TAJIKISTAN
We are going to the Komintern kolkhoz. It is near Dushanbe and encompasses fifteen villages. It is a large kolkhoz, but there are larger ones still. The director of Komintern is called Abdulkarin Sharipov. A large, heavy man without one leg. He lost it in the war, defending the Ukraine. He got hit by German shrapnel; they took him to the hospital; from there he returned home. He never saw a German, neither during the war nor later.
Sharipov cannot walk; he drives us everywhere in his small director’s pickup. Along the way he recites what a kolkhoz member can own: three cows, twelve sheep, and as many donkeys and horses as he wants. A good sheep costs 150 rubles, and a new house costs 15 sheep. In addition to raising animals, kolkhoz members farm the land. They collect eight hundred pounds of wheat from one hectar. It should come as no surprise that the harvest is so small and yet lasts several months, since the fields are high up in the mountains and situated at various altitudes, with the low fields ripening early and the high ones late. It is like this in all of Tajikistan, where they sow and gather year-round. In June in the valley of Vahsh it is already harvesttime, while in the Pamirs peasants are just then going out to sow. Apricots are ripening in Leninabad, while in Isfar the apricot trees have just started to flower.
We pass through a village. Tajik women stop, turn their backs to the car, and hide their faces with their hands. The Revolution liberated these faces from their coverings, women took off the veil, but the reflex has remained. At the university in Dushanbe I met Rochat Nabijeva, who in 1963 became the first Tajik woman to receive an academic degree. The subject of her thesis was the struggle to abolish the veil. The struggle had cost many lives. Hundreds of women who had bared their faces were killed. The Basmachis publicly executed these women. It is curious that mankind, whose essential nature is so determined and invariable, should produce at various latitudes such contradictory customs. For in some civilizations it is man’s ambition to expose his woman’s face as much as possible, and, in others, to conceal it as much as possible.
Sharipov drove us to the edge of the village, into the shade of a spreading tree. Here he threw a party. There were cherries, apricots, and apples. Immense bowls of steaming meat. Stacks of wheat pancakes. Various soups, national dishes, salads. Mountains of all kinds of food. Cases of vodka. Sharipov wouldn’t drink, saying that Muslims are forbidden to drink. But in the end he did drink something. Then he got up, stripped, detached his prosthesis, and stepped into the stream that flowed nearby. The peasants stared at the naked director. What is he doing? I asked. He is lowering his blood pressure, one of them answered.
The feast continued without the director. Many people had gathered. One of them started to tell a story, and now and then all the others would burst out laughing. I asked what they were talking about. Then a teacher translated for me the story about a young Tajik who returned from the war to the Komintern kolkhoz and had forgotten his own language. He spoke to everyone in Russian. Few people in the village know Russian. “Speak in Tajik,” his father told him, but the young Tajik pretended he didn’t understand what his father was saying. People started to gather in front of his father’s house, wanting to see what a Tajik who has forgotten his native tongue looks like. First the neighbors came, then the entire village. The crowd stood and watched the young Tajik who had returned from the war. Somebody started to laugh, and the laughter spread. The whole village laughed, roared with laughter; people were holding their stomachs, rolling on the ground. Finally the young Tajik couldn’t stand it any longer; he came out of the house and shouted to the people: “Enough!” He shouted in Tajik and then started to laugh himself. That day on which the young Tajik remembered his native tongue, a sheep was slaughtered in the village, and everyone feasted all night.
“It is good to know Russian,” the teacher concluded, “but a Tajik must also know his own language.” We drank a toast to all the languages of the world.
In the morning I was flying to Kyrgystan. Turan took me to the airport. In each direction a different landscape. To the north — gentle, green hills. To the south — high, snow-covered mountains. To the east — desert mountains, scorched by the sun. And then — buried in greenery — Dushanbe. Beyond the snow-covered mountains — India. Beyond the desert mountains — China.
KYRGYSTAN
In Kyrgystan I am accompanied by Rustam Umralin. Rustam is a man of few words; in the course of an entire day he utters only a couple. “I don’t really like talking,” he told me on the first day we met. As a result we spent our time in silence. On Sunday we went out on the town. Frunze resembles Ashkhabad and Dushanbe, only it has a better climate, and Russians who for one reason or another have to live in Asia try to settle in Frunze. In appearance and atmosphere the city is European, Russian. The main street, which is called Twentyrsecond Congress of the CPSU, serves as a promenade. One can see many young people on it, strolling in groups or in couples — a Russian couple, an Uzbek couple, a Kirghiz couple. On Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU Street one can buy ice cream and pierogi with meat; one can look at modern shop windows. One can sit on a bench.
In front of the old post office African students congregate, extremely elegant, bored, without girls. It is hard to figure out where to go. There is a bar, but there is a line in front of it. We look in on the sports stadium. Junior teams are playing; the bleachers are empty. We walk farther, but where are we going, what for? I sense that Rustam doesn’t know what to do with me. Rustam has to walk with me because that is in the program of my visit. I don’t know how to behave. Stop this walk? “Maybe we should stop walking?” I ask Rustam, but he protests. “How can we? No, no, we will walk,” he says. He falls silent again, keeps walking; I trail behind; he’s edgy and I’m edgy; we cannot find a comfortable fit, get close, get friendly; we cannot come to an understanding even on what would appear to be the simplest of matters — whether or not to stop walking.
From Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU Street we turn into Sovieckaya Street. There are little cottages here, cozy, well cared for, with mallows and raspberries growing beneath the windows. A landscape transported straight from Smolensk to here, to the foot of the Tien Shan range. On the porches sit Russian grandmothers, wrapped up despite the heat in checkered kerchiefs, in warm lambskin jerkins, in ankle-length skirts. The grandmothers ply their trade cautiously, holding in plain view only one or two glasses of cherries, ten kopecks for a glass. The old women sit in solitude, one on each porch, along the entire length of Sovieckaya Street, which stretches for kilometers.