea himself, and he personally stopped by to see how we were doing.

We spent the daylight hours wandering around Paris, walking out the tiredness in our legs and the hunger in our bellies. Thinking of our families, Sabit-aka still refused to spend a single kopeck, and I contributed as well as I could to this endeavour, like the obedient dog of a good master, never straying a step from his side. Some evenings Jean-Pierre would come for us, and take us to his home town of Fontainebleau in his luxury automobile. Or we’d visit Henri. Henri was a staunch communist, ‘the last communist among poets, and the last poet among communists’, whose communist granddad had diapered him with a red banner; Henri was a modern-day Louis Aragon. Yes, Henri sometimes invited us to his place, his library of a house in a working-class neighbourhood, where we gave ourselves up to a really sinful extravagance: leg of lamb. We ate our fill, practically swimming in its blood and juices.

Unfortunately, though, there were far too few of those evenings. For the most part, we spent our days measuring, step by step, the breadth and depth of our voluntary, obligatory starvation. On an empty stomach, even Paris pales. The Louvre looks like a bone picked clean, gnawed over by hungry human eyes for so many centuries. The Centre Pompidou is nothing but a house where all the world’s freaks get together, and Sacré-Cœur, the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus himself, seems to have been placed up high on the top of that hill just so that the blind wretches of the world won’t trip over it. One of those days, though! – one of those days, we finally came out on top.

We had walked to Luxembourg Garden, carrying a free tourist guide. A handful of vagrants, huddled over against the morning chill, just like us, had gathered here, in a less populated part of the park, to play chess. Now, our Sabit-aka was a renowned chess player, who had even studied with Erkin Vakhidov, the chief rival of the chess master known only as U. Elbekov. Chess master U. Elbekov, incidentally, was the son of the poet Elbek, executed during Stalin’s time. In other words, the roots of this tree were very deep.

‘Think I should take them on?’ Sabit-aka asked, stopping to watch.

‘If they’re playing for money, you might lose everything we’ve managed to save,’ I told him, to give myself a little insurance. But once he caught sight of a chessboard Sabit-aka was a little like a stallion that has laid eyes on a mare – gripped by an unmanageable fervour, impatiently awaiting his turn. The first Frenchman he challenged somehow stumbled over his own feet on the forty-eighth move. My hands were shaking and my heart was thumping, but things were easier with the second opponent, and Sabit won on the thirty-seventh move. He used a tricky combination on his third contender. His fourth opponent fell to a simple scholar’s mate. The audience were rooted to the spot, like so many tree trunks in Luxembourg Garden.

‘Sabit-aka! You should play for money,’ I whispered in his ear like Kara-batyr’s sister. Just when I had managed to talk him into it, the other players refused to play against him any more, saying he hadn’t been honest about how good he was, and talking about how he must’ve learned from Karpov and Kasparov.

Idiots! They didn’t know this was a different tree they were talking about, with roots in a different place! From an old city, too, from the Xuvaydo district of Tashkent!

We didn’t earn a centime from those games, but Sabit-aka took his revenge for our hungry hardships. It was a moral victory, but it felt like payback. Our Waterloo.

⁂

[Voice 2 starts]

Long ago, in the land of Mongolia, there lived a king by the name of Qorud. He was the king of all winged creatures. One day, King Qorud decided he wanted to taste the most delicious flesh in the world, no matter to whom it might belong. He summoned before him, from among all the flying beasts, the Crow, the Swallow, and the Bee, and this is how he greeted them.

Swallow with his forked tail

Swallow in the spring,

If you see a swallow sail

Blessings he will bring.

Crows are eaters of the dead

They pick their meat with care

If a crow flies past your head

Misfortune you will bear.

Honey bees to honey pray

Let them fly before you.

Gather nectar through the day

And ne’er a false word for you.

After he pronounced those words, King Qorud gave his three winged soldiers their instructions. ‘There are three dimensions to this world: the height of the heavens, the length of the land, and the depth of the deep blue sea. Fly now in all three directions, and find me the most delicious meat of all!’ The three winged creatures bowed to the King, and flew from the royal chambers.

As they soared together, the oldest, the Crow, cawed out: ‘King Qorud spoke of three dimensions. I will go perch at the edge of the water and watch its surface, and perhaps I will see something interesting. You, Swallow, fly up to the sky. You will be in your element with all those insects! And you, Bee – you take the surface of the Earth. After three days, we will meet back here and make our decision.’

Each of them agreed that this was a very good plan, and the three winged creatures flew off in three different directions. The Crow settled down by the water, but other than a dead toad, all he saw on the surface was his own reflection. The Swallow flew up into the sky and started chasing flies and mosquitoes, while he himself was chased by hawks and falcons. But we will leave the two of them for now, at the edge of the water and in the blue of the sky, and hear some more about the Bee, flying along just over the surface of the Earth.

When she went out collecting nectar, the Bee flew from flower to flower; now, in the same way, she flew from beast to bird, and took a bite of each to find out which was the tastiest. She sampled them all: the Goat, and the Elephant and the Tiger, and the Porcupine and the Snake, but none of them had a flavour that was anything at all compared to the taste of Man.

The three days had not yet passed when this news had already spread, from the Butterfly to the Magpie, from the Magpie to the Hedgehog, from the Hedgehog to the Rooster, and from the Rooster to the whole wide world. So of course the news also reached the ears of the Swallow in the sky and the Crow sitting on the shore. The two of them conferred, and when the Bee returned to the meeting place, they asked her, quite casually, ‘Who, then, has the tastiest flesh in the world?’

‘Man does,’ answered the honest Bee.

But the Crow sighed, and pretended to be hard of hearing, and complained to her, ‘I’m an old bird now, and my eyes and ears are not what they used to be! Come a little closer, and repeat that again a little louder!’

The bee buzzed up closer to the Crow, right up to his open beak, and when she started to say loudly, one more time, ‘The most delicious thing in the world is the flesh of Man!’, the Crow snapped his beak shut and cut off the Bee’s tongue.

And now, back in the court of King Qorud, the three winged creatures had to make their reports. The Bee tried to speak, but could make no sound other than a buzzing.

‘What is she trying to say?’ the King finally asked.

And the Crow answered, ‘If Your Majesty permits it, I will tell you what she says.’