Ismailov Manaschi

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-911284-56-7
Verlag: Tilted Axis Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 257 Seiten

In his latest tragicomedy Hamid Ismailov interrogates the intersection between tradition and modernity. A former radio-presenter wrongly interprets one of his dreams and thinks that he has been initiated into the world of spirits as a manaschi, one of the Kyrgyz bards and healers reciting Manas - the longest human epic, consisting nearly of a million verses - who are revered as people who are connected with supernatural forces. Travelling to a mountainous village populated by Tajiks and Kyrgyzs, he instead witnesses the full scale of the epic's wrath on his life. Following on from the award-winning The Devils' Dance and Of Strangers and Bees, this is the third and final book in Ismailov's Central Asia trilogy.

Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek writer who was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992 due to what the state dubbed 'unacceptable democratic tendencies'. He came to the United Kingdom, where he took a job with the BBC World Service. His works are banned in Uzbekistan. Several of his Russian-original novels have been published in English translation, including The Railway (Vintage, 2007) ,The Dead Lake, which was long listed for the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and The Underground (both Restless Books). The Devils' Dance was the first of his Uzbek language novels to appear in English, and won the EBRD Prize in 2019.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ismailov, Hamid

Weitere Mitwirkende

Rayfield, Donald

Leseproben

Part Two

Some time passed. In spring, tulips and edelweiss sprouted on the mountain slopes; then the melons ripened and it was summer and things were good everywhere. Exasperated and fed up with his pointless work at the radio station, Bekesh resigned, and went to stay in the country. He hunted with Dapan, he looked after the cattle, he completely forgot about the magic stone, and he went to the summer pastures and enjoyed reciting the at the top of his lungs. Tumor and Topon recognised him and obeyed him. But even though he dressed just like Baisal in gown and leather coat, at heart he felt there was something not quite right. He was searching for himself, wondering if this was how he ought to be living. He imagined a voice inside him saying he was a melon when sweet melons were being picked, but forgotten once the bitter beer is poured.

In any case, he was upset by the hostility in a story by Sheikh Sa’diy that he was given to read one night by Uncle Sattor. It went like this: a young man was travelling the world and arrived at one of Anatolia’s main ports. Since he couldn’t find anywhere to stay in this unfamiliar place, he set off for a dervishes’ teahouse. The dervishes gave him a warm welcome, and took him to see their elders, who made an exhortation to cleanliness: they said it would be good for the young man if he cleaned the prayer room and swept it out. The young man bowed, and took his leave. An hour passed, then two, then night fell, but there was no sign of the youth. The dervishes assumed he was too lazy to get down to manual work.

Early the next morning one of the dervishes, on his way to the market, came across the young man by the outside door and told him off: ‘You idler: you’re no good as an apprentice, because you don’t know the first things about the path of cleanliness, nor about service without expecting reward.’

Immediately the youth began to weep. He said to the master dervish, ‘I couldn’t see any dirt or any dust that I could get rid of in the prayer room, apart from myself. Because I didn’t want to sully its cleanliness, I brushed myself down and, being a specimen of dirt, I freed the prayer room of my presence.’

Bekesh gave a lot of thought to the sense of this parable and applied it to himself, looking at his foster-father Baisal as a dervish saint; and although it seemed a heresy to juxtapose the world of the with a prayer house, he could not put an end to these thoughts. He was spending the evening in the yard, sitting at a grindstone sharpening a scythe, before the hay had to be cut the next morning. His heart leapt when he saw Dapan come running in from the fields, and as soon as the boy had filled his mouth with something, he started jabbering away about all the recent incidents.

He told Bekesh that while he was taking care of his calf, angling for fish by one of the dams made in a gully where a mountain stream ran down, a man dressed in red had appeared by his side and sat down on a big mountain rock. Showing curiosity, the man said, ‘Do you know that fish talk with their tails?’ In fact, the rod that Dapan was holding had begun to shake violently. Then the man cast a glance, ‘There, now you can pull in your fish, you can hear it yourself.’ Throwing down his rod and line, Dapan ran away in fright.

‘Where did you leave your calf?’ asked Bekesh. Dapan pointed to the mountain stream. ‘Well then, let’s go off together,’ said Bekesh, but Dapan absolutely refused. So, clutching his scythe, Bekesh went off to the stream’s bank: the calf had been grazing and got itself wet, and was happily lying under an overhanging rock. By its side was the handle of the fishing rod. Of the man dressed in red there was not a trace.

—

The next morning Bekesh asked around and learnt that some forty Chinese builders had come to the village. They had a contract with the Tajik government to tunnel through Mount Asqar as part of a road-building project. As we have said, Chekbel had its own peculiar qualities. Bekesh had now lived in the village for quite a time, and was discovering quite a few things that he had not known about. For instance, until very recently he didn’t know that Dapan was a pupil at the Tajik-language school. He knew now that their documents would be issued by the Tajik authorities, because they were actually situated in Tajikistan, and, as Tajik citizens, they would not be accepted in a Kyrgyz school situated in the Tajik kishlak.

Basically, all this portended trouble for Chekbel: the Kyrgyz children were being forced to study Tajik, the Tajik children to study Kyrgyz. Though others found this either ridiculous or deplorable, for some reason Bekesh was secretly pleased by the idea that the children would grow up bilingual. But there was one thing that did affect him, and which he found both ridiculous and deplorable. Now that he had resigned from his job at the radio station, he had to sort out one or two documents; and he discovered that in Chekbel not one, but two village administrations existed, each belonging to one country. The Kyrgyzstan administration was in a Tajik kishlak, and the Tajik officials were situated in the Kyrgyz ayyl. The police station, of course, and the post and all the rest were likewise all randomly scattered, higgledy-piggledy. True, for both sides the water came only from Tajikistan, while the electricity came from Kyrgyzstan.

Because Chekbel was so far from the capitals of either country, it had preserved this state of chaos for many years. However, now that forty or fifty Chinese had arrived from Tajikistan to tunnel through a mountain that led back to Tajikistan, it became clear that the road-building had tipped the scales sharply to one side.

Suddenly realising this, Bekesh felt himself in a great state of anxiety, and everything in him was astir.

—

The people of Chekbel were swarming about like wasps in a nest that had been kicked. What with the Chinese construction workers casually arriving, turning up as if they were going to make themselves at home in Chekbel, and a road opening up in one direction, while there was none in the other direction, confusion arose. The matter was discussed once in the mosque and once at the market. In the streets, from morning to night, people were chatting to one another about this business.

Since Bekesh was a natural radio reporter, he had come to take a look at the Chinese with his own eyes. In a gully between two mountains, on both banks of the stream, three railway carriages had been installed, and Chinese men in orange clothes (one of whom Dapan had perhaps seen not so long ago) were brewing tea in a brazier that was hung from an outer door. Their quilts and mattresses were propped up against the carriages.

When these men were first spotted, they seemed to people’s worried eyes like scurrying ants, unlike the serious, dignified villagers of Chekbel. Some of them were banging nails into old dried tables, another group took a length of wire from a sack and strung it between the tables to give themselves a radio signal, while a third group took spotless porcelain bowls, clean as a summer breeze, from their food store and laid them out on a sideboard: in short, not one of them waited for another to give an order. They were in complete thrall to their work, except for one person having trouble with his cooking pot. Bekesh stood there observing them: it all reminded him that the Chinese had at times been the most determined and vicious enemies of Manas.

This Chinaman had come,

So he said, to know him,

He’d come apparently,

Suddenly, to cause trouble,

He was going, he said, to pull down

The hero who had raised his head,

He was going, he said, to bind

A feeble, inept groom.

When the black Chinaman came

Most of the nation ran away in fear,

Abandoning hope for their souls…

But when Bekesh’s eye fell on any one of them, that person smiled gently in response to him, to soften Bekesh’s sensitive heart. It was as if each one of them was saying to Bekesh in his own language, ‘The goshawk perches on a beam, I’m ready to sacrifice myself for its tail.’

—

Bekesh stood there for a long time, watching the men. Without breaking off their work, one of them – a rather large man – was yelling out things in his abrupt language to somebody in the railway carriages. Then, limping out of a carriage, a man who didn’t seem to be a Kyrgyz, but was definitely not a Tajik, and certainly could not have been a Chinaman, came out: in any case, he was good-looking. He was holding wire-cutters and a length of wire, and although he hadn’t finished the job in hand, he approached Bekesh and greeted him in somewhat rough Kyrgyz, as if to say, ‘Well, can I help you?’ Then, so as to make acquaintance, he put the cutters and the wire in his left hand and offered his right hand, saying ‘Mimtimin.’

At first Bekesh didn’t understand the latter word, and replied only to the first question. ‘Nothing really, I’m just hanging around.’ Then, so as not to appear unfriendly, he spoke again, asking, ‘What is it you just said?’

‘My name is Mimtimin,’ the young man repeated.

‘Mimtimin?’ Bekesh repeated. ‘Are you Chinese?’

‘No, I’m a Uighur,’ came the slightly embarrassed reply. ‘I’m the interpreter for them,’ he added, pointing behind him.

Bekesh reacted adversely, showing he had his doubts about this young Uighur. Could his name really be a Uighur one? Or was it Chinese? he began by questioning.

‘No,’ said the interpreter, ‘my real name is...