Chapter 8. “And here there used to live…”
Time flew by. We had been in Tashkent for almost two weeks, but the healer still hadn’t appeared in Namangan. And no one knew when he would be back. Tension was mounting; a sense of alarm was growing. Sometimes I panicked –what if we never got to see him? Our friends did everything possible to make our agonizing wait easier. They invited guests to entertain us; they took us out.
One day we visited Yakov’s countryside cottage. I climbed out of the car and gasped, “Oh, my God, how long I’ve been dreaming about this! Right by the gate there were two sour cherry trees. They were short, young, and dotted with dark-red, shiny cherries. They were not just shiny, but they sparkled with reflections of light like little stars in the night sky. They stuck out on all sides of the branches on their strong little green stems as if on the needles of a hedgehog. I rushed over to those beauties and, like a little boy, stuffed my mouth with juicy fragrant cherries.
“Just imagine… there are no such cherries in America! No, cherries there are absolutely tasteless,” I explained to the laughing Yakov.
I also remember another trip. Yakov Gavrilovich decided to show me the factory where he worked. It manufactured reinforced concrete plates for construction of residential buildings. We wandered through half-empty workshops where big machines, forklifts and elevators could be seen. Most of them were not working. The workshops’ capacity was only partially used. When I asked why, Yakov answered, “You see, we used to be a link in the chain. We received raw materials, made plates and delivered them to construction companies. Now, the chain has fallen apart, as the country has fallen apart. That’s why we don’t work to full capacity."
Obviously, these sad circumstances hadn’t affected the life of the local bosses. We arrived at the factory on Friday, and Friday was the so-called “let’s detox” day for local bosses. For that purpose, the management of the factory had had a special complex built – a sauna with a steam room and swimming pool, a gym, a billiard room, and many other things just as pleasing. But, naturally, the most important part of “detox” was “a feast.” About 30 people could fit around the table in the dining room. After taking a sauna and swim, they usually had their feast.
And that’s what happened that day. We were among the invited guests. I was “served” as an American guest, an exotic fruit from overseas, so to speak. My head was spinning from the noise, laughter, guitar strumming, endless toasts, and thick cigarette smoke.
"Well, will you come back? Will you?" one of the bosses asked from the other end of the table. The noise died away. Everyone waited for my answer.
"I’ll come for a visit," I answered somewhat hesitantly. The whole table burst into thunderous laughter.
"That’s my man! To our guest!" the boss toasted and emptied his small glass in one gulp. It must have been his tenth drink.
I wandered around the city alone in the mornings visiting street markets and once-familiar streets. I stopped at my dear Teachers Training Institute. It looked horrible. Two fires had ravaged it since I left. The second one was particularly devastating. The institute was disfigured and half-destroyed. I couldn’t look at the charred columns of the main entrance without pain. Though the building was under renovation, classes were being held in the adjoining annexes. Entrance exams were underway in the music department. Students scurried back and forth talking… I tried to get a closer look at them as if expecting to see familiar faces. I listened to their voices when I caught Russian spoken. No, even though everything was familiar, I didn’t know anyone there. And the Russian language was not considered official any longer. The inscriptions on all the plaques on the doors of the dean’s office and various divisions, shiny and black, the same as in my time, were now in Uzbek. They didn’t want anything Russian there.
Once, returning home after a walk, I decided not to wait for a bus and instead flagged down a private Moskvich car. The driver was an elderly man with thick graying hair and strong hands who held the wheel firmly. He kept his car very clean. In short, the man – his name was Volodya – was nice and of few words. He drove me, taking short cuts through narrow alleys with old one-story houses made of clay and brick. I had surely been there before but recognized nothing.
After we had entered those dense quarters, Volodya grew sad and even began to sigh. I didn’t feel comfortable asking him what was wrong. I didn’t want to. I didn’t dare. But suddenly he said, without looking at me, "Can you see those houses? The Germans used to live there, many Germans."
I was silent. I wasn’t yet sure why he was telling me about it. We rounded a corner. Volodya sighed once again and slowed down. "And the Tatars lived here… remember?"
I kept silent. Is it his business whether I remember or not? I didn’t want to tell him where I was visiting from.
"And here…" We were driving very slowly. Volodya was viewing the alley with mournful attention, as if he had come here for the purpose of paying tribute to the abodes of deceased relatives. "This was a Jewish alley… here, here and there… The Jews still lived here not so long ago, just ten years ago."
He wasn’t looking at me, and it appeared that he was talking to himself. At that point I couldn’t keep silent any longer. "So, was it good or bad?"
Volodya turned his head and looked at me with disdainful amazement. "What do you mean, good or bad? What can be good about it? All the teachers, engineers left… shoemakers, tailors, butchers… all of them real masters of their trades… Such great people were forced to leave!"
And then he began to tell me about himself, and I learned that Volodya was an engineer and that many of his friends who used to work with him at the same factory had left Uzbekistan. "And today in the republic…" He grunted again and grew silent.
Then we were both thinking about the past, about the things that had been lost for good. But perhaps for me who had left 15 years before it was not as painful as for Volodya. I had acquired something to replace it. But he… he continued to lose. He had been losing something all those years. And now it seemed he had lost hope.
Chapter 9. The Healer from Namangan
The day was breaking. Our Zhiguli rattled down a concrete road. The healer had come back at last. Yakov had arranged our visit, and we set out for Namangan immediately. I mean, we rushed there… we were flying along as if we had wings. But that would be an exaggeration since we had been driving for over an hour and were still within the city limits. The suburbs had flashed by. Now there were fields, mostly cotton fields on both sides of the highway, or meadows with cows grazing here and there. There were also gardens and orchards. Even though the soil here was clay, it was, as they said, rich, very fertile. The republic was famous for that. Out of all the people who had settled on this land, only the Uzbeks, a very industrious people, truly enjoyed its fertility. Love for the land was fostered from generation to generation. Everyone, from children to adults, worked on the land from sunrise to sunset. Bent over with hoes or shovels, old and young worked in the fields or in their gardens, digging up the beds, turning up soil, sowing, planting seedlings… I saw them toiling, those hard-working people, many times as a child. It seemed that they didn’t get tired. Being able to grow things was the main joy of their lives.
The road climbed, and we were in the mountains. We were driving directly to Namangan – via Angren and then over the Kamchik and Pungam Mountain passes in the spurs of the Tian Shan, then down into the Fergana Valley. It was an almost five-hour drive, longer if anything happened. The road over the mountain pass had never been easy, and now, in this time of troubles, this era of collapse, general mistrust, feuds among the republics and growing terrorism, it was even more difficult. Who knew what might be in store for us there? Explaining why we were going there to border guards and passport controls would be all right. But what if we bumped into bandits? People said that extortion of gas had become a normal practice. We had prepared as well as possible for such unexpected encounters. The second car followed us. We preferred to travel as a group. Yakov, our patron, sat next to the driver and supervised the itinerary. So far, everything had gone fine. Even the road, contrary to my expectations, was in good shape – not too many holes and bumps.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the window. For me, a city boy who had grown up in Tashkent and Chirchik, this was the first time I had seen the Tian Shan, except when I attended the institute at the Husman Sport Camp. I had to cross the ocean to visit my native mountains. How beautiful they were. The mountain spurs could be seen far ahead for many miles; they seemed to go on endlessly. The narrow road wound around like a huge snake. Now it was hiding behind a sharp turn, now it was plunging down abruptly, now it was becoming wider, only to narrow again beyond the next hill, and it seemed that heavy rocks would squish the sides of the car. Now and then, the road would suddenly become almost vertical, like a rearing horse, and our straining engine would rage and roar. It was a hard and beautiful road, carved through the mountains as early as the 1920s, making this land accessible to people. The road would become blocked around the passes only during bad snowstorms.
I was looking through the window without a break, eagerly, with a feeling of sweet pain. Mama sat next to me in the car since we were on our way to see the healer in Namangan, and our misfortune was riding along with us. Still, this road and these mountains were doing something for my soul with every passing second, every passing hour. One could say that they distracted me from my somber thoughts. No, that's the wrong way to put it. They didn’t distract me – the pain was inside me – they filled me with something else. And the road was streaming, whirling, falling, hiking rapidly up and up, now almost running into a rock, now heading for the river bubbling among the boulders, now receding from it and reappearing somewhere far down below, at a bend or in the valley, so calm and peaceful, somewhere in the endless expanse, beyond the haze of the hills.
One of those little valleys, green and inviting, appeared in our path, and we stopped for a short rest. It was time for Mama to take a break, and we also needed to fill the tanks with gas from the extra fuel can. Here, we naturally wouldn’t find any of those gas stations we were so used to on the highways in America. Even if we came across a gas station, gas there was worth its weight in gold. Though we could see other things, fondly remembered and cherished from childhood. Trees, as tall and slender as ship masts grew on the sides of the road. A row of half a dozen stands could be seen in their shade. It was a small roadside market, a pleasure for travelers when they reached the pass. Here one could quench one’s thirst with kumis (mare’s milk), buy fragrant honey and freshly toasted sunflower seeds, feast on kurt –white salty balls made of kumis, or eat a fresh warm crumpet with homemade cheese. Local Uzbek women were selling that food. Clad in brightly streaked traditional silk dresses, fur vests, kerchiefs, and thin leather boots, they all had weather-bitten brown cheeks that revealed them to be mountain dwellers. But just like women anywhere in the world, they were chattering with such enthusiasm that they didn’t seem too concerned about selling their goods. And they also didn’t seem to care much about what their kids were doing, so the kids played, clustering together and happily poking at the ground.
We ate and rested in the shade. The sky was like a huge blue tea bowl inverted over us. The air was crystal clear. Everything we saw –sky, trees, river, mountain slopes – was very distinct, down to the last small detail. Goats were grazing on the closest mountain, very near the top. “Mountain goats. Only they can go that high,” our driver explained.
The mountain was so steep that its slope was almost vertical… Horses were neighing close to the river in that small peaceful valley. The river was wider there, shallow, quiet and transparent. Pebbles on its bottom sparkled in the sun's rays. Mama looked at the water, squinting.
It was time to continue our journey. The mountains whirled around us, retreated, disappeared from view, as we descended ever lower, and the Fergana Valley opened up before us. It seemed especially bright and hospitable after the beautiful yet wild and severe mountain landscapes. It was impossible to tear our eyes away from the generous beauty of the plenty created by human hands. Orchards floated along our path. The tree branches were heavy with fruits, like precious stones – rosy peaches and apples… Grapevines twined around small columns… Melon fields filled the air with the delicate aroma of honeydew. It seemed possible to reach out and touch the melons and the huge striped watermelons through the car window… Sunflowers bent their heavy gold-crowned heads. Corn stood like a dark-green solid mass. Emerald cotton fields crisscrossed by canals and roads stretched to the horizon. Villages could be seen – their roofs flashing among slender trees that appeared to reach for the sky.
"I’ve heard," Yakov enlightened me along the way, "that this rich agricultural country was called Davan in ancient times. Now, as you know, the Fergana Valley is divided among three countries – Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The Uzbeks own more than half of the valley. And people naturally flock here in great numbers. It's quite densely populated. Almost a third of the population of Uzbekistan lives here. And they live nicely, right? They're lucky."
“Lucky they are, but they've toiled really hard for this luck,” I thought, clinging to the car window.
Canals shone like long stripes in the distance. Webs of ariks branched off of them. And all along the canals, one could make out the small figures of people with hoes, opening spigots and crosspieces to allow the water to run into their ariks.
"There are hundreds of canals here," my guide explained. "The water comes from the mountains through the Naryn River and Kara Darya. They flow from the very top of the Tian Shan, from the glaciers, and they converge here in the valley to become the Syr Darya." Yakov pointed somewhere off to the east where most likely that miracle occurred – the birth of the largest river in Asia. "So, there must be enough water for gardening and crops, but I’ve heard that there's not enough drinking water. They have a lot of problems filtering it. Ariks, as you can see, are ancient. They’re the old Asian irrigation and drinking water systems."
Then Yakov finished his story with some unexpected information – we were getting near a dangerous area where the local Tajiks and Meskhet-Turks had been engaged in a bloody feud, though Yakov wasn't worried. "It’s happening farther on, in Tajikistan," he assured us, waving his hand in that direction to demonstrate how distant it was. "It’s quiet on the Uzbek side of the valley."
I told him about the bloody atrocities, unbridled abuse of power, killings not only of children and old people but of fetuses ripped from the wombs of pregnant women that I had heard about on the news. I wanted to understand what was going on there.
"Ethnic discord, Valera," Yakov shrugged. "Fighting over power and land, as usual," he finished sadly.
Meanwhile we were approaching Namangan. There were more people on the road. The atmosphere was more animated, and urban dwellings began appearing on the roadside, the same prefab four-story buildings as in Tashkent, the same shopping centers, so the city didn’t seem distinctive to me, although I wasn’t examining it closely.
Surkhandarya Street was unpaved and dusty. The gate. The courtyard. The garden. The one-story house. We knocked at the gate for a long time. We had covered miles and miles to get here, but perhaps we were not expected, perhaps no one was at home. Then we heard steps – and the door was opened. It was a dark-complexioned middle-aged man, and he was very calm.
"Come right in. I am Mukhitdin Inamovich."
This was an Uzbek home, a real Uzbek home where life continued the habitual way from generation to generation, where footwear was to be left at the front door. It had a cozy living room with a carved ceiling and plinths, and rugs on the floor. On top of the rugs were blankets, on which we sat down, crossing our legs before a distarkhan, a kind of low table, laden with sweets and fruits. We were tired, tense, tortured by the waiting. The only thing we were eager to do was to talk to the healer as soon as possible. But it is easier to move a rock than to break a custom. No one would talk about business with travelers before feeding them. After exchanging greetings, we talked unhurriedly about our families, children, and work. We drank fragrant tea with sweets – that’s how an Asian meal always began. Then the host served soup – shourpa in large bowls, kogas, a very tasty shourpa. In other words, everything took its normal course, and perhaps it was for the best. The exhaustion of the road receded, and tension was eased. There was wisdom in ancient customs.
It was only after the meal that the healer turned to Mother and said, "Let me examine you."
The examination, which happened right in front of us, seemed quite strange to me. The healer didn’t ask Mother to undress. He didn’t take out a stethoscope. He took Mother’s right hand, put his fingers on her wrist and began to feel her pulse… I froze, trying not to breathe. Suddenly he asked, "When did you have an inflammation of the right fallopian tube?"
"Inflamm…," Mother thought for a moment. "I had one about 30 years ago after a miscarriage."
Then the healer was feeling her pulse again. "Something’s wrong with your left breast. When did you have surgery?"
Mama looked at me in surprise. “Does this mean that you've already told the healer everything? When did you get the chance?” I understand from her glance.
"The surgery was about two months ago," she answered.
I remained silent. I was lost, awestruck. I didn’t know how to express it. The thing was that I hadn’t had an opportunity to tell the healer anything, neither on the phone nor today. I hadn't had the chance. I hadn’t talked to him about Mama’s disease – that was it. And suddenly now… I looked around, for the first time, with a strange feeling. Where were we? At the doctor’s for a long-awaited visit? But those words were so closely connected in my mind with a hospital environment, a well-equipped office, white robes, at least. Here there was none of that. Perhaps after this he would take Mother to his hospital, I thought.
He hadn’t done a blood test… no x-ray… This strange healer sat calmly near my mother, his fingers moving lightly around her wrist. He could hear some melody. Beethoven – the name flashed across my mind. Why Beethoven? He was deaf… And this man was not, he wasn’t deaf. We were deaf, the deaf spectators.
"When did your tailbone begin to ache?"
That, I knew myself. Five years ago, Mama slipped and fell on the stairs. She was in pain. Injections had to be administered. The amazing thing was not only that he knew about it but the way he asked the questions. He didn’t ask, “Does you tailbone ache?” He asked, “When did it begin to ache?"
"When did you begin having the pain in your lower leg?"
Her right leg had begun to ache after Mama tore a ligament. And in that way – question after question, without any tests, equipment, or x-rays, in that room with the rugs that reminded me of the Tashkent of my childhood, he told us about all Mother’s ordeals, exactly, down to the last detail. It was like magic, but I stopped myself. “Calm down. He's not a sorcerer. He's a scholar, a doctor, but you’ve never met such a doctor before.”
At last he took his fingers off Mother’s hand and looked at me. His face and gaze were very calm, but when our eyes met, there was something special in that gaze. It was somewhat penetrating, but I didn’t know if I felt that because I was nervous. He looked at me and talked, bending his fingers like a child counting. “First of all, we need to cure her liver, uterus, fallopian tubes… heart… cortex…"
At that moment someone called him. I rushed out of the room after him. I was afraid he would reveal something in front of Mama. Liver, uterus, heart… And what about the most important thing? Why was he silent about that?
"Doctor," I mumbled, "Muhkitdin Inamovich. How about it? Will you be able…? Is there any hope of curing her?"
"We’ll see, my dear man. You see, it’s already in the liver."
Mukhitdin Inamovich expressed his thoughts in a very simple way. Was it because he had talked to her not in his native language or because he was a simple person by nature and didn’t like to overuse scientific terms the way many doctors did?
“It’s already in the liver,” echoed in my mind over and over. Blinking to remove the fog from my eyes, I asked, "What will happen? What?"
"We’ll see, my dear man," he repeated. "In your mother’s uterus, I saw two scars left from scraping. That’s where it spread from. We need to try hard to stop the process. If we succeed, there is a chance, but she will need to be treated for a minimum of three to four years.
I began to nod as if in understanding, though I didn’t comprehend anything then. However, the words “three to four years” made me almost happy. They allowed me to breathe, they meant postponement, they gave hope!
Mukhitdin Inamovich patted me on the shoulder. "Let’s go. Mama is sitting there alone."
It was amazing. I had known this person for only a few hours, but I had the feeling that he was an intimate acquaintance whom I had always known. I felt complete trust. I was relieved. No more of that horrible burden that seemed to press not only my soul but my whole body into the ground. Why had this happened? Because of his unpretentiousness? Because he had managed to determine this just by feeling her pulse? But that didn't explain anything. Probably, some amazing qualities of his soul had made him a true healer.
It seemed that Mama felt it as well. She greeted us with a smile. "You’ve told me everything about myself. Now, please, look at Valera," she requested.
He nodded, "Sit down."
I sat down, fighting off my fear. He barely touched my wrist as he said, "When you were a child, you had a bad case of food poisoning. Do you remember?"
Just think. The doctor was wrong. I was upset. "I didn’t…," I began to say, but Mama interrupted me.
"You did. You had food poisoning. We all had food poisoning from meat… We spent three weeks in the hospital. He was almost ten, so he doesn’t remember," she explained to the doctor.
He nodded. "That’s why when you run for a long time or lift something heavy, you have pain here… under your left ribs."
I looked up at him but couldn’t say anything. The most expensive doctors on Park Avenue had examined me, did all the tests, but they couldn’t find anything. Nothing! They couldn’t explain what caused the pain.
The doctor held my hand, nodding slightly. You have four colics located there, in your intestines," he muttered, obviously explaining what had happened to my intestines after the poisoning. What “colics” were, I could only guess. They must have been some kind of obstructions. But that wasn’t important. If he knew I had pain, he couldn’t be wrong about the diagnosis.
Then the doctor found what I myself knew about – I had an allergy and a pinched sciatic nerve. That was all, thank God. I sighed with relief.
Perhaps in order to calm Mama down, after understanding that we liked him, (With his permission, I was videotaping the way he worked.) Mukhitdin Inamovich decided to show us a video about some of his patients.
In the first frame we could see a woman with a child in her arms. "From Turkey," the doctor explained. "The five-year-old child couldn’t walk from the time he was born. He had cerebral palsy."
In the next frames, the doctor massaged the child. One frame, another, then a third. One angle, then another. But in all of them, there was the motionless little body and the doctor bent over it. But suddenly, something was different. What was it? Yes, the child moved his hand. More frames. Massage, massage, massage… But now we were watching very closely, very attentively… Up… his leg moved… Yes, he moved it, the knee was bent… Another frame – the child was sitting! Now we were excited, waiting as if for a miracle… And it happened. There he was crawling, getting to his feet, and there was the happy mother in tears (Who wouldn’t cry under the circumstances?), watching her child playing, romping. That day, we saw a few more amazing tapes. Not all of them could demonstrate graphically, like the one with the massaging, how the doctor worked, but they showed desperate, exhausted, seriously ill people at the beginning, and the same people, happy, serene, physically reborn at the end.