I didn’t know before I got there that the majority of the Samarkand population was still Tajik and spoke a form of Farsi, an Indo-European language grammatically unrelated to Turkish and Uzbek. Furthermore, our host family was actually Tajik. Gulya knew Uzbek from spending vacations with her aunt in the Fergana Valley, but at home with the children she spoke Tajik and Russian—mostly Russian. Four-year-old Lila, who was being groomed for the Russian school system, barely knew any Tajik at all. Not that I minded—my enthusiasm about learning Uzbek, already pretty lukewarm, was nonetheless a fiery furnace compared to my feelings about learning Tajik. Although I sometimes tried speaking Uzbek with Gulya, she would switch to Russian almost immediately, pointing out that we would understand each other better. Like most people, she was more interested in communicating her own thoughts and feelings than in helping to keep alight the flame of the Eastern Turkic languages.
At Gulya’s request, I met a few times with Lila’s nineteen-year-old brother, Inom, to help him with his English lessons.
“A book is at table,” Inom said.
“Right, almost . . . The book is on the table.”
“Uh-huh, OK . . . You know, Emma, it’s hard for me to take English seriously, since I already speak three languages: Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek. English is much easier and simpler than these languages, so the little details of it aren’t really important to me.”
Discontinued by mutual agreement, these English lessons were rapidly incorporated into Gulya’s ongoing invective against her son. “There’s an American right here in our house, and you won’t be bothered to talk English with her! You care nothing about your future! All you care about is washing your car, you no-good muzhik!”
As soon as I had left for class, Gulya and Inom apparently began their day with a screaming argument. One morning, Gulya had actually picked up a brick from the ground and thrown it at her son, shrieking, “Muzhik! Muzhik!” I didn’t believe Eric at first when he told me, but he showed me the broken brick in the courtyard, where it had shattered against a wall. After wearing themselves out, mother and son would get into Inom’s car and drive to Gulya’s travel agency—one of the few air-conditioned buildings I saw in Samarkand—where she processed visas and organized tours for foreigners.
I have never been so hungry in my life as I was that summer. I remember lying across the bed with Eric, fantasizing about buying anything we wanted from the twenty-four-hour Safeway across from our apartment in Mountain View.
“A whole catfish,” I proposed.
“Birthday cake ice cream,” Eric countered, alluding to a Safeway-brand flavor laced with blue frosting and pieces of cake.
When we first moved to Mountain View, I used to think it was depressing to look out the window and see a gigantic Safeway parking lot, but that was before I spent any time in the “Fourth Paradise.”
Breakfast consisted of “soft-boiled” eggs, dipped briefly in warm (not boiling) water, with bread and orange jam. The jam came from a vat under the sink; when Gulya lifted its oilcloth cover, you could see a network of busy ants hurrying over the gemlike surface.
Our relationship with Gulya reached a new level of unspoken antagonism the day Eric discovered a second kitchen in the other wing of the house, where the jam container had a rubberized lid and no ants—we alone were given the jam with ants. In the absence of any visible jam shortage, this behavior was difficult for me to understand. Eric claimed that it was characteristic of the Tajik Communist elite. In a closet next to the secret kitchen, Eric had also discovered a secret, flushing toilet. The toilet in the main bathroom was broken, and Gulya said the man who fixed toilets was on vacation, so Eric and I had to use the “Uzbek-style” toilet: a hole in the ground. When you lifted the wooden cover over the Uzbek-style toilet, a dense black cloud of flies buzzed up in your face. Sometimes the Uzbek-style toilet clogged, and then you had to poke in it with a big pointed stick. Our feelings were very hurt when we learned that we were the only ones who had to use this toilet.
Every morning at seven thirty, I left Gulya’s house for the university. Her street at that hour was quiet and deserted. A few times I saw a chicken walking around importantly, like some kind of a regional manager. There was a police station at the corner of the main road. Large numbers of police officers sprawled on benches in a yard, talking loudly. All along Sharof Rashidov Street, old men in skullcaps sat at card tables selling lottery tickets and single cigarettes. The proprietors of teahouses hosed down the sidewalks, waking up the stray dogs.
Despite these and other interesting sights offered by the city dubbed by Tamerlane “the Mirror of the World,” I spent most of the walk staring at the ground, trying not to fall into the yawning chasms that appeared every few blocks. The people of Samarkand probably weren’t thrilled to have all those yawning chasms in their sidewalks, but they made the most of things by using them to incinerate their household garbage. Newspapers, watermelon rinds, and other items smoldered obscurely in their depths. Often, the only way to traverse the yawning chasms of burning garbage was via wooden or metal planks. I was greatly impressed by the agility with which the Russian girls in particular trotted across these makeshift bridges, in their high-heeled sandals, with their somehow empty facial expressions—so unlike my own facial expression, which, I felt, probably conveyed a kind of deep literary trepidation.
The last part of the walk passed through a past or future construction site, a vast expanse of orange clayey soil and crumbly rocks. Walking on this terrain gave you the hopeless feeling of running in a dream, but afterward you knew it had been real because your shoes were orange. Eventually the orange clay gave way to sparse grass, and there was my destination: “the nine-story building,” the biggest building in the university. A janitor at this building, with whom I later struck up a friendship, gave me his mailing address as “Samarkand State University, Nine-Story building, Janitor Habib.” “That’s how I get most of my mail,” he explained.
In the morning, the lobby of the nine-story building was filled with serious young people. The girls wore bright red lipstick and brilliantly colored ankle-length dresses; the boys, light shirts, dark pants, and pointy-toed shoes. When they smiled, their gold teeth glinted in the sunlight. Uniformed guards at the door checked your pass and made you walk through a metal detector, which didn’t appear to be plugged into anything.
The elevator was always broken, so I walked up to the fifth floor, where I met my language teacher, the philosophy graduate student Muzaffar. (His specialty, I later learned, was the Marburg school of neo-Kantians.) Muzaffar’s teaching materials consisted of a 1973 Soviet textbook that presented the Uzbek language exclusively through the lens of cotton production: a valuable lesson in how monomania structures the world. The unit about the months and seasons was about the months and seasons in which cotton was sown or harvested. The unit about families was about the roles played by different family members in the production of cotton.
“Rustam works in a cotton mill all year round, but his younger sister, Nargiza, is still a student,” I read. “She picks cotton only in the summer, with the other students.”
“Did you understand?” Muzaffar asked.
“I did.”
Muzaffar nodded. “I thought so.”
We finished the textbook in two weeks. The basic grammar was nearly the same as in Turkish, as was much of the simple household vocabulary, though there were some differences in usage. The word it, for example, means “dog” in both Uzbek and Turkish—but in Uzbek it means a regular dog, whereas in Turkish it means a contemptible, low-down cur. As a Turkish person in Uzbekistan, one was always wondering why the Uzbeks spoke so insultingly about their dogs. Conversely, the standard Turkish future-tense verb ending exists in Uzbek, and is also a future-tense ending, but with a pompous or literary-heroic connotation. “You can use it to say, ‘President Karimov will cover his nation in glory,’ ” Muzaffar explained, “but not to say that ‘Muzaffar will drive to Tashkent to pick up Safarov’s friend’s visa.’ ” (Muzaffar worked part-time as Vice-Rector Safarov’s secretary.)