A Poet and Bin-Laden

11/09/2001

11/09/2001

The website “Conference of the Refined” at h***:://library.ferghana.ru/uz/index.htm provides the following information about Belgi (real name Asror Abutov, nom de guerre Yosir):

Belgi is a poet of the Uzbek “new wave” and author of the volumes of poetry Yo’l (The Path), Ikkinchi kitob (The Second Book), Bambergiana and Moskva Daftari (Moscow Notebook). The recently published English book Poet for Poet included a number of poems by Belgi, as well as this brief biographical note: “Born in 1961 in Osh in the Ferghana Valley, applied unsuccessfully to the Literary Institute, took work where he could find it, travelled widely. Now living in seclusion in the mountains of his native province… ”

When I asked the author of this note about the final sentence, he exclaimed: “At that time how could I have known that this reclusive Sufi retreat in search of a spiritual master would lead to Afghanistan?” And indeed, at the time when those words were written, the mountains of the Osh province were far from being a theatre of military operations where Islamic militants made annual forays or a political bazaar where some traded in politics and others in narcotics or foreign hostages.

I shall try to recount all this in detail, but I shall start, I think, from the very end.

On September 11, 2001 I was on holiday with my family at Issyk-Kul Lake: how can you expect any Tashkent or Central Asian intellectual to summon up the effort to go any further than that? Before lunch we had been swimming and riding in a catamaran, and after lunch we were relaxing at home. In an attempt to salvage something from those meaningless, monotonous days when, as Pushkin said “Fare niente is my law”, I was sitting there with a pen and a sheet of paper and a gradually mounting sense of frustration with the members of my household because of the pointlessness of it all. The members of my household were applying their own precautionary defensive measures: in other words, it was normal family life during a holiday. Eventually we decided to walk to the lake again, I blamed my fruitless depression on my wife’s zealous attitude, she got even with me for absenting myself from family activities for two hours, and our two children automatically took mental note of the new cracks between their parents in order later to coerce one into buying ice cream and the other into the interminable construction of skyscrapers of sand.

And now I attempt to recall every little detail, as if there had been some kind of portent, the way a bird will occasionally fly for some distance in front of the windscreen of your car, or the silence is suddenly sucked into both your ears in a contracting sphere of dread, but there was nothing like that, except perhaps for those sandcastles that were washed away by the cold water of the lake.

We got back to our room in the early evening, but there was still some time to go before supper and so on this occasion I felt justified in switching on the television and flicking through the channels. It was strange, though – the foreign satellite channels were all showing a picture of a fire that had started in some tower or other. For some reason I thought about the Tate Gallery in London – I had recently read about it being opened in the magazine Ogonyok. Why did I think about London? Most likely because there was someone speaking from London: then I realised it was the BBC channel and I started listening carefully. I wouldn’t claim that my English is very advanced – sure, I studied it in school and passed the minimum postgraduate reading requirement, but I’d say I’m probably better at expressing myself in Uzbek at the market than understanding what those analysts are barking about in all those dreary, identical studios. Even so, I did make out the words “New York” a couple of times. And while I was wondering just what it all had to do with New York, the little aeroplane appeared on the screen, exactly like in a second take, and flew slowly and surely into another tower concealed behind the first one. This time I understood without any words – simply from the childish cry emitted by the anchor man – that they weren’t showing a Hollywood film, that these unimaginable things were happening even as I watched, and at that moment the entire world was turning into one big Hollywood....

Our whole family sat in front of the television all that evening, missing supper – no great loss – and later, after the whole chilling event had been dubbed and explained by the Russian language channels, in the dead of that cold Issyk-Kul night I had a strange dream that I still remember to this day.

In one of the kishlaks, or mountain villages, where I used to be sent for Young Pioneer camp, I walked out of the gate and saw a car hurtling along in my direction. The car’s wheels were running along the unbroken line of yellowing clay fences sticking up out of the white snow, as if these fences marked its only road through the snowfall; it was attached to these fences, and its impetuous motion followed their curves. I would have thought the car was racing along almost vertically, if it had not gone whooshing past me, turned in a steep arc and shot off beyond the dark forms of the bridge and the river that I could see down below. “Lunatic!” I thought, and was about to carry on walking downhill when the car emerged from a dip, swung round and set off back across the bridge. Now it was aiming for me. I went dashing across the snow to get as far away as possible from those fences that held the car the way the electric wires hold a suburban train, but the car made a sharp U-turn and seemed to come lunging after me. I dashed along through snow up to my knees, sometimes slipping into steep holes, but in any case leaving a deep track behind me as I fled. The car could easily pinpoint my location. I put on two rapid spurts of speed and slid down the side of the hollow, all the way to the channel of the glimmering river, and a thought flashed through my mind like lightning: “The car will run straight off into the river here!” True, there was also the thought that it might hook me and pull me with it, but the thought that came after that was even more frightening: “What if the driver comes after me without his car…” How could I defend myself on the white snow?

Woken by a chilly shiver of fear in that black, cold, Issyk-Kul or, rather, Tian-Shan night, I gazed out through the window of our wooden hotel building at the morning twilight advancing from the east, unwilling to admit to myself that this fear under my skin was changing my life forever. And this fear is the point from which I wish to start my story.