But the city that left the strongest impression on me was Samarkand, with its abandoned Soviet department store, and the astronomical observatory where, in the fifteenth century, Ulughbek had mapped the coordinates of 1,018 stars, and the deserted medieval university. The Lion Medrese’s mosaic lions—half tiger, half clock—were clearly the work of someone who had never seen a lion. Samarkand is where Tamerlane was actually buried, under a six-foot slab of jade taken from a temple in China. It crossed my mind that I might like to come back someday, when I was less tired, dirty, and confused.
Shortly after I returned to the United States that summer, the Russian ruble crashed. Many of the banks, including Menatep, collapsed overnight. Rustem liquidated his rubles by buying fax machines; he occasionally sent me faxes at my summer job, in the copyediting department of a big New York publishing house. Eventually the faxes stopped; the summer came to an end.
Back at school that fall, I started studying the “Russian Orient”: I read Soviet realist stories by Uzbek and Kirghiz writers, Pan-Slavic treatises by Soviet linguists, Pan-Turkic treatises by Kemalist Turks, “Caucasian” poems by Russian poets. I signed up for a beginning Uzbek class, which was taught by a graduate student, a Samarkand native called Gulnora. I was fascinated by the language, which seemed to me like a harsher, more naïve, more Russian version of Turkish. Where Kemalist Turks had borrowed French words (for things like trains and ham), the Soviet Uzbeks borrowed Russian ones. At that time I happened upon a book about Pushkin by Stanford professor Monika Greenleaf. According to Greenleaf, Pushkin’s journey to Arzrum was actually a substitute for a journey to Paris: a city Pushkin had dreamed of all his life—“In a week I’ll definitely be in Paris!” begins an unfinished play—but had never visited.
Pushkin’s travels began at age twenty-one when, on the basis of some radical political verses, he was banished from Petersburg on a civil service assignment to present-day Dnepropetrovsk. There he made the acquaintance of the 1812 hero General Raevsky, with whom he traveled for three months through the Caucasus and Crimea, accumulating material for Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisaray. Pushkin was transferred next to Moldova, and then to Odessa, where he fell desperately in love with the governor-general’s wife, fought several duels, and was obliged to leave the civil service. Meanwhile, the secret police had just intercepted a letter in which Pushkin mentioned “studying pure atheism” from a deaf Englishman in Odessa who had conclusively disproven the immortality of the soul. On the pretext of these heretical lines, Pushkin was exiled to Pskov.
In 1826, the new tsar, Nikolai I, allowed Pushkin to return to Moscow, and even undertook the duty of censoring his works. Unfortunately, the tsar turned out to be Pushkin’s most annoying censor yet. Worse still, he made Pushkin directly accountable to Count Benckendorff, the head of the secret police, who had to approve all his travel requests. (By this point, Greenleaf observes, Pushkin’s “loudly lamented exile in the early 1820s” had already begun to “represent the peripatetic freedom of his youth.”) When Benckendorff denied Pushkin’s request to travel to Paris, in 1829, Pushkin decided to slip across the border to Turkey. And so the Orient, which was supposed to represent “the open spaces of adventure and personal reminiscence,” actually represented the opposite of freedom: banishment from Paris, the center of the world, to the most meaningless peripheries.
When I returned to Stanford as a second-year graduate student, I had to start taking a Russian-language pedagogy class, to prepare for my mandatory year of teaching Russian to undergraduates. The class was taught in Russian by a Soviet-trained linguist called Alla who advised us, among other things, to treat our more stupid students with sympathy, “as if they had cancer.”
While I was in pedagogy training, a scandal erupted around one of my classmates, Janine, a non-native Russian speaker who was at that time teaching first-year Russian. Dropping in on one of Janine’s classes, Alla had seen her write on the blackboard the phrase vasha imia (“your name”)—which would have been fine if imia (“name”) were feminine, but in fact it is an irregular neuter, so the correct form is vashe imia. Janine’s class was immediately reassigned to another graduate student (who now had a double teaching load); for the rest of the year, all Janine was allowed to do was grade homework papers, using an answer key.
I thought a long time about Janine’s situation. Granted, “name” is a pretty common word in first-year language classes, so the teacher should probably know what gender it is. On the other hand, what we were really talking about here was a one-letter spelling mistake on an irregular noun. Who among us was safe from such a misstep?
As I was having these thoughts, UC Berkeley announced a search for an Uzbek language instructor—a clear gesture from the “invisible hand.” I had had only one year of Uzbek language instruction, but the professor conducting the search—author of a famous semiotic study of suicide—said that if I took an intensive all-summer course in Uzbekistan, I could have the job. The director of the Stanford special-languages program also said I might be able to teach Uzbek at Stanford: either the Berkeley or the Stanford Uzbek class would count for my language teaching requirement. This seemed like a great idea to me, because who was going to refute my spelling of Uzbek words on the board? Nobody.
The only U.S.-accredited intensive immersion program in the Uzbek language was run by the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR) and cost seven thousand dollars. “I wonder why it’s so expensive,” I remember remarking to the Berkeley professor. “Airfare is a thousand dollars . . . and after that, you’d think the overhead in Uzbekistan would be pretty low.”
The semiotician counted off on three fingers: “One thousand for instruction, one thousand for room and board, and four thousand for the body bag to send you home.”
I got the seven thousand dollars, most of it from Stanford and the rest from the U.S. Department of State, but then came a new development. It suddenly turned out that the salary for the Berkeley job was paid by a government grant for which only native Uzbek speakers were eligible. Bizarrely, it also turned out that the director of the Stanford special-languages program had told the grant-awarding committee that I had fabricated the entire conversation and e-mail exchange in which she told me there was a possibility of my teaching Uzbek at Stanford. I still have the e-mail to this day. It says: “I would be delighted to have you teach Uzbek in the Special Languages Program.” “I never told that woman anything,” the special-languages director apparently told the grants committee.
I didn’t take the news too badly. Maybe, I reasoned, it was all for the best that I wasn’t being encouraged to run away to Uzbekistan with a four-thousand-dollar body bag, just because I was afraid of being caught by Alla in a spelling mistake. I made an appointment with the administrator in charge of Newly Independent States (NIS) region grants, to explain that I wanted to return the money. As I told her my story, the administrator’s expression grew more and more distant.
“This doesn’t look good,” she said finally. “You’re backing out of your research proposal just because you aren’t eligible for this particular job at Berkeley, this particular year?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t look good. I like you, Elif, and I want you to succeed. That’s why I’m telling you that, if you back out of your proposal now, the likelihood of this committee ever awarding you a grant again will be very small.”