Sukunat

I was very young. A summer noon in Uglegorsk, in the Rostov Region: heat, the empty yard of a mining settlement, three-storey blocks and poplars that seemed to me taller than any house. I was riding my bicycle and suddenly stopped. There was no one around. Not even the birds were singing. I heard absolute silence.

And then, out of nowhere, a breeze appeared. It rustled in the leaves of the poplars, set them swaying, and the rustle sounded so distinct, as if until then not a single sound had existed in the world. There were no thoughts. There was only wonder and delight.

Much later I read in the Bible how the prophet Elijah stood on Mount Horeb. A great wind passed, tearing the rocks apart, but the Lord was not in the wind. Then an earthquake and a fire, but He was not in them. And only after the fire came “a still small voice”. The Hebrew text has an expression here that can be read as “a thin voice of silence”. At the time I did not know these lines. But when I read them, I recognised my yard.

There is another silence too, which I came to know as an adult. High in the mountains, at Krasnaya Polyana, on the Black Pyramid, I found myself alone: the tourists were far away and did not disturb me. It was a ringing silence, as vast as the snow-covered peaks of the Caucasus and horizons you can never reach. There you need add nothing: no explaining, no judging, no hurrying on.

These two silences, the hot one of childhood and the high one of the mountains, became the basis of “Sukunat”. That is why it sounds wide, almost orchestral: I wanted to convey not the absence of sound but the fullness of presence. “So‘zlar o‘ldi, qoldi nur” - “The words died - the light remained”. Usually we carry on an endless inner conversation, comparing and preparing our answers in advance, and we stop hearing what is happening in front of us.

The Qur’an says to remember the Lord within oneself, humbly and not aloud, in the morning and in the evening. The Khwajagan Sufis valued quiet, silent dhikr, and al-Qushayri devotes a separate section of his treatise to silence. I would not call that childhood noon a dhikr. But the silence in which a wind suddenly appears teaches the same thing: to listen.

I will not pretend that the boy on the bicycle understood all this. Then there was only wonder. Today I rarely manage to stay in such silence for long. But the memory of that noon has not disappeared. Sometimes it is enough to stop and hear that the world exists even when I stop talking. The wind still passes through the leaves.