In the national mythology devised by the Soviets, Uzbek statehood was retroactively dated to the era of Timur (Tamerlane), whose grave was located in Samarkand. The Timurids were declared to be the Uzbeks’ ancestors—even though, in real life, the people known as Uzbeks had been enemies of the Timurids. A statue of “Amir Timur” replaced the Karl Marx monument in the center of Tashkent; previously condemned by Marxists as a barbaric despot, Timur suddenly turned out to have understood all the forms of socioeconomic life: nomadic, agricultural, urban. He was declared to have been not only a military genius, but a great chess player, and even the inventor of a game called Perfect Chess, played on a 110-square board.
I was particularly intrigued by Perfect Chess, which reminded me both of Eric’s delirious ravings and of The Knight’s Move, a book by the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky. In The Knight’s Move, Shklovsky proposes that the history of literature proceeds not in a straight line, but in a bent one, like the L-shaped path of a chess knight. The authors who influence one another are not always the ones you would expect: “the legacy is transmitted not from father to son, but from uncle to nephew.” Furthermore, literary forms themselves grow by assimilating foreign or extraliterary material, veering off in new angles.
Shklovsky would probably have liked Perfect Chess, in which each player has, in addition to the standard pieces, two giraffes, two camels, two siege engines, and a vizier. The camel moves in a “stretched” knight’s move—one square diagonally and two squares forward—while a giraffe moves one square diagonally and at least three squares forward. The Soviet invention of an Uzbek national identity reminded me of the giraffe’s move, a move two steps further than anyone would normally think of. They assimilated the Timurids, circumnavigated Genghis Khan: the legacy twists and turns, passing from the great-uncle to the great-nephew of the one who sacked his palace.
As Amir Timur was declared the father of Uzbek statehood, so was the greatest Timurid poet, Mir Ali-Shir Navai (1441–1501), declared the father of Uzbek literature. Alisher Navoi, as he became known in Uzbek, was born and died in Herat, in present-day Afghanistan, and had previously been claimed as a shared patrimony by all of Chaghatay literary culture. The Soviets reclassified him, along with the Chaghatay language itself, as Old Uzbek. “Chaghataysm” was declared anti-Soviet. The term Old Uzbek gradually expanded to denote any human achievement that had ever taken place within the boundaries of the UzSSR, including the composition of Avicenna’s medical textbook and Al-Khorazmi’s treatise on algebra.
I learned many of these historical circumstances only later. They helped me understand the feeling I so often had, while studying Uzbek literature in Samarkand, of being a character in a Borges story, studying a literature invented by a secret cabal of academicians.
Every day for two hours, after my language class with Muzaffar, I studied “Old Uzbek” literature with Dilorom Salohiy, an assistant professor at Samarkand State University. Dilorom, who held doctoral degrees in both Russian and Uzbek literature, was a beautiful woman in her early forties, with high cheekbones, olive skin, and slightly Asiatic eyes outlined in kohl. She wore small gold hoop earrings and long silk dresses printed with tiny, amazingly variegated flowers. One dress had so many colors that I wrote them down in my notebook: brown, fuchsia, green, yellow, white, pink, purple, black, and orange-red. Unlike Muzaffar, Dilorom spoke perfect Russian, but she didn’t know any English at all. Her voice was soft and regretful, as if she were gently breaking you some terrible news.
Dilorom spoke in Uzbek most of the time, very slowly, often addressing me as qizim (“my girl,” “my daughter”). She didn’t like to speak Russian, and used it only as a last resort. Nonetheless, to my surprise, I understood most of what she said—or at least I understood something, continuously, most of the time she was talking. The Chaghatay texts we read together in class, on the other hand, were almost completely impenetrable. I recognized about three words in ten, which, due to the metaphorical style of the writing, wasn’t enough to get even the most basic gist. You would understand man, snake, and evil, and the poet could be talking about anything, from politics, to love, to snakes. At the end of each class, Dilorom loaned me a Russian or modern Uzbek translation to read at home. Sometimes the books seemed to confirm what she told me in class; other times, they seemed completely unrelated.
It was, furthermore, impossible to find any external confirmation of anything Dilorom told me simply by walking into a bookstore: no Uzbek literature was being printed in book form while I was there. The bookstores sold only romance and detective novels, Russian editions of Windows for Dummies, newspapers, and endless manuals about pregnancy and child-rearing. The state had recently declared the Uzbek birth rate to be in a crisis, and baby propaganda assailed you from all media outlets. One television commercial showed the spotlessly clean free maternity clinics open to all those who fulfilled their civic duty of procreation. Rosy babies lolled beatifically in individual glass basins. The resemblance of these basins to casserole dishes was accentuated by the maternity nurses’ white aprons and tall white hats, which resembled chef’s hats. This commercial always made me think of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”
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As nineteenth-century British people considered Napoleon to be Satan incarnate, so did Dilorom consider Genghis Khan to be the superhuman nemesis of the Uzbek people, the wrecker of the “First Uzbek Renaissance” embodied by the achievements of Avicenna and Al-Biruni. Shaking her head sorrowfully, she told me that Genghis Khan not only rode a bull, but he didn’t wear any pants. She said that God should forgive her for mentioning such things to me, “but he didn’t wear any pants.” Because the Mongols were too ignorant to make swords, they carried wooden sticks. In Samarkand, scholars were drinking tea from special porcelain teacups that rang different musical tones when you tapped them with a spoon. Genghis Khan destroyed every single one of these teacups, the secret of whose craftsmanship has been lost forever.
“In English we have an expression: ‘like a bull in a china shop,’ ” I remarked.
“That’s how Genghis Khan was—but even worse. He destroyed not a shop, but a whole civilization.”
Timur was the opposite of Genghis Khan. The Mongols destroyed eleven centuries in 130 years; but Timur rebuilt it all in seventy years. This “Second Uzbek Renaissance” reached its fullest expression in the lifetime of Alisher Navoi. At the time of Navoi’s birth, the people of Turkestan were already telling time using a chest from which a doll would emerge every hour. In Europe, people were still using the hourglass: a “sand clock.” Only the Turks had clockwork, which they used to make an escalator that lifted the king onto his throne every morning.
Navoi lived for four years in Samarkand: a city so deeply imbued with poetry that even the doctors wrote their medical treatises in verse. But before Navoi himself transformed the Old Uzbek vernacular into a literary language, all of this poetry was written in Persian. In his Muhakamat al-lughatayn, or Judgment of Two Languages (1499), Navoi mathematically proved the superiority to Persian of Old Uzbek, a language so rich that it had words for seventy different species of duck. Persian just had duck. Impoverished Persian writers had no words with which to differentiate between a burr and a thorn; older and younger sisters; male, female, and infant boars; hunting and fowling; a beauty mark on a woman’s face and a beauty mark somewhere else; deer and elands; being adorned and being really adorned; drinking something down all at once in a refined way, and drinking slowly while savoring each drop.