The Devils' Dance
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THE DEVILS’ DANCE TRANSLATED BY THE DEVILS’ DANCE HAMID ISMAILOV DONALD RAYFIELD TILTED AXIS PRESS POEMS TRANSLATED BY JOHN FARNDON The Devils’ Dance جينلر بازمي The jinn (often spelled djinn) are demonic creatures (the word means ‘hidden from the senses’), imagined by the Arabs to exist long before the emergence of Islam, as a supernatural pre-human race which still interferes with, and sometimes destroys human lives, although magicians and fortunate adventurers, such as Aladdin, may be able to control them. Together with angels and humans, the jinn are the sapient creatures of the world. The jinn entered Iranian mythology (they may even stem from Old Iranian jaini, wicked female demons, or Aramaic ginaye, who were degraded pagan gods). In any case, the jinn enthralled Uzbek imagination. In the 1930s, Stalin’s secret police, inveigling, torturing and then executing Uzbekistan’s writers and scholars, seemed to their victims to be the latest incarnation of the jinn. The word bazm, however, has different origins: an old Iranian word, found in pre-Islamic Manichaean texts, and even in what little we know of the language of the Parthians, it originally meant ‘a meal’. Then it expanded to ‘festivities’, and now, in Iran, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, it implies a riotous party with food, drink, song, poetry and, above all, dance, as unfettered and enjoyable as Islam permits. I buried inside me the spark of love, Deep in the canyons of my brain. Yet the spark burned fiercely on And inflicted endless pain. When I heard ‘Be happy’ in calls to prayer It struck me as an evil lure. So I told the angel my personal myths; They seemed to me more pure. But playing with her hair, the angel said: ‘Your legends are needed no more!’ Her words buzzed noisily in my ears: ‘You’re swimming in blood and gore.’ The king of lies told me to swim on: ‘Your fortune’s waiting there.’ But my soul arrayed in funeral black Is already awaiting there. Leave now, Satan; I am afraid. Go! My sword’s smashed, my shield holed. Don’t you see? I am lying underneath A mountain of troubles, crushed and cold? Oh angel, one last breath, the last of all: One last look, then may the skies fall! Cho’lpon CHAPTER 1 POLO Autumn was particularly fine that year. Wherever you happened to be – walking home down the empty streets from the new tram stop, casting an eye over the clay walls of Tashkent’s Samarkand Darvoza dis- trict, or going out into your own garden after a long day – every imaginable colour was visible under a bright blue sky. In autumns like this, the yellow and red leaves linger on the branches of trees and shrubs, as if they mean to remain there right until winter, quivering and shining in the pure, translucent air. But this motionless air and the tired sun’s cooling rays already hint at grief and melan- choly. Could this bitterness emanate from the smoke of dry leaves, burning some distance away? Perhaps. Abdulla had planned to prune his vines that day and prepare them for the winter. He had already cut and dried a stack of reeds to wrap round the vines; his children, play- ing with fire, had nearly burnt the stack down. But for the grace of God, there would have been a disaster. Walking about with his secateurs, Abdulla noticed that some of the ties holding the vines to the stakes were torn, leaving the vines limp. He couldn’t work out how this had happened: had the harvest been too plentiful, or had the plants not been cared for properly? Probably the latter: this summer 10 The Devils’ Dance and early autumn, he hadn’t managed to give them the attention they needed, and the vines had had a bad time of it. He was uneasy. He had the impression that some dev- ilish tricks had been at play ever since he freed the vines from their wrappings in early spring. Almost daily, you could hear bands playing loud music, and endless cheering in the streets. Enormous portraits hung everywhere from the building on Xadra Square as far as Urda. Every pole stuck into the earth had a bright red banner on its end. As for the nights, his friends were being snatched away: it was like a field being weeded. Not long ago, the mullah’s son G’ozi Yunus turned up – dishevelled and unwashed from constantly having to run and hide – and asked Abdulla to lend him some money, pledging his father’s gold watch as a token of his trust- worthiness. Then Cho’lpon’s wife Katya came, distraught, bursting into tears and begging Abdulla to write a letter of support. ‘They’ll trust you,’ she said. But who would trust anyone these days? These were vicious, unpredictable times; clearly, they hadn’t finished weeding the field. As the great poet Navoi wrote, ‘Fire has broken out in the Mozandaron forests’. And in the conflagration everything is burnt, regardless of whether it is dry or wet. Well, if it were up to him, he would have been like a saddled horse, raring to go. Just say ‘Chuh’ and he’d be off. With these gloomy thoughts in mind, Abdulla bent down to the ground to prune the thin, lower shoots of the vines. He systematically got rid of any crooked branches. If only his children would come running up in a noisy throng to help. Sadly, the eldest had fallen ill some time ago and was still in bed; otherwise he would have joined his father and the job would have been a pleasure. The youngest, Ma’sud, his father’s pampered favourite, might not know the difference between a rake and a bill-hook, Ismailov 11 but he was an amusing chatterbox. The thought made Abdulla smile. The toddler found everything fun: if you put a ladder against a vine stake he would clamber to the top like a monkey, chattering, ‘Dad, Dad, let me prune the top of the vine…’ ‘Of course you can!’ Abdulla would say. Possibly, Abdulla wouldn’t have time to prune, tie back and cover all the vines with reeds today. But there was always tomorrow and, if God was willing, the day after that. Soon after he’d protected his vines, the cold weather would pass, the spring rains would bring forth new shoots from the earth, and the cuttings he had planted in winter would come into bud. It was always like that: first you pack and wrap each vine for the winter; the next thing you know, everything unfurls in the sun and in no time at all it’s green again. Just like literature, Abdulla thought, as he wiped a drop of sweat from the bridge of his nose. The flashes of sunlight coming through the leaves must have dazzled him, for it was only now, when he tugged at a vine shoot bearing an enormous, palm-shaped leaf, that he discovered a small bunch of grapes underneath it: the qirmizka which he’d managed to get hold of and plant last year with great difficulty. The little bunch of fruit hiding under a gigantic leaf had ripened fully and, true to its name, produced round, bright-red berries, as tiny as dewdrops, so that they looked more like a pretty toy than fruit. Abdulla’s heart pounded with excitement. He had been nurturing an idea for a book: the story of a beautiful slave-girl who became the wife of three khans. The autumn discovery of a bunch of berries as red as the maiden’s blushing cheek, hidden among the vine’s bare branches, had brought on a sudden clarity and harmony. Turning towards the house, he called out joyfully, ‘Ma’sud, child, come here quick!’ But suppose the first fruit is too bitter? He plucked a berry from the bunch that he meant to give the toddler, and put 12 The Devils’ Dance it in his own mouth. Ramadan had just ended: he had for- gotten the feel of food in daylight. The large pip crunched between Abdulla’s teeth, and its sweet flesh dissolved like honey through his entire body. And suddenly he had a revelation: he knew how to begin his book. It would be a terrific story, surpassing both Past Days and The Scorpion from the Altar. Ahmad Qori, who lived at the top of Abdulla’s street, had lent him a stack of books by the classic historians, and he had already researched the fine details. If he could get the supplies in quickly he could then be on his own, sitting in front of the warm coal fire of his sandal. Surely the three months of cold would be long enough for him to finish his novel. Abdulla didn’t wait for his youngest child to toddle out from the ancestral house: he picked one more berry of the unexpected gift, tucked the tiny bunch of grapes behind his ear and got down to work. On 31 December, 1937, a freezing winter’s day, Abdulla was taken from his home and put in prison, neither charged nor tried. So he did not begin his narrative with that early-ripening bunch of grapes in the shade of a broad leaf. Instead, Abdulla began his novel by describing a typical game of bozkashi, where players fight for a goat carcass… — Nasrullo-xon, ruler of Qarshi, was very fond of bozkashi, though as a spectator rather than a participant. Today, mounted on a bay racehorse which had only just been brought out from the stables, he rode onto the bound- less meadow that lay outside the city.