Persian, Dilorom told me, had only one word for crying, whereas Old Uzbek had one hundred. Old Uzbek had words for wanting to cry and not being able to, for being caused to sob by something, for loudly crying like thunder in the clouds, for crying in gasps, for weeping inwardly or secretly, for crying ceaselessly in a high voice, for crying in hiccups, and for crying while uttering the sound hay hay. Old Uzbek had special verbs for being unable to sleep, for speaking while feeding animals, for being a hypocrite, for gazing imploringly into a lover’s face, for dispersing a crowd.
It was all just like a Borges story—except that Borges stories are always so short, whereas life in Samarkand kept dragging obscurely on and on. In Borges, the different peculiar languages yield up, in a matter of pages, some kind of interesting philosophical import: the languages of the northern hemisphere of Tlön have no nouns, a circumstance that immediately turns out to represent an extreme of Berkeleyan idealism whereby the world is perceived as a sequence of shifting shapes; the Chinese encyclopedia has different words for animals drawn with a fine camel’s-hair brush and animals who have just broken a flower vase, which dramatizes the impossibility of devising any objective system of classifying knowledge.
By contrast, whatever it was that you learned about Uzbeks when you studied their language, it was something long and difficult to fathom. What did you know about Uzbekistan once you learned that Old Uzbek had a hundred different words for crying? I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem to bode well for my summer vacation.
The earliest texts composed in the Turkic vernacular, Dilorom said, were fables and didactic maxims. Of the fables, I particularly remember the tale of the deer and the hammam. One day, the story goes, the deer went to the hammam. Afterward he felt so clean and comfortable that he lay down for a nap in a cool, muddy spot under some trees. He woke up and went to visit his friends, not realizing that he was covered in mud.
“Where are you coming from?” his friends asked. “From the hammam,” the deer replied.
“Can you guess the moral of this story?” Dilorom asked me.
I thought it over. “You can’t tell where someone comes from just by looking at them?”
Dilorom shook her head, smiling sadly. “No, qizim, the moral is this: Don’t resemble that deer!”
The greatest Old Uzbek didactic writer was the twelfth-century poet Adib Akhmad Yugnakiy. Yugnakiy, who suffered from congenital blindness, demonstrated in numerous ways his preternatural poetic vision—for instance, by molding a cooked bean into the shape of a ram, an animal he had never seen before. “A ram,” Dilorom repeated, and drew in my notebook a picture of a bean, followed by a picture of a ram. The ram had a mild, sickly countenance and huge curved horns. Who was the true genius: Yugnakiy or the nameless one who first saw a bean mashed up by a blind poet and called it ram?
Dilorom told me, and I wrote in my notebook, that five copies of Yugnakiy’s masterpiece, The Gift of Reality, had reached our era. They were discovered in 1915 by a Turkish scholar named Najib Osim. “Osim” didn’t sound to me like a Turkish name—it violates vowel harmony—but I later found out that Turkish people call him Necip Asim “Yaziksiz” (“the Merciless”). Turkish people refer to Adib Akhmad Yugnakiy as Edip Ahmet Yükneki; they call his book not Xibatul Xaqoyiq, but Atabetü’l Hakayik. Their name for the language it’s written in isn’t Old Uzbek, but Hakaniye Turkish, or “the King’s Uighur.” Despite these discrepancies, I was relieved to learn that “Yugnakiy” corresponded to something in the consensus view of reality.
“Mana, qizim—here is a precious, rare thing, a very old book,” Dilorom said, reverently handing me a 1962 Soviet edition of the Xibatul in modern Uzbek translation. It was printed on newsprint and bound with yellowing glue. (Yugnakiy had been reprinted in a large edition under the Soviets, because he wrote about the dangers of wealth.) “This is a very precious, rare thing, but I will let you bring it home and read it tonight because I know you love books, and I know you will take good care of it.” As homework that night, I translated some of Yugnakiy’s maxims into Russian.
The world holds in one hand honey; in the other, poison. One hand feeds you honey, and the other—poisons you.
When you taste something sweet, consider it bitter. When the road seems easy, then come tens of difficulties. Hey, dreamer, so you want grief and ease: but when will hope achieve itself?
This world is like a snake: first it looks soft, but then it looks like a bitter draught. Even if the snake has a nice, soft appearance, nonetheless it has a bad character. Precisely when the snake appears to be very soft, that is when you should run away from it.
Dilorom, looking over my translations the next day, said that they were too literal. “You should think more about the meaning and less about the words,” she advised me.
The most popular fourteenth-century literary genre, sometimes composed in Old Uzbek, was epistolary poetry. Poems during this period took the form of love letters between nightingales and sheep, between opium and wine, between red and green. One poet wrote to a girl that he had tried to drink a lake so he could swallow her reflection: this girl was cleaner than water. “Most people, like you and me, are dirtier than water,” Dilorom explained. “That’s why we take baths to get clean. But this girl is cleaner than water. If she puts her arm in the water, maybe the water will become cleaner.”
Another poet compared his beloved’s upper-lip hairs to the feathers of a parrot feeding a pistachio to the beloved’s lips. To help me appreciate the richness of this poetic image, Dilorom drew a picture of it in my notebook. It was terrifying.
Most days, while I was at the university, Eric walked to the city to buy mineral water, which he hid under the bed or in our suitcases. We couldn’t leave bottled water in plain sight because Gulya would grandly thank us for buying water and then she and Inom would drink it all. Every few days Eric changed dollars for sum. Without speaking any Uzbek or Russian, he somehow got a much better rate than at the exchange offices, and better, too, than the discount rate that Gulya offered us. When we walked around in the city, he frequently exchanged greetings with young money changers; they would tap their hearts and bow to each other. In his free time, Eric read and annotated the ACTR regional guide for Uzbekistan, underlining various interesting phrases: “several hostage-taking incidents in the Kyrgyz Republic”; “certificates verifying legal conversion of foreign currency”; “South Korea: 14%”; “purchasing power parity: $2,400”; “inflation rate (consumer prices): 40%”; “Islamic insurgents based in Tajikistan”; “generally valid for four years with multiple entries”; “only boiled water”; “only sporadically enforced.”
Curiously, Eric also occupied his free time by writing poetry. I found several poems scribbled on the back of the regional guide, one about baseball, another about DNA. Apparently, I was the only one unaffected by Samarkand’s preternaturally poetic atmosphere.
When I came back from class at noon, we ate lunch together in the annex kitchen: bread, raw tomatoes, and kholodets, a cold Ukrainian meat jelly, which Gulya prepared in unfathomable quantities. I’m not a huge kholodets fan, and this particular version came out not only lumpy but also full of tiny bones. Eric ate it anyway. After lunch, we took turns hosing each other’s heads with the garden hose. Completely drenched (though we would be dry within two minutes), we walked to the city, stopping to purchase small permafrost-hard ice cream sandwiches of Russian manufacture from a tiny boy named Elbek, whose father owned the tobacco store. Elbek executed these transactions with touching professionalism, producing the ice cream from the big steel freezer with a flourish, scrupulously counting out the change. We wanted to give him a gift when we were leaving Samarkand, but couldn’t find anything to buy him, and tried to give him a twenty-dollar bill. He looked crestfallen. He didn’t want any money. His father came outside, and he also wouldn’t take the twenty dollars.