“Oh, I’m sure we’ll like it,” I said.
The driver looked genuinely confused. “How can you say that?” he asked. “You don’t even know what kind of music I have.”
Thirty kilometers of the highway from Tashkent to Samarkand passes through Kazakhstan. The moment we cleared the police checkpoint, the landscape looked completely different. Patchy, grayish fields stretched as far as the eye could see. There were no trees at all, no human figures. Here and there stood a few melancholy, skeletal horses, with drooping prehistoric heads.
Twenty minutes later, trees reappeared, leafy trees with their trunks painted white, on either side of the road; Uzbek police were guarding a roadblock.
“So we’re back in Uzbekistan?” I asked the driver.
“Yes, this is Uzbekistan. Trees, you see.”
“They, um, don’t have trees in Kazakhstan?”
He shook his head, frowning. “Don’t like them.”
“The Kazakhs don’t like . . . trees?”
The driver shook his head more emphatically. “No way.”
We pulled up in front of the house late that afternoon. Two massive wooden doors were set in a pink plaster wall; one of them swung out slowly and Gulchekhra, our “host mother”—they really called her that, as if we were tapeworms—came outside. Peculiarly familiar music drifted toward us. Gulchekhra smiled graciously at me and Eric, and less graciously at the driver, whom she addressed in Tajik: she was evidently trying to dismiss him, while he shuffled his feet and looked at the ground, with the appearance of somebody waiting to be paid. It was not, as we later learned, a deceptive appearance. The driver was a sort of relative, in the broadest sense, so one tried to be kind to him, Gulchekhra explained, but it was the Americans in Tashkent who had his money; they hadn’t given it to her.
We walked through a covered passage, to a stone courtyard with a square pool, its water green and cloudy with vegetable life. The hot, shimmering air throbbed with what I belatedly recognized as a ballad by Enrique Iglesias. Next to a large boom box, a boy with a weedy adolescent mustache was washing a Daewoo sedan with a garden hose.
Eric and I were given an entire wing of the house, consisting of three rooms: a bedroom, a little sitting room with a television, and a dining room with a long table that could seat twenty. (The malfunctioning toilet was in a different wing.) Gulchekhra told us to call her Gulya, and announced her intention to call me “Emma,” because my real name was so complicated. A former Communist apparatchik, she now worked as a travel agent and had been to “every country in the world, except America, Africa, and Japan.” She had two children: Inom, the teenager with the car, and Lila, a four-year-old girl. Inom and Lila’s father had, Gulya explained, “become a yogi” and moved to California two years ago.
That afternoon Inom drove me to the university, where I met Vice-Rector Safarov, a personage whose refrigerator-like build, rubbery face, and heavy eyelids brought to mind some anthropomorphic piece of furniture in a Disney movie. Reclining in a leather chair in his office, speaking in accented Russian, Vice-Rector Safarov gave me a speech about the importance of comparative literary and cultural study.
“We can study symbols and how they are used in different cultures,” he announced, “or we can study systems of folklore, or we can study how different languages structure people’s perceptions of the world.” He leaned back in his chair with his arms folded. “What kind of language do you wish to study here, in the principal aspect?”
“The Uzbek language,” I ventured cautiously. Did he already know that I was supposed to teach Russian next year?
Safarov took out a notebook and proceeded to sketch my program of study. I would have four hours of class every day: two hours of “spoken speech” and two hours of “written speech,” aka, the great Uzbek literary language. I was the sole student in these classes. Rising from his desk, Safarov opened the office door with a flourish, revealing a lanky young man in a button-down shirt. “Here is your language teacher,” Safarov said. “His name is Muzaffar.” Muzaffar, a philosophy graduate student, had pale skin, pale almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and a floppy, sad, puppetlike comportment. He bowed, lifting one hand to his chest. Despite his exotic appearance and foreign gestures, his general air of malaise was familiar to me from previous observations of philosophy graduate students.
Muzaffar had been instructed to accompany me back to Gulya’s house. I found his presence oppressive. At one point during our walk, we passed some Russian girls smoking cigarettes. “I have to apologize to you, Elif,” Muzaffar said in English, softly and in what seemed to me an insinuating tone. “Our girls, Uzbek girls, of course do not smoke in street, but Russian girls, they do this.”
“That’s fine,” I said. I tried twice to invite him to go home and let me walk the rest of the way alone, but it was no use; man or God had instilled in him too strong a sense of responsibility for my welfare.
We turned onto Gulya’s street. “I will see you tomorrow,” Muzaffar said. “We will work very hard.”
“Great,” I said.
“At our age,” he observed, “we must work and study a lot, while we still have the strength.”
This remark for the first time began to dispose me kindly toward Muzaffar. I laughed, and a glint of amusement appeared in his pale eyes. “While we still have time,” he clarified. “Already time is running out, but soon we won’t have strength left, either.”
By now we were a few yards away from the massive wooden doors; I could already hear Enrique Iglesias. Muzaffar said that it was time to say goodbye, and that he would now stand behind a tree until I was safely inside the house.
“Oh, OK,” I said. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye. You go into the house now. Don’t worry. I will be here.” He pointed at an emaciated tree.
I knocked on the door, glancing over my shoulder where Muzaffar, faithfully stationed behind the tree, raised one limp arm. I returned this gesture. Inside the courtyard, the music was very loud. Inom was washing his car again.
“Was there a man hiding behind that tree?” Gulya asked, suspiciously.
“I didn’t see anyone,” I said.
Who Killed Tolstoy?
The International Tolstoy Conference lasts four days and is held on the grounds of Yasnaya Polyana: the estate where Tolstoy was born, lived most of his life, wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and is buried.
In the summer after my fourth year at Stanford, I presented part of a dissertation chapter at this conference. At the time, the department awarded two kinds of international travel grants: $1,000 for presenting a conference paper or $2,500 for field research. My needs clearly fell into the first category, but with an extra $1,500 on the line, I decided to have a go at writing a field-research proposal. Surely there was some mystery that could only be solved at Tolstoy’s house?
I rode my bicycle through blinding sunshine to the library and spent several hours shut up in my refrigerated, fluorescent-lit carrel, with a copy of Henri Troyat’s seven-hundred-page Tolstoy. I read with particular interest the final chapters, “Last Will and Testament” and “Flight.” Then I checked out a treatise on poisonous plants and skimmed through it outside at the coffee stand. Finally, I went back inside and plugged in my laptop.
“Tolstoy died in November 1910 at the provincial train station of Astapovo, under what can only be described as strange circumstances,” I typed. “The strangeness of these circumstances was immediately assimilated into the broader context of Tolstoy’s life and work. After all, had anyone really expected the author of The Death of Ivan Ilyich to drop dead quietly, in some dark corner? And so a death was taken for granted that in fact merited closer examination.”