A Poet and Bin-Laden

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

It seemed to me that Belgi had inherited his elegance of spirit, love of religion and passion for writing from his forebears. I should say that I reached this conclusion a long time ago, although for the most part I had only seen the secular, social side of Belgi’s life. In 1996, when seven of us were invited to the small Bavarian town of Bamberg for a conference on “Uzbekness”, we all found ourselves accommodated in the picturesque Walkmuhle – a former mill standing on a fork in the river. Our little house was essentially an island surrounded on all sides by the branches of the river, cataracts, waterfalls, streams and bridges. Add to that a dark autumnal avenue of maples and oaks leading off into the forest and in the distance the building of the Constanze rising up over the river and its trembling reflection, and you will understand many of Belgi’s poems of that period.

In the mornings we were woken by the chiming of the distant bells of Bamberg cathedral, the town hall and a dozen small churches, and in the midst of the low-key luxury of the house’s numerous compartments we gathered together in the kitchen, where everything was within easy reach if you just held out your hand. Hot, thick coffee, cereals, jams and preserves, and especially that fragrant black German bread and those intelligent, so highly intelligent conversations – never in my life had I had known such a cosy and comfortable feeling as I did there and then.

And then there were morning walks along the sluggish river and down those dawn-radiant avenues over the red autumnal sand crumbling under our feet. Belgi loved to hum songs by the Beatles and Demis Roussos while we decided the future of Russo-Uzbek relations or compared Fitrat with Luther and Goethe with Navoi. One morning there Belgi said that he was planning to write a poetic symphony about this town and call it Bambergiana. He had been struck most of all by the robust stone substance of the town, its immutability over the centuries. He told me that now when he arrived in his native Osh, his home district, he would not recognise it – every year one clay building was replaced by another, the son rebuilt the father’s work, the grandson his grandfather’s. The only thing that remained untouched was the stonework of the mosque on the Suleiman-mountain in the centre of the town, but even its ground was already a patchwork of graves and paths and pipes. And even Babur’s house, which had stood on top of the hill for five centuries – someone had managed to get hold of that and demolish it… But here, in our time, everything was still standing as it had stood in the time of the crusaders, in the time of the first Popes…. It was strange suddenly to feel that you were the variable factor, he told me then, and suddenly fell silent.

Our afternoons were wasted on the conference, but Sokrat-aka, the oldest among us, decided to arrange soirées for each of us in the evenings, and when it came to Belgi’s evening, instead of reading his poems, which he simply handed out to each of us, he unexpectedly suggested that we should listen to what he called a “documentary story” about his grandfather.

Immediately after the poems he handed out copies of the criminal proceedings against Mirzaraimov Abut and began his story with the very last day of this man’s life, the last day before he was shot in February 1939. I won’t retell his story here, because that very evening one of us bluntly asked Belgi to let him have the entire story line, saying he would include it in his novel The Railway, which he was finishing writing at the time. And the story of the grandfather – Obid-kori – really is there in his book. I recommend you to read that section of it to acquire a better understanding of the life and fate of the poet whom I first met in that far-away Bavarian town with the bell-chime name of Bamberg....