The Bookshelves of Tashkent

We lived in a small apartment on Zantkava Street. I say small and I mean it — two rooms, a narrow kitchen, a window in the main room that looked onto a courtyard where someone was always hanging laundry or arguing or both. But when I try to picture that apartment now, what I see first is not the walls or the courtyard or the light. What I see is the books.

My father David had built the shelves himself, from floor to ceiling along the longest wall. This is not a metaphor. He had actually built them, with his own hands, from boards he found somewhere in the way that men in those years found things — through patience and connection and a willingness not to ask too many questions. The shelves were uneven. They bowed a little in the middle under the weight of what he placed on them. But they held. I don’t remember a time before those shelves existed, which means they were there before my memory was, which means books were there before I was.

My mother Sophia stood at the window. This is how I picture her, always — standing at the window, not looking out at anything in particular, her face turned toward the light in the way that people turn toward light when they are thinking rather than seeing. She was not a dreamy woman. She was precise, in fact, quite organized, she managed the household with an attention that I did not fully appreciate until I had my own household to manage. But at the window she was something else. Softer, perhaps, or just more interior. When I picture Tashkent I picture her there, the laundry courtyard behind her head through the glass, the light of Central Asia which is a particular kind of light — thick, almost tawny in the afternoon, with a quality of weight to it that I have never found anywhere else I have lived.

My father read to us in the evenings. He would sit in the chair — there was one chair that was understood to be his, not by any declared rule but by that unspoken grammar that operates in families — and he would open a book and read aloud. Pushkin, often. Pushkin was safe and also genuinely loved, which is a combination rarer than it sounds. But also Akhmatova, which was less safe, and which my father read in a quieter voice without explaining why the voice changed. I understood the reason only later. A child picks up the registers of caution before she understands what they protect. I knew that some names were spoken at full volume and some names were spoken more carefully, and I knew this not from any instruction but from the quality of the air in the room when those names were said.

Outside, it was the same. The talk of names was always quieter on the street than it was at home. I noticed this early. On Zantkava Street, or at the market, or in the courtyard, people had a way of arriving at certain subjects by circling them, coming in from the side, as if approaching something that might startle. At home my father circled too, but less. He allowed himself more. That difference meant something to me, though I was years away from having the vocabulary for what it meant.

My mother worked at a publishing house. I remember visiting her there once as a young child — I must have been five or six — and the thing I remember most clearly is the smell. Paper and glue and something else, something mineral, which I now know was ink but then simply registered as the smell of where my mother went in the mornings. The publishing house had a different feel from the apartment. More formal. People there spoke carefully about a great many things, not only names, not only lineage. The calibration was different. There was a way of carrying yourself inside those walls that Sophia had, and that the other workers had, and that I watched carefully because even at five or six I understood it was a skill.

At home she let it drop. This is the thing I want to say about those years, the thing that took me the longest to understand: the apartment on Zantkava Street was a kind of pressure valve. Not loud, not theatrical — we were not theatrical people — but honest. My father would put down whatever caution the day required and pick up Akhmatova and read her in a normal voice. My mother would stand at the window and think her own thoughts without arranging her face. There was something being preserved in those two rooms. I did not have a name for it then.

What I did have was the sensation of being inside something. Books on every wall. My father’s voice in the evening. My mother’s profile against that heavy Central Asian light. I learned to read early and I read everything I could reach, which eventually, as I grew, was all of it. I remember the physical texture of those books — the older ones especially, the ones that had come from somewhere else, from before, from people whose names were not always said at full volume. Their spines were fragile. Their pages had a quality of wanting to be turned carefully. My hands learned something from that, a kind of patience with fragile things, a reluctance to press too hard.

I don’t know exactly what I inherited from those years in that apartment. I know I came away with a conviction that books are not decorative. That the presence of language — careful, chosen language, language that has been worth someone’s effort to preserve — is the presence of something real. I know that I still find it difficult to be in a room without books in it, that there is an unease, a subtle wrongness, like a room without windows. I know that when I hold a fragile page my hands still know to be gentle.

I know that I learned the meaning of names from the way my father said them — which ones he lifted into the ordinary air and which ones he handled like the oldest volumes on that bowing shelf.

The courtyard below our window was always full of noise. But inside, in the evenings, it was quiet enough to hear everything that mattered.

This is what Maddie makes from a conversation. Yours would be about your own rooms, your own people.