A Poet and Bin-Laden

Chapter One

Chapter One

“When did it all begin?” Yosir thought in his solitude. On either the sixteenth or the seventeenth day of the month of Sha’ban in the year 1422 of the Hidjra (November 2001), when the time for the after-sunset prayer was approaching, they were ordered to assemble on the southern outskirts of the Zulmat kishlak, which fortunately the Americans had not bombed yet. When Yosir asked the messenger if they should turn out with their things – since any other question that was natural in other places and other circles, such as “What for?”, “What’s going to happen?”, “Will it be for long?” could cost you dear – the messenger replied briefly: “As usual!” and Yosir and Hamsa began hastily packing their hurdjuns, or traveller’s bags, and the AKMS automatic rifles wrapped in Afghan felt cloaks.

Seven minutes later they were sitting in the yard of one of the local mosques after putting their hurdjuns down beside the clay fence nearby. Some men were counting off their prayer beads, some were intently reciting to themselves the most glorious names of God, and a few of those who had only just joined them were bent over in the afternoon prayer that had been missed. But there was something here that went beyond an ordinary gathering, as if the sound of the myna-bird’s light, delicate whistle was about to be replaced by the first sound of a plane and a bomb or rocket flying through the air, and the chirring of the first cricket in the corner, its voice cracked from the drought, was about to be drowned out by the rattle of a machine gun replying to the imperturbable plane….

The yard of the mosque filled up quickly, someone ordered the doors to be closed and, glancing from under his brows, Yosir noticed a tall, burly figure appear in the doorway of the mosque itself and move rapidly to the front of the gathering, accompanied by several armed guards. It was Muhammad Tahir Farruk (Tahir Yuldash – the Amir of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan). Like everyone else in the mosque, Yosir was sitting with his head bowed low, but since he was in one of the front rows, out of the corner of his eye he saw the Amir halt facing the gathering, while three of his bodyguards walked on further and three stayed beside him on his right, probing the community with their eyes. That had never happened before. Yosir had prayed with the Amir numerous times, and the Amir had very rarely played the part of an Imam, preferring to make himself inconspicuous somewhere in the general body of the community, but everything was different now.

In a low, hoarse voice the Amir read out the obligatory hamd and naat – the blessing in the name of Allah and his Prophet – and then, with mounting fervour, he moved on to the sermon itself. He spoke of jihad, a holy war against the infidels and above all against the empire of Satan – America; he spoke of shahids, who had died a righteous death on this path, of children who had been made orphans, but also avengers, and yet again Yosir wondered in amazement where Muhammad Tahir found that blazing passion that spoke prophetically above and beyond his own thoughts, will and lips, so that he never faltered, or hesitated or stumbled over a misplaced breath. He didn’t learn it all off by heart, did he, he didn’t rehearse it all in front of a mirror – for where would he get a mirror?

Yosir suddenly remembered that when he came back to Mazari-Sharif from Kabul with the film, they have been shooting, in the afternoon of the twenty-third day of the month of Jumad Al-Sani in year 1422 of the Hidjra (September 11, 2001) and entered a house belonging to Uzbek fighters on Puli Havoi Street, the Amir was sitting in the yard, shaving the head of one of his bodyguards by the light of a small flaming torch. The other two bodyguards were sitting nearby with their already shaven heads bleeding.

A certain alarm, not exactly fear, must have shown in Yosir’s eyes, and the Amir had laughed and spoken first, before he could say anything: “Look, I am letting the bad blood out of their heads. It’s very good for you, would you like to try it?” He made several cuts in his bodyguard’s cleanly shaven skin and covered them with a glass jar heated briefly over a flame, the way in which a cold is usually treated. Blood covered the walls of the jar like dark paint. The bodyguard tensed up, but he didn’t groan. “He’s short of iron! Look how brown the blood is! You’re all short of iron!” the Amir had joked and then, leaving his bodyguards in the yard, he had gone into the house to talk to Yosir.

That evening, following communal prayers in the yard of that house, at which people had gathered, as usual, by making their way through openings between one yard and the next, so that no one in the street could possibly guess who they were and what they were doing there, Yosir, who was tired after his long journey, had decided to go to bed early, without telling the curious all the latest news from Kabul and the Turkistan madrasah there. But no sooner had the final mountain passes before Mazari Sharif flashed in front of his eyes than he heard sounds from the next room, where the three sentries on duty were listening to the BBC, the Voice of America and Radio Liberty respectively: a loud braying in three voices was followed by rapid repetitions of “Allah-u Akbar!” – “Allah is great!” over and over again. Everybody in the house jumped up and, in defiance of the rules, went dashing towards the room on the upper floor, but one of the sentries was already flying down towards them with a radio pressed against his ear, and all Yosir could hear was “New York” and then something else, followed by “destroyed”. The sentry went rushing past – to do as he was supposed to do and report the extraordinary news to the Amir, who was dealing with somebody in the basement. For some strange reason Yosir caught himself thinking of the gigantic wave that was expected when half of a Spanish island slipped into the sea, and felt horrified as he imagined it:

Hovliqar u, talpinar u, shoshar u,

Go’ringizdan na’ra tortib toshar u…

He had once translated these words of Chulpon about a wave of fire into Russian, and now, in the milling throng of that dark house, he tried to recall the ending:

And the wave will seethe and surge and rage

And scorch your coffins with a mighty roar …

And from there it was but half a step to Brodsky:

Someday it and not, alas, we

Will flood along the railings of the promenade,

Advancing to shouts of: “Don’t!..”

“Don’t!” the Amir shouted and Yosir, adrift on his sea of memories, shuddered when he suddenly saw the bodyguards, who had pointed their rifles up into the sky, towards the sources of the rumbling that had been expanding for so long, lower their gun barrels, and heard the Amir first shout after them in his wheezing, sleepless voice: “Death to America! Death to the empire of Satan! Allah-u Akbar!” and then order everyone to leave the house one at a time and assemble immediately in the trenches.

Running out of the mosque when the bombing had already begun, Yosir glanced up as if for the last time at the sky, which was scored across by several long, bloody slashes, as if someone had decided to let the sky’s bad blood, and high up above, slicing imperviously through the air and glittering like sharp blades in the cuts, he saw the American super-heavy B-1 bombers. Or that same wave of fire….