Dancer from Khiva, The Read online

  Before my parents could come out into the street, the man who brought me had driven away. My parents were surprised at my strange appearance. My nails had grown as long as the fairy-tale ogré Kashchei the Immortal, and I looked as ugly and dirty as the witch Baba-Yaga. My hair was standing straight up, because I hadn’t combed it. Why would a shepherd have a comb if he didn’t have a single hair on his head and he walked around stooped over, barely shuffling his feet like a half-dead sheep?

  I lied to my parents and said I’d been looking after my grandmother’s herd of cows and had no time to take care of myself: I was too lazy. To be honest, most children in our parts run around barefoot and are pretty dirty. In fact that’s putting it mildly. People who have a bath or a shower get washed. But those who don’t take a bucket of water and pour it over themselves. And that’s all. Some people have a primitive sort of washbasin. But for getting washed you can even use a jug. There are all sorts of ways. But if you bathe in the canal or the lakes, you still won’t get clean, because the water in them has clay in it, you see. And how could anything be clean round there? Anyway, the way I looked didn’t really shock everybody. So my parents never knew, they didn’t guess what had happened to me, and I didn’t say anything.

  But afterward I had to say good-bye to my braids. My head had started to itch back there in the desert, in the shepherd’s rough shelter, but now the lice climbed out where they could be seen. I scratched my head for days and nights at a time, until the skin was bloody and raw. In the end my father cut all my hair off. I was sorry to part with my long braids. But on the other hand it was good I didn’t have it anymore, because I remembered how one of the cruel brutes in the desert had wound my hair round his hand and pulled it and strangled me with it and how horrible it was and how afraid I was and how much it hurt. When I remembered that, I didn’t want to wear a braid anymore. Thank God they didn’t burn me and I was still alive. If they’d burned me, I’d be dead now. When I think about that, I shudder all over and I feel really terrible.

  You’d probably be interested to know more about my family.

  I’ll start with my grandfather, an unusual man, and then tell you about my father. His life was a hard one too.

  That’s what this part of my tale is called:

  The Story of My Family

  My father’s father was called Siddik-makhsum, or Mullah Siddik. People used to come to him from different villages for help. He prayed for people, wrote them various spells against the evil eye and hexes, reconciled husbands and wives, and even wrote a book on magic (decades later the whole family quarreled and fell out because of that book). And he also cured women of infertility. The husbands themselves used to bring their wives to him and leave them there for a few days. My grandfather had a pair of our traditional women’s trousers hanging in his doorway. When a woman went in, he used to say to her: “Quick, take your trousers off!” If the woman protested, he used to send her home with the words: “I told you to take your trousers off in the doorway!” But others stayed, and afterward almost all of them got pregnant. Just how did he cure them? Well, it was a great misfortune to remain barren. And afterward there were a lot of little children who looked like my grandfather running around in the kishlaks nearby.

  At that time religion was forbidden, the churches and mosques were closed. But people still wanted to believe, and they found people in their kishlaks who carried on preaching and performing the rites in spite of everything.

  One night they came to arrest my grandfather in his own home. They arrested and exiled him. He was sent to Siberia for ten years. My father, Nizomiddin, was only three then. My grandmother, Niyazdjan, was left on her own with five children. And that was a terrible, hungry time—the nineteen thirties.

  A woman can’t manage alone. Niyazdjan went to live with Sadulla, her exiled husband’s brother. Sadulla had eight children of his own. Now things were even harder for him. Sadulla provided for the entire family on his own. He was a barber, and he also circumcised boys. He had special instruments for that: a sharpened cane split at the end and a folding razor (my husband told me about them—after all, women aren’t allowed at circumcisions!).

  In our parts boys are circumcised when they’re three to five years old. Circumcisions used to be done at home. The boys were laid on the floor, special beautiful cushions made of satin were put under their legs, their arms were held, and everybody distracted them by showing them money, toys, and presents. And their knees were covered with a towel, so they wouldn’t see what was happening. The little bit of skin was squeezed in the slit in the cane and sliced off—whoosh—with the razor. The boys had no time even to realize what had happened. Then they were congratulated, because now they were real men, and given money and presents, and the next day they were already running around outside.

  Uncle Sadulla wasn’t poor, but he was mean. He locked the food away in the pantry and fastened the key to the belt of his trousers with a pin. Even at night he was never parted from the key. He fed his own family well, but he gave my grandmother Niyazdjan hardly any food for her children. Two of the children starved to death. Nizom—that was the short form of my father’s name—used to cry all the time.

  Then one day Niyazdjan stole some bread cakes made with black flour, slit open her mattress and hid the bread there and then fed her children at night. But Sadulla noticed, he took the bread cakes away, and beat her in front of everybody.

  As he beat her, Sadulla shouted loudly:

  “Do you think it’s easy for me to feed my children and yours! I took you in for the sake of my brother Siddik, and you steal from me!”

  In the East a woman has no right to contradict a man. Niyazdjan stood there hanging her head, putting up with everything and crying quietly.

  Sadulla wanted to marry her off, because she was only twenty-three. At first Niyazdjan couldn’t bear the idea, but then she realized she had to save the children and she agreed. She wanted to tell her husband about her misfortune, but how? She couldn’t read or write.

  Soon they found a bridegroom for her, put her in a cart harnessed to an ass, and took her and her children to a different family. The sun was terribly hot, and Niyazdjan was stifling under her yashmak. By the way—women in the East often used to fall ill because they never saw the sunlight!

  Sadulla was glad he’d got rid of his burden. The bride price he received for Niyazdjan was fifteen kilograms of grain. And that was all. As far as he was concerned, all my grandmother was worth was fifteen kilograms of grain.

  The new husband wanted to have a child of his own, but for a long time my grandmother wouldn’t agree. She was afraid of what would happen to her own children. But she had no way out: if a woman doesn’t give birth in a year, eastern men take another wife. And the children from a previous marriage don’t count.

  Soon Niyazdjan had a son. Her husband was very happy. It was his first child, and it was a son as well!

  Now it became very difficult for Niyazdjan to manage with the children, and her husband went to her parents’ house to fetch her nine-year-old sister Oidin to help.

  And this is what happened after that.

  One day Niyazdjan was busy with the housework, and she asked her sister to go into the next room and take down the meat hanging on a hook in the ceiling. That was the way they used to keep meat before. There was a pile of bedding and some kind of bundle lying on the floor under the hook. Oidin stood on it to reach the hook. She felt something soft under her feet and then heard a gentle squeal. She felt frightened and went running to fetch her older sister. The new baby was lying on the bedding, wrapped in a robe. When Niyazdjan unwrapped him, the child was already dead . . .

  The husband threw Niyazdjan and her children out into the street, and they had to go back to Sadulla. When he saw the exhausted, hungry children, he reluctantly took them in.

  A few years later Siddik came back from exile. When he learned his wife had been married to someone else, he renounced her thrice and said: “You are not my wife
!” But for the sake of the children he allowed her to stay at his brother’s house.

  My grandfather gradually became a respected man again. I remember when I was six a wedding was celebrated in our kishlak. A lot of people gathered for it. I was playing with the other children outside in the yard. Suddenly everybody stopped talking. I looked round and saw my grandfather escorted by four other men, two walking in front of him and two walking behind. When the men there saw Siddik-makhsum they stood up, put their hands on their hearts, and bowed their heads. The women who were at the wedding covered their faces with their shawls and went inside into the room, although veils had been abolished a long time earlier.

  But let’s go back a little bit. In our village there was a cunning woman with no husband who lived with her lame fourteen-year-old niece. When Siddik came back from exile, this woman suggested he could live in her house, and she soon married him to her niece.

  My grandfather became a rich man again. He married people, buried them, read prayers at the festival of Ramadan. For this people gave him sheep and fruit. Soon children were born, one after another, to his lame wife.

  Niyazdjan and Nizom used to go to help the new wife. Niyazdjan massaged her sick legs. They weren’t jealous of each other. Niyazdjan composed verses in honor of her former husband and sang them herself. She taught my father to love his half brothers. And Siddik used to give fruit to her and her son, who still lived with Sadulla.

  My father grew up and graduated from secondary school and was glad when he left Sadulla’s house to join the army. He served in Saratov and then in Novosibirsk.

  One day when he was on leave he met a Russian girl, Anya. They began seeing each other, and they fell in love. Then one day Anya didn’t turn up for a date. It was a very cold winter. Nizom waited and waited and finally went to Anya’s house. It was the first time he’d ever been to her home, he was very nervous.

  He went up to the fourth floor and rang the bell. A woman opened the door and asked in an unfriendly voice:

  “What do you want?”

  Nizom was flustered and he said the first thing that came into his head:

  “Can I have a drink of water?”

  “Is there no water in your unit, then?” the woman asked, but she still brought him a huge mug of ice-cold water. And he was already chilled to the bone! But he drank it slowly, hoping that Anya might come out. But she still didn’t show up. After that ice-cold water he fell ill. Anya used to visit him. She reminded him about the icy water and they laughed.

  When Nizom was demobilized, he went to the telephone exchange where Anya worked and tried to persuade her to marry him, so they could go away together. But the girl refused: her parents were against it, they didn’t want their daughter to marry a non-Russian.

  When the day for him to go away arrived, Anya came to the train, threw herself into Nizom’s arms, and said she was pregnant. Nizom almost went out of his mind. But what could he do? How could he stay in Novosibirsk, when his mother was living alone in poverty and Anya’s parents wouldn’t let her marry him?

  It was a very painful parting. They stood on the platform and cried with their arms round each other. Later my father learned that soon afterward Anya had a miscarriage.

  When he came back from the army, my father graduated from the pedagogical institute in Urganch and began teaching Uzbeki language and literature. And then Niyazdjan decided to marry her son off. But it is very hard to find a bride when you’re poor, and Niyazdjan was also refused because her husband had left her and married another woman.

  Siddik’s neighbors and relatives criticized Siddik for not worrying about his son’s future. And then Siddik began looking for a bride for my father. As he was riding round the kishlak, he met Kurban-kul on the road. Kurban-kul bowed respectfully to Siddik-makhsum, and they began talking. And so Siddik found out that Kurban had a daughter, and they agreed to make a match.

  When he got home, Siddik told everyone the good news.

  My father was terribly anxious: “What’s she like? What does she look like? Is she ugly?” You see, in our parts the bridegroom and the bride can’t see each other before the wedding. Nizom wouldn’t accept this custom. He found out where his bride-to-be lived and set out to take a look at her in secret.

  Not far from the house he climbed up an old mulberry tree and began to wait. He sat there the whole day without seeing anything. Finally he saw a girl walking along, driving cows back from pasture. And she was going straight toward the house where his bride lived. My father could see only the girl’s back. Then he whistled quietly, hoping she would turn round. And she did turn round! My father jumped down from the tree, and there he was facing a pretty girl with a round face and big black eyes. And her eyebrows were like swallow’s wings. The girl took fright and ran off into the house in a flash.

  Nizom went back home as if nothing had happened, and as he went to bed the only thing he could think of was his bride.

  Finally the matchmakers were sent to call and the day of the wedding was set. Only at the wedding did Asila learn that the young man who had tumbled down out of the tree was her future husband.

  After the wedding the newlyweds lived with Uncle Sadulla, and then Siddik built a house for them, and men from all over the kishlak came to help with it.

  Houses used to be built without foundations, and so they didn’t last long. But in those clay houses it was cool in summer and warm in winter. My parents moved into the new house with my grandmother Niyazdjan.

  It was four years before my mother had her first child, a son. And two years after that I was born.

  My grandmother wrote her verses and sang them while she played the mandolin. First she would ask a guest what his name was, then immediately she would compose a poem in his honor and sing it. At all the weddings and festivals she sang and danced with the other women and played the mandolin.

  And still she went to my grandfather Siddik’s house to help his lame, sick wife, who had borne eight children.

  Beside his house, my grandfather Siddik had a big pool and that was his special place for resting. He used to lie on his side, propped up with one elbow on a cushion, drinking green tea from a bowl and smoking a hookah. When he drew in the smoke, you could hear the water gurgling in the hookah, and the smell of fragrant tobacco spread all around. But my grandmother Niyazdjan sat in the house with my grandfather’s wife, treating her legs with all sorts of herbs. Later the lame woman’s children grew up, and became literate people, they knew Arabic. But she died of grief after the death of her youngest daughter from appendicitis—when the ambulance arrived it was already too late for them to save the girl.

  As I’ve already said, we lived a poor life. My father was the only one who had a job. Only one of our rooms had a floor and a real divan in it. My mother kept that room locked. It was for guests. Our ceilings were made out of reeds. When the roof leaked, my father used to take some straw, mix it with clay, and patch the roof like that. The well was outside, and so was the toilet. And my mother used to cook on a tandyr, a special stove made of scorched clay that she heated with the dry plants left over after the cotton was picked. But there weren’t enough of these plants, and every time my father had a vacation from the school he went away into the sands for a few days to gather firewood for the winter. He used to hire a tractor driver with a trailer to bring back dry saxaul, the only kind of tree that grows in the desert.

  We all slept in one room. My mother used to spread out a felt mat of sheep’s wool on the floor and put mattresses on the mat. And then we went to bed. There were a lot of fleas in the felt mat. During the night we used to scratch ourselves and cry. Our mother used to switch on the light and drive away the fleas. After a while the felt mat was changed for a carpet.

  Our mother put us in the kindergarten at the collective farm, and she raised silkworms at home. She fed the larvae fresh mulberry leaves. Soon the worms turned into cocoons, and they were quickly gathered up and handed in at special collection points.

&nb
sp; One day, when I was five—in the summer, in the heat—this is what happened. We always kept water for washing our hands outside in a kumgan (that’s what the special jug is called). I went outside to play dolls with the other girls. I used to make the dolls out of sticks. I tied strings to a stick and dressed the stick in a rag, and we made all the rest ourselves out of clay. I was sitting there playing, and I felt thirsty. I looked and saw the kumgan standing there and I went across and picked up the kumgan and started gulping down water—and I almost swallowed a bumble bee! It had enough time to sting me on the tongue. How I screamed at the pain! I spat the bumble bee out, it fell on the ground and started crawling away slowly, it must have got soaking wet in the kumgan. A few minutes later my tongue swelled so much that I almost choked. My parents were frightened, and they called an old medicine woman. She smeared my tongue with clay. Then it was easier to breathe.

  Sometimes I used to think it would have been better for me to die then, when I was five, so that I wouldn’t suffer anymore . . .

  When I turned seven, the director of the school came to our house and said to my father:

  “Nizom, if you like, I’ll take your daughter to the young pioneer camp, she can have a little vacation before school, you know my children are at the camp too.”

  “All right, I’ll just call her,” my father said, and he asked me, “Well, daughter, will you go to camp?”

  I was very curious to see what camp was like—I didn’t have any idea, because I wasn’t going to school yet. My father said:

  “Go and get dressed. He’ll come to collect you in a minute.”

  My mother wasn’t home. I went to the cupboard, found all my warm things, and put everything on: several pairs of trousers, two or three pairs of socks, a jumper, a pullover. I was afraid it would be cold in the camp. I thought it was a long way away from us and I’d be freezing! But it was forty degrees outside. I went out into the street, and the director of the school was standing there with his motorbike. Neither the director nor my father looked at how I was dressed. And the director drove me away.