How strange that this region should have been cut up and named along ethnic lines in the Soviet era, precisely during the ambitious dream of belonging beyond ethnicity, of dissolving the boundary of skin. I have read that it was a strategy of both Lenin and Stalin to ward off potential nationalist insurgencies by granting certain forms of nationhood, such as borders and languages, to the ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union. So two styles of homeland, ethnic and Soviet, developed in the same place.

After exploring the mausoleum further, she closes the chapter with the following meditation:

Usmon points out the holes pierced at either end of the brick monument at the center of the mausoleum. Samanid rulers were said to reign for forty days after their death, and during this time you could send them messages through the holes. I think of the Swahili words sasa and zamani, loosely translatable as now and then, and the idea that for a certain period the dead remain with us in the sasa, the now, before fading into the zamani. If only we could keep them with us longer. I’d tear out this page of my notebook, crumple it up, and stuff it between the bricks. And the Samanid kings, poised between life and death, would read that I tasted sunflower oil. That I felt a film of dust.

We walk outside to admire the building’s ornate heather-gray molding and the salt that makes it look lightly sprinkled with snow. There used to be an ancient cemetery here, but the Soviets razed it to build an amusement park. Now the Ferris wheel carves the sky, like the Zoroastrian symbol for the sun.

While I came to this book out of an interest in the region, Samatar’s prose and deft handling of ideas has committed me to picking up her fiction sometime soon.