IN OCTOBER 1944, INSTALLED at the Intelligence Corps headquarters on the first floor of the Satriano Palace, I was as ever astonished at the magnificence of the Bay of Naples as seen through the garden statuary, when the order to leave immediately for Taranto arrived. Here I was to take charge of 3,000 Russian prisoners at that moment ‘in transit’. Enigmatic as this first appeared, no further information was to be obtained, so I took the first train south and after many delays arrived in Taranto in the evening of the next day.
A major in temporary command of the Russians explained their presence. They had been captured in the north of Italy while fighting in the German army and were to be repatriated by sea. I would go with them. The major exploded with wrath. ‘These men are shits,’ he said. ‘If any man so much as attempts to escape, you will shoot him.’ I warned him that such an order could not be accepted. He suddenly appeared to calm, and there was a change in his tone. ‘Do they have foxes up in Naples or wherever it is you come from?’ he asked. I told him that I had no idea. ‘Pity,’ he said. ‘They do in Rome. That may surprise you. In the woods. Get one with your pistol if you’re lucky.’
The Russians had been transferred to the veteran troopship Reinadel Pacifico, and going aboard I found them in their rumpled German uniforms filling the holds and crammed into every inch of deck space. To my surprise I was to learn that all these weary, sick and demoralized men had actually turned on their German captors and gone over to the British in the first battle in which they were involved. In recognition of this they had been promised that their German uniforms would be replaced with British ones. This had not happened and a total collapse of morale had followed along with a number of suicides. Almost all the nominally Russians in sight were Asiatics, in particular from Uzbekistan, and at this moment they had begun an almost tuneless chanting described by an interpreter, who had just arrived on the scene, as a tribal funeral dirge.
A Tadjik, who was the first of these Asiatics that I could make understand me, described his experiences when captured by the Germans advancing into Russia. He and his comrades had been herded into a camp where they were held for three days without food or water before they were made to understand that they were prisoners of war. An interpreter had explained their quandary. ‘There are more of you than expected,’ he told them. ‘There is food for a thousand, but ten thousand of you are here, so you must draw your own conclusions.’
The pick of the prisoners were enlisted in the Asiatic division sent to northern Italy and the rest eventually eliminated by starvation or outright murder, and, since regular German army soldiers were reluctant to kill prisoners, methods were contrived by which they were killed by their own comrades.
Between 4,000 and 5,000 Asiatic Russian prisoners died, largely of starvation, in such death camps. Now, squatting among the survivors in the fetid twilight below deck of the Reina del Pacifico, I listened to the survivors’ descriptions of the horrors that had overwhelmed them. Death’s finality, these survivors admitted, was frequently confirmed by a knock on the head, after which the corpse would be smuggled away to a quiet place to be eaten. Cannibalism, at first dismissed as no more than the most impossible rumour, became a hideous commonplace to be accepted. If a man died his edible parts were eaten. Even a prisoner unconscious through sickness was liable to be attacked. One of the men I talked to displayed the cavity in the back of his leg where half the calf had been gnawed away while he was in a coma. Eventually I was convinced that all the ex-prisoners carried on this ship had eaten human flesh. The majority admitted to this without hesitation—as if the confession provided psychological release.
Authority among these survivors was divided between two men, an Uzbek mullah of the Muslim faith, and one of the handful of Christians, Ivan Golik, a Muscovite with the rank of senior lieutenant in the Red Army, whose philosophies of life were diametrically opposed. Golik’s determination was at all costs to restore the fighting spirit of these cowed victims. The mullah, by the name of Haj el Haq (‘the Pilgrim of Truth’), advocated death for his followers, in this case mass suicide by drowning, to be followed by life everlasting in the Muslim paradise. It was a remedy evaded by even the most fanatical of the mullah’s followers by the ship’s arrival at Port Said, where the promised British uniforms awaited us.
Bound to the wheels of a military machine which once set in motion could not be stopped, ordnance spewed forth: not only the promised uniforms but a range of such army equipment as camouflage netting, gas capes, signalling flags, and above all innumerable razors and shaving brushes, the uses of which bewildered these men with hair that grew only on their heads.
It was the three-quarters of this gear that one would have supposed to have been useless that the Asiatics seized upon and converted to the ends of art, piercing, splicing and amalgamating them to provide a variety of musical instruments, tiny, antique-looking fiddles, lutes, pipes and rebecks. Soon the bowels of the ship quivered with the wild skirl of Oriental music.
Supreme theatrical art had transformed a man who had tasted human flesh into a tender princess stripping the petals from a lily while a suitor quavered a love song.
Whatever these men had suffered in the camps, nothing had been able to take their art away.
Incredibly, at last the war came to an end. I was demobilized and decided to visit Central America. I travelled to Guatemala City, where little tribal life was to be found although primitive groups of great interest had managed to survive in the Cuchumatanes mountains occupying much of the north of the country.
Guatemala was the only one of the small countries of Central America not described as being in the USA’s ‘backyard’. Instead it remained stubbornly resistant to all efforts to extinguish its persistent nationalism. Guatemala had held out against all foreign pressure, defended by the poverty of its resources and the absence of oil or very significant amounts of gold. The great barrier of the Cuchumatanes mountains offered better protection than the highest of walls. It was defended also by the national character and the stubbornness of some of the toughest and most dedicated of the Central American Indians.
From Guatemala City I went on to join friends at work in the highlands of Guatemala. Here they were studying the life of the Maya Indians of that area, whose existence as they reported to me was a blend both of sophistication and extraordinary spirituality. This was perhaps most apparent in the Mayan attitude to death. Their Chilam cemeteries were in the centre of the villages and the dead were seen as remaining in contact with the community and even included in family conversations and projects. These people lived wholly on maize and beans, and when these exhausted the soil in which they grew, the family, tribe, or even nation led a nomadic existence until an area where cultivation had not taken place was discovered. It was migrations of this sort that had covered Central America with the ruins of deserted cities.
I had hoped to be able to assist my friends, the Elliots, in their studies of this fascinating race, but was prevented from doing so by the landing in Guatemala of a force of mercenaries from the United States who proceeded to occupy strategic points throughout the country before overthrowing the government, and substituting a right-wing dictatorship in its place. The newcomers had a programme for a revision of the national psychology. Indian communities such as the Chilams would all become peons in the employment of farms, be paid wages, cease to grow maize and beans, and be liable for call-up in case of war. In particular, employment laws were part of the campaign to do away with Indian culture, for the Maya would now be compelled to work in slaughterhouses and even attend church. The old, stubborn and isolated Guatemala had at last joined its neighbours in the backyard.
I settled to write a book (The Volcanoes Above Us) about my sad adventures in Central America, which to my immense surprise eventually became a Book Society Choice for 1954. An even greater surprise was to receive a letter from the Writers’ Union of the USSR to say that they would like to reach an agreement with my publishers to issue the book. It went on to suggest that it would be useful if their representative could visit this country to discuss the possibility with me.
I wrote back to say that I would be delighted to meet the Union’s representative, and a week later I took a telephone call from a London hotel to announce the arrival of Valentina Evashova in this country. It was arranged that we should meet in my agent’s office in Bloomsbury and it was here that our first encounter took place later in the day. A little to my surprise the distinguished professor bore a remarkable outward resemblance to a Russian peasant of the kind portrayed in one of the Soviet films to be seen in London cinemas at about that time. She was sixtyish, short and a little stout, and bundled in garments of the kind a prosperous peasant might have worn to attend a political meeting. Her expression, on the other hand, was intelligent and shrewd. She had dyed her hair dark red. She spoke rapidly in confident and faultless English. Valentina’s wit was quicker than either mine or that of the agent, thus her replies to our questions were ready within split seconds of their being put.
Valentina was critical by nature and ready with instant judgements on all the problems encountered in such meetings. Her eyes ranged dubiously over the office in which she had been received. It was small and bright, but essentially modest in its furnishings and equipment. Later she made some passing comment on this and in a way it was a forewarning or reference to the grandeur of similar establishments in the Soviet Union.
Valentina had been authorized by the Soviet Writers’ Union to inform me that they would print six million copies of The Volcanoes Above Us in paperback form. After some minutes passed without mention of any reward likely to be offered for these rights, she brought up the subject almost in passing. Russia, she said, paid no overseas royalties, but compensated foreign authors in a way most of them agreed was equally attractive. They were invited to visit the Soviet Union, not as mere tourists but as the honoured guests of the nation. The hospitality of the country was theirs to be enjoyed. They were invited to come and go where they liked, and stay as long as they liked. They could, for example, be accommodated for any length of time and without cost to them in a dacha at Sochi in the perpetual summer of the Black Sea. Guides could be given them to explore Central Asia, spend a month with a tribe in Sinkiang or hunt a unique species of boar in Outer Mongolia. As tactfully as possible I pointed out that my agent had worked very hard on the English production and marketing of this book, to which her reply was that she was sure that he too could be invited to become a guest of the Soviet Union.
On this and two subsequent occasions when Valentina visited this country on behalf of the Writers’ Union we were happy to have her stay with us in Essex. It was an environment which must have seemed as exotic to her as later in my case were the Black Sea coast and the valleys of the Caucasus. As was inevitable she was out of her depth with the class system. The village policeman she glimpsed in passing while pruning his roses would be unlikely, she thought, to terrify local evildoers. She was astonished by the behaviour of a son of the local big house who had never quite recovered from his public school, but our gardener impressed her by the pleasing gravity of his expression as he demolished the weeds. ‘Is he an intellectual?’ she asked.
My publisher had thought fit to organize a party for Valentina, choosing the Ivy restaurant for the venue. Included were a Collins director, his film-star wife, and the uncontrollable dog from which she declined to be separated. This could not possibly have been other than a memorable experience for a woman acclimatized to the Muscovite equivalent of what the Ivy had to offer. Everyone who had done rather well in everything came here, and their gay chatter and laughter bubbled all around us. Did they laugh in Moscow? Undoubtedly, but it would not have been like this. I suspected that this gaiety was a convention, and to some extent even a practised art. I could not imagine what I had seen of the Russians fabricating mirth. Valentina had had no practice in subterfuge of this kind. As a Russian she had never been introduced to the mechanism of social pretence. Thus at our small party she was inevitably the odd one out who could not laugh things off and thus reach an easy compromise with unpalatable truth.
My forthcoming visit to the Soviet Union was soon discussed. ‘Leningrad,’ she said, ‘is not completely recovered from the war. You should make a start with Moscow, which offers everything of our country and life-style that the foreigner will wish to see. Be careful in crossing the street on dark nights. We have introduced new laws for car-driving, which is still to be improved. Ask the hotel porter to provide you with a torch whenever you leave the hotel after dark. It is not advisable to drive a car yourself, but if you wish to do so no charge is made for a qualified instructor to accompany you. You will be asked to avoid driving down steep hills or in the medieval district of the city where the roads are narrow. These are indicated by signs.’
Discussion of where best to go next came up and Valentina rattled off a list of historic cities and their principal attractions. ‘Time is short,’ she said, ‘so perhaps we shall be obliged to select a very special few. Had you anything in mind?’
‘Would Central Asia perhaps come into this?’ I asked, a little doubtfully, and I charted the lines of disappointment in her face.
‘Everything depends upon you,’ she said. ‘It is your choice. Central Asia is very large, but four-fifths of it is desert. Were there any towns you had in mind?’
‘I thought perhaps Bukhara, or Samarkand.’
‘No one may visit Bukhara at this time,’ Valentina said. ‘There has been an outbreak of plague. Samarkand is open to travellers. It is a capital of the tribal people, which you might not find interesting. All the same, you only have to say the word and it can be arranged.’
‘You remember I told you about the tribals I took back to the Soviet Union. Most of them were Uzbeks.’
‘And was there anything special about them?’
‘Yes, they were natural artists. It’s hard to explain. But they were in some way different. Not like us. Very few of the other tribals came through. I think the Uzbeks may have been saved by their art.’
‘I’ll give the Union a ring,’ Valentina said, ‘and if there’s no plague in Uzbekistan you shall certainly go. You may need an adventurous guide who won’t be too scared even if you do run into the plague. I suggest Natasha, whose background has toughened her in a way you may need. She was in Leningrad as a child at the time of the siege. The government ordered Russian civilians to stay in the city, even if they were starving. Natasha was only fourteen but her mother dressed her up as a young soldier and got her out. She speaks your language as well as you do, and she’s beautiful if a little cold. When would you like to go?’
‘As soon as I can,’ I told her, and a week later I boarded the plane for Moscow at Heathrow. If at any time the mere boarding of a plane could be an experience, this was one. The enormous flying machine awaiting us must have been designed to represent the power of the nation that had built it. It spread its great wings over an area emptied by its lesser competitors. I climbed the twenty-two steps and trudged silently over a splendidly carpeted floor, following the stewardess. She lifted the voile curtain of the compartment I was to enter. One of its two seats was already occupied by an exceptionally well-dressed man, who rose to bow, shake hands and introduce himself. This was Dr Bryansky, a lecturer in English History at the University of Kazan.
A soft thunder of the engine extinguished the music of Borodin and the great machine moved forward, shaken suddenly as if by a mechanical palsy as it took off. A few moments passed, the red cabin light went out and the music started again, Borodin replaced by a march. What was to follow prepared me for the Russian scene that awaited me more than anything else could have done.
The passengers were on their feet, and were now moving out into the aisle. Dr Bryansky seemed about to join them. ‘Shall we walk together?’ he asked, and I replied, ‘With pleasure.’
The aisle was now filled with two ranks of strolling passengers, and these we joined. ‘What would you like to talk about?’ Bryansky asked. ‘Some special subject, perhaps?’
‘Well, perhaps not at this moment, Doctor,’ I said. ‘My trouble is that I’m a writer, and I’m going to be called upon in the near future to produce a coherent description of my experiences, starting more or less now.’
‘I sympathize,’ Bryansky said. ‘I imagine you’ll be making a start with Moscow. Have you ever been there before?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is my first visit to the Soviet Union.’
‘You picked the worst possible time. Moscow is for spring and autumn. We shall be lucky if the plane is permitted to land if there happens to be a fog.’ Bryansky’s pessimistic gesture was one with which I was to become familiar, but at that moment the red light showed once more and the passengers broke up their social promenade, bowed to each other and made for their seats.
It was after dark when we landed, and spaced ranks of persons, one behind the other, awaited arrivals at the airport. Valentina, holding carnations, stood in the precise centre of the front line. I suspected that the Zil limousine seen at the kerb through the airport doors would be for us, and it was.
A room had been reserved for me at the Sovietskaya, and as we drove yard by yard through a swirling mist Valentina told me about the hotel. According to Valentina it was a quiet place, favoured by visitors concerned with the arts and sciences. It was a hotel, she said, that put itself out to make guests feel at home, and in accordance with this, dinner would feature a typical English menu in my honour. This proved indeed to be the case, our first course being Brown Windsor soup, followed by roast beef. While we tackled this, the orchestra entertained us with pieces most favoured by the British.
Valentina had a surprise for me. Only four weeks had elapsed since the signing of the contract for the book, but on this very day the first copies of the Russian version had appeared on the bookstalls. At the time there were no bookshops in the country and these horse-drawn stalls, parked at various licensed positions throughout the streets, occupied a unique position in the Soviet Union, having to some extent succeeded in remaining private enterprises.
The most energetic and successful of the bookstalls, Valentina said, were in the heart of the city, just as close as businesses could be to Red Square. This particular day was a national holiday and even our Zil limousine was only permitted to cover a short distance of Tverskaye Street—often described as the Oxford Street of Moscow. With the Kremlin in sight we continued on foot, then turned into the narrow and somewhat gloomy side-alley where the leading booksellers were in business.
Here in the dim light and gathering fog we were confronted by what appeared to be a large version of an English market-stall, from the middle of which rose a pyramid displaying stacked ranks of my books. Today, Valentina proudly informed me, was not only The Volcanoes’ publication day, but the copies on sale here were the first delivery fresh from the press. First Day had been stamped on their covers, and this, Valentina hoped, added a stimulus to sales.
I was now exposed to the extraordinary sight of a queue that had formed to buy my book. Buyers were eager, the stall’s owner having announced that supplies were only likely to last for a matter of days. The high sales Valentina had anticipated had made it possible to drop the book’s cost to the equivalent of about three shillings. Valentina claimed that Soviet citizens were the world’s most eager and voracious readers. Such prices undoubtedly helped.
Suddenly, the portrait of The Volcanoes’ author was produced for inspection. It was a face of a visionary and a leader of men. A boldly painted eye stared confidently back at me. There was a challenge here, a firmness of purpose and courage. I looked up at Valentina, who shook her head, and we both laughed.
Valentina tackled the bookseller. ‘Comrade, we both like the portrait, but it’s incorrect.’ He pushed his way through the buyers to talk to us, for a moment distracted by the bell chiming repeatedly on the old-style cash register in the rear. ‘They never sent the real picture as promised,’ he said, ‘so we had make do with the best we could find. The story is that this gentleman in the picture is in French films, but who’s to know the difference?’ Valentina asked how many books he had sold, but he couldn’t tell us, though it was ‘certainly quite a number’. I examined a copy left on the counter. The cover glistened with yellowish varnish painted over a picture of a volcano erupting. In the lower right-hand corner a terror-stricken witness to the scene opened his mouth in a scream. The bookseller smiled admiringly. ‘You must admit it stands out,’ he said, and I had to agree with him.
I spent four days in Moscow, with Valentina always at my side. As she had promised, Valentina had persuaded Natasha to act as my guide on my tour of the country, and on our last evening together, Valentina told me a little more about my future companion. Natasha, she said, was the daughter of one of the nation’s leading film stars, but she had become a figure of some importance in her own right. She spoke all the main European languages with complete fluency, and was therefore in much demand as a guide in the service of foreign visitors. My guide’s arrival at the hotel next morning, however, did little to improve the Muscovite’s reputation for dangerous driving. The road passing the forecourt of the hotel—a prolongation in fact of the Orel Highway—must have been one of the widest in Europe, and, like the rest of the city’s streets, it was largely deserted. Knowing the Russian obsession with punctuality I was waiting with my bags by the kerb when Natasha drew up. Seconds later, with the highway still apparently empty, a taxi crashed into the back of her car. Within minutes the police were on the spot, followed almost immediately by a doctor in a sports car of local production. Natasha had been flung forward, doubled up, by the force of the crash and the doctor suspected damage to the vertebrae of her neck. At that, the doctor drove her off to the nearest hospital for an X-ray. They returned within the hour with Natasha full of smiles and the news that all was well.
As it had been announced that our plane would be delayed, we still had some time to spare. We settled in the hotel’s lounge to discuss plans. Natasha was a lively, fair-haired girl, possibly in her early thirties, who spoke English—as did most Muscovites I had so far met—both idiomatically and fluently. She was clearly excited by the prospect of a journey of exceptional interest, but she was lukewarm, as most Russians appeared to be, on the subject of Central Asia. ‘There is so much to be seen in the Soviet Union, and so little in the Asian steppe.’ Valentina had been insistent that Sochi should be included in the itinerary. Natasha, however, was opposed to this. She shook her head, lips tightly compressed. ‘I believe you will see what I mean when you get there.’
‘I agree that Sochi is very beautiful,’ she explained, ‘and it is historically interesting due to the local opposition to the Tsarist regime, and its liberal traditions. But the place is now full of foreigners, many of whom have been persecuted in their own countries and have been invited by our government to settle there. The government houses and feeds them in exchange. This lazy life has changed their characters. It is hard to live simply when you no longer have to fight for democracy or freedom. These men behave like primitive Indians. They paint their faces and stick feathers in their hair. They expose themselves to women and sleep in the street. We can stay in this place if you wish, but I am against it. I think we should please Valentina by stopping there a day or two, and then we should go away.’
We left the hotel and caught the plane. Like all those who visit the Black Sea, we were unable to find any justification for its name. Coming in to Sochi at sunset we had circled over a vast spread of lemon-coloured water fleeced with hardly moving breakers. On landing, wonderful frigate birds tumbled out of a sky deepening to night to inspect us, and at the edge of the runway we glimpsed children oblivious to our presence, still playing with immense crabs on the beach.
An Intourist representative wearing a circus comedian’s pink bowler hat was there to meet us and accompany us to our dacha. The dacha had been reserved for us for some weeks, he said, but he had to apologize for its condition. Turning on the kitchen light he was quick with a sponge to wipe out the obscene drawing on the wall. Through the window I could see the sea, now ashen in the evening light, and beyond the furthest waves a glowing ripple of the far-off Caucasian peaks.
The small incident of the drawing on the wall provided a glimmer of insight into an unexpected aspect of Natasha’s complex personality. As I examined once more what was left of the damaged wall-drawing, I said, ‘Pity. A good, strong picture. Quite a primitive work of art. Wonder if a fisherman did this?’
‘No,’ she replied, contempt twisting at the muscles of her mouth, revealing in her judgement a puritanism that came as an immense surprise.
Shortly after dawn the next morning the local council’s chairman arrived to pay us a courtesy visit. The chairman—whose name, we soon discovered, was Budenin—had brought with him a posy of water-lily blooms and a basket of oven-fresh black bread as welcoming gifts. He was quick to apologize for the early hour. ‘I started life as a fisherman,’ he said. ‘We Sochi fishermen work a fourteen-hour day, and that means an early start.’ He straightened himself for his formal speech, delivered, as I had come to expect in this country, in fluent English. ‘I have been asked by the members of our council to express our pleasure and satisfaction at your visit to our town,’ he said, and I assured him how delighted we were to be able to visit the principal town of the Black Sea. ‘Are there as many foreign visitors this year?’ I asked.
Quite as many, Budenin assured us. ‘Many foreign people are visiting our town at this time. You must understand that some are friends of the government. Not all these we are liking so much. Why is their behaviour so strange? My friends have all been fishermen since childhood, and we each know how the other can be expected to behave. Whatever the situation that arises, we know how our friends will confront it—how they react in pleasure, in anger or in sorrow. The foreign friends of the government who now occupy so many of the houses in this town we cannot understand, for there is no way of foretelling how they will react to any situation.’
Next day, the chairman invited us to lunch in the ancient building which the council had commandeered. He perched us on stools, as was the custom in Sochi, round a low table. ‘When friends honour us with a visit,’ he said, ‘the main thing here is to keep fish off the menu. This means that sometimes we’re down to horse. Today we’re in luck. This is a kind of edible squirrel from the mountains. We like it, and we hope you will, too.’
The council building had been chosen for the commanding views it afforded over the town, and in front of us we could see the fishing boats in port, some with old-fashioned blood-coloured sails and odd cartoon figures painted on their sterns. Immediately beneath us, ancient buildings shelved steeply down to the sea. Inhabitants of this upper part of the town, the chairman informed us, were noted for their eccentric behaviour, blamed ridiculously on the thinness of the air. A citizen walking in the street below stopped to blow a whistle, at which Budenin left the table to open the window and listen to the man’s news. Coming back, he assured us that there was nothing we really needed to hear, except that, as expected, the seasonal alteration in fishing times appeared to be giving trouble again.
The chairman then took his seat again and ladled food on to the plates. ‘There was one bad incident last night,’ he explained. ‘You see, all our people are fishermen. I’m one myself. A servant of the government, if you like, but a fisherman at heart. There’s a season when we fish by daylight, and another when we put out floating lights and fish at night. When the night-fishing goes on our wives sleep alone in their beds. We respect them and they respect us. That’s how it should be. But now there have been certain incidents involving the foreigners—we’ve been obliged to appeal to the police at Sukhumi to come to our aid.’
Back in Moscow I had perhaps incautiously mentioned to Valentina my interest in wildlife and this, passed on by the Writers’ Union to their representative in Sochi, had produced the offer of a small expedition on my behalf. Specialists in local fauna and flora had been alerted and I was assured that the Abkhazskaya mountain range, some forty miles to the south, was exceptionally rich in rarities of all kinds. Much of this region was virtually unknown territory, having been made accessible to four-wheeled vehicles only a few years before.
Two days after our lunch with the chairman, three specialists in animal and vegetable life arrived in a suitable vehicle. After Natasha had excused herself, we set out on a brief reconnaissance of the area most likely, as they believed, to produce results.
It turned out that two of my companions were university professors. However, the third, Colonel Vyacheslav Soldanov, was an acting army officer, and I could not repress a suspicion that he would be attracted to any adventure offered him, however small. It was a suspicion that increased when the colonel suggested our trip might offer an opportunity for exploration of a minor kind. One of the latest army four-wheel-drives had been put at our disposal, he said, and this could be used on the roughest of tracks, previously unpassable to any motorized vehicles. Soldanov claimed that with this form of transport we could reach parts of the Abkhazskaya mountain range that had never previously attracted botanical interest. I was amazed at this point to discover that my escorts had brought with them a brown paper bag containing a scimitar. This, they said, would be used to uproot interesting specimens—garden spades being practically unknown in this area of the Soviet Union.
The route suggested by the colonel was automatically accepted by the two scientists. Just as we were about to leave, however, one of the professors recalled an extraordinary event which had occurred very near the region we were to visit. A group of illicit adventurers in search of valuable minerals had suffered a catastrophe. They had been attacked by swarms of bees of an unknown kind, causing the deaths of several members of the group, and the panic-stricken flight of the survivors.
After a study of his maps the colonel assured us that we had nothing to fear from killer bees. We therefore made a start, and in the early afternoon we reached the closest of the foothills.
We found ourselves among a deserted landscape of strange shapes and exhausted colours. Walking up through the hills we came across an opening among the trees, where some freak effect, perhaps of the weather, had cleared a black little semicircle. Around us pigeons clustered like white decorations in the top branches of the pines. The Colonel was surprised—and perhaps a little disappointed—that a previous visitor had left a notice, now hardly legible, nailed to a tree trunk, advising visitors as to what could be seen. In front of us, it said, was a ‘Cave of a Thousand Owls’, and we watched in silence as the birds flapped in and out of sight through the black cataract of the cavern’s eye. In another, smaller cave we found evidence of a now vanished human population, for it was full of skeletons packed carefully into niches by those who had interred them, with polished stones plugged carefully into the sockets of the eyes. The whole of this area was scented with the peppery odour of the pines, and there was a mysterious pinkish tint to the light, as if at the instant of sunset, caused by countless millions of tiny, winged insects that were drawn up into the stratosphere.
In these surroundings the colonel revealed himself in a new light. He believed that human mistakes over the course of the ages had caused countless damage to evolution, and despite his honours degree and senior army rank he was prepared to defend his views against all comers. Evolution, he insisted, seemed to have fallen into a mysterious torpor—either it had come to a complete standstill or accelerated in an eccentric and incomprehensible fashion.
This, said Soldanov, was why he visited these mountains whenever an opportunity arose. It was here, according to his researches, that early man had begun interfering with the natural world. He had cut down the trees, and killed all the animals considered dangerous—the bears, the mountain lions and the poisonous snakes—but the invincible malarial mosquito and the high mountain caves full of deadly bees would always remain. These, he said, would put evolution back on course in the end. In the meantime Soldanov thought there was no place to equal Abkhazskaya for a view of what had gone wrong with the world.
Back in Sochi two days later, the Soviet Union’s erstwhile foreign community was still giving trouble. The detachment of police that had been called up from Sukhumi to deal with the problem had more or less shrugged their shoulders and gone off. The chairman had ordered obscene drawings to be cleaned off the town’s walls but these had immediately been replaced with others of a similar kind, although with less artistic pretension. Natasha’s only news was that two respected exponents of the socialist ideal had endeavoured to further the cause of the natural presentation of the body by a naked stroll down the principal street. She was delighted to say that she had booked seats on the plane for Tashkent that would be leaving next day.
Natasha was clearly surprised to learn that we would be joined at the airport by a second guide supplied by the Writers’ Union. Sergei Vilanski, an expert in Oriental history and culture, was young, handsome and above all Western in appearance and in every aspect of his manner. Although he did not admit to this I suspected him of having spent part of his childhood in our country, and there was a light-hearted cynicism about him that I found difficult to associate with a wholly Slavonic past. I took Natasha to be an orthodox communist, although such was the breadth and depth of her knowledge that nothing of this showed through. Vilanski seemed above all to be a man of the world, for whom politics were a game in which one found oneself involved willy-nilly and which one played with whatever skills one possessed or could develop.
On the plane, Natasha engaged me in earnest conversation on the subject of literature, about which she held many strong opinions. My guide—described by Valentina as the most brilliant of her pupils—turned out to be fascinated by English writers, and I learned that she had familiarized herself with the whole of William Shakespeare’s opus. On rare occasions a non-Slavonic sense of humour appeared to peep out, as when she mentioned her extensive knowledge of English limericks, from which she was apparently able to extract inoffensive titbits for presentation on suitably academic occasions.
The immensely long journey to Tashkent took its effect. Vilanski’s cynicism on the subject of the Socialist Motherland had been coldly received by Natasha, but, perhaps driven by boredom, he now began to lay siege to her as an available young woman. There was no place in Central Asia like Tashkent to have a good time, he insisted. The Pasha was an old friend who put him up in his palace whenever he visited. It was an Arabian Nights situation—why should she stay at a run-down hotel when he was sure he could fix it for her to have a good time in pleasant surroundings? Naturally he’d make sure that I, too, was well looked after.
‘Comrade, why don’t you change the subject?’ Natasha said. ‘Surely you can see I’m not interested.’
At Tashkent, a message left at the hotel broke the alarming news that a meeting had been arranged with the chairman of Samarkand’s council for six o’clock next morning. It would take two hours to travel there by car, said the man at the desk, and one had in consequence been booked. ‘Could there be some mistake?’ I asked, and Natasha assured me there could not. Samarkand, she said, had established a national reputation for its prompt and efficient handling of its affairs. The city’s chairman had trained himself to dispense with sleep two days a week, she had heard. Before entering politics, she added, he had been a well-known long-distance runner.
At four next morning we were ready in front of the hotel for the car. We reached our destination promptly at six o’clock, which, we soon learned, was the hour of maximum activity in Samarkand, an ancient and over-poweringly splendid town. Its centre was dominated by a cluster of mosques, each with a majestic dome roofed with tiles chosen to match the blue of the dawn sky, upon which it appeared as little more than a delicately pencilled outline. Within minutes of our arrival the town’s celebrated patriarchs, white-bearded under their tremendous turbans, came on the scene in solemn procession. We watched them align themselves at exact intervals along the city’s walls, where they were to remain until midday.
It was characteristic of Samarkand that our meeting with its chief citizen and the three members of his council should take place in the ancient rose gardens for which the city remains famous. The chairman, Abu Hasan, explained the function of the gathering of the bearded patriarchs we had so admired. ‘They are there,’ he said, ‘as the embodiments of justice and truth. To become a city guardian is to fulfil any citizen’s greatest ambition, and a long period may pass following a guardian’s death before he is replaced. We are fortunate at this time that no places have been left empty.’
The rose gardens among which we had been received began some hundred yards from the city’s centre and its assembly of magnificent mosques. It was an area that was flat and utilitarian, and planting and pruning were clearly in progress, while young apprentices were busily sweeping cuttings away. Abu Hasan was insistent that it was from precisely this spot that the garden rose had spread in its millions to all the civilized places of the world. Here 5,000 years ago the first rose as we know it had been grown to be worshipped as a spirit from heaven. Abu Hasan told us he had started his adult life as a fairly successful rose-grower, and had even exported his most valuable hybrids to European countries. These days pressure of his work for the community had limited his creative activities to three new roses a year, all of which were expected to take prizes in the annual show. One of these plants had produced a small flower that was not quite blue, and although she praised it with apparent enthusiasm in his presence, Natasha subsequently admitted that she found it bizarre.
Outside the city, the rose, having escaped captivity and blended with nature, came into its own. Abu Hasan took us up into the hills overlooking the town, where we were confronted by a remarkable scene of rambling roses spreading throughout the pines. The chairman amazed us by quoting The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam not only in the archaic Persian, but in Fitzgerald’s English translation. A short walk brought us to the place where the poet had first given words to his inspiration. It was from this spot, we were told, that Samarkand’s roses had begun their long journey into the hills, travelling at a rate of six inches a year. Now a brilliant floral vanguard had reached a mountain top streaked with vermilion eleven miles away.
Our excursion to see the mountain roses was only one of the attractions Samarkand arranged for its visitors. I was granted the exceptional honour of a tour of the splendid tomb of Tamerlane, although I was surprised that Natasha did not accompany me—possibly, as a woman, she was excluded from the experience. Although this was not specifically stated, it seemed likely in any case that only one visitor at a time was permitted to enter the building, for the official accompanying me remained at the entrance of the dimly lit tomb. The simple magnificence of this small, mosquelike building can hardly be equalled in the world. A flight of steps covered with onyx tiles takes one down to the basement, where, in the dead centre of the room, Tamerlane lies in his sarcophagus of jade. The legend is that when a ruler makes his pilgrimage here, the spirit of the great king may whisper encouragement to him from the grave. Absolute silence is the rule. I had removed my shoes at the entrance and as an added precaution had placed my hand over my mouth. On leaving the tomb the attendant bowed and thanked me for my ready acquiescence.
My request to see Bukhara, considered by some to be the most interesting of the ancient cities of Central Asia, was turned down as Valentina had warned me. The excuse given—that the city was still affected by the plague and was thus permitting no visitors—was readily accepted by Natasha. Vilanski, however, claimed that the authorities had closed off the city as a result of the ethnic tensions therein. In Bukhara, he said, the basically Muslim population was resisting a drive from Moscow to Westernize its Central Asian provinces. Vilanski told us that the Russian authorities were so determined to modernize these forgotten territories that they were persuading, or even forcing, Asiatics to change from Oriental to Western styles of dress. A great consignment of factory-produced (three sizes only supplied) Western-style garments had just arrived in Samarkand, he reported. He had been particularly amused by the spectacle of Asiatics, who usually wore slippers that could be kicked off in a matter of seconds when the time came to pray, wearing boots designed above all to resist the Russian snows.
The time allocated to the splendours of Samarkand was drawing to its end, and Abu Hasan informed us of his wish to throw us a farewell party in characteristic Oriental style. It was an occasion I welcomed with the greatest enthusiasm, for the chairman emphasized that his council was enthusiastically behind him in the project, designed to show their friends from the West what the East had to offer them. Unfortunately, it was an honour over which their guests were divided, for Natasha was an out-and-out Muscovite and had made it clear to me that she had come to Central Asia only out of loyalty to Valentina. She believed that our time together would have been better spent in the cities of European Russia, which no longer—as she put it—lived in the past. Vilanski, a romantic in these matters, took the opposite point of view. For him, the Far East was steeped in colour, legend and romance, and it had been one of the high spots of his career to have been included in our excursion. He had even taken a crash course in Arabic before joining us.
Natasha proposed to repay some of our hosts’ hospitality by organizing a movie show of an educational character, the films for which she had brought with her from Moscow. These specialized in sporting occasions in the capital, together with footage of young students training to become useful and well-rewarded citizens in the many excellent professions open to them in later life. Natasha’s earnest proposals for the improvement of culture and opportunities in Central Asia met with outbursts of scornful laughter from Vilanski. Clearly, whatever hopes I had suspected him of harbouring for Natasha were now at an end.
Abu Hasan’s party was to begin, as celebrations do in Soviet Central Asia, at roughly the moment of dawn. It was the custom in Samarkand to set off ancient bombs, shells and other explosive devices collected from old battlefields on festive occasions, and the first victims of such jollifications often expired with the first light. No instructions in the art of enjoying oneself are called for in Central Asia—it is a capacity in the blood. Above all, the celebrants are in search of sheer noise and will go to extremes to procure it. In one town some fifty miles from Tashkent two railway locomotives had been involved in a planned crash, although it was reported that casualties had been skilfully avoided.
The day of the party coincided with the feast day of a minor saint, and we woke to the ringing of holiday bells promising citizens a day of less serious occupation, although with greater rewards. A bleached sky was full of mewing sea birds, and tufts of cloud among the minarets, and as we walked over to the chairman’s party we saw little girls, roused unkindly from sleep, being manacled to the lambs they were to guard during the festivities, and important old men, turbans scrupulously tied, moving like chess pieces through the morning mist towards the nearest place of worship.
There is little in the way of preliminaries to a party in Uzbekistan. Sudden action is there as if by electrical contact, and participants rise from their beds, throw on whatever clothes they can find and immediately spring to life. We moved through a throng of revellers into the town’s principal square, where we were soon joined by an Uzbek tribe, bringing their special vision to the sightlessness of urban existence. Unlike the townspeople, the souls of this mysterious tribe had been preserved by a kind of holy ignorance. All of them, even the queen who led them through their deserts, preserved their illiteracy, careless that they appeared to outsiders to be lacking in intelligence. Everything they possessed, whether bought, bartered or stolen, had taken on a sacred meaning. Their wizards had painted mystic signs on their bodies and had draped themselves with soles torn from a consignment of Muscovite shoes, now promoted to fetishes.
‘So you’ve run into them before,’ someone said, and I told them about the prison ship. ‘Their art saved them,’ I explained. ‘It wasn’t food that they craved. It was bits of coloured cloth to feed the imagination.’
‘They talk to their horses like children and their horses talk back,’ the man said. ‘Or so they tell you.’
In proof of the approaching victory of the West, time had set up its court in Samarkand. Here in the square, a large clock, imported from Moscow along with the new boots, had been fixed to the façade of an ancient fort. Soon it beat out the hour of midday—although this remained six o’clock by old-fashioned Muslim custom.
The chairman produced dancers for our entertainment and musicians accompanied them on archaic instruments. I was joined by Natasha, who, though she remained cool in her attitude to all such Oriental display, had been forced as a matter of courtesy to put in an appearance. Vilanski pushed his way over, and placing at risk any final hopes of Natasha’s favour, he joined in the general acclamation of the performance. ‘It is certainly interesting,’ Natasha decided, ‘but to be perfectly frank it doesn’t appeal to me. After all, we’re Westerners, and our tastes were formed in a different environment.’
The star of the occasion was a tall, muscular-looking woman who we learned was the Horse Princess, Princess Faraha, unofficial head of the Uzbek people. The chairman brought her over to us so that we might see her dance at close hand. Her arms were laden with bangles to the elbow, and she wore a species of veil currently in fashion, which reached only to the tip of her nose. The accompanists beat their tambourines and she went into a short but highly Oriental dance routine in which the muscles of her stomach were put to remarkable use. It was a dance I greatly enjoyed, but inevitably it called forth Natasha’s wrath. Although it did not seem impossible that Princess Faraha understood English, Natasha turned to me and remarked loudly and insultingly on the spuriousness of the proceedings. ‘The Princess’s people are from the Sholdava Steppe,’ Natasha said. ‘They still live on the wild sheep they hunt on horseback.’
I asked if there was any possible chance of seeing them in action. The Princess seemed about to reply when Natasha cut in. ‘I’m sure that something could be arranged for you through the Ministry,’ she said, ‘but I warn you that these people are still quite primitive, and any photographs you might be able to obtain are not likely to be suitable for public exhibition.’
As soon as the entertainment was at an end, the Princess knelt to receive her traditional reward. Only a few years before this would have been a gold coin first pressed against her forehead then handed over with due ceremony, but now the chairman simply passed her a fifty-rouble note.
Thus gold had turned to paper, and what would once have been an audience dressed in the tribal splendour described by travellers of the past had become a crowd clad in mass-produced garments from Russian factories. How sad it seemed that these people who had designed and cultivated the first rose gardens of the world and built these overpowering mosques should now be obliged to turn their backs on colour and clothe themselves in the uniforms of a utilitarian world.
At the party I had met a native of Tashkent who had emigrated to the States and lived there for two years before his return. Since the building of Tashkent’s airport he had been employed by the region’s developing tourism industry, and his special responsibility was the opening up to the public of the Sholdava steppe—one of the great unexplored places of the world. I spoke to him at length about the project, and he was ready with a series of convincing replies.
‘You heard of the snowmobile?’ he asked. ‘We’re all set up to make snowmobiles for sand.’
‘What is there to see?’ I asked.
‘Pygmy sheeps,’ he said. ‘Same size as not big dog. You ever see pink rats? You gonna see them there. One mountain lion used to be around but now old. Maybe dead. Anyway no trouble.’ The sandmobile, he said, would follow the routes used by the horsemen of old. The great problem, of course, was that the steppe was in a perpetual state of change.
‘One day big hill, next day wind comes and is small hill. No tribes, only families. One husband, two wives. If a woman finds man to feed her she will marry that man. When no more food, she will go away.’
‘That is sensible,’ I said.
‘Not only one Sholdava,’ he went on, ‘are many steppe. The rulers live in highest places and food is brought to them. The Horse Princess comes also to all these places. If a ruler feeds her she may marry him for a short time. Then she will go.’
‘And someone else will feed her?’
‘That is why she is princess.’
‘If I provide the food would she marry me?’
‘Maybe you are not too much for her in some way, but I think that she will.’
My new friend promised to take me to see the steppe, and we set off together on a day-trip early the next morning. In the late afternoon we reached a small, ruined town, beyond which the steppe’s frontier of pale greenish gold shone in the distance, a glistening, emptied world forming a small corner of a forgotten universe.
I soon saw why my friend had found it almost impossible to write a tourist guide to the great steppe, for even as we studied the horizon through our binoculars the view changed.
‘You go look for mountain there yesterday, and that mountain is not there today,’ my friend repeated. ‘A week passes and nothing the same. If wind is OK comes smell of peaches, but then it changes, and you cover nose from smell of death.’
After the success of our excursion, it was decided that we should make a longer exploration of the steppe, but the next day my friend failed to appear. In his stead his representative arrived at the wheel of an old Ford V8 fitted with extra large wheels and oversized tyres. He was a pure Uzbek, small, dark and eager to please. Unfortunately, he was the possessor of the difficult name of Vloc, which sometimes produced a titter when I attempted its pronunciation. The sandmobile was not ready, he said, assuring me in a mixture of Russian and English that this was all to the good. ‘In Ford we get there,’ he explained, ‘in sandmobile, maybe.’ A brusque change in the weather accompanied the appearance of this unexpected form of transport. It had rained during the night for the first time in two months, and the sky was clotted with plum-coloured clouds.
A shapeless human form under the blanket covering the back seat caused a few moments of confusion. To my surprise, after the removal of the covers this shape became recognizable as the Horse Princess, and I now remembered some mention at the time of the chairman’s party of her forthcoming visit ‘to my steppe’. The change in her appearance was remarkable. She was wrapped in the unflattering garments of a working woman. Gone were the bangles and necklaces, and the shadowed eyelids were no more. But, above all, I was astonished to see that no trace of the vulgar paint-assisted fairground good looks of two days before remained. They had been replaced by an air of unmistakable intelligence. I felt a certain relief that Natasha had declined to accompany me.
We were headed, I was told, for the village where the Princess had been born. ‘They call it a village,’ Vloc said, ‘but there are only four or five huts, with more horses than humans living in them.’ While we were discussing our prospects a rent appeared in the sky’s grey covering, rain poured down and almost instantly smoke began to rise from the sand. It would dry, Vloc said, in a matter of hours—especially close to the hills where the drainage was good. As we had come to a halt, he broke out the food he had brought in case of emergencies—in that part of the world they fell back on edible worms in times of shortage—and he showed me the offerings he proposed to place in front of the horse shrines should we receive a hospitable welcome at our destination.
The rain soon stopped and we reached the village well before dark. A tiny man came out of a hut. Black hair fell to his shoulders and he was without front teeth. ‘Bow to the shrine,’ he said, and the Princess took us behind the hut to a mound under which the horses were buried, and I made my obeisance.
‘They passed a law making us Christians,’ Vloc explained, ‘but when one of us dies a note goes into his grave saying that he refuses to be resurrected. If there’s no way out of it we ask to be resurrected as horses.’
Next day he offered me a tiny pony to accompany him on a visit to areas which were out of reach by car. ‘They pray to horses there,’ he added as an inducement, ‘and hang flowers round their necks.’ My stallion in miniature threw me as soon as I mounted it. ‘It must be the smell he can’t stand,’ Vloc said. ‘We could rub you down with salt. That might do the trick.’
The salt was then applied, but with little success, for mounting under Vloc’s supervision the most docile of his ponies, I held on for only a few yards before being thrown over its head. Thereafter we trudged through squelching sand to a neighbouring village where garlanded horses were indeed in view. This may have been the steppe’s first attempt at transforming an authentic folk ceremony into a tourist attraction. On our arrival, young Uzbeks had been sent scurrying off into the dunes for flowers; a little while later a few returned bearing long trailers of what might have been a coarse and bedraggled version of convolvulus. While Vloc mumbled what he said was a prayer, the villagers hung the resulting garland round a horse’s neck, after which it was removed and given to the animal to eat.
Vloc had spent much of his childhood on the steppe, but he admitted that he no longer wished to stay here more than a few days—nowadays, he claimed, he was dependent on Russian food, not to be had in these backward places. When deprived of Russian bread in particular, he said, he began to feel weak after three days. The villagers had recently announced a godsend, in the form of a swarm of large edible flies, and the pessimism with which he received this erstwhile good news only served to emphasize the gap between his present state and his past.
Vloc clearly took (or pretended to take) the edible flies incident as an omen that we should depart, but, I asked, what was to be done about the Horse Princess? Was she staying on the steppe, or did she intend to return with us? Vloc said that he did not know her intentions, or whether arrangements should be made on her behalf. When he finally thought of asking the Princess herself, she replied that she would stay. She had returned to her people, after an absence of many months, to count the number of her tribe, she said. She was pleased to announce that this had increased by one. But she was worried about her horses. The Uzbeks could not be relied upon to deal with numbers, she was sorry to say, and she had come above all to be sure that the number of animals was not on the decrease.
I returned to Tashkent, where Natasha was waiting for me at the hotel. As I walked through the door nothing moved in the calm of that serene Slavic countenance. ‘Lucky you got in early,’ she said. ‘There’s been a plane cancellation and we have to take off tomorrow.’
‘Couldn’t be better,’ I said.
‘How about the steppe?’ she asked. ‘Did you enjoy it?’
‘I did. You’d have enjoyed it, too.’
‘I’ll phone Valentina straight away,’ she said. ‘She’ll be delighted. So it was a success in every way?’
‘It was a totally new experience,’ I explained, ‘and an immense surprise. Did you manage to amuse yourself in Samarkand while I was away?’
‘I visited more rose gardens, then Vilanski drove me here,’ Natasha said. ‘This is one of those quiet places where news soon gets round. They tell me the Horse Princess is back on the steppe.’
‘She was. I saw her; in fact I travelled with her. But not for long. She was on the move.’
‘Did they go in for a great deal of dancing wherever it was that you went?’ Natasha asked.
‘No, because it’s no more than the simplest of existences. The Horse Princess dances in the towns and puts the money to good use on the steppe. There they call her the teacher.’
‘And what does she teach?’
‘How to care for spider bites, calm lunatics and keep out the sand.’
Natasha nodded her agreement. ‘And what could be better?’
‘Another thing she teaches,’ I said, ‘and out there on the steppe it’s the most important thing of all, is resignation. I told you about the prison ship and the Uzbeks who were going to be shot? They knew it would happen, but they didn’t seem depressed in the slightest. They kept up their laughter and joking all the time. It was just about the only laughter you heard on that ship.’
‘It’s the old Muslim thing, I suppose,’ Natasha said. ‘Put up with it. It is written.’
‘I often wonder what happened to them. Do you imagine Valentina might be able to find out?’
‘I’m sure she’ll try if you ask her. Anyway, we’ll see her tomorrow. She’s certain to be at the airport to meet the plane.’
2001