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Ella and The Fountain Of Tears
Even though Russia has annexed Crimea again; Crimea will always have a city called Bakhchisaray
ENCOUNTER
MUNEEB HAROON
We met Ella and her husband for the first time at the
dinner table in Istanbul. They were our group mates
on our recent visit to Turkey. Ella is a beautiful lady with blond hair. She has the looks of a middle
aged Bond Girl, who could have easily played a KGB agent in one of the Bond Movies. She had
been a music teacher in Soviet Union and was really good at playing the piano. A couple of times she
showed her piano playing skills by playing the one in the hotel lobby. She loved to talk and was fun to
talk to.
We talked about almost every subject under the sun including literature. I am a big fan of Russian
prose and I told her that Chekov was my favorite writer. She asked me if I knew that most of what
Chekov wrote was based on his own life experiences. She told me her favorite Chekov story was the
"Lady With A Little Dog." Then the discussion turned to other Russian writers. It was when we started
to discuss Turgenev that she seemed to come alive. She told me that her father had introduced her to
Turgenev's writings. She said she was young when she read his "First Love" and could not understand
why Zinaida would fall in love with an older man. She read it a few years later and was so deeply
moved by it that she could not stop crying after reading that book. For those of you who have not read
the book, the story is about a sixteen-year-old boy, who is infatuated by Zinaida, his new twenty one
year old neighbor. She never reciprocates his affection and often mocks him for his youth. He later
finds out that she herself is madly in love with his father. Ella then went on to talk about the famous
scene in the book, where the son looks through the open window of Zinaida's house and sees her with
his father. He sees that Zinaida is begging him to reciprocate her feeling for him. His father tells her to
stop thinking about him and strikes her arm with a riding crop. Zinaida kisses her arm where he hits
her. As Ella was talking about that scene, she kissed her own arm and you could see the shimmer of a
tear in the corner of her eye. Some books can leave lasting impression on you.
The very first time Ella saw my wife, she became fond of her. She kept reminding me that I was lucky to
have a beautiful wife like her. Then, out of nowhere, with a very serious look on her face, she asked
me: "How much did you buy her for? You must have paid a lot?"
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"Excuse me, what do you mean?" I asked.
"Don't you buy your wives?" She said in a confident tone.
I laughed and told her that it does not work that way in our culture. You cant just buy a wife! It was
only after my wife told her that she was not a commodity, which could be bought and sold, that she
believed me.
The topic then turned to Russian poetry. Russians love literature but they are really mad about their
poetry. For Russians there are poets and then there is Pushkin. To appreciate Pushkin you have to
know Russian; I don't. Robert Frost put it better than anyone when he said that, "poetry is what is lost
in translation." So Pushkin never made it to my favorite poets list. The mention of Pushkin, however,
reminded me of a certain marble fountain in Crimea.
Ever since the Russians acquired the Crimean Peninsula back in eighteenth century, many ethnic
Russians have settled there. This got worse during the communist rule. Joseph Stalin, the genocidal
maniac, forcibly displaced the Tatar inhabitants of the peninsula and put them in the central Asian
Republics and then settled more Russians in their homes and cities. The Crimean Peninsula is a
Russian majority area now. The supposedly "ethic neutral" communists went on to change the names
of every neighborhood, every street from their Tatar names to Russian ones. Only one place was
spared this "Russianization" campaign, the city of Bakhchisaray. The reason: Bakhchisaray has a
palace which contains a small marble fountain. Confused? Here is the story.
Before Catherine the Great captured Crimea from the Tatars, one of the rulers, Kirim Girey Khan, had
fallen in love with a captured slave girl and married her. The girl, alone and away from her home, died
soon thereafter. Heartbroken, Khan wanted a monument built, a monument to commemorate his
beloved wife. To build a monument befitting the grief that the Khan felt, the royal architect decided to
build a marble fountain. This fountain has been crying and shedding tears in the corner of the palace
ever since. When Pushkin visited the palace back in early 1800s and saw the fountain, he was so
moved that he immortalized it in his famous poem "Fountain of Bakhchisaray." It became one of the
most popular poems in Russia and has been made into a movie and a ballet. Even that genocidal
maniac, Stalin, could not demolish the fountain of tears. Since Pushkin's poem was called "Fountain of
Bakhchisaray ", you can't have the Fountain of Bakhchisaray in a city with some strange Russian
name. Because of the fountain, the palace was spared and the city is still called Bakhchisaray.
As we were talking about Pushkin, and since we had been discussing recent events in Crimea, I
decided to ask Ella about that Pushkin poem. I asked her if she knew the poem. With a smile she said,
Sure I do. Then she closed her eyes and recited the poem for us. She was reciting it in Russian, a
language my wife and I do not understand. That did not matter. The expression on her face, the way
she uttered those wordsit all conveyed the emotions and meaning of the Pushkins poem to us
although we could not understand a single word. Right away I knew that even though Russia has
annexed Crimea again; Crimea will always have a city called Bakhchisaray.
Poetry is that powerful!
(Muneeb Haroon is a Kashmiri-American physician who lives and practices in New York)
Lastupdate on : Thu, 17 Apr 2014 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Thu, 17 Apr 2014 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:00:00 IST
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