Reading Lieutenant Zherebtsov’s log, as rendered by Paustovsky in Kara Bogaz, I was overtaken by a sense of something more than maritime adventure. Travelling with him past ‘gloomy, precipitous coastlines’ and reefs that ‘seem to lie in wait’, I had the impression that the writer was taking a covert sounding at the end of each paragraph, as though Paustovsky were in search of navigable channels between the world as it really existed and the one that he dreamed.
We set out from Baku, heading for Astrakhan, and from there past unknown and inhospitable coasts further south. […] As far as the bay at Kinderli we struggled against a brisk southerly wind – the ‘moriana’ – which blew us dust and the smell of brimstone from the desert. It is said that mountains of sulphur can be found there.
The story grows increasingly fanciful as Zherebtsov, emissary to Tsar Nicholas I, journeys further along the eastern coast of the Caspian. The explorer and his sailors see the Asian continent rise from the desert like a ‘doorstep. A threshold unassailable, to be breached according to the nomads only at one spot: along the course of a dry river bed.’
The style and rhythm of this journal bespeak the formative hand of the littérateur. Paustovsky exhibits no qualms about distorting the landscape ‘by virtue of a great, sparkling and shifting fragmentation of the sun’s rays’ – which causes Zherebtsov to see the coast as ‘a sharp and jagged mountain range, while in actual fact it was flat as a sheet of paper… Thick layers of sky are permeated with salt, lending the sun a dull, rather silvery colour even as it shines relentlessly.’
Gradually I came to suspect that Paustovsky was toying with, or perhaps even consciously mocking, the space given him to manoeuvre as a Soviet author. Had he intentionally opted for this unknown territory in order to give his literary imagination free rein? It was as though, having drifted far from familiar geographical locations, Paustovsky was creating a universe of his own. And of course why – so far away from the centre of power – should he worry about verifiable reality?
To establish whether Lieutenant Zherebtsov was a historical figure or a fictional character, I turned to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. There I found him in the index: Zherebtsov, lieutenant commander 1st class, assistant harbour master at Baku, naval scout – cartographer. His most memorable exploit, the encyclopedia said, was the charting of the shores of the Caspian in 1847, as commissioned by the Russian Imperial Ministry of Transport and Sea Traffic. Under the heading ‘particular achievements’ I found ‘Discoverer of the bay at Kara Bogaz’.
There you had it. A geographical area of that name really did exist, or had existed. My research to date had turned up ‘Kara Bogaz’ only as a mythical place of legend. The name was first recorded in a 17th-century almanac, in connection with the mysterious disappearances of seagoing vessels: Kara Bogaz translated as ‘Black Maw’. It was a voracious sinkhole, a Bermuda Triangle in the Caspian where ships went down without a trace. Ordinarily sober-minded merchants along the Volga delta claimed that the Caspian poured down through fissures in the seabed there, only to well up again thousands of kilometres to the north. Once the water had been desalinated by layers of subterranean rock, they said, it served to replenish the Volga. Others claimed that the Maelstrom, a whirlpool which drank up the waters of the world’s oceans, was actually located in the Caspian: in a round basin, rumour had it, somewhere along the eastern coast.
Lieutenant Zherebtsov had had no idea where he might find Kara Bogaz. The only clue, in that same 17th-century almanac, proved useless: ‘Off Farabad there is a marine waterfall that makes such noise as to cause the Persian merchant to give it a wide berth, for fear of being dragged down into the underworld.’ But no one in Russia had heard of Farabad. And what was a ‘marine waterfall’? How could the level of the sea drop so steeply as to cause water to go pouring down inexorably?
The nautical chart at Zherebtsov’s disposal provided no more than a hint of Kara Bogaz’s possible location – ‘consisting of two wavy, dotted lines’. That sketch was all there was to show for an earlier expedition organised by Peter the Great to expand his influence in the direction of India. To that end the shipbuilder-tsar had commissioned a convoy to travel to the Oxus river. Although once comprising a section of the Silk Route that had been navigated by scores of merchants, its exact course was unknown to the Russians. Marco Polo had seen mulberry-wood boats bobbing on it, and legend had it that the mounted army of Mongol general Genghis Khan had watered their horses along its banks.
Accepted wisdom at the imperial court in St Petersburg was that the Oxus must drain somewhere in the southeasternmost corner of the Caspian. In his dreams Tsar Peter pictured his fleet sailing down the Volga and across the Caspian to the Oxus, where it would push into the heart of Asia and, hopefully, on to the Indian Ocean. The only problem was that the river’s mouth proved impossible to locate.
After wintering on the Caspian coast, therefore, the tsar’s expeditionary force, commanded by General Bekovich, had no choice but to set out overland. Nomads had told his scouts that the course of the Oxus had been diverted long ago by means of an earthen dam. The powerful khanate of Khiva, since ancient times a famous station along the caravan routes, was said to have achieved this feat of advanced hydraulic engineering by employing slave labour. If the rumour were true, military engineers reasoned, it should be no problem to blow up the dam with gunpowder and so restore the original course of the Oxus as a channel for navigation.
Bekovich and his men made their way across the Karakum Desert until finally, dusty and exhausted, they made camp one day’s march from the mud gates of Khiva. The khan, having been warned, rode out to meet the troops. He accepted their gifts, received the general with a great show of Oriental hospitality, invited him and his officers for a magnificent meal at his palace, and had them beheaded the next day. The general’s skull, stuffed with straw, was passed as a trophy from one khanate to the next.
For the Russians, therefore, the mystery of the Oxus remained unsolved. Only one year after the death of Peter the Great, in 1726, did the Russian hydrographer Semyonov discover the entrance to the dry river valley. Tucked away between walls of rock he found the remnants of a vanished civilisation: wooden troughs, irrigation canals, shards of pottery. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia notes under Semyonov’s particulars that the contours of Kara Bogaz remained uncharted by him, ‘because his men refused to sail into the bay’. In the distance, the hydrographer had seen a foaming funnel, a strait through which the waters of the Caspian were being drawn with unheard-of speed. But his sailors would not obey Semyonov’s orders to set course for the channel.
A century later, during Lieutenant Zherebtsov’s journey, the myths surrounding the Black Maw are still very much alive. Those who let themselves be drawn into it, fishermen from Turkmenistan say, find themselves in a pool of sulphuric acid that dissolves ships’ hulls and propellers within weeks. But Zherebtsov is not to be put off by bad omens. ‘Arriving close to the bay at Kara Bogaz we saw a dome of reddish-purple haze floating over the sand, like the smoke of a silent fire burning above the desert. Our Turkmen pilot’s comment was: “Kara Bogaz is smoking.”’ Once his ship nears the strait, which can barely be seen from sea, the lieutenant has little time for consultation: his corvette is dragged into the ‘hell-gate’ to Asia. ‘The current was wild, and the strait resembled nothing so much as the Volga at high water.’ Its timbers cracking and groaning, the ship hurtles down this river for two or three kilometres until the foamy caps make way for the leaden mirror of the bay in which ‘all sound seems strangled’. That is all; nothing else. The crew drops anchor, but decides to keep the corvette’s motors idling that first night.
‘With our supplies of fresh water being diminished, the boilers were fed with water taken directly from the bay. Just before sunrise we discovered that, despite being blown clean every quarter of an hour, their inner walls were covered with a layer of salt thick as a man’s thumb.’
Zherebtsov suspects that the bay’s salinity is comparable to ‘that of the Dead Sea in Palestine’. Floating on the waves are shoals of dead fish that wash up, pickled, on the beach. The shores, it turns out, are composed of gypsum and saline clay and are devoid of freshwater springs. The climate is extreme as well, as we read in the logs ‘quoted’ by Paustovsky: ‘No rain ever falls here. The extreme heat causes it to dry up before it touches the ground.’ The lieutenant believes that the bay is a huge, flat kettle in which the water of the Caspian evaporates, thereby explaining its extreme salinity. Without expanding further, he states that this is a very unusual kind of salt, ‘of a make-up different from that of common table salt’.
He is also struck by broad, parallel bands of red foam on the water. He has a sloop lowered and discovers that they consist of minuscule shrimp eggs. ‘When I set course for the next strip of foam, somewhat pinker than the others, a most unusual sight occurred. The band took flight, squawking loudly, and flapped with a clumsy cumbrousness over our launch and the heads of its baffled oarsmen. It was a flock of flamingoes that had been sitting on the foam and feeding on the shrimp eggs.’
Amansoltan Saparova was born of Turkmen nomads in a kibitka, a portable shelter of animal hide, somewhere amid the furrowed sands of the Karakum Desert. As a girl of ten she had danced with a Young Pioneers’ shawl around her neck for the salt miners of Kara Bogaz.
I met her at the Hotel University, a dormitory colossus in Moscow’s Sparrow Hills district with crumbling carpet in the hallways. Outside, the wet snow of early winter flaked against the windows. Dr Saparova was a ‘chemical historian’, a member of the Turkmen Academy of Science, and had written her thesis on the history of sulphate extraction during the first two Five-Year Plans (1928–1937). Her skin was bronzed, her black hair tied up in a knot, and she wore spectacles of unmistakably Soviet provenance: large, tinted and with an almost elegant bend to the arms. Her Oriental blood could be seen in the eyes magnified by those lenses, their irises and pupils equally black.
Moscow in mid-November was a horror to her, but she had chosen neither the season nor the venue for the annual salt conference. Mrs Saparova was approaching retirement age, and if all went well this would be her last scientific meeting.
My request to talk to her had met at first with hesitation. ‘About Kara Bogaz?’ she repeated suspiciously. In the lobby, amid pillars overgrown with plastic ivy, I found Amansoltan sitting as if she were there for a job application – ramrod straight, her hands folded in her lap, alert. I had noticed the same characteristic in older people who had made a career in the Soviet era: they were forever on their guard.
Of course she was familiar with Kara Bogaz: in fact, she had drawn on it for her thesis. ‘Paustovsky researched the whole thing quite accurately; there’s no historical nonsense to be found in it,’ she told me.
I was not entirely sure whether she meant this, or if she was simply afraid of saying anything derogatory about Paustovsky.
As long as we remained on familiar ground, she spoke freely. Amansoltan confirmed that Lieutenant Zherebtsov in his report had recommended damming the ‘useless lagoon’. That, he speculated, would put an end to the fish mortality: all gurnard, herring and sturgeon sucked into the bay, after all, died by the shoal.
His superiors in St Petersburg were already drafting plans for the dam when Zherebtsov withdrew his advice. What had caused him to change his mind was the analysis of a sample he had brought home which turned out to consist of pure ‘Glauber’s salt’. Closing off Kara Bogaz might safeguard the fish population of the Caspian, Zherebtsov reasoned, but it would also interrupt the process by which this medicinal salt was formed.
Glauber’s salt, Amansoltan told me, had been discovered by a 17th-century Amsterdam pharmacist, Johann Glauber, who, during a trip to the Alps, had been advised by local shepherds to relieve his stomach cramps by drinking from a rather smelly spring. Once recovered from his ailment, he poured some of this salubrious liquid onto a sheet of blotting paper. What was left behind was a white powder that he called sal mirabilis (‘miracle salt’), a name later changed to ‘mirabilite’ or, more commonly, ‘Glauber’s salt’.
‘Na2SO4,’ Dr Saparova dictated.
At Kara Bogaz this miracle salt precipitated on the shore in the form of a white crust. The flat kettle (no more than four metres deep, but with a surface area of 18,000 square kilometres) served as an open-air still for the production of sodium sulphate, an indispensable ingredient for the glass and paper industries, for tanning and the manufacture of artificial fertilisers.
Even under the tsars, it transpired, enterprising merchants had set about exploiting these deposits. The shores of the bay on which the salt crystallised from mid-November to mid-March were placed under concession to a cigarette manufacturer, a lady merchant from Petersburg and a commandite partnership. The extraction took place by primitive means: during the winter, nomads would rake the washed-up salt above the high-water line and in the summer carry it off on camel-back. But the First World War interrupted the concessionaires’ work, and pirates took advantage of the chaotic period that followed. Nameless ships would appear out of nowhere, charge their holds quickly and disappear in the direction of Persia with a cargo of mirabilite.
That remained the situation in 1921, when Lenin requested detailed information about the mineral reserves there. For her dissertation, Amansoltan had been granted access to his personal correspondence. ‘If you are extremely busy this can wait for a few days, but absolutely no longer than that,’ the Soviet leader told his scientific adviser, reserving 40,000 gold roubles to pave the way for socialist exploitation of the bay. The scouting expedition reported that: ‘The unique capacity of this area makes the bay at Kara Bogaz the richest source of Glauber’s salt not only in our fatherland but in all the world.’
It was Soviet engineers who at last began the extraction of sulphate on an industrial scale with the gruelling construction of a processing plant at Kara Bogaz; it was to become one of the flagship projects of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan.
Such were the facts – all of which I could find in Amansoltan’s thesis. But I wanted more than reports, or reports about reports. I wanted to visit those remote chemical plants. Were they still operating? Was the bay at Kara Bogaz still navigable?
She laughed loudly and nervously. Two of her salt-engineering colleagues looked up from the glasses of tomato juice they were diluting meticulously with a carafe of vodka.
‘Out of the question,’ she said.
I reacted irritably. What did she mean, out of the question? Judging from her business card, Dr Saparova worked for the Turkmen Ministry of Chemical Affairs; I had expected that she, of all people, would be in a position to help me. But she insisted that all areas of sulphate extraction, and those of phosphate as well, were strictly off-limits.
‘During the Soviet era,’ I objected. ‘But surely not any more?’
Amansoltan’s expression hardened. ‘Without a propusk,’ she said, ‘no one can even get close.’
In Russia, and apparently in Turkmenistan as well, public life was regulated by propusk. The propusk, or permit, was a deep-seated Soviet phenomenon that had grandly survived the fall of Communism. Even the right to live in Moscow was reserved exclusively for those holding a permit. Anyone lacking an array of these profusely stamped, laminated passes got nowhere, was no one. The propusk granted Duma representatives access to the Duma, tram drivers the right to enter the tram garages, archivists to the archives.
What I wanted to know was how I could go about getting a special Kara Bogaz propusk – who issued them? If I passed myself off as a sulphate expert, would I stand a better chance? – but I realised that this was not the moment. We both sipped at our tea, which had grown cold by then; I shifted nervously in my chair and turned the conversation to days gone by: did she remember anything about living in the desert?
Seeming relieved, Amansoltan began telling me about the boletuses. Was I aware that, once or twice a year, rain fell on the Karakum? ‘Within a couple of hours, mushrooms pop up everywhere.’ As a child she would be sent out to gather mushrooms, which her grandmother fried over a fire fuelled with dried camel dung.
‘Karakum’, I would do well to realise, was Turkmen for ‘black sand’. But the desert also contained tracts of silty, reddish loessial soil, and yellowish, shifting dunes like those in the Sahara. At the bottom of deep ravines there grew the leafless saksaul, a thorny shrub that had somehow come to be classified as a tree. ‘Cheetahs used to hide under them. Sometimes they would steal a foal or a sheep, but they haven’t been seen there since the 1950s.’
Amansoltan owed a great deal to her father, or rather her foster-father. His name was Rashid, but he insisted on being called Rashid-Aka; the suffix ‘aka’ being an expression of the respect to which he laid claim even as a young man. She told me that he had joined the Bolsheviks in the 1920s of his own free will, a decision that had been an enormous advantage to him, and later to her as well.
Amansoltan’s foster-father came from a fishing clan. At a tender age he had already gone out fishing alone on the Caspian in a felucca, a small wooden sailing boat. He sold his catch in Krasnovodsk, the harbour where he one day discovered that the comrades had seized power. There on the quayside, at the age of sixteen, the Revolution had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck: out of curiosity, young Rashid the fisherman had let himself be recruited by the Red soldiers and their Communist Party.
The representatives of the Soviet powers rarely ventured then beyond the basalt ridge that separated Krasnovodsk from the rest of Turkmenistan. The coastal town was no more than a bridgehead from which they undertook half-hearted efforts to pacify the basmachi: proud horsemen who fought with scimitars against the new authorities.
In those efforts, Rashid proved a useful accomplice. An excellent horseman, he could crawl like a circus acrobat around the strap beneath the horse’s belly while it was at full gallop. In 1932 he actually became athletics champion of the Socialist Republic of Turkmenistan and, by way of reward, was sent to Moscow to be trained as a secret agent.
‘In 1936 he witnessed Maxim Gorky’s state cremation in Red Square,’ Amansoltan said. ‘And later that of Maria Ulyanova, Lenin’s sister, as well.’
When Rashid returned to his native region in the late 1930s – as intelligence operative in the district of Krasnovodsk – his future bride, Amansoltan’s mother, was still wandering the sandy plains. Having been widowed early, it was her habit to move with her firstborn, her family and all their sheep and camels from gorge to gorge in search of new pastureland.
As an infant, Amansoltan went along on those treks, which often lasted for days, tied to her mother’s or aunt’s back. The bonds rubbed so terribly that she would arrive at their destination covered in blood. On her fifth birthday they shaved her head, ‘except for two little braids’: a ritual signifying that she had survived vulnerable toddlerhood and would now be given a horse of her own.
Until a few years after the start of the Second World War the nomadic tribes could still cross the border into Persia freely, where they traded carpets for lemons, dates and tea. But all that changed in 1946: with the passing of a single ordinance, nomadic life became tantamount to vagrancy and therefore punishable by law. I was reminded of the Soviet appeal cited by Paustovsky in Kara Bogaz: ‘Nomads! Strike your tents […] Cease your wanderings through the barren deserts and become workers.’
The Turkmen fisherman’s son with his special instructions from Moscow was charged with taming the nomads. When his wife-to-be arrived in his district one day on horseback, he claimed her for his own. She and her daughter were taken into custody and brought to him for interrogation. Rashid, by then a widower himself, took mother and child into his own home.
‘My grandparents tried to flee to Persia with their herds, but the Red Army had closed the borders. There were watchtowers and armed soldiers. All our animals were collectivised.’
Collectivised?
‘Yes, appropriated, “stolen” we would say these days… As far as that goes, a lot has changed.’
Her father, she told me, had a scar on his shoulder. Everyone knew it was from a sabre wound, the result of a fight with the basmachi. ‘He wore that scar like a badge of honour. I remember that, as a child, I was awfully proud of that. But these days the basmachi are commemorated and honoured again in Turkmenistan. Now they call them freedom fighters.’
Amansoltan’s suspiciousness, I saw, was ebbing away. She told me about the very first time she’d been allowed to visit the salt works. She must have been nine, maybe ten. Still a Young Pioneer – ‘Always ready!’
In those days there was no road to the bay. The white powder on the desert floor squeaked beneath the tyres of her father’s Kommandir jeep. Amansoltan had been given a pair of oversized workman’s sunglasses (‘like a mask’) and watched through the darkened glass as her countrymen chipped at the caked salt and shovelled it into baskets. They wore headscarves to guard against sunstroke, and used the loose ends to protect nose and mouth from the maddening flurries of salt.
In the new ‘chemical town’ at Cape Bekdash, on the isthmus between the Caspian Sea and the sulphurous lagoon, the heat was a little more bearable. A fountain bubbled there and eucalyptus trees had been planted. Because of Rashid’s position, Amansoltan was allowed to spend four consecutive summers at the salt facility’s Pioneers’ camp. She recalled the cheerful atmosphere among the members of the Komsomol, the Red Youth, students of civil and hydraulic engineering from the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat who would spend their holidays doing volunteer work at this remote outpost. Packed together tightly in the beds of Kamaz trucks, they sang the popular songs of the day, while the dust beneath the wheels billowed up like smoke. In the evening, when the heat died down, they would all go to the open-air cinema. It was there that Amansoltan, wearing her red shawl, had danced for the salt workers.
After secondary school the sometime nomad girl found work as a laboratory assistant at Krasnovodsk’s oil refinery. She learned to pipette and distil; when it turned out she was good at that, she was recommended to the Mendeleyev Institute in Moscow. All of the Soviet republics were expected to provide a quota of students, but Turkmenistan had almost no educated candidates; without really trying, Amansoltan ended up at the best college for chemistry in the Union.
The Soviet comrades had given her a chance to better herself. This realisation was all that kept her going, for life in Moscow was hard. She hated the mud months, November and April, when the snow turned to a wet, brown mush. She moved into a communal dormitory close to Sokol metro station, little more than a stone’s throw from Hotel University.
‘I married a fellow student,’ she said. ‘A Russian boy. But I’d rather not think about that.’
She had three children. Completed her studies. Got a divorce.
By then her parents had died and Amansoltan had no one to go back to. She had little choice but to accept an assistant-professorship, not a bad job after all: it offered the prospect of promotion and Party membership. Starting in 1975, she had worked on and off on her dissertation in the archives of the Lenin Library. She never joined the Party. ‘By the time I was approved, in the 1980s, I wasn’t interested any more.’
Like so many others, Amansoltan had had her fill of Communist rhetoric. Her opinion of Konstantin Paustovsky, too, had changed. ‘He was and remains a Soviet writer,’ she said matter-of-factly.
What did she mean by that?
That was hard for her to explain. He was popular, no doubt about that; every Turkmen who had learned to read and write, every Turkmen in other words, was familiar with Kara Bogaz. And true enough, Paustovsky’s optimism was phenomenal. But it was as though he had somehow fallen from his pedestal. Until ten years ago, Amansoltan said, there had been a Konstantin Paustovsky Street in Krasnovodsk, ‘but after the Soviet Union fell apart it was given a new name, like Krasnovodsk itself. Just the sound of it was far too Russian.’
Despite his infectious enthusiasm and good intentions, Paustovsky remained a representative of the Soviet occupier. To put it rather crassly: a colonist who had urged nomads to work in salt pans in the burning sun in order to scrape together riches for the bosses in Moscow.
‘Paustovsky never admits the tiniest fraction of a doubt,’ Amansoltan said. ‘As though things could only work out perfectly for us, for sulphate extraction, for everything. But don’t forget: that work is the unhealthiest you can force a person to do. So how could anyone sing its praises?’
She had never suspected Paustovsky of malicious intent – those were simply the times he lived in. ‘But that unconditional “belief in a radiant future” wasn’t necessary,’ she added resolutely.
If I was interested in literature, and in her native country, I should read Andrey Platonov. ‘A Russian Soviet writer as well,’ she said. ‘And Paustovsky’s contemporary.’ The first time she had come across his work was in Moscow in the 1960s. His novel Soul in particular had made a lasting impression. It was about her, or at least about the nomads of the Karakum. I had read a few collections of Platonov’s short stories, but not Soul.
Amansoltan suggested that I read Soul alongside Kara Bogaz; it would add nuance. I promised to do just that.
Andrey Platonov wrote Soul, or Dzhan, in 1934. By then Paustovsky was already a popular writer, his Kara Bogaz making triumphant headway among the reading proletariat. A new edition appeared every two or three months, and the combined print runs ran into the hundreds of thousands.
Platonov’s readership, however, was limited, his relationship with the authorities troubled. It was Maxim Gorky who had helped the 35-year-old writer by including him in a ‘travel brigade’ of Muscovite authors bound for Turkmenistan. The idea was that they would find inspiration for Soviet themes along the way.
In 1934 Turkmenistan was celebrating its tenth anniversary as a Soviet republic and barely had a literature of its own, while the ‘liquidation of illiteracy’ campaign was moving from oasis to oasis and leaving behind a trail of local schools.
The dozen writers sent out by Gorky travelled along the Trans-Caspian Railway – the ‘Iron Silk Route’ completed in 1930 – with stopovers in the Karakum. While his companions descended into their nocturnal drinking bouts, Platonov kept to himself. He would go outside and lie on a warm hillside beside the Amu Darya, a meandering stream that split at Khiva into scores of even smaller waterways.
To his wife Masha in Moscow he wrote: ‘The desert beneath a starry sky has made a deep impression on me. I have come to understand something I have never understood before.’
During a visit to a collective cotton farm Platonov asked about the dried-up bed of the Amu Darya. He had read that five or six centuries ago the main channel of this river, known then as the Oxus, had cut through the whole length of the Karakum and emptied into the Caspian. But owing to siltation – or to irrigation projects at Khiva; the archaeologists were still bickering about that – the river had changed course in the direction of the Aral Sea. Platonov’s hosts nodded and led him down to the dead river valley, where they showed him the remains of terracotta conduits and agricultural terraces. But the deep gorge proved not to be dead after all. Beside pools of still water the writer met Soviet citizens who had no inkling of the Revolution, let alone of the tenth anniversary of Socialist Turkmenistan. This assorted band of wandering souls he referred to as the Dzhan, ‘a Soviet people who hunger like no other after happiness’. In Platonov’s words they were rovers who owned nothing but ‘a heart and the fact that it beats’. In another era they had worked the farmlands of Khiva. ‘At the irrigation mills they took the place of donkeys. Their work it was to push a wooden lever and cause the water to run into the channels.’ But now that the river had withdrawn, they simply vegetated in ‘a deep ravine with steep sides like a burial pit’.
In Platonov’s landscapes I recognised the places Amansoltan had described: she and her family had wandered through this same gorge. The major difference with the Dzhan was that her grandfather had been a prominent baj: an owner of sheep, camels and a herd of pure-bred Akhal-Teke horses.
Her mother’s mother had told her many stories about the gorge, which the locals called Ushboy. With its craquelure of clay, dry but for a couple of marshes, the bottom had once been the bed of the Oxus. According to Amansoltan’s grandmother that river was ‘a fickle woman, mourning her youth and the cities she had once known’. The Oxus still sought reunion with the Caspian, which she loved with all her might. ‘But the Aral Sea had lured her in and abducted her.’ Because of this adulterous whim, the population that was left behind was doomed to wander the Karakum for all time.
Against this mythical background Platonov sends his protagonist Nazar on a mission of redemption to a backward people, on behalf of the authorities in Moscow. As a child of the Dzhan, the emissary (‘who had, from a tender age, a strong antipathy to sorrow’) had once run off in pursuit of a tumbleweed and ended up, after much wandering, at the Moscow Institute of Economics. As a learned man he returns ‘to establish a world of happiness on his native soil’.
At the railway stations on the steppe along his way he is struck by the portraits of Lenin, copied so pathetically ‘that Lenin looks like an old man, a kind of good father to all orphaned inhabitants of the earth’.
Nazar reports to the Party Office in Tashkent, where the secretary-general gives him his orders:
‘Go there. Find that lost people.’
‘All right,’ Nazar said. ‘But what am I to bring them? Socialism?’
‘What else?’ the secretary retorted. ‘Your people have already been through hell, so now let them spend some time in paradise; we can afford to give them that. You will be our official representative.’
Nazar is determined ‘to countenance unhappiness no longer’. As he searches for his people he comes across a camel in Ushboy Gorge, sitting in an almost human pose with its front legs resting against a sandbank.
‘Its humps sagged loosely and in its black eyes lay the tentative gaze of a wise and melancholy person. A clump of tumbleweed came scraping along out of the distance. The camel looked at the thistle, its eyes alit with hope, but when the plant rolled on the animal closed its eyes, not knowing how to weep.’
The Dzhan themselves are in just such a state of comatose melancholy. The ‘people’ prove to be a pitiable residue of humanity, sucking on wet sand to quench their thirst. ‘Blessed be those who die in their mother’s womb,’ is all Nazar’s mother has to say when she is reunited with her son at last. Because the souls of the Dzhan have been ‘lived to a pulp’, there is nothing left for them but to ‘mechanically vegetate onwards’.
In addition to Nazar, it seems, another Soviet emissary has arrived: a man by the name of Nur-Mohammed. This evil character lures the remaining inhabitants out of the still-moist gorge in the hope that they will die amid the dunes. He plans to escape to Afghanistan with the 12-year-old Ajdym in order to sell her on the slave market. Nazar intercepts this caravan of the thirsty, submits to the most gruesome hardships, but with Ajdym’s help finally succeeds in eliminating the infernal Nur-Mohammed. As a kind of Moses, Nazar then leads the survivors out of the desert. Arriving at civilisation’s gateway they are met by a convoy of Soviet trucks and its barrage of headlights. The trucks are loaded with rice, hard tack, flour, cans of meat, medicines, petrol, lamps, axes and shovels, clothes and books.
The Dzhan set up a commune on the spot. ‘At Nazar’s recommendation the people elected a workers’ council, which everyone joined […]. And Nazar rejoiced silently to see the steely-eyed, protective hedge of Bolsheviks standing around poor, sweet little Ajdym.’ This socialist experiment, however, lasts less than forty-eight hours. As soon as the Dzhan awaken from their sleep, sated and strengthened, they roll their meagre belongings in reed mats and scatter. From a mountaintop plateau Nazar and Ajdym watch as their kin swarm out in all directions. Once they have disappeared from sight, Nazar sighs in resignation. ‘It was here […] in the infernal quagmire of the old world, that he had hoped to live authentically at last. But the people saw more clearly than he how they could best live. It was enough that he had helped them to survive; let them now, each and every one, go in search of their own happiness beyond the horizon.’
The composer of this final chord would have known all too well how it would grate in the ears of the official censors. Like all writers, Platonov was obliged to first submit the text to GlavLit, the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs, whose officials were empowered to approve a manuscript for publication, or to turn it down. Their ‘nihil obstat’ was delivered in the form of a number consisting of five digits and a letter of the alphabet. Anyone casting doubt on or ridiculing Soviet thinking did not receive a GlavLit number.
With the packaged manuscript, however, Platonov enclosed a letter in which he promised in advance to rewrite the ending: ‘Please note the following when reading: the author will write a different version […] in which the people of Dzhan achieve a state of happiness as realistic as possible for modern human beings.’
As was to be expected, the author received his manuscript back by return post. But even his next version, in which the Dzhan come together to live harmoniously in a socialist commune, was not approved. No matter what he tried, Platonov never succeeded in having Dzhan published during his lifetime.
Paustovsky knew that the censors were not to be trifled with. Sincere or not, at the end of Kara Bogaz he sounds the requisite drum rolls and clarion call: ‘We shall carry out the Party slogan and achieve the industrialisation of the outlying regions.’ The Soviet engineers, put ashore by Paustovsky to harvest the mineral riches, will ‘give the lie to the cruel legends about the desert, by bending it to the will of socialist industry.’
A strange machine arrives in the bay, designed to prise loose the deposits of salt and ease the gruelling labour. Moscow sends ‘collapsible homes’ for the Turkmen ‘in which they will never again be plagued by fleas’. The nomads are shy and suspicious, but their scepticism fades when ‘Lenin’s ten-year-old promise’ is fulfilled: ‘With autumn a rumour reached the kibitkas: a crowd of engineers had arrived, and with them a fleet of machines resembling iron camels; concrete was being unloaded from ships, and the Bolsheviks were planning to redirect water from the Amu Darya to its original riverbed.’
The village elders ‘laugh at the naivety of the Bolsheviks’, who apparently do not know that the sandy bed of Ushboy sucks up water ‘like a herd of thirsty buffalo’. But the Soviet engineers apply themselves to the task. They dig a canal, build a dam and pour concrete where the riverbed consists only of coarse-grained sand.
‘Then the triumphant day arrived. The clear water of the Amu Darya gushed into Ushboy, and the sand did not steal a single bucket of it.’
One by one, impressed by this miracle, the old baji convert to socialism. They demonstratively remove their green turbans – a sign that they have completed the voyage to Mecca – and present them to the children ‘as gifts to play with’.
I turned the final page of my Russian Kara Bogaz, a second-edition print from 1932. The inside cover contained technical information in miniature type, including the print run (20,000 copies) and the price (2 roubles). And amid the hieroglyphs I could also make out a number (B-24290), issued by GlavLit.