“We like your son so much,” I explained. “Can we at least buy him an ice cream?”
After some negotiation, Elbek’s father let us buy him a small bottle of orange Fanta. Then he gave us each a small bottle of orange Fanta, for free. Our whole time in Samarkand, we were either trying not to give money to people who were trying to take it, or trying to give money to people who were trying to refuse it.
After devouring as much of the ice cream as possible before it completely melted, we rushed to the park to ride the Ferris wheel. This ancient, clattering apparatus was operated by a gloomy Turk from Trabzon, who let us ride around three times per ticket. When the wheel paused at the top, you could feel a faint, pleasant breeze that sometimes even rocked the seat, producing a loud braying.
From the Ferris wheel we often proceeded to the Internet salon in the Soviet part of the city: an infernal storefront jam-packed with teenagers who were possessedly manipulating avatars through gutted buildings and abandoned warehouses, shooting one another in the back with Uzis. Periodically, some young person, shot in the back one too many times, would leave in disgust, at which point the proprietor rushed to the abandoned station and sprayed the chair and keyboard from a can of Sure deodorant. Chemical clouds of shower-fresh deodorant hung in the sultry air, adding a certain je ne sais quoi to the ambience.
In the second week of class, Dilorom told me more about the life and works of Alisher Navoi. During his four years in Samarkand, Navoi had tutored the king’s children in history, and worked in the court. One day an old woman came to court and said that because the king had killed her son, she wanted to kill the king’s son. The king was brought into court and placed in the defendant’s seat—“precisely analogous to Clinton with Monica Lewinsky,” Dilorom explained. Navoi offered the old woman a choice of the king’s son’s blood or some gold. She chose the gold. Everyone applauded Navoi’s judgment, but he quit his job anyway. To be a good king, he said, you have to be blind and dumb—and also some kind of a paralytic. He was that, for seven years, and it was harder than life itself.
Dilorom gently pulled my notebook toward her and, with the apparent intention of illustrating Navoi’s position in the court, drew an enormous serpent’s head with a tiny man wearing a hat standing inside the serpent’s mouth, staring into its throat: that was Alisher Navoi.
Navoi said that it is better to be a scholar than a king, because a scholar doesn’t leave his learning at the door of the bathhouse. Being a king is no guarantee of happiness: Alexander the Great was not only the world’s greatest king but also owned a magic mirror that showed him the whole empire, and even so, he died at age thirty-three in a terrible depression. Navoi expressed his views in an allegorical work about a dog’s funeral in Khorezm. A row of dogs march single file to the graveyard; other dogs pace in a circle around the first dogs.
Navoi wrote an anatomy of human society, from the king to the beggar. A bad king is like a pig that roots around in the earth for no reason. A good king is like a farmer who roots around in the earth for orderly, beneficial reasons. The worst king in human history, Herod, had a plan for Pharaoh to fly to heaven in a basket powered by vultures in order to shoot God. The vultures kept flying because there was carrion on a stick over the basket. They saw the basket’s shadow and thought it was God who had been shot down.
In addition to kings, humanity includes travelers, scholars, businessmen, farmers, gleaners, bakers, millers, orphans, and wives. Bad businessmen sell the same wares at different markets at different prices. “Be careful of that when you go to the market, qizim,” Dilorom advised me. Farmers, she continued, are the highest people because they bring the garden of heaven to earth. There are good beggars, bad beggars, Sufis and Sufi teachers, called shayx. Good beggars are sick and have many children and are unable to work. A good shayx has such knowledge that he can blow and make the water part with his breath, or he can blow on a woman’s belly and make her pregnant. A bad shayx tricks the people with false miracles: he produces a flame from a glass tube, but it turns out later that the tube contained a special kind of gas that combusts on contact with oxygen. That’s no miracle!
“Mana, qizim,” Dilorom said: “Here, my daughter.” She carefully removed from her handbag a folded piece of paper and smoothed it out on the table. It was a photocopy of a drawing of a man who looked just like a goat.
I inspected the drawing. “That’s the bad shayx?”
“That’s the bad shayx.”
“He looks a bit like a goat.”
Dilorom smiled. “Goats can lead sheep to the best place in the mountain,” she said gently. “And if anyone steals anything from them, the goat knows.”
Reaching into her bag again, she produced a flimsy paperback booklet: a trilingual Uzbek-German-English collection of Navoi’s verses, titled Pearls from the Ocean.
Was it my heart—a bird—that was caught in your locks that unfortunate night,
Or was it bats of some kind?
Remember, the sultan dooms to death even his closest friend
If he learns the latter has secreted away money from the treasury.
Speak, Navoi, if love has not yet crippled your soul—
Why do you spew blood whenever you sob?
Meanwhile in language class, Muzaffar started teaching me about Uzbek conversational etiquette. Whenever Uzbeks meet, he explained, they immediately begin bombarding each other with questions: “How are you? How are the ones at home? Are things peaceful? How is your wife? Is she in good health? How is your work? Is your work good? Are you in good health? Aren’t you tired?” I initially tried to answer the questions, but it turned out that you were supposed to simply shoot them back as fast as you could, while raising your right hand to your heart and holding your left hand in the air. “Look where my hands are,” Muzaffar said, jerking his hand to his chest in his puppetlike way. We practiced these niceties for a long time, striking our hearts and shouting at one another: “Are the ones at home good? Aren’t you tired?”
Later we went to another floor of the nine-story building, where I lurked in a hallway in order to assail total strangers with these questions. Muzaffar stood half hidden in a doorway, making helpful gestures. By and large, once they had gotten over their initial surprise, the strangers seemed to find it perfectly pleasant and appropriate to be ambushed in this manner. One diminutive woman in a housekeeper’s uniform pursued the exchange for ten minutes, firing off more and more questions. “Do you like hot weather? Did you fly here on an airplane? Are your ears pierced?” When I confirmed that my ears were pierced, she stood on her toes to peer at my earlobe. “You should wear earrings!” she concluded.