Fish- a History of One Migration Read online

  I only remember that a shape suddenly appeared in the doorway, blocking the light. The owner of the place stood there, a hoe in his hand: he had armed himself against horse thieves. He shouted something in Tajik. I kept doing my job. Suddenly, the man calmed down and crouched in the corner. When I was done, I kissed the indifferent horse again straight on a dry nostril. The owner stood up, gathered me in a fatherly hug and mumbled, “Thank, thank, good girl, horse old, Nureddin very old, it’s a pity.”

  He took us to the house, to the open porch-aivan, and treated us to tea with quince jelly and tasty flatbreads. The old man lived alone; his wife had died a long time ago. The teacups were dirty, with chipped rims. He hushed at the dog, saw us off to the street, and stood at the gate waving as we walked away. He glowed like a light bulb in a dark closet. I walked down the street and did not hear anything of what Ninka was saying. I surreptitiously felt my cheeks: the ice melted, but inside I was still cold and felt good, because the chilly weariness was fading away and something else was seeping in, something I cannot describe to this day.

  Later, when I worked in Dushanbe General Hospital, I saw and treated many pus-filled wounds. I did my job just as I am doing it now with Grandma Lisichanskaya. Two and a half years ago, when she had her stroke, they said she had a week to live, two weeks at the most. But the old woman proved strong. She is eighty-nine. In 1944, when she was thirty, she smuggled her two children out of besieged Leningrad, where she had just begun her doctoral studies, but got trapped in the city herself and survived the terrible 900 days before hitchhiking to Moscow when the siege was over. She waited for her husband to return from the front, then survived his arrest and ten-year labor camp sentence. She wrote to Stalin asking him to protect her from the illegal claims of a greedy NKVD officer who wanted to add one of her rooms to his apartment, and she succeeded in keeping the flat intact until her husband returned from Vorkuta. He was diabetic and had had a leg amputated; she nursed him for another ten years. She put her children through college. She gave Mark Grigoriyevich—her beloved oldest son—her blessing to emigrate when an impresario friend of his invited him to Italy. She stayed behind, surrounded by her well-worn books, at the helm of a vast family clan which she ruled with a firm hand for as long as she had the strength. All her life she turned away any help. And now, unconscious, halfway between heaven and earth, with her mind gone, she recognizes only me, an unknown stranger among all those she had loved and raised to survive in the world.

  That’s what Mark Grigoriyevich told me. Of all the family members, he alone insisted on caring for his mother and paid all the expenses. He calls constantly to ask how she is feeling; he sends money readily but always remembers to note, “Verochka, not a word to my wife.” Of course, I am mute as a fish.

  When grandma is not dying and not sleeping at night, I sit in the armchair and read aloud. I think she listens with interest. We have already read Dead Souls, made our way through Dickens, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Arabian Nights, and now I am reading Jack London’s Smoke Bellew to her. My Pavlik loved this book. I love it too; we used to have all these books: I bought them for the kids. But Valerka did not like reading; I think that from the day he was born he simply preferred building things. And he is still doing it, fixing cars. His skills feed him, his wife Svetlana, and their girl—my granddaughter, born two months ago. That’s when I became a grandma myself.

  My grandma here is listening; occasionally she lifts her good hand, and flexes and unfolds her long, dry fingers, which means she is feeling well. Slowly, she falls asleep. Then I go to bed myself. Long ago she was a decent piano player.

  . 3 .

  I did not listen to much music when I was a child, only what we sang in school or heard on the radio. Sometimes, on holidays, a folk-instrument band played at the Culture Center. At first, its sound was pleasing, like a coyly sweet voice floating through the night air. It seemed to weep and laugh at the same time, emphasizing the foreign words; it wove its tune around you like a vine winding its way about the post of a gazebo. My Tajik classmates’ faces would assume a dreamy look that reminded me of prairie dogs in the midday sun, standing next to their holes on their hind legs. It did no good to ask what the song was about, the answer was always the same: shaken out of her sweet trance by my stupid question, a girlfriend would wave dismissively and spit through disdainfully curved lips, “You wouldn’t understand anyway, it’s about love!” Once uttered, the magic word would return the girl to the land of her dreams, and her face would melt into the kind of smile that the poets of the East customarily compare to a rose in bloom. And the voice continued singing about a love that could not be translated into Russian, about roses, and about the moon floating in a bottomless, starry ocean, so unlike the northern skies overtaken by clouds. And the listener laughs and cries at the singer’s words, which have turned into a monotonous chant. All of a sudden, you cannot bear listening anymore. The chant clings to your body like the juice of an overripe peach; you want to wash it off, rinse your face and ears, chase away the obnoxious whiner, chase him off the stage where he is begging—his right hand over his heart, his left reaching out, as if asking for small change.

  Now, when I get around to ironing, I sometimes turn on the TV. But the words of the songs they play might as well be translated from Tajik. I spit onto the iron and it sputters back, expressing our shared disgust with trite rhymes and talentless music. I switch channels or iron in silence, which is even better: I am soothed by the iron’s weight, the warm smell of clean steam, the arrow of the fold and the sheet’s melting wrinkles.

  Having had my fill of Eastern singing, I would run as far as I could from the Culture Center, climb a clay wall across the street from our house and gaze at the Milky Way, at the myriad stars and the still moon to whom I entrusted various silly thoughts.

  Not far from our street, on the Samarkand highway at the edge of town, in the middle of a large, lush garden, was a museum. It was where they kept the things the archaeologists found in their digs: enormous clay barrels (humas); copper vats with copper, round-horned mountain goats perched on their patina-covered handles as if they were on the edge of a cliff; soot-covered pots and thick-walled clay frying pans; jewelry, green with age; and similarly frog-colored knives and darts, axes and hammers, along with the clay molds in which they had been shaped.

  In summer, we went to the dig site for archaeological practicums. Our school did such a good job that the city’s Party Council issued a special decree not to send us cotton-picking in September, instead leaving us to help the archaeologists. This was doubly good, because the expedition paid a bit of money, and for Mom and me the extra cash was very welcome. I was extremely proud of the fact that I was bringing home honest earnings at the young age of fourteen. But, most importantly, it was interesting.

  The head of the expedition, Boris Donatovich—or, as he was called in respectful Tajik style, akó Boria—was a short, chubby man who always wore an old, patched-up padded overcoat and an even older canvas military hat that was said to be his good-luck charm. He had beady eyes and a strange habit of constantly chewing the insides of his cheeks. After work, akó Boria would gather us around him on the aivan, pour us tea and begin to tell stories.

  He told us about the Prophet Mohammed: how he fled from his tribesmen to the mountains, fell into a trance, and saw the surahs of the Quran in a poetic fit. Mohammed was weak of body, like Boris Donatovich, but mighty of spirit and possessed the gift of words, which Muslims believe can move mountains.

  When Boris Donatovich spoke, he was transformed. He could be soft, or hard, depending on what the story required. His energy and power gave us goose bumps, a feeling that was joyful and unsettling all at once. His voice rang confidently in the electrified silence, and his precise words, so perfectly stacked one onto the other, fell into our mute admiration. It was unthinkable to interrupt the wizardly music of his words; I was too ashamed even to run to the bathroom.

  The Arabian Nights tales were beloved by all in Pan
jakent. We even staged some scenes from the tales in our school drama group: threw ourselves at the feet of the boy who played the Shah, wringing our hands and pleading for our lives in flowery and elaborate language that none of us ever used in real life. Still, the tales’ true beauty was revealed to me only when I heard them in Boris Donatovich’s narration. He would begin the story on the aivan under the starry sky, and we could almost see a disgusting, humpbacked dwarf in front of us—the dwarf who rode about on Sinbad’s shoulders, spit and sizzled with venom, and ordered the sailor around. Suddenly, I’d feel him on my own shoulders: there he was, weighing me down, choking me. There was no relief from this burden; I’d have to carry this monster around until I died, like a terrible disease for which there’s no vaccine.

  Or I would see a rich, eastern bazaar: Ali, the Prophet’s closest relative, rides wherever he pleases on a fiery steed, not at all concerned about where the horse treads. He is a dandy and a spendthrift, and has ordered the smith to make a beautiful, mysterious, battle-worthless double-bladed sword, Zulfikar. After Ali’s death, rumor had it that this trinket—a rich man’s toy—was sheathed in pure magic.

  Or Iskander the Double-Horned, the great Alexander, young and beautiful, would appear on our aivan surrounded by his generals. Warriors by birth, they had marched across half the world undefeated, but quickly lost their zeal for battle when they came up against Eastern luxury and languor. Charmed with the gold and the moon-faced dancers, they lost the miraculous strength they had when they were just a rogue troop of poor Macedonians, hungry for the world.

  We heard tales of Ulysses and his travels, of the siege of Troy and the archeologists who uncovered the city from the depths of the earth, centuries after the ancient battles. We heard tales that were depicted on the walls of old Panjakent houses. This city once stood on the Silk Road, amid the flow of goods and tales that connected the civilized world; they were carried here by peoples who spoke many different languages. The Silk Road—that great trading artery—traversed the world, flowing over borders; customs officers welcomed traveling merchants and did not oppress them; the earth was flat and endless. The roaming tribes spread their tales and knowledge (the same thing in those days) about the world. Knowledge and beautiful stories were prized like gold, and travelers valued life because they understood that love and freedom, daring and betrayal were the same everywhere, just as heat and cold, the sun and the mysterious moon, sand and clay were the same. The celestial bodies may rise at different angles in different corners of the earth, the sand may glimmer in different colors, the clay may crumble differently, and different languages may have different names for these basic elements, but their essence remained the same. Everywhere clay and sand made walls for homes; in the beginning of time, God made man himself from clay and sand, breathed divine life into him, and taught him to love, to suffer and to hate, to greet the sun and to sing to the moon. Men were doomed to eternal wandering. When they migrated peacefully, their movements went unnoticed and unremarked. But when uprooted hordes hacked their paths with swords and paved them with corpses, the ancient chronicles took note. Life in peacetime, at best, turns into fairy tales; historical memory clings to troubles, bad years, storms, births and deaths of kings under whose gaze the simple and happy life crumbled to dust and faded. In Panjakent, tucked cozily away between the mountains, tribes mixed like clay in a potter’s drum; the local merchants and the tax-fattened rulers preferred peace, culture, and order. Warm sun nurtured rich harvests and contemplative moods; the Silk Road brought world news and tales; life, when one rose above its routine aggravations, could seem like a well-told dream of life. Cool dining rooms in rich homes were painted with scenes from didactic tales, so that one would not be bored at mealtime—sort of like was done in Soviet restaurants.

  Later, when I read the same stories in books, I always recalled them as they were told at the aivan, those cool evenings, the hot tea with flatbread and apricot jam. Layla and Majnun, Romeo and Juliet—everyone was against their love, but they loved so much that they died for each other and were buried in the same tomb. Our expedition had its own Layla and Majnun, or Juliet and Romeo. Everyone knew and pretended not to notice that the driver akó Ahror and Lidiya Grigoriyevna, a conservationist from Leningrad, were in love.

  I had known akó Ahror for a long time: he had driven the coffin with my father’s body to the cemetery. Mom had invited him to the wake, but he politely declined. Ahror, being a Muslim, did not drink vodka, shaved his head, and observed ruza, a long fast when it is prohibited to taste food from early morning until the first star appears. On the hottest days, Ahror, a true ruzador, would rinse his mouth with water and spit it out, not letting a single drop trickle inside him.

  He had a small truck which he loved and cherished. The car was ancient, with lettering on its hood that said “Molotov Plant,”[8] and I had heard men marvel at the fact that it was still running. Ahror always responded by saying that he would never have another car. He was constantly checking the engine or polishing the truck’s metal body, greenish with time like the axes in the museum, but still strong, as if tempered for a long life with its owner.

  Ahror was married. No one had ever seen his wife or children, because they lived on the other end of the city. We only knew that Mukhibá, his wife, had been very ill for quite a while and could barely move around the house. The children helped her, and the husband was the breadwinner: he spent the summer with the archaeologists, and when the expedition left, hired himself out in the market to deliver small loads. He never pushed the truck beyond its limits.

  His love for Lidiya Grigoriyevna was the same: tender and solicitous. She worked in the conservation lab at the base camp. On the rare occasions when it was necessary to treat a fresco on-site or to transfer it from a wall, she went to the dig. Sometimes we found the frescoes already crumbled, and Lidiya Grigoriyevna had to piece them together from the fragments, which she laid out in large cardboard trays. She used a common clyster to blow dust off them and then wiped them with rags soaked in her various solutions until the colors returned. Then she began to assemble the picture, just as kids now put puzzles together, except that she did not have the finished photo to match and had to guess where to place each little piece so that they would come together, months later, into a glued and preserved ancient painting.

  I remember how long it was taking Lidiya Grigoriyevna to put together a giant fish: she might as well have been putting it together scale by scale. Akó Ahror, as usual, was sitting out of her way on his stool by the window and watching adoringly as her long fingers picked over the specks of color. I kept stopping by the lab to see how things were going and also stood there silently, watching her work. I was looking at the half-assembled body—she already had three fins on the table, two on the fish’s back and one behind the gills—and the waves that looked like funny little worms as if drawn by a child. Then I glanced at the pile of unmatched fragments and suddenly clearly saw the fish’s eye and what looked like the curve of a gill.

  “Here’s the eye,” I said, having summoned my courage.

  Lidiya Grigoriyevna took the fragment, turned it around in her hand, then smiled glowingly and added it to the fish’s body. The fragment fit.

  “That’s the eye alright! Great job, Vera!”

  Her words gave me confidence. No longer afraid of being wrong, I said, “And here is the gill.”

  The gill fit, and now the head was complete.

  Lidiya Grigoriyevna hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks. The eye made the fish come alive, and the rest of the picture came together quickly.

  After that I was transferred from the field to the lab. I washed fresco fragments, sometimes finding bits of a picture. One time I found a tip of a camel’s tail and his hind leg, and Lidiya Grigoriyevna figured it out and pieced together an island with a big tree and the camel resting in its shade, and even the pattern around the picture made out of those endless curlicues that sometimes were found on clay pots. This pattern was called me
ander, I remembered the word.

  When the eye of the fish was found, Lidiya Grigoriyevna stopped, went to the piano that was standing in the corner, and played for a long time, for me and akó Ahror, both. She played Beethoven. I looked at the fish swimming in the sea, and akó Ahror sat with his hands clasped around his knee and studied the floor as if it were a mirror that could reflect Lidiya Grigoriyevna at the piano, her fingers flying across the keys, her proud foot forcefully stomping on the pedal and her eyes shining with unknown delight.

  Lidiya Grigoriyevna often played after work. It was her way of resting and, it also seemed to me, of talking to akó Ahror. In public, they said little to each other and, of course, kept pretending that there was nothing between them. Their eyes always betrayed them.

  One day I took my lunch (a flatbread and a slice of cantaloupe) to the orchard, lay down under a peach tree and stayed there, in silence, for a while, chewing and staring into the sky. Water gurgled in the aryk,[9] I was cool in the shade; burst peaches that littered the ground gave off an intoxicating smell. Drunken wasps crawled in and out of the tunnels they had gnawed in the over-ripened fruit. My face, hands, and even my neck became sticky with cantaloupe juice. I unbuttoned my dress and bathed quickly in the cool water of the irrigation canal, pressed my fingers on my hardened nipples. I wrapped my dress around me and fell on my stomach into the soft grass. Suddenly I flushed as if I hadn’t refreshed at all. Somewhere close by a twig cracked on the ground and the grass rustled under someone’s feet. Carefully, I peeked from around a tree.