E-Book, Englisch, 446 Seiten
Ismailov Of Strangers and Bees
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-911284-35-2
Verlag: Tilted Axis Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 446 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-911284-35-2
Verlag: Tilted Axis Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
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.
Weitere Infos & Material
Events of the Year of the Hijra 1409
The one who walks before you is a deceiver and a windbag, who beautifies what is false and forges fictions. He will supply you with stories you never sought, made murky with falsity, in which the truth is overburdened with lies. But still, he will serve as your secret eye and your watchman.
Avicenna, Hayy ibn Yaqzan
[Voice 1 starts]
It was 1900-and-something AD when that dream knocked me off balance. Perestroika had unfurled its wings, and those wings were starting to stir up a storm, but all my thoughts were tangled up in that dream, leaving me with no interest or strength to pay attention to anything else. Eventually, I couldn’t stand it any more. I knew I had to find him, and that meant finding a way to travel – first of all to Provence. Only then did I get to feel for myself the refreshing breeze from perestroika’s wings.
And in fact, a way was found. One day in the autumn of that year, I was in Moscow on business when I got a phone call from Sabit Madaliev at the Writers’ Union. ‘Sheikhov! You speak French, don’t you?’ Sabit-aka asked.
‘Yes, a little,’ I answered, somewhat confused, remembering that it had probably been ten years since I last picked up a book in French. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It seems that we have some guests coming from France, and we need someone to go with them to Tashkent,’ Sabit told me with a sigh. ‘I thought of you.’
To make a long story short, two days later I set off for Tashkent with two Frenchmen. Since they had come to discover the world of Uzbek poetry for the benefit of the good folks back home, the big-name Uzbek poet and dissident Muhammad Solih met us in Tashkent. I won’t bother you with the details of the thorough inspection the KGB agents gave our visitors at the airport, nor how they tailed us throughout our trip. I’m sure you get the picture. Instead, I want to start with our arrival at the Solih family home.
We walked in, washed up, and sat down at a lavishly set and draped dasturhon. Then there began the snatches of individual conversations and the long exchange of polite comments, the simple meal and the extravagantly long sojourn at Solih’s table. Not to mention the endless toasts. First we drank to our guests’ safe arrival, paying them tribute for having arrived at all. Our visitors mumbled something just as florid in praise of their hosts. Ah, how fine and elegant was the French that flew from my lips that day! And how hard my tongue had to work, as though it was juggling a hot potato in my mouth, back and forth from one cheek to the other.
Once he was nice and drunk, Solih-aka summoned me quietly into the kitchen. ‘These guests of yours are serious about their drinking! They haven’t refused once! I pour, they drink, I pour, they drink… Is it some sort of national custom?’
‘The French, you know…’ I managed to say with a shrug.
The next day, Jean-Pierre – the one who woke up around one in the afternoon – called me over politely. ‘Such strange local customs you have here! Does everyone drink so much? The host kept pouring more, and we didn’t want to offend, so we kept drinking. We’re here in an unfamiliar country, with unfamiliar customs, after all…’
There you have it – the clash of civilisations.
—
[Voice 1 starts]
The next morning we left for Samarqand. Riding along in the Volga sedan that belonged to the Writers’ Union, we talked about how one day there would be a Sajudis here in Uzbekistan, too, just like they had in Lithuania. You can imagine how the mountains looked, just coming into autumn. The poplars standing straight and tall, their leaves plunged into a deep yellow like so many paintbrushes dipped in paint; the red, and saffron, and blue, and deep grey leaves of the apricot trees… Every five kilometres we got out of the car and were delighted all over again.
We visited Bukhara, and then Afshana.
And, believe it or not – we surely didn’t! – the French visitors promised to invite us to visit them. To assuage our doubts, they wrote out the official invitation letters before they left, and handed them to us right there and then.
Then the craziness began. As the founder of the Birlik movement, Solih was buried in work, so the job of making the return visit to Paris basically fell to me and Sabit Madaliev. It was true that the Frenchmen had issued strict orders not to come without Solih. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t talk him into it. In any case, we thought we could handle it ourselves. Sabit-aka agreed to talk to the Soviet Writers’ Union, and the Union finally gave us its blessing, along with two thousand French francs.
According to our calculations, and based on what our knowledgeable colleague Inga told us, it would cost three hundred francs per night for a decent hotel room – one hundred for each star in its rating. We made an agreement with the Hotel Lafayette, in some Paris quarter or other, for three hundred francs each night.
Finally the time came that made our hearts beat a little faster: in the bitter-cold Moscow winter – it was December – we got in a taxi and told the driver to rush us to Sheremetyevo Airport. And wouldn’t you know it, on the way there the car slid and spun on the ice and then, while it was getting hauled to the shoulder, ran into another vehicle that had been put out of action! We narrowly missed getting run over by yet another one as we sorted that out. Still, God took pity on us, except that when we were boarding the plane I realised I had lost my hat. Not such a catastrophe, I decided. At least my head was still in one piece; everything else would work itself out.
—
We landed in Paris pretty well sloshed. Paying to get on the bus sobered us up, just as if somebody had poured cold water on us. That was the effect of spending our first seventy francs. This, we told each other, was capitalism.
Sabit-aka had all the money, so he was the one to worry the most. We decided we’d let the bus take us into the city, and after that we’d get where we needed to go on foot. We got off at Place Charles de Gaulle. It looked simple enough on the map, but every passer-by we asked for directions shook their heads and told us to take a taxi. How the hell could we take a taxi, if even a bus cost us seventy of our two thousand francs! So we set off on foot, lugging our suitcases and draped in our Moscow winter coats. We trudged along for five hundred metres before stopping, thoroughly worn out. There were plenty of hotels on both sides of the street, and right in front of us we spotted a three-star place, less expensive than the already fairly cheap Lafayette room we’d reserved by phone. A room for two hundred and fifty francs. We thought we had better check to see if this was one of the hostels Inga had mentioned. It looked nice enough from the outside, we thought, and in we went.
‘Any rooms?’
‘Oui.’
‘Can we have one?’
‘Of course!’
‘Could we take a look first?’
‘Certainly, messieurs.’
We saw that it was no worse than the Hotel Rossiya in Moscow, where they put up the writers who come for the annual conference. A television, phone, refrigerator – just a regular room. We decided to stay.
First we arranged in the refrigerator all the chicken and snacks our wives had packed for our trip. To do that, of course, we first had to rearrange all the little bottles holding beverages of various potencies (the fridge was full of them!) to make room for our chicken, as snug as if in its own little nest.
Then we walked out into the city.
‘Listen. No more public transport! From now on we walk,’ Sabit-aka warned me. We crossed the street, strolled straight ahead, and came out at the river. Following the notes we had made on our map, we headed back to the hotel and the tea kettle we’d brought with us. We served ourselves boiled water sweetened with four pieces of hard candy.
Then we took a walk in the other direction, this time towards the city centre. We marvelled over the Tuilleries, and the Louvre, and all the narrow streets. Tucked away in a corner we came across a hotel offering rooms for one hundred and five francs. One star. (Only then did it occur to us that the cognac back home was labeled with exactly the same star system.) We ventured inside.
‘Excuse me, but would it be possible for us – two Soviet writers – to share one room?’ we asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ they answered. ‘Would you like to check in right now?’
‘No, tomorrow morning, please,’ we requested. Believe it or not, the gloom of evening had already set in.
‘All right, we’ll be expecting you. Just one thing!’ they said. ‘There’s one double bed, and one single.’
‘We’d be fine sleeping on army cots!’ we told them happily. But what could these silly Frenchmen know about army cots?
—
That night, tired, we returned to our hotel. Trouble awaited us. Those French hoteliers had decided to turn off the refrigerator! Two of our roasted chickens were sweating out water. The whole room stank. It was Soviet chicken, after all, so not the freshest. We toiled at it diligently, hoping to find some unspoiled pieces, but once that smell hit us (merci, messieurs!) we knew they were rotten head to tail. We had to throw it all out, wrapped up in our unwept tears. Again we drank our hot water sweetened by candy, dipping some biscuits in it this time.
We...
