“Goodness” by Odil Yaqubov (1965)

Every time I think about my Aunt Munavvar, I don’t remember that painful event that happened later, but that summer day when my soul became a little sad and warm. My grandmother’s garden is crowded with our relatives and my uncle’s cousins: someone is building a firepit, someone is chopping wood, and someone is sprinkling water in the yard and rolling out a carpet on it. An evening wedding!Everyone is elated. I join the other children and together we play and shout happily to one another, climb into the blackberry bushes, and hunt for eggs in pigeon nests . . . All of a sudden, from the middle of the grape arbor my grandmother’s head appears, a familiar sight that brings me comfort and warmth. She calls me over and puts two or three bunches of grapes from her shawl in my skullcap.“Go take these to the living room. Let your uncle and aunt . . . try them.”I want to run toward the living room, clutching my skullcap to my chest, but my grandmother stops me, holding my hand, and slowly says looking around:“—If . . . they happen to say ‘sit down,’ don’t stay. Let them be alone together at least for a moment. Tomorrow . . .” Grandma speaks in a barely audible tone, her lips trembling, she presses the end of the shawl to her eyes and whispers: “Go!” My uncle will leave for the war tomorrow. Last night he ran off with my new aunt from Tashkent. Judging by the whispers, they had studied at the institute together. At night, our house was full of women, and I could not see my aunt, but this morning I saw her near the spring when I was returning from the pasture.My uncle was washing his face leaning over the spring, and my aunt was standing by him in an atlas ikat dress, a silk headscarf decorated with purple flowers, a towel on her shoulder, and a bucket in her hand.My aunt, tall, even taller than my uncle, was a slender girl with a long face—I noticed this while my uncle bathed and toweled off. I was particularly struck by her ghostly, gloomy, coal-black eyes. In general, there was a slumping sadness to her body, yet with an open, gentle, thoughtful face.I wanted to pass by them unnoticed, but my uncle saw me and called me over.“—Here, meet Munavvarkhan,” he said. “My nephew, Mansurpolvon, this is the boy I told you about. If someone hurts you while I am gone . . . you just let him know . . .”My aunt took the bucket in her left hand, held out her right hand to me, frowned and smiled gently.“Is it so? If someone hurts me when your uncle leaves . . . will you take my side, Mansurjon?”I blushed and muttered something. My uncle answered for me: “Not only that, but my nephew will take off the head of the person who offends you, won’t you?”My aunt winked at me. “Oh, stop it, not everyone is a hooligan like you!”My uncle burst out into laughter. I hardly knew what to feel it was so strange, and I ran into the garden. Ever since then, my aunt’s thoughtful expression, the kind words she spoke to me have lingered in my mind. What a simple village boy I was then! Without a thought, I sprinted and opened the living room door with a bang! My aunt, who was in the center of the room, turned around in fright.My uncle, resting his head on my aunt’s lap and playing with her hair, stepped aside and looking at me says, “Oh, it’s you again, polvon?1 Come over here.”“Yes, this is . . . Grandma wants you to have some grapes . . .”“Your grandmother?” My uncle laughed again. “Come on, give me the grapes, let’s all enjoy them.”When I set the grapes on the table in front of them, I saw tears in my aunt’s eyes. I wanted to put the grapes down and leave, but with an index finger she wiped away her tears and took my hand.“Sit down, Mansurjan, we will eat the grapes together.”My uncle reluctantly offered: “Sit down!”He squinted at me, passing a bunch of grapes to my aunt.“Do you know why your aunt is crying? ‘Let the wedding be old-fashioned,’ she says, she wants to enter the chimildiq.”2“Yes, I want to make a proper entrance,” she added.“She wants to greet her aunts bowing with kelinsalom.”3Eating the grapes one by one, my aunt says, “Why are you laughing? A once-in-a-lifetime wedding, I want it all. My poor mother! Please do not offend her. Let them prepare the chimildiq, organize kelinsalom, let the girls sing lapar.4“Look at this! These are the words of an aunt who is almost a university graduate!”“So what if I am educated? After all, you’re going to war tomorrow.” My aunt turned away, unable to speak.“Okay, okay, I give up, honey! Have it your way, enter chimildiq, please your aunts as well. Just don’t cry, darling. Come on, wipe your tears, smile!”With a laugh my uncle tugged gently on her hair. But I also noticed that he was emotional too, and his little laugh was really just to give himself cover. Dismayed, I quietly slipped away.The wedding was in the evening. On a summer night, mournful melodies full of feelings of separation sounded over the village gardens. When the bride arrived (my aunt came from a neighbor’s house), a bonfire was lit at the gate, and the assembled men brandished a rope.5 Grandma, with a handful of coins, laughed and cried with joy as she scattered the money over the bride’s head.6 Girls and boys played until dawn as if they wanted to forget completely about the separation and the longing and anguish over soldiers going off to war. In the morning, the crowd gathered in the village square and with tears and prayers, saw off thirty young men.After my uncle’s departure, my aunt felt alone and isolated, not knowing what to do with herself or where to go. She looked like a deer in the headlights, spoke little with relatives despite their attentions, not even with my grandmother; she wandered around the garden alone most of the time, lost in thought, her large soulful eyes staring into the distance.Sometimes I brought her a range of books. She accepted the books gratefully, thanked me profusely, but read very little, or closed them before she even started. Only on those days that a letter from my uncle arrived did her eyes shine. Only in those moments was she happy, and here and there in the big garden you could hear the gentle buzz of her humming songs to herself.A week passed in this way. Then, before the term began (she got a job at school), she went to the steppe to harvest wheat, saying if I stay in the house all day, “I feel suffocated.” No matter how much my grandmother begged or pleaded, my aunt refused to return from the steppe before school started. Not every day but every two or three days, I rode my donkey out to the steppe to deliver my grandmother’s provisions—two or three loaves of bread, three or four grilled corn-on-the-cob, a large bowl of samosas, and a jar of sour milk.As my aunt was a girl from the city who was not used to challenges of the rural village, she soon grew thin and sunburnt. It was apparent that she was suffering in these conditions, but she always received my grandmother’s greeting with smile on her face: “Try to calm her down. Mansurjon, tell her that ‘I am doing just fine among these young women and ladies.’”She had my sympathy. Wasn’t it better to be there on the steppe where they are all one group, crying together with them if they cry, laughing together if they laugh, instead of moping in the village, waiting for the mail carrier day and night, completely self-involved?Many of those working on the steppe were young girls whose hearts were being grilled by the pain of separation just like my aunt. They worked hard, often until midnight, as if they were taking revenge on their pain. They sang poignant lapar that they interwove with songs for their sweethearts on the frontlines, and you could hear them tremble out across the wide steppe. They wrote letters of simple sincerity. My aunt, at the request of the girls, sometimes wrote “more beautiful” letters for them, and sometimes composed poetry, so everyone loved her.My aunt looked forward to seeing me, mostly because I brought news from my uncle.At such moments, my aunt held my head tightly with her work-roughened hands, pressed me to her chest, kissed me on the forehead, and shouted: “You are the one, my savior!” When I saw her face this animated, her coal-black eyes shining with joy, I was over the moon, and I wanted to cheer her up.My aunt returned from the steppe on the eve of the start of the term, but after a week, the school closed, and everyone went back to the cotton fields. In the middle of September, suddenly letters from my uncle stopped coming.In his last letter my uncle wrote, “We will enter the battlefield soon,” and that was it.Fifteen days later, a letter came from a boy from our village who was in battle with my uncle. He wrote that my uncle was wounded and was taken to hospital. This guy said that he saw him with his own eyes and asked for my uncle’s address so that he could write. This letter filled all hearts with hope. It was like the sun rising on a dark night; my aunt’s eyes once again doggedly traced the path of the postman. But a month went by and there was still no word from my uncle. During this period, so many letters were written to the guy from our village—he himself was injured and was also in hospital. He once again stressed that he personally witnessed how my uncle was wounded, how the medics pulled him out of a trench. But what of it? There was still no sign of him.My aunt was very brave at first, trying not to give in to despair. But the days went by, crushed her spirit and in the end, and she went limp. Despite the letters that came from the guy from our village, even after he was discharged from the hospital, her spirit faded away, and she fell into permanent depression. She was broken.No longer teaching, she could always be seen walking across the field lost in thought, her lips trembling like a small boy’s, her eyes blinking back tears. Every day at noon, she would send me home, to see right away if a letter had arrived, and then I would observe the color drain from her face and watch as her hungry eyes would wander along the path I had traveled. There was no greater pain for me than shaking my head and saying no, looking into her large, dark eyes full of hope!I usually walked away in silence, not daring to look into her eyes, and then took the cotton she had gathered to the cotton gin and mowed hay beside the cows along the ravine. I had a dream that one day a letter from my uncle would arrive, and I would come running to bring her this letter from afar. This scene never left me as I walked and walked: my aunt crying tears of joy when she saw the letter, then laughing, then hugging and hugging me, and we would grow ever closer . . .I am telling you mostly about my aunt, but the situation was even more difficult for my grandmother. Every evening as soon as my aunt returned from the fields, she went to her guest room and lay on a wire-frame bed and stared at a point on the ceiling for hours without moving or speaking, and my grandmother who was even more upset, had no way to soothe her. Most of all, my grandmother did not want my aunt to leave.It was the middle of November, but the frosts had not come yet. The days were warm, as in early autumn, and under the trees they cast a purple carpet of shadows on the lawn. The bare gardens already seemed perfectly gloomy and serene.In the morning, while saddling up to go to the mill, I heard my aunt’s voice coming from the kitchen. She was talking excitedly to grandmother.“Oh! I am sure a letter will arrive today,” she said. “I had a dream. Your grandson rode a horse.”“God bless, let it be, dear.”A moment later, my aunt came out with grandmother, carrying a bag of oatmeal mixed with barley, her thin face beaming. She helped me hoist the bag up on to the donkey.“—Come back soon, nephew—she laughed—I will make pumpkin pie today and we’ll celebrate! . . .”I hopped up on my donkey, feeling happy, too. No one was home when I returned with the milled oats. I tossed the sack of flour into the kitchen and went to the stream, leading the donkey.As I approached the stream, I saw my grandmother sitting in front of a large grave under an old mulberry tree. Grandmother called this grave a shrine to her saint, every Saturday she tied a white cloth to an argali sheep’s horn and at night she burned incense on her altar.Squatting like a man, there was grandmother, with a prayer mat beneath her, her lips moving in a whisper, imploring the saint.I had seen my grandmother behave this way in the past, but she usually did it in the wee hours or during regular prayers, but today she did it at noon.Feeling restless, I went to the stream, and as soon as I got there, my heart lifted. By the stream, near the spring among the willows, my aunt was sitting, rinsing her yogurt-coated hair in the water.As she shampooed, she saw me, stood up, and piled her soft hair, which fell to her waist, on top of her head.“Back so soon, nephew?” I am going to add a little pepper to the pumpkin pie so that the taste remains in your mouth! She picked up her bowl and went into the garden, and I lay down on the grass and let my donkey wade into the water, its neck craning across the spring to get at the dry grass that grew on the other side.If only my aunt’s dream would come true, that the postman would leave a letter! When I carry this letter to her, the dark clouds gathered over our house disappear and the sun would break through!Slowly, I straightened up and looked over to the garden. Grandma was no longer under the mulberry tree. Hesitantly, I approached the grave and knelt down.I closed my eyes, and I offered in a whisper a kind of prayer that only a child could utter, full of sincerity and passion: “O, mighty, merciful, kind one! Grant my wish! May my aunt’s dream come true! For my grandmother’s sake, dry my aunt’s tears, lift the sadness from their heads. Oh, kind, mighty one, protect them!”“The postman! The postman!” Voices seem to break in on my prayer. Startled, I opened my eyes. There were children shouting—herding cows near the stream. The postman—a young man who lost an arm on the battlefield—was approaching us midstream riding his long-eared donkey.A feeling of dread, yet warm as the autumn sun, swept over my body. At that moment, I was dead certain that the postman was heading toward us, bringing a letter from my uncle!I up, by a feeling and I into the A letter! A letter from my grandmother out of the her with My aunt her with a in one hand, a in the and her hair was as a with her hair down, she went me and ran off in the that I was by grandmother, her shawl with her I after them, but the postman never came our way. he toward the neighbor’s garden, I felt my up and came to an the stream, my aunt her hand, the in the me the letter . . also came up in and on a young man, us the letter, Come on in the are a pumpkin eat your and enjoy it as a for the news you are my postman stopped his He his which looked like a as if he was going to his then turned his face to the and letter, are you talking letter, a A letter from my his the postman said do you want from the only letter that come is not from your but from the head of the hospital. it . . . It was on by the head of the village aunt me There was such such in her eyes that I felt had and I like a into the Grandma still get you she said with a you telling me that this letter came from his and you it to the village my a who lingered long after the the postman his donkey a My grandmother was going to run after but my aunt cried . . . it It is no turned to me, her lips trembling, this the news you had for her trying to get I looked at the unable to face her trembling I “I . . . I only wanted to I my aunt’s eyes filled with tears at first, and then she with this was your of . . . out of my like a and to the At that moment, my grandmother, who had standing there in a looking back and her and me, toward her, while I into the . . long someone from the village arrived, and in an women and the and crying For a week, coming and going from my grandmother’s and the day or no one, not even my grandmother, me a For a week, I a living soul to I could out my I with After all . . . I loved my aunt from the of my and I did it only to bring her joy, to do for could I have that the letter would arrive on the day, at the it be that my aunt a week later, my grandmother me. I saw her and her which had one and the and I into her and I told her all my pain. I that I it to her but because I it was from my uncle, and I to bring joy to my aunt. I told her that I still for her and that, if I even to give my for her. . . for my She my She to my aunt, kissed me on the and my I had no way of knowing what my grandmother had said to my aunt, or what my aunt would have said in but I know that my aunt never looked back at a and a on her she the I for her day and night, for a word from her, I to her eyes she left the but she saw me she off in the before I could month later, my aunt was set to return to her of our relatives went to the to a that she at least say or a word in of the I for her from early the her and my grandmother, I went to the stream, to the spring where I my uncle and her. When the began moving and approached the spring, I stepped slowly the My aunt, in a and a shawl on her on the with her back turned to . . won’t she won’t she around to look at . . . Not even say . . . look at to my What I It happened this . . . If you me, me, but . . . say just one I . . . I you so so very I was the the old noticed me and said to my aunt. My aunt slowly turned around to look at me and turned away again. It seemed to me that her eyes, and from were filled with tears me. I fell and as the around the in the My aunt did not even She my She me.