Know your enemy: John Angliss introduces his translation of a new short story by one of Azerbaijan’s leading,persecuted writers

Akram Aylisli was celebrated as the People’s Writer of Azerbaijan, until he upset the government. Yet despite having his books burnt and a reward issued to anyone who would cut off his ear, he continues to write. John Angliss introduces an abridged version of Aylisli’s latest short story, The Polecat, published here in English for the first time

THIS WINTER, RENEWED skirmishes on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan led to fears that the long-standing tension between them was esclating again. At the centre of the conflict is not only historically significant territory (Nagorno-Karabagh), but also two competing narratives, with nationalists on both sides telling stories of horrific pogroms against their communities when the Soviet Union began to crumble.

Akram Aylisli, a writer well-known for his plays and novels set in the villages of Azerbaijan, decided instead to tell a different story. In his 2012 novella Stone Dreams, he fictionalised the massacres of Armenians from 1918 to 1989 through the perspective of the Azeris involved, both the perpetrators and those trying to save their Armenian neighbours.

The reaction to Aylisli’s taboo-breaking story was sharp. His plays were banned from theatres; his books were burnt; his literary awards were revoked; and the head of the governing party offered a reward to anyone who would cut off Aylisli’s ear.

“The government tried every possible way to destroy me, but I endured every type of persecution and I did not leave my homeland,” he told Index on Censorship from his home in Baku.

Years after allowing Stone Dreams to be published in a Russian literary magazine, he is still facing persecution. “The dreadful sanctions employed against me and my family remain in force. Officials whom I have known for years are still frightened to say hello to me,” he said. “I am automatically banished from everything under the control of the state. My children lost their jobs. Despite this I am still resisting, because I have thousands of readers in this country and, most of all, we owe them gratitude for bringing me where I am.”

Asked whether he believes that village literature – a genre that has defined his career – will die out as people continue to migrate to cities, Aylisli said it may have a positive effect “for village literature too is formed in the cities”.

Aylisli’s latest short story, The Polecat, is the story of Qubuş, a very ordinary man in a fast-depopulating post-Soviet village. It touches upon the brutality of the crowd and the causes of apparently senseless violence, but also includes elements of slapstick humour, a fascination with nature, and forbidden love.

“I don’t find Qubuş a romantic. He is a simple, conscientious and moral man who is spiritually tied to village life,” said Aylisli. “I also share many of the same qualities.”

Credit: Illustration by Eva Bee

The story takes its name from an incident where Qubuş witnesses villagers killing a polecat and is left traumatised by their brutality.

Writer Akram Aylisli upset the Azerbaijani government with his 2012 novella Stone Dreams, in which he fictionalised the massacres of Armenians from 1918 to 1989 through the perspective of the Azeris involved

Credit: Osburg Verlag

Aylisli explained: “In Azerbaijan, a polecat is a rare and mystical animal. What people know of them is mostly hearsay. This metaphor contains a hidden philosophical message. People maul a living creature, without knowing what it is and why exactly they need to destroy it.”

The Polecat

By Akram Aylisli

1

QUBUŞ WAS DAZZLED by the starlight in the sky in his dream. When he was a small boy, Qubuş had liked nothing more in the boiling summer heat than to stretch out on their sod roof and gaze at the stars in the sky, but back then he had never seen this many stars or this much light.

Then, somehow, the stars suddenly went out. All the light vanished from the world. The sky went instantly darker than dark, like the burnt underside of the metal disk on which his wife Batula baked bread every day. The thought crossed Qubuş’s mind that the stark darkness would remain forever, and so in terror, he shook off his sleep and opened his eyes.

The moon had set, but after the complete darkness of the sky in Qubuş’s dream, the room seemed even more radiant than most nights. By now, the house was cold. In her own bed, Batula was snuggled up tightly in a blanket.

For a long time Qubuş had woken up in the middle of the night whether he had had a nightmare or not. He would get up and wander around outside, then return to his bed to sleep once more.

In the light of day, those nights under the starry rural skies appeared extraordinary to Qubuş, like a separate world having nothing to do with the village, incredibly far away and high above. The village belonged to everyone by day, but by night was only Qubuş’s.

This year, some of those who in other years would have sealed their windows and doors as the cold descended and gone to spend winter in the city, were still in the village. Such a mild autumn had not been seen for a long time. Even if the nights were a little cold, the sun’s heat was sufficient for everyone to go out to other houses or the fields. A number of the houses, which would soon go dark when seasonal city-dwellers left, still burned their night lamps on their porches until the break of day.

Qubuş’s eyes wandered out to the courtyard and fixed on Sona’s house for a long time, dreamily watching the weak flame of the lone lamp burning on her porch.

Sona was not from the village; she was a newcomer. She came to marry a man at least 30 years older than her. After she got used to the villagers, she began to tell everyone: “I was married twice in my own village, but my husbands threw me out because I did not have children.”

“After two husbands, who in my own village would take me?” she said. “Rather than grow old alone, I said, give me a husband – I don’t care if he’s aged or crippled.”

Qubuş had first seen Sona at least 20 years before on that porch. His heart had leapt when he saw her. How strange the magical, sweet passion that was aroused in him; a new world cast light into his heart.

Back then Qubuş was a little older than 50; now he was past 70. In that time, so many things had happened in the world. The kolkhoz [collective farm] had dissolved. Sona’s husband Müslüm, the one-time horse manager on the kolkhoz, became unemployed and got a chest disease from smoking three to four packs a day.

After Müslüm’s first wife died, his daughter, who had married a man in a far-off village, brought Sona, who was the same age as her, to her father. Within a year, God favoured Sona with a perfectly healthy child from the aged, asthmatic Müslüm.

Then suddenly, neither the child remained, nor Sona’s former happiness and beauty. But nonetheless, the magical, sweet passion that had made Qubuş’s heart leap when he first saw her lived on.

Qubuş had once (while Müslüm was still healthy) almost given in to his passion.

That day, Müslüm was not in the village. Sona was left at home alone.

Qubuş gingerly looked into her courtyard. He saw her lying on the dry earth in the shadow of the apricot tree in front of the porch. She got up, leaned against the tree and looked at Qubuş rapt. Then smiled. It was such a smile that Qubuş’s heart filled to the brim with joy, his soul gained untold strength, and an extraordinary light flooded his eyes. He then understood that Sona too had nourished a secret hope. But it turned out that Qubuş would not fulfil the desire that had long lurked in his heart. As he left the house that day, Qubuş’s mother, Xavar, had somehow known where he was going.

Suddenly, there was an earsplitting clanging and clattering of an iron spade from behind Sona’s fence: Xavar had ostensibly brought it out to clean the gravel and stones from a nearby ditch. She went behind the door of Sona’s courtyard and let out such an ugly “ahhem-ahhem” that it put the Müslüm’s three-to-four-packs-of-Pamir-a-day “ahem-ahem” to shame. Realising what was going on, Sona plunged into the house.

Qubuş stood a moment unmoving in the shade of the apricot tree before returning home in distress.

“You scoundrel! You scoundrel!”

As soon as Qubuş got in the gate, his mother began cursing him from afar. From that day on, Qubuş would often hear the same thing from the old woman. But she never spoke of it to anyone else. As strange as it may sound, it never occurred to Batula that Qubuş might have harboured such desires.

2

AND THEN THE hard days began for Sona. Her son Aslan, who went on military service in April, was sent back in a coffin at the end of May. The fire in her eyes, fuelled by her heart’s vigour, went out forever. She mourned and cried, pouring her heart out to everyone she met, blaming her husband Müslüm for the death of her son.

“You know, I told him. I told him a thousand times that that boy would not make a soldier. Take whatever is in the house and sell it, but keep him out of the military – I mean, take the lot and use the money to get him a doctor’s note. He wasn’t sick, I mean, but my son wasn’t one of those boys who could go and serve like a proper soldier. The senile old man didn’t listen to me.”

There were many in the village who had predicted that Aslan would not carry out his military service to the end and return safely. Others thought he might get a sharp shock and come back a “real man”. You see, Aslan wasn’t just any child: he was a great source of trouble for the whole village. There wasn’t a child that Aslan hadn’t harassed and made cry, no old man or woman he hadn’t terrorised. The little tyrant would run men over on his horse. He would gallop up and down, grabbing young women’s scarves from their heads and waving them in the air like flags.

For maybe more than a year, Sona went to the cemetary every day, in the cold of winter and heat of summer, and sat crying at her son’s grave from morning to night.

Recently, Batula had heard from someone that Sona would not stay in the village that winter; she intended to go to stay with her sister who had married in Baku. For now, Sona’s lamp was still a lovely sight on the porch, showing she was still there.

3

OVER THE PAST 20 or 30 years, one by one the young people of the village had gone off and left. They had found jobs in the shops and bazaars of Baku, Moscow and other Russian cities, then gradually enticed their kith and kin to stay with them. Qubuş feared the time would come when no living soul would be left. In the last two years, this fear had grabbed him tighter. Maybe this was why he had recently been having nightmares every night.

Tonight, when Qubuş returned from the courtyard to lie down in bed, he saw such a terrifying dream that even the world’s most horrible tales could not match it.

An empty village; a day without sun. And at the crack of dawn, an uncountable chine of polecats, queued up one behind the other, were making their way slowly into the village from the outskirts. Their target and their intentions were clear: four or five months before, polecats had been mercilessly tortured and killed in the centre of the village – an event which still haunted Qubuş’s dreams – and these polecats had come to take revenge on humans.

The hideous, vengeful polecat army had not yet reached the centre of the village when Qubuş saw another battalion of the animals emerge as if from nowhere and barge into the courtyard, killing all the sheep, ripping them apart and gnawing on their flesh. One of the polecats leant against the gateway, staring with blood-red eyes at Batula, who was sweeping in front of the porch. It was awaiting its chance to charge.

Batula, however, suspected nothing.

Qubuş couldn’t find the voice to shout or the strength to move in order to save his wife from the polecat’s claws. And this time when he awoke to find everything in its proper place, Qubuş went out into the courtyard feeling relieved.

Batula was baking bread on a metal disk below the balcony. The sun was in its place. The sky was in its place.

Qubuş approached his wife and, when he saw the metal plate on the stove, he remembered the deep dark sky from his dream. “Who will I go and see in the village centre?” Qubuş asked, looking up at the transparent, strikingly lit sky. “Will I see Yunus the lawyer? I thought he was an honorable man, but after that polecat incident he lost all my respect. He didn’t carry it out humanely, he was ruthless. What do those animals do to anyone that deserves such brutal treatment?”

Qubuş would not forget the torn hide, broken ribs and bloody flesh if he lived another 100 years. The incident happened in the middle of summer, and afterwards Qubuş was so disgusted by that place that he did not set foot there again.

“Yunus is not a bad man. Don’t use Yunus as an excuse. You were so afraid that day you haven’t shown your face since,” Batula said, laughing. “They say you were like that as a child, an awful coward.”

“Why don’t you slaughter that sheep?” Batula said, after putting a plate of fried eggs in front of her husband. “My mother-in-law, poor woman, died wanting for meat.”

“Who should I get to butcher it? There’s no butcher left in the village.”

“You haven’t even thought of going to visit the poor woman’s grave for a long time. I go every Thursday,” Batula sighed, then stared for a while at the gate.

All the people who would gather in the centre of the village were Qubuş’s age. At some time in the past they had been children playing knucklebones together. Now those people came to boast and brag in front of each other. They wore suits and had mobile phones in their pockets. When their telephones rang, they would quickly run to one side and whisper into them, then return to brag some more. “That call came from Moscow,” they would say. They didn’t care what their children were doing in those Moscow shops and bazaars to make money or what trickery they were resorting to. Everyone, old and young, had forgotten how to till their own soil and earn an honest crust.

Qubuş was originally a carpenter: he worked his father’s trade. Most of the windows and doors in the village were his handiwork. Now no-one built their homes in the village, there was no work for Qubuş, but he was never without employment. He always found work for himself in the garden or around the house. When he had nothing to do, he would make a rolling-pin, a bread board or some other useful thing for his poor neighbours.

4

THAT AFTERNOON, ON his way to the graveyard, Qubuş was forced to pass by the centre of the village, for there was no other road leading there. Qubuş hoped to come across Sona. He didn’t meet anyone, but he both talked to himself and to an imaginary Sona. All the way to the cemetary, they exchanged sweet words.

As he stood with headstones all around, one of the fresh ones stood out. Aslan’s picture looked out with such crazy passion you half-expected him to force his way off the stone, jump on a horse and run someone down.

“You scoundrel! You scoundrel!”

This time it was his mother’s voice that seemed to come from this world.

By the time Qubuş turned back from the cemetary sunset was nearing. Soon the village centre would fill with bragging men. For now, Yunus the lawyer was sitting alone in the square, listlessly fingering his prayer beads.

Yunus was one of the best-looking men in the village. For 40 years he had chauffeured for the First Secretary of the local district committee. When the government fell and the district committee was abolished, he moved quickly to privatise the brand-new Qaz-24 he had been driving by putting it into his own name. Now Yunus drove every day to the district centre to sit and pass the time with his old friends and acquaintances. From time to time he would help not only those going to the station or to weddings and funerals, but also those needing to go urgently to hospital, whether they could pay or not. For many years, Yunus had taught the people of the village to write petitions and where to take their complaints: this is why they called him Yunus the lawyer.

Qubuş wanted just to greet Yunus and leave, but Yunus was not going to let him.

“Hey, Qubuş, where have you been? Sit down. Tell us you’re not tied to your wife’s apron strings, you never leave the house.”

“I have a lot to do at home,” he said. He could find nothing else to say, but he was glad to have the opportunity to ask Yunus about the polecat. “I’ve been wanting to ask you something for a long time. Where did you catch that polecat you brought here once?”

Yunus studied Qubuş’s face suspiciously.

“I ran it over, then I tied it to the car. Both its back legs were broken. But the pest still tried to run off. When I saw it would escape, I tied it up by its head, fastened it to the back of the car, then quickly drove here and took it out so those who had never seen one could see its nasty face. But the burning had nothing to do with me — as you clearly saw yourself. When Manaf the teacher saw that Abdulla the Black-Arse was here too, he ran to his house to get petrol and poured it on the polecat. Then he set it on fire.”

Yunus burst out into loud peals of laughter. “He knew that this would burn Abdulla the Black-Arse as well. I saw myself how hatefully Manaf glowered at Abdulla as that creature burned away.”

Abdulla the Black-Arse was one of the richest men in the village and he had married Samaya, the village’s most beautiful girl. Manaf the teacher was madly in love with her, and the marriage drove a hot brand into the poor man’s heart. The people of this village were so difficult that everyone harboured malice towards someone.

“A polecat is a real pest,” said Yunus. “There’s no nastier animal on the face of the earth. They are such dishonourable animals that they will dig up corpses and eat them.”

“Have you seen polecats dig up corpses yourself?”

“No, I haven’t. I heard it from my father.”

“Obviously your father must have heard it from his father. This is just a story, it’s nonsense. People have been living in this village for thousands of years, and no one has yet seen a polecat desecrate a corpse. It’s an old habit of idle people the world over to put the truth aside and talk of fictions.”

Neither could find anything to say for a while.

“I’m raising a beautiful yearling sheep for roasting. Can you come and butcher it in the morning,” Qubuş had no idea how such a thing had suddenly occurred to him.

Yunus looked completely astonished: “Qubuş, are you seeing straight? When did I become a butcher? I’ve never in my life so much as slaughtered a chicken. If you like, I’ll find a man from the town tomorrow to come and slaughter your sheep. If you give him a kilo of meat, he’ll be happy.”

“I will, in fact I’ll give him three kilos. You find someone and bring him in the morning, and you’ll get a nice share of meat too.”

“You can be sure of it,” said Yunus, determined.

They ran out of words.

Qubuş decided it was time to go. It wasn’t long until the morons with their mobile phones came out of their houses to swagger over. But instead of getting up to go home, Qubuş had a vision of Aslan’s sly eyes, with their crazy passion, among the fresh gravestones.

“Maybe you will know, Yunus,” he said. “Where did Sona have Aslan’s gravestone made?”

“Sona didn’t have Aslan’s gravestone made, I did,” Yunus said with unconcealed pride. “I saw her off. She packed up and left for Baku this past Sunday.”

Qubuş felt a dark wind rushing through his heart.

“Impossible! But her lamp was burning all night.”

“She left it like that on purpose. If my son should suddenly arrive, she said, let him not see the house unlit. She still wants to believe he is away on military service.”

Qubuş said nothing to his wife about Sona when he came home.

“I saw Yunus the lawyer in the centre of the village,” he said. “He promised to find us someone from the town to kill the sheep in the morning. That lawyer is a real lawyer. Look what he told me: he said that everyone who goes out to the village centre has a big devil inside of them. They all hate one another. The man who set fire to that polecat, in his own mind, was burning his enemy. It’s difficult for a person to believe these things, but some lap it up.”

Batula found what Qubuş said quite funny. Laughing, she said: “You were there that day too. Maybe one or two of those people were burning with rage for you.”

Qubuş didn’t take his wife’s laughter seriously, continuing with his previous earnestness: “Why one or two?” he said. “Almost all of them!”

“Bah! Why would that many hate you? Who’ve you done any wrong to?”

“Enmity doesn’t only happen when people do wrong.”

“Then where does it come from?”

Qubuş had long known the answer to this question, but he was in no hurry to tell Batula. He looked silently at his wife for a time. “It comes from me not being like any of them,” he said, his heart knowing that if a polecat resembled other animals, maybe the villagers would not have persecuted it so much.

5

THAT NIGHT, QUBUŞ did not go out into the courtyard. He did not want to see the single lamp burning on Sona’s porch, because for Qubuş, the burning light now meant that Sona would never return to the village. What was the relationship between Sona putting that light on the porch when returning to Baku and whether or not she would return? Qubuş didn’t know. But despite not having gone to school, he knew that in this world, there are some things the eye cannot see; only the heart can.

August 2015