Another day we learned about watermelons. Muzaffar taught me a folk expression: “The watermelon fell out of its armchair.” “Can you guess what it means?” he asked.
I thought about it. “A usurper will always eventually be deposed?”
“Wha-a-at?”
It turned out that the Turkish word for armchair is the Uzbek word for armpit, so the expression actually meant “The watermelon fell out from under his arm,” and was used to denote a great disillusionment. “Muzaffar is walking back from the market, proud of his watermelon,” Muzaffar explained. “All of a sudden, something happens; he isn’t proud anymore.
“In my family,” he continued, moving from figurative to literal watermelons, “Muzaffar is famous for always buying the worst watermelon. ‘Send Muzaffar to the market,’ they say. ‘He will bring us a big, round, beautiful melon and eating it will be like chewing on some old dry grass.’ ” Muzaffar’s grandfather, by contrast, chose the best watermelons, which were often ugly in appearance, and which he identified by holding them up to his ear and listening to them “talk.” Muzaffar had tried listening to the watermelons talk, but he never heard anything. He had tried deliberately buying ugly melons, but then he just ended up with a melon that united a pale and tasteless interior with an ugly exterior.
Muzaffar did his best to teach me how to buy a good watermelon. Some people, he said, maintained that a watermelon should be heavy and dense. Others said that the best melons were large and light. So that was no help. A good watermelon had to have an orange spot, to show where it had sat in the sun, and a dry belly button, to show that the vine had broken naturally. When you tapped it with your right hand, it had to resonate against your left hand. As to the rind, the important thing wasn’t the color itself, but the contrast between the different colors.
Muzaffar and I kept trying to schedule an outing to the market, so he could watch me try to buy an Uzbek watermelon, but he was always prevented by either Vice-Rector Safarov or the Marburg neo-Kantians. Eventually he said I should go to the market without him. But he had impressed upon me so seriously that they would try to sell me the worst watermelon and overcharge me for it that I got demoralized and never bought any melons at all.
When Alisher Navoi was six years old, his favorite book was Farid al-Din Attar’s didactic poem Mantiq al-Tayr, usually translated as The Conference of Birds, although Dilorom called it The Logic of Birds. He carried the volume with him everywhere and constantly recited from it until finally his parents confiscated the book and said they had given it to a sick orphan. It was too late; Alisher already knew the book by heart.
The Logic of Birds, Dilorom explained, is about a group of thirty birds, including a peacock, crane, duck, rooster, parrot, eagle, laughing crane, and hoopoe. The hoopoe says that he will lead the other birds to a great king, who is also a bird—specifically, a simurgh, the world’s largest bird, who eats only delicious fruits and loves to sing, but only with its mate. Someone once captured a simurgh and put a mirror in its cage, but the simurgh was not deceived, did not sing, and died.
To reach the simurgh’s bird paradise, the thirty birds fly for a long time over seas and mountains. Some of them get tired and want to turn back, but the hoopoe rallies their spirits by telling them didactic stories. Finally, after the birds have flown through seven realms, battling severe depression, without reaching the simurgh, the hoopoe announces: “You have already reached the simurgh—the simurgh is you. You forgot the bad things in your hearts and thought only of an ideal.” This makes sense in Persian, a language in which the phrase si murgh means “thirty birds”: the group of thirty birds striving for something beyond themselves is, thus, already the same thing as the transcendent bird paradise. That’s the logic of birds.
All his life, Navoi wanted to write an answer to The Logic of Birds. Finally, at age fifty-eight, he wrote The Language of Birds, the central figure of which is an ugly, ash-colored bird called the qaqnus. The qaqnus bird has one thousand teeth in its beak, and each tooth sings a melody. Collecting thorns and twigs, it builds a tall nest, sits on top of it, and starts to sing. Its song is incredibly beautiful, but makes human listeners sick. (This song is called navo, the root of the name “Navoi.”) As a function of singing, the qaqnus sets itself on fire, burns up, rises to heaven, and becomes a flower. A little bird comes from the ashes; that’s its baby. The baby then spends its whole life collecting its own bonfire. “Such is the dialectic of the qaqnus,” Dilorom explained. In The Language of Birds, Navoi compares Attar to the qaqnus, and himself to the baby bird that climbed out of the ashes.
According to the critic Vahid Abdullayev, who had been a friend of Dilorom’s father, each writer in the history of literature is a qaqnus: he spends his whole life gathering firewood with which to burn up the previous generation of writers. This was Abdullayev’s version of the “knight’s move.”
I thought a lot about the language of birds, and its relationship to the logic of birds. What were the birds—our strange uncles—trying to tell us? In various esoteric traditions, the “language of birds” is a code word for total knowledge. As Solomon exclaims in the Koran, “O mankind! Lo! We have been taught the language of the birds and have been given abundance of all things.” Tiresias, endowed by Athena with the gift of prophecy, was suddenly able to understand birds. So was Siegfried, when he accidentally tasted dragon’s blood. That was lucky for Siegfried because some nearby birds were just then discussing a plot to kill him. Among alchemists and Kabbalists, the perfect language that would unlock ultimate knowledge was known as either “the green language” or “the language of birds.” The Russian futurist poet Velemir Khlebnikov is famous for inventing several “transrational” languages, among them “god language” and “bird language.” Interestingly, Khlebnikov’s father was an ornithologist.
Every day near sunset, when one could imagine that the temperature might be falling, Eric went to play soccer at a nearby stadium. (Like most Soviet-era stadiums, this one was called Dynamo.) I went with him a couple of times to use the track, which consisted of irregular rubberized panels laid on top of a bed of sand and gravel. Some of the panels overlapped, creating ledges on which it was easy to trip. Other panels were separated by chasms in which one might twist an ankle. It was by far the worst track I have ever seen in my life. The enclosed soccer field was also riddled with holes and burrows, in which unknown small creatures lived out their mysterious existences. As nightfall approached, the soccer players—mostly high-school students—twisted their ankles with increasing frequency. “See you later, kids!” they would shout bravely to their teammates, as they hobbled off the field.
Eric was befriended by one of the soccer players, a sixteen-year-old Uzbek boy named Shurik, who wanted to join the CIA when he grew up. One night Shurik invited us to dinner. His whole family—seven-year-old identical twin sisters, a grandfather, and a baby—were sitting on pillows at a low table in a courtyard one-quarter the size of Gulya’s. The parents came out of a tiny wooden lean-to with a huge pot of plov, fragrant with saffron, lamb, and dried apricots. The grandfather, who took a great liking to Eric, gave him a history book in Uzbek. “You can translate it for him,” he told me, proceeding to write a completely illegible inscription on the flyleaf.