The sea had fallen behind us, and we were flying above a desert of dream-like immensity. Its sands melted into the sky, corroding every horizon in a colourless light. Nothing suggested that we were anywhere, or even moving at all. The last solid objects in the universe were the wing-tips of the plane. Yet when I stared at the faces dozing or brooding around me, I felt that only mine did not belong in this sun-stricken wilderness. They were wide-boned faces, burnished and still. They slept.
We had turned along the forties latitude now, midway between Gibraltar and Beijing, into the world’s heart. It was a childish concept, I suppose – that the world had a heart – but it had proved oddly durable. As a boy I had soon lost the notion that one day I might slither down the North Pole or run my finger-tips along a red-hot Equator. But unconsciously I had gone on feeling that somewhere in the core of the greatest land-mass on earth, beyond more familiar nations, there pulsed another country, half forgotten, to which the rest were all peripheral.
Yet even on the map it was ill-defined, and in history only vaguely named: ‘Turkestan’, ‘Central Asia’, ‘The Land beyond the River’. Somewhere north of Iran and Afghanistan, west of the Chinese deserts, east of the Caspian Sea (which lay far behind us now), this enormous, secret country had turned in on itself. Its glacier-fed rivers – the Oxus and Jaxartes of the ancients, the Chu and the Zerafshan – never reached the ocean, but vanished in landlocked seas or died across the desert. The Himalaya cut off its mountains from any life-giving monsoon where the Pamirs rose in a naked glitter of plateaux, so high, wrote Marco Polo, that no bird flew there and fire burnt with a pale flame in which you could rest your hand.
Yet this region stretched from the Kazakh steppes to the Hindu Kush. It was larger than Western Europe and split by atrocious geographic extremes. While the Pamirs lay under permafrost, the Karakum desert beneath us could simmer for weeks at a time in 105°F in the shade, and its flatlands harden to a surface like levelled stone.
‘There’s nothing to see down there,’ said the Uzbek seated beside me. ‘It’s the Turcomans’ country’ – and his voice darkened in despisal. ‘They’re shepherds.’ Then, alerted by my clumsy Russian, he asked: ‘Are you from the Baltic?’
‘No, England.’
‘England.’ He contemplated the word as if waiting for something – anything – to flutter into his mind. ‘That is next door to America ....’
I stared down. The plane’s fuselage was gliding above a wasteland where faint tracks wandered. Here and there, as in some anatomical chart, canals and arteries converged over the blank tissue of the sand, or spread into dark fields. Occasionally, too, the soil whitened to saline flats, where all shrubs had withered away, or never been. But against the desert’s enormity these features looked as slight as craters on the moon. For mile upon mile the only colour was a terrible, famine-breathing platinum, less like pure sand than the pulverised clay of the empires which had petered out in its dust: Persia, Seleucia, Parthia, Macedon .... It was awesome and somehow expected: that the heart of the world was not a throbbing organ but a shifting question-mark.
People had filled it with their inner demons. In ancient times it was the domain of Cimmerian hordes who lived in perpetual mist, and of the dread Scythians with their horses and gold. It became a corridor awash with nomad nations. For centuries it would remain silent and the movements of its peoples unknown, then it would unleash its wild cavalry west and east – Scythians, Huns, Turks, Mongols – to unwrap the softened empires round them. It was the hinterland of God’s vengeance.
Its strangled rivers also nurtured empires of its own, muffled to Western ears by the vastness surrounding them. They left themselves behind in cities and tombs broken over the encroaching wilderness or in the river valleys. Only after the fifteenth century, when the Mongol empire fractured and the Silk Road died, did this fearful heartland sink out of history, splintered into obscure khanates and tribal pastures. Four centuries later the Russian empire easily devoured it, and its noise was heard only dimly, through Moscow, as if it were a ventriloquist’s dummy.
‘You will go to Samarkand and Tashkent,’ the man beside me said. It sounded more a command than a question. ‘But you won’t go to Tajikistan, there is fighting there. They are fighting everywhere now. Nobody knows what the future is ....’
But my journey unravelled in my mind through six thousand miles of mountain and desert. The Soviet system of tourism had broken up, and I had secured my visa by pre-booking rooms in a chain of grim hotels, which I would often ignore. The old order – all Soviet Central Asia – was cracking apart, and its five republics, artificially created by Stalin, had declared their sovereignty a few months earlier. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kirghizstan — suddenly the Soviet tide had ebbed from these shadowy Moslem nations and had left them naked in their independence. What would they become? Would they hurl themselves into the Islamic furnace, I wondered, or reconvene in a Communist mass? I could conceive their future only in the light of powers which I already knew: Islam, Moscow, Turkey, the West.
To the south, for more than an hour now, the snow-peaks of the Kopet Dagh, the ‘Dry Mountains’, had guided us eastward. Adrift in a sea of haze, they drew the ancestral battle-line between the Turkic and Persian worlds. For more than two hundred miles they followed us like the first waves of an ocean poised to come crashing out of the Iranian plateaux barely thirty miles to the south.
Then we started to descend over a wide oasis. Beneath us the snake of the Karakum Canal was taking silt and water to the Caspian Sea. The collective farms looked as neat as Roman camps, bisected by pale streets where nothing moved. A voice over the Tannoy announced that in ten minutes we would be landing in Ashkhabad.
Ashkhabad: the capital of Turkmenistan evoked no feelings at all. Turkmenistan was one of the poorest and wildest of the old republics of the USSR, a desert region huger than Germany, peopled by less than four million souls. Over a century ago its inhabitants had been oasis farmers or stockbreeding nomads, whose raids had filled the markets of Bukhara and Khiva with thousands of Persian slaves. Now Turkmenistan had discovered oil, gas and minerals, and – it seemed – the habits of dictatorship. With the collapse of the Soviets, little had changed in its government except the formal abolition of Communism.
Watching the passengers as we came in to land, I realised that the broad Mongol visage belonged to Kazakhs and Uzbeks, who were travelling on east. But the Turcoman faces were fiercely individual and anarchic. Sometimes they showed brown hair with long jowls and slender noses. A few might have been German or English. Two seats from mine an oval-faced woman with blue eyes was breast-feeding a blue-eyed baby. In front of her lolled a turbaned mullah whose beard bifurcated down his chest from concave cheeks. As they all hunted for their luggage under the seats of the groaning Tupolev, I saw that they had scarcely a suitcase between them, but heaved out packages trussed with frayed string, bedrolls and splitting bags. They seemed like nomads still: predators and opportunists, whom history had caught in mid-migration.
Their capital, when I reached it, did not seem theirs at all, but a Russian city, almost featureless. I wandered its streets in bewilderment: streets funnelled through avenues of firs and plane trees, a placeless greenery. A century before, only a few hovels had clustered here, but the military station which replaced them had bequeathed wide roads laid out for army wagons and artillery. In 1948 Ashkhabad was pulverised by earthquake, killing 110,000 people. Now all was modest, low, temporary-looking. The city had a passive strangeness. It seemed half empty. Ministries, colleges and institutes deployed in pastel colours and bland classical orders. Here and there some mock-oriental tiles or plasterwork made a concession to local culture, but the hammer-and-sickle and Red star still stamped every gate and pediment. Nobody had chiselled them away, or seemed even to notice them. They remained behind with a recessional foreboding.
The streets were still full of Russians: lumbering young men in jeans, and heavy-hipped women with hennaed hair and worn faces. In the parks the gossiping war veterans were still ribboned in their medals, and robust female gardeners bent among rose-beds. I longed to talk to someone. The youths loitering under the chestnut trees, and the young mothers walking their children, teased me with the mysteriousness of a people still unknown. What did they do when they were not here? What were they thinking? Momentarily they inhabited a milieu of maddening remoteness.
Along a track between trees, two small girls were riding a children’s railway. They perched at little wheels, and thought they were steering the train, while their mother sat and watched. We joked a little as her girls steered themselves importantly, but our laughter sounded fragile and empty. Perhaps the illusion of control was too adult a sorrow. She was half Russian, it turned out, and half Armenian, and until the year before had been married to a Turcoman. The small girls, with their primrose skin and black eyes, were the fruit of this union. But she wanted to go to Russia now. ‘We all do. My Russian friends talk of nothing else. Some have already gone. My grandparents arrived as farmers at the time of the czars – there was land hunger in Russia then – so I haven’t known any country but this.’
‘You belong here?’
She hesitated. ‘In a way.’ Perhaps she belonged nowhere now. She had one of those Slavic faces which ignite into a sentimental sadness that is paradoxically touching. ‘It’ll be hard to go back. It’s not even “back” really.’ She trembled a little as she spoke. ‘But they’re making it hard for us. If you want a job you have to apply in Turcoman. The first question they ask you is: Do you speak Turcoman?’ But I’ve never learnt this language ....’ She said this with a wondering regret, as if she suddenly saw that there was a culture here, not a dying irrelevance. All her life it had been these half-noticed Turkic peoples who had been compelled to learn Russian. Now, overnight, she was a foreigner in her own birthplace.
I asked: ‘But where will you go?’
‘I don’t know. I have relatives in Moscow, but it’s impossible to find work there. Two-room apartments cost a million and a half roubles It’s too hard a place.’ She added sadly: ‘Harder than here.’ The toy railway-train had squeaked to a halt, and her girls were clambering out. She exploded, suddenly bitter: ‘But these people will regret it when we go! The Russians run every-thing here! We’re the only people who make things work. When we’re gone, what will their future be?’
The future was moving through the city round us, of course, but it remained opaque. The Turcomans inhabited these streets and flats like strangers. They walked in shabby jackets and dusty shoes. Their women put on flowered dresses and the same melancholy jackets; but their heads flashed with silk scarves over the fall of glossy pigtails. Occasionally an old man in a towering sheepskin hat or blue turban seemed to have hobbled out of another time, or a young bride shimmered past in ankle-length velvet.
Yet they moved in a Soviet city. Suddenly they had inherited all the structures and institutions of another civilisation. For decades Moscow had tried to assimilate them to a nationless stereotype – a Homo Sovieticus – and in this their own culture had been buried. Even the street names – Gagarin Prospect, Lenin Avenue – remained, for the moment, unaltered. Only Karl Marx Square had become Turkmenistan Square, and the cynically named Freedom Prospect had been renamed after Makhtumkuli, the eighteenth-century founder of vernacular Turkic literature, whose portrait now stared from the walls of offices and institutes as if he were president.
Scanned from any height, the city looked impermanent, almost pastoral: a shanty-town whose tin and asbestos roofs drowned in trees against the vaporous Kopet Dagh. Sometimes I had the fancy that it was an enormous cantonment, built to accompany some truly Turcoman town which had vanished. But this other town was unimaginable.
As I roamed the sanitised squares and boulevards, the depth of this people’s change was impossible to know. They seemed cauterised. Even the Russians did not appear to own this metropolis, but carried with them a look of rural displacement. They trudged the pavements like farmers. It was as if the city itself belonged to nobody. With its grid-iron streets and screening trees and aseptic monuments, it was the perfect laboratory for the Communist experiment, where disparate peoples would be blended, and the world made simple.
It was early April, and a warm rain pattered out of the sky. It polished the avenues to brilliant green, stirred stagnant ponds in the wells of numberless flat-blocks and hatched a swarm of pink umbrellas above the women. Whenever a wind blew, it seeped through the frames of my hotel window.
But little else entered the hotel. It was a parody of the self-defeated Soviet world which had built it. It reeled across the sky in a cliff of balconies and porticoes. But inside, everything fell to bits. Stone-flagged floors spread a mausolean gloom through reception and dining-rooms, overcast by fretted ceilings. In the bedrooms nothing worked, but everything – fridge, television, telephone – was represented. My bath might have been designed for a cripple, and the plasterboard furniture, varnished malignant black, was breaking up. Electric wires wandered nomadically about the walls, and a tiny rusted fridge doubled as a bedside table, and sighed disconsolately all night. The coming months would blind me to such trivia, I knew; but for the moment I observed them in disordered fascination. Even in this near-rainless land, damp had mounded up loose plaster behind the splitting wallpaper, and etched it with a sepia tidemark.
Outside, the corridors were dark. That spring the instability of Central Asia had warned foreigners away. Only in the dining-room a little orchestra of tambour, drum and accordion played Turkic pop songs to a delegation from Ankara.
I found a telephone that worked, and rang a number given me in England. It belonged to a Turcoman writer. He had been a secret dissident, a friend had told me, and had only been published after perestroika. And that was all I knew.
In fact his whole people were elusive to me. They had emerged into known history only in the fourteenth century – a Caucasoid race tinged with Mongol blood – and their country, along with all Central Asia, had been almost impenetrable until 150 years ago. Then, for a brief half-century before the Bolshevik turmoil, European travellers had brought back contradictory tales of them. The Turcomans were wild and depraved, they said: a proud, ignorant and inhospitable people, robed outlandishly in scarlet gowns and topped off by monstrous sheepswool hats. They could ride for eighty miles a day and survive on nothing but bruised wheat and sour milk. They were at once gluttonous, austere, affable, thieving, immodest, anarchic and frank. For a pittance they would slip a knife into you.
So when Oraz appeared in my hotel, a cloud of mirages trembled and evaporated. He had a regular, handsome face with high, furrowed cheeks and a trim physique. He looked smart, dapper even, yet not quite comfortable, as if this status – or whatever it was – had been awkwardly won. He was nearing fifty, but there was something boyish in him. It was an odd mixture, a little disconcerting.
‘You don’t know our city? Then we’ll walk it together!’
Little by little, beneath his acquired suavity, I watched a raw Turcoman emerging. The rumoured coarseness and danger had gone, but he walked for hours with a hardy lightness, and talked in fluent, stressless Russian, with an innocent pride in his borrowed city. For twelve years he had worked as a civil servant in the prime minister’s office, he said – and pointed out a nondescript building. ‘I wrote my first novel there.’
‘Actually in the prime minister’s . . .?’
‘Yes, I began it when Brezhnev was still alive. It took me six years. It was about corruption in government, and it was obvious where my material came from. I made a study of it.’
It had been a precarious, near-foolhardy undertaking. Perhaps it explained the animal alertness in him. I said: ‘But what did you expect of the future?’
‘I didn’t imagine the book would ever see the light of day.’ He smiled. Those years seemed far away now. ‘I remember thinking the manuscript would be passed round among my friends. But no, I wasn’t really frightened, not for myself. Just for my children.’
Yet he had gone on with that secret, apparently futureless labour, year after year, and I could not tell whether he had done so out of disgust with his surroundings – in self-cleansing – or from a writer’s fascination with his material. ‘But even in the middle of the Brezhnev years and all the hypocrisy,’ he said, ‘I didn’t believe people could go on for ever living lies. Not for ever. It had to end.’
For a man born in the Stalin era, it was a high hope. But his was an instinctive and obscurely irrepressible faith, grown out of the surety that indoctrination must falter in the end, because every generation was born innocent. ‘At the moment every-thing’s in chaos, and everyone’s bitter,’ he said. ‘Our lives have become too expensive, ever since perestroika. But it had to happen. It may be hard now, but it will get better . . . .’ Perestroika, after all, had transformed his life. He had to believe in it, in the freer future. He was, in a sense, its symbol and harbinger.
He was walking in a nervous, high-strung stride. He seemed at once buoyant and vulnerable. His novel had sold an astonishing sixty thousand copies in Turkmenistan. ‘It was the first thing of its kind allowed here,’ he said, ‘a scandal.’
But I questioned aloud how his nation would extract itself from the Soviet shadow. Of all the people in the old Union, these were the least prepared for independence. For seventy years Communist models and propaganda, collectives and institutes, had overlain all Central Asian. Then, overnight, as in some schoolchild’s fantasy, the teachers had gone away, leaving behind the message that the lesson was wrong.
‘But we were never close to the Russians,’ Oraz said. ‘We Turcomans have an utterly different character. Have you heard of Turcoman chilik? It’s something like our essence. It means independence, even idleness, and hospitality and courage. It’s a kind of pride. The Russians chose to flout it. If a woman touches a man in public, for instance, that is against chilik. Modesty between the sexes goes deep with us. Even in marriage, we never kiss in front of our children. All that is private.’ Chilik seemed to express a sober, Turkic dignity. It eschewed passions, or any violent self-seeking. ‘But of course since the Russians came, all that has been diluted. Even the idea of dictatorship is alien to us. We were always free . . . .’
A moment later we passed the newly opened Iranian embassy – a drab tenement riddled with nesting pigeons – and he looked at it with distaste. ‘Our temper is different from the Iranians’ too. That fundamentalism won’t come here. We’re a sane people.’
He was describing an old north-south watershed: the divide between an effervescent Persia and the more slow-tempered Turk. He spoke as if there was something unmanly in extremism. Besides, the Iranians were Shia, and barely a century ago the Sunni Turcomans had enslaved them as worse than unbelievers.
‘Our people aren’t interested in dogma. We don’t persecute anyone for his beliefs. Some of the Russians may be leaving – those not born here – but most will stay. They’re welcome to stay – but not as rulers. This is our land, and it will be a good place.’ He laughed a blithe, confident laugh.
His patriotism was guileless, often naïve. He believed in his people’s inherent righteousness, as the Russians had once believed in theirs. The Turcomans were naturally peaceable, he said. It was a myth of Soviet historians that they had ever warred among themselves. We passed a statue of Stalin’s henchman Kalinin, which would soon be replaced by a monument to Turmenistan’s first prime minister, shot for his patriotism in 1941. ‘Nobody knows where he’s buried, but he’ll have a memorial here.’ As we tramped across a cenotaph to the Second World War dead, Oraz said: ‘This, at least, we share with the Russians. The victory over Fascism!’
It was one of those overblown yet harrowing monuments that cover the old Soviet Union: a statue of motherhood towering opposite an eternal flame shut in by blood-red marble pillars. The dead were still remembered in mounds of chrysanthemums and gladioli. But the eternal flame had gone out. Its broken gas-vent hissed faintly. I did not have the heart to tell Oraz that many thousands of Central Asia’s soldiers, embittered by Stalin, had deserted to the Germans.
Yet he seemed, for the moment, immune to disillusion. He was bright with an imagined future. I feared for him. I wondered if anyone of his generation had believed in Communism at all.
‘Maybe one per cent.’ He laughed harshly.
‘The very poor?’
‘No! The others. The officials.’ We had entered a park where a statue of Lenin survived. It hovered angrily above us. ‘And now they don’t know what to believe.’
Lenin stood on a ziggurat brilliant with Turcoman tilework, and lifted a declamatory arm towards Iran. Beneath, an inscription promised liberation to the peoples of the East.
‘There are fifty-six Lenin monuments in the city,’ Oraz said. ‘This one will stay and the rest will go.’ He was striding round the dried fountains which circled the monument, suave in his suit and tie, while above him the baggy-trousered Lenin crumpled his cloth cap in his hand. ‘Maybe in time this one will go too. But not now.’
I felt perversely glad that it would remain: a gesture of moderation, and a fragile acknowledgement of the past. A group of visiting farmers was posing beneath it for a snapshot. The photographer – a dour youth in a T-shirt blazoned ‘USA: Nice Club’ – arranged them in a crescent of interlaced arms and cheerless faces. I thought: so people still come to be photographed here, out of habit, or some tenuous loyalty.
But as the youth adjusted his tripod, I peered through the lens and saw that his clients were framed against the plinth of oriental ceramic, which rose to the top of the photograph and amputated Lenin somewhere in the sky. ‘We don’t include him any more,’ the youth said. ‘He’s out of fashion.’
But what, I wondered, could replace him? As Oraz and I trudged around the state exhibition hall that evening, I felt the Turcoman culture slipping irretrievably away. The modern paintings regaling the walls celebrated it only in synthetic images – tribespeople plucking lutes or riding through misted mountains in a swirl of antiquated robes. The artists were tourists in their own past. At the end of the hall a sixty-foot-long Turcoman rug, rumoured the largest in the world, hung in a crimson waterfall of patterned symbols.
‘I wish I could read these for you,’ Oraz said, pointing out emblematic horses and birds’ eyes. ‘They would tell you half our history.’ He shook his head. ‘But I can’t.’ Even the classic art of poetry, he said, was dying.
‘Does nobody write it any longer?’
‘Oh yes. Everybody writes it. But nobody reads it.’
That night, wandering the emptied streets alone, I came upon the marble podium where the Turcoman president and his ministers had once saluted May Day parades. Until a few months before, it had been the city’s political heart. Now it glimmered derelict beyond the street-lamps. As I climbed on to its rostrum, the marble and limestone carapace of its walls was cracking under my hands. The crowning statue of Lenin had gone – as if an enormous bird had flown from its roost – but the pedestal, torn in its removal, had been boarded round by wood painted to resemble stone, as if the wreckage of those stupendous foot-prints was still too painful to expose.
I stared down on the avenue beneath, thickened to seven lanes for the passage of parades. A wind stirred dead leaves over the steps. I remembered what Oraz had said about the people’s disbelief in Communism. Yet that night I fancied that it still pervaded the sleeping city – in the slogans which nobody had dared wipe from the walls, in the jargon on people’s lips, even in Lenin’s statue lingering in the park nearby, warning that his ghost be not provoked.
Korvus was an old man now. Beneath a burst of white hair his face shone heavy and crumpled, and his eyes watered behind their spectacles. Thirty years ago he had been Turkmenistan’s minister of culture, and a celebrated poet; and he was a war-hero in his country. Authority still tinged his stout figure as he greeted me. He wore an expensive Finnish suit and a gold ring set with a carnelian. Yet a Turcoman earthiness undermined this prestige a little, and a loitering humour.
He seemed to live in schizophrenia. His public life had been spent in Soviet government, but his house nested in a Turcoman suburb sewn with family courtyards, vine-shadowed, where the hot water ran in fat pipes on struts above the lanes, and people shed their shoes before entering the homes, in the Islamic way.
He ushered me indoors. He looked gentle, preoccupied. He lived with the family of his eldest son – the hallway was scattered with toys and shoes – and as I entered the sitting-room I stopped in astonishment. I had stepped into an engulfing jungle of Turcoman artefacts. It was as if I had dropped through the floor of the bland Soviet world into an ancient substratum of his people’s consciousness. Phylacteries in beaten silver set with semi-precious stones, horsewhips and quivers and camel-bells, the tasselled door-frame of a yurt tent still darkly brilliant in vegetable dyes – they covered the walls with a barbarian intricacy.
‘My son and his wife collect them,’ the old man said. He looked vaguely unhappy.
‘They’re magnificent.’
He sat beside me on a divan. I could not tell what he was thinking. His whole life had been directed towards a Soviet future, in which national differences would disappear. Yet for years, piece by piece, his son had been harvesting his people’s past and pouring it over the walls in a lavish, speechless celebration. It hung before the old man now like an indictment. It was the history he had abandoned.
But after a while he said sombrely: ‘I think it is right that this has happened, and that we have our freedom. It is right that the old Union is split up.’ He spoke as if he had fought against each sentence before it had conquered him. He did not look at me. ‘Although the war seemed to unite us.’
The war: he had returned from it with a chestful of medals – ‘like Brezhnev,’ he laughed. He had survived the ferocious tank-battle of Kursk, and fought through the terrible winter of 1942-3, when the thrust of the whole war changed and the world was lost to Hitler. His face ignited as he spoke of it. He relaxed into its simplicity. Things had been easier then. Somewhere in the fields of south Ukraine, he said, he had attacked a German tank single-handed and been hit by shell splinters. ‘I regained consciousness in the snow, covered in blood.’ Humorously he patted his chest and back, wriggling his short arms around his body. ‘I didn’t know if I was alive. How were my legs? They were still there. My head? That was on. But my back and side were ripped, and my hand a mass of ligaments. So I packed snow round my wounds, and the German fire missed me and I crawled away. Later one of our officers – a hooligan type with a motorcycle – charged up and filled me with vodka and drove me off. I was operated on in a field hospital under gas, and woke like this.’ He held up his hand. I saw that two fingers were gone, their stubs welded in a wrinkled trunk. He grinned at it.
In the bleak, triumphant years after the war, he had gone to Moscow to study. Perhaps he had believed in the Soviet unity then. He had married a Russian orphan, and returned to Ashkhabad a hero. He chuckled and drew his maimed hand across his chest to conjure ranks of medals. Later he had written poems about the war, and love lyrics. He had become head of the Turkmenia Writers’ Union, then its Minister of Culture in the sixties.
But how much had he invested in his authority, I wondered? Had he believed in Marxism-Leninism or in literature or, arcanely, in both? It was hard to ask. He looked so old now, and somehow depleted, yet comfortable. He had taken off his jacket and put on a lumpy cardigan. His damaged hand rested on his knees. But his wife lived in Moscow – she did not care for Ashkhabad, he said – and he came and went between them, not exactly separated. His life seemed now to have resolved into these divided loyalties. They were perhaps his truth.
I wondered how easily this family cohabited: the failing war-hero and his film-director son Bairam – who was working on a study of Red Army atrocities – and a garrulous, ten-year-old grandson. A depthless chasm of experience seemed to gape between them all.
Bairam came in later, pale and ebullient, without the look of closed unsureness which I often saw about me in the streets. He grew excited by my interest in Turcoman things, and presented his collection piece by piece, unrolling hundred-year-old kelims at my feet in a patter of discriminatory pride. These were not the soulless products, dull with aniline dyes, which 200 underpaid girls (he told me) turned out in the local Soviet-built factory. They were works of love and patience, whose skills had been inherited from mother to daughter. He brought in jewellery too: necklaces which had flooded the breast with lapis lazuli and silver bells; enamelled and filigreed frontlets that clipped on to the woman’s ears before cascading about ber in a tumult of chains. They trickled like water through my fingers.
Meanwhile the old man switched on the television which stood among the nomad regalia, and drank brandy mixed with Pepsi Cola. ‘I used to drink too much,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘But I hardly drink now.’ On his chosen channel the Ashkhabad Orchestra, dressed in white tie and tails, was playing Moussorgsky.
Bairam was full of projects. He was working on a film which would have been unthinkable two years before, he said. It was a documentary on his people’s flight from the Red Army during the forced collectivisation in the 1930s, when a million Turcomans and others had fled into Iran and Afghanistan.
He spoke like his father, in sudden bursts of feeling, while still holding up jewellery for me to admire. ‘We’re even showing a sequence on the Red Army machine-gunners mowing down the refugees in the mountain passes. Yes, this happened.’ He held up an amethyst frontlet, as if it might have belonged to the dead. ‘The film is being bought by Moscow television! They asked us to cut out what the Red Army did, but we said no. So they’re transmitting it whole!’ He let out an airy laugh. It was an astonishing reversal of power.
His father went on listening to Moussorgsky, but after a while ambled out into his courtyard. It must have been simpler to survive the war and all the Stalin years, I thought, than to meet this shock of independence. But Bairam waved the notion away. ‘No, not for my father. He was already independent. He never believed in the Party. He left it twenty-four years ago.’
I asked in astonishment: ‘Why?’ Leaving the Party was tantamount to suicide.
‘There was a sort of scandal . . . when he was Minister of Culture. They said he travelled too much – in Turkey and India. The KGB got after him.’
I thought: so in Moscow’s eyes his ideas had become contaminated. ‘What did he do after that?’
‘There was nothing he could do. After you’d left the Party, that was the end of you. There was no chance of a job. So he sat at home and wrote poetry . . . .’ He smiled weakly. ‘That’s how I remember him, all my childhood.’
So whatever had happened, I had not understood; and the old man’s look of hurt and reconciliation sprang from something older than his country’s independence. A little later I asked him about Oraz – who had written his subversive novel from the heart of government – and Korvus only said: ‘I know who you mean by this man.’
The note of censure was unmistakable. A residual loyalty to the system, perhaps, had been disturbed by that betrayal. He himself had simply resigned, and become a poet.
On Sundays, when the central market opened, the farmers spilt into the city. Behind their hillocks of tangerines, pomegranates, beetroot, peppers and dried apricots, they waited from early morning with dogged unconcern: a people whose faces expressed all the fierce gamut of Turcoman change. There were Mongoloid faces whose cheeks had stayed creaseless into old age, and long Caucasoid ones with startling pale eyes, and Bedouin visages where the beetling noses erupted beneath tapered brows. A few of the older women, in the remembered modesty of youth, still touched their concealing scarves to faces no longer beautiful, and squatted all day before a cupful of onions or carrots from their private plots.
The shoppers trudged disconsolately among them. Sudden inflation had sent the fragmented Soviet Union into shock. Everybody was complaining. Everybody had a dirge of comparative prices on his lips. On e kilo of meat costs a hundred roubles now . . . last year it was just ten! Everything was better under Brezhnev . . . .’ And the Russians who moved among them looked as poor as the rest.
It was here that I met the artist Momack. He was drifting about, like me: a slight, middle-aged man in baggy jeans and trainers. In this rough ambience he looked faintly theatrical. He had the sensitised melancholy of a king in a Persian miniature. A satiny beard swarmed blackly up to his cheekbones and liquid eyes. He felt close to these farmers, he said. They seemed nearer to his people’s roots. But I could not imagine them feeling close to him.
He drove me to his studio in a twenty-year-old Zhiguli saloon. Years ago, he said, he had daydreamed of selling all his paintings and buying a Mercedes Benz. ‘I love those cars.’ He tapped his splintered windscreen. ‘But instead I’ve got this.’ The Zhiguli might have been assembled from scrap metal. It moved in spasms, and swung about like an artist’s mobile.
We clattered down Gogol and Pushkin streets – ‘I hope they keep those names,’ he said. ‘They were real people, writers not politicians . . . .’ He hated politics. Even Islam was not a belief to him, but a habit. It had always rested lightly on the pastoral Turcomans. He had counted three new mosques being built in the city, he said, but they signalled a mild cultural resurgence rather than a doctrinaire revolution. ‘We Turcomans never so deeply believed. We never had many mosques. It was enough just for five or six people gathered in a house to pray . . . .I remember that as a child.’
His studio stood in a suburb still scattered with the dwellings of 1948 earthquake victims. The building had lain derelict for years, until he and some friends had restored it. Now it had become a nest of gaunt ateliers where nobody seemed to be working. A debris of sculpture lumbered its courtyard – two decapitated leftovers of Socialist Realism carved in silver-painted polystyrene, and a discarded portrait-bust.
We went down an echoing corridor, where outsize stoves loomed like pillars. In the studio was a primitive press for Momack’s etchings. He sat down awkwardly. His life’s work lay stacked around us, unsold. The canvases banked up in shelves or were heaped against the walls. As a student he had become infatuated by Picasso and Chagall, and over the years his paintings had grown dangerously unrepresentational. They had sold only to friends. After perestroika, he said, he had enjoyed some acclaim in Moscow and even Eastern Europe. But life was hard now, he was so isolated. He supported two daughters by his first wife, and by his second a little son, who had yesterday been circumcised and cried all night.
Hesitantly he showed me some pictures. His early oils were romanticised scenes of Turcoman village life, and faltering essays in Picasso. But his etchings and watercolours were besetting and strange. Obsessively he had painted weddings and mirages. Above all, mirages. It was as if his people’s past shimmered just out of reach, maddening and ungraspable to him. His figures were like ghosts. They walked or rode in abstract deserts and mountain-valleys, and they reeked of melancholy. They were people in moonlight, in flight. Their shadows on the sand or rock were as important as they were, and were often doing something different.
‘These are only attempts,’ he said. ‘You can never achieve what you want, can you?’
The grief in him, the hunt for some rootedness in the past of his violated people, perhaps arose from an orphan’s distress. His father and two small sisters had been killed in the 1948 earthquake, leaving his mother pregnant with him; and when he was only thirteen, she too had died.
‘Perhaps that’s why I’m already going white . . . .’ He touched a plume of ashen hair spurting back from his temples. He was still only forty-three. No wonder all his pictures seemed to weep for a lost motherland. He had chosen to inhabit the fringes of his city, among the victims, and his friends came from the minority peoples who float between the Russian and Turkic populace in all the capitals of Central Asia: Armenians, Tartars, Jews, Koreans, Poles.
Had he conceived of his painting, I wondered, as a way back to his past?
‘No, no, nothing like that now.’ His expression dissolved into a kind of tragic softness. ‘It’s only line and colour. That’s all. Line and colour. No, I haven’t rediscovered my culture, just extended my technique.’
Some of his pictures descended into a peculiar literalness. In one the words of an illuminated Turkish manuscript hung like a curtain behind a bearded artist. But the composition dwindled away in four parts, the words faded and the figure was pared to a shadow. ‘This tells that without knowledge of his past a man is nothing,’ Momack said pedantically. ‘He can’t understand himself. He disappears.’
Now he was fingering a watercolour labelled Marriage: a Study of Old and New. A village bridal dress – the vivid crimson of fertility — lay in a museum vitrine, brilliant but inaccessible; while beside it, in virginal white, posed a Western mannequin bride. Under her veil, she was naked.
I longed to find some geographical heart to this diffused nation, but there was none. It owned no Vatican, no Acropolis. Its people had perhaps drifted westwards into the Karakum desert in the tenth century, but even this is unsure. Late in the nineteenth century the advancing Russians found them scattered beneath the Kopet Dagh foothills in fortress villages and nomad camps. Of all the Central Asian peoples the Turcomans had the firmest sense of their own nation, and the strongest will to fight. Yet even amongst them this statehood was a cloudy concept. They thought of themselves first by tribe – Tekke or Yomut or Salor – and their frontiers were in constant flux.
Only the little town of Geok-Tepe, I thought – some twenty miles north of the Iranian foothills – might have covertly been remembered as a national shrine. In 1879 the Turcomans had thrown back a czarist army from its walls in a rare reverse for the imperial arms in Central Asia, but two years later the Russians returned under their sanguinary general, Skobelev – Old Bloody Eyes’, as the Turcomans came to call him – and laid siege to Geok-Tepe again.
Inside its three miles of mud-built ramparts the most savage and powerful of the tribes, the Tekke, had assembled ten thousand mounted warriors for a last stand. Artillery failed to dismantle this redoubt, so the Russians sent in sappers to mine the soft earth beneath its walls. After twenty days of siege, a two-ton explosion and a rain of artillery blew a breach almost fifty yards wide, killing hundreds of defenders; then the Russian infantry charged forward with their bands playing, and streamed through the breach. Hand-to-hand fighting broke the dazed Turcomans. They fled out of the fortress with their women and children, and were massacred indiscriminately in their thousands. For years afterwards the plains were scattered with human bones, and the tribespeople only had to hear a Russian military band playing for their women to start wailing hysterically and their men to fall on their faces in terror.
Yet Geok-Tepe became a legend of heroic failure, and when I mentioned it to Korvus’s son Bairam, he grew excited and insisted on driving me there. It was only fifty kilometres away, he said. He knew a local historian who would join us. We would go to the burial-place of the Turcoman war-leader Kurban Murat. ‘We’ll have a party!’
By the time we left next morning, the party had mushroomed uncontrollably. We clattered out of the city in a Volga saloon stuffed with his friends from the state television company. There was a mocking film-director, already drunk, a mouse-like scriptwriter, and a cloudless colossus of a historian with a pock-marked face. Scenting festivity, they had abandoned their desks en masse and were stirring up a carnival euphoria.
Even before we left the outskirts, they had waylaid a friend in his butcher’s shop. Through a swinging jungle of fly-blown cow and sheep, we thrust our way into a mud-floored storeroom and squatted down in this sordid secrecy for a random picnic. Roundels of bread and saucers of cucumber appeared, and soon the tiny room resounded to the splash and gurgle of vodka. An infectious jubilation brewed up. We toasted one another’s countries, families, businesses, futures and pasts. Turcoman and Russian oratory blundered together in helpless pastiche. Occasionally the butcher came in to snatch up a knife or a bloodstained apron. But we were soon past caring. Shoulders and necks were clasped in inebriate brotherhood, and bawdy jokes recycled as the film-director implacably refilled every-body’s glass.
Even in my vodka-soaked trance, I recognised the director’s strangeness. He was the group’s self-appointed jester, but he had the face of a ravaged clown. With his every movement a shock of greying hair floundered above two goitrous eyes. Much of his humour was lost to me, but the rest was subtly self-degrading. The others laughed sycophantically. The role of joker had become his distinction, his passport. He appeared close to breakdown. ‘English culture! Turcoman culture!’ He lifted a shaking glass. ‘These are high cultures! Not like the Russians . . . .’ Our glasses clashed. ‘I love England . . . . Most of all I love Princess Anne! That is a beautiful woman!’ His eyes came bulging close against mine. He was slopping vodka into my glass. ‘Vodka’s the cure for everything!’
Only the historian did not drink. ‘He is a very serious man,’ the clown gabbled. ‘He wants to talk history with you. But he says drink fucks his brains.’
The historian’s face cracked into a smile, which survived there senselessly a long time later, as if he had forgotten it. All his moods traversed these slow gradients, and remained stranded in his expression after all feeling must have gone.
By now the damp from the earth floor was seeping up through our socks and trousers. But we settled drunkenly into the last crusts and dregs. With dimmed amazement I remembered that the men squatting in this butcher’s store were the sophisticates of Ashkhabad. But their formal shirts and ties now looked like pantomime, and our party seemed to unleash in them some deep, earthen craving, older than Islam.
An hour later we were meandering over a potholed road towards Geok-Tepe. For miles Ashkhabad seemed to extend itself over the scrubland in scattered villages of pale-bricked cottages and dishevelled gardens. The country had a vacant, incomplete look, as if it were earmarked for a suburb, and was waiting. Pylons and telegraph poles criss-crossed the plains in a dirty spider-web. Heaps of piping and rubble littered the roadsides. Every building appeared to be unfinished or falling down, with no moment between consummation and decay.
We passed cement and asbestos works, and wine distilleries. Then cotton fields and vineyards appeared, and collective farms named ‘Sun’ or ‘Glory’, adorned by faded slogans celebrating strength and labour. Once we crossed the Karakum Canal flowing westwards seven hundred miles from the Amu Dariya, the classical Oxus, to fertilise all these oases beneath the Kopet Dagh. It ran in a brown tumult between concrete banks and encroaching reeds.
Soon afterwards, driving through pastureland, we came upon an enormous graveyard. Many dead from the Geok-Tepe massacre had been interred here, and a year afterwards the Turcoman leader Kurban Murat was buried amongst them. He was not only a warrior but a Naqshbandi Sufi, a holy man, and his tomb became a lodestar for pilgrims, and a token of resistance. Far into the Soviet era it was secretly venerated. ‘It had just decayed to a mound,’ the historian said, ‘but people remembered it.’
We scrambled through a gap in the concrete wall. The saint’s tomb had been clumsily rebuilt: a brick cube under a clay dome. We had all sobered a little, and now went swaying in silence through the grass towards it. All around us heaved an ocean of nameless mounds misted with white poppies. The historian said: ‘Two of my great-grandparents were killed in that battle. They’re buried here too.’ He knew the place, but did not go there. He eased open the door to the tomb of Kurban Murat. Only the director remained outside, suddenly ashamed or indifferent, running his hands over his face in the Moslem self-blessing.
We peered into a wan light shed by the perforated dome. We were alone. The grave-mound swelled huge and constricted in its walls. It was covered in green silk. At its head, pilgrims had left variegated stones, and several hundred roubles lay there untouched. Three times we circled the grave anti-clockwise in the Moslem way, squeezing along the walls. Nobody spoke. Then suddenly, violently, at the grave’s head, my companions prostrated themselves and struck their foreheads against its mound. I gazed at them in mute surprise. All at once the place reverberated with the ancient, tribal prestige of the dead, and of all the unutterable past. Their foreheads were covered with dust when they rose.
Next moment we were outside, among the graves again. A few swallows were twittering in the grass. ‘Many people come here on the anniversary of the battle’ — the historian snaked out his arm to conjure queues – ‘especially the descendants of the dead.’ But the dead were mostly anonymous. Here and there a Turcoman samovar, discoloured and rusting, betrayed the presence of a grave, or an inscribed headstone showed. But most were marked only by the raw earth breaking through a weft of shrubs and poppies.
‘Do the Naqshbandi come?’ I had read that they still pervaded Central Asia.
But he said: ‘No. They’re not important. Our religion is older than theirs, older than Islam. We have our own faith. That’s why we can’t accept fundamentalism, or Iran, or any of that.’ His face confronted mine like a blank moon. He wanted me to understand. ‘The people who come to our shrines, they’re not exactly Moslems, you see, although they are called that. Their belief is earlier . . .different.’
Lingering beside this clannish mausoleum – the lair of a sainted warrior – I believed him. It reeked of ancestor-worship. The formal practice of the mosque, all the structures and theologies of urban Islam, seemed far away. This was a secret place of tribal memories, and anger. ‘The Russians killed fifteen thousand of us on that day, many of them women and children, and lost three thousand of their own.’ The historian stared across the rough, earthen sea. ‘They were barbarians.’
Yet he had invented the number of enemy dead. Against the piteous Turcoman casualties, the Russians (perhaps minimising) put their own at fewer than 300. But the historian’s history was glamorous and simple. He was rebuilding his country’s past as dangerously free of truth as the Russians had once created theirs. Wandering the graves, he claimed a 7000-year ancestry for the Turcomans in this land, as if they were the pure descendants of Neolithic men. He had reconstructed them not as idolatrous slavers who had veneered themselves with a more sophisticated faith, but as an ancient, homogeneous people steeped in early wisdom.
Now the director was stumbling along the path beside us. ‘It’s not our tragedy!’ His shirt gaped open above a straggling tie. ‘It’s their tragedy, the Russians’ tragedy! It’s the Russians who had to leave this country, not us. Like the British from India or the French from Algeria!’ His clownish eyes strayed over me. ‘Like all colonialism – it’s the tragedy of the colonisers!’
I mumbled uncertainly. Colonialism seemed to resolve into no such easy patterns. He was drinking himself to death like any Russian.
‘It’s their disaster, their mistake!’ His arm trembled towards the graves: ‘These others were not mistaken . . . .’
An hour later, as we motored towards Geok-Tepe, the odd, reckless fervour overtook him again, and he insisted on stopping. Nobody dared refuse him and soon we were all lolling in the grass with two more bottles of vodka and a bag of halfliquefied cheese. Beside us glinted a stagnant pool, where a concrete sluice was channelling away water from the Karakum Canal. It gurgled miserably. By now my head had floated clear of my body, and my feet were unfamiliar to me. I recognised them dimly at the far end of my legs. The self-made clown had turned us all into children. We laughed in a gale of idiot mirth whenever he opened his mouth. A few dusty shrubs concealed our scandal from the road. ‘This is a beautiful Turcoman place,’ he cried, and everybody laughed.
I was aware only of the historian secretly condescending, touching my arm from time to time, and his eyes said: I’m sorry. And sometimes Bairam pushed bread and cheese at me and whispered: ‘Eat, eat, don’t just drink. Save yourself ...’
I longed to tip away my glass unseen, but the director watched me with fevered eyes every time he refilled it, and demanded toast after toast. Then – half in jest at first, half in absolution – he would slither his hands over his face in the Moslem blessing, until they were squirming down his cheeks in cynical desperation. But he muttered: ‘I’m grey. Only good men go grey . . . . Look at these others . . . .’ He got up and staggered in the grass. ‘This is a beautiful place . . . . Will you give my love to Princess Anne? . . . Our is a high culture ...’
We never reached Geok-Tepe, but somehow circled back to Ashkhabad in a nimbus of alcohol. At the hotel, where my floor-lady usually sat at her post in bored watchfulness, the desk was vacant and I fumbled in its drawer for my room-key. Then I stopped. A piece of paper had caught my eye. With a shock I found myself reading a report on my own movements. Scrupulously it noted the times I had left and entered my room, and the identity of those who had visited me. I felt slightly sick. An old tension took hold of me, familiar from twelve years before, when the KGB had dogged me through the western Ukraine. The paper reminded me of what I already knew, but which in the pleasure of the day I had forgotten: that this was not a free country.
But to whom, I wondered, did the local KGB report? Were they being cleansed of their Russian element and turning purely Turcoman, or had the links with Moscow been preserved? Above all, what was their point? But most likely, I thought, they would change only with the slowness of those Jurassic sauropods which possessed two brains, one in the head, one in the base of the tail: an organism of unwieldy, vegetable instinct. For a while they would simply continue doing what they had been programmed to do, however senseless, because that is what they had always done.
The next moment my floor-lady appeared, agitated. An obese Russian babushka with hennaed curls and pencilled eyebrows, she too seemed to belong to a fading species. She greeted me with a wriggling wave of her fingers, then groped for my key in her pocket, shooting me smiles. ‘How stupid of me . . . .’
Next day I revived my plans to reach Geok-Tepe. A driver named Safar offered to take me seventy miles for barely two dollars (the devaluation of the rouble had turned the dollar to gold) and we set off past the same factories, cotton-fields and jaded pasturelands. The country grew poorer as we went. The cottages spawned shacks of corrugated tin: animal pens, dwellings, lavatories. Weather-blackened men idled in the doorways with dark, Bedouinish women in black dresses and flaring headscarves. Over the grasslands roamed flocks of karakul sheep and lambs – the source of astrakhan wool – and small, one-humped camels. But the fields were fringed with salinated marsh which shone like dirty snow.
By now the Kopet Dagh mountains were teeming across the southern horizon, and dropping their foothills in our path. A storm raged beyond them, discolouring the sky. Suddenly a military airfield appeared. Outside their camouflaged bunkers, the jet fighters were all pointed at Iran thirty miles away over the mountains. I was unsure if foreigners were permitted on this road, but the old rules had broken down, and the airfield was circled only by broken barbed-wire and derelict watch-towers where nobody watched. The next moment we were past.
I wondered what people thought of this arsenal in their midst – the forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States — but Safar only shrugged. He had done his military service in a chemical warfare unit near Bukhara, he admitted, and he didn’t mind the Russians. ‘We can get on with them. They’re all right. The Russians won’t go away.’
But they were already going away, I knew.
I wondered about Safar. A dust of white hair flew back from his brows, and his long face was deeply lined. Yet all the lines had gone the right way, and his nose craned over a loose, laughing mouth.
But his life unfolded in tragedy, as I was now expecting here. In the earthquake, when he was only a boy, he had lost his three-year-old sister buried under the debris, and his father had disappeared long before during the Stalin years.
‘I never knew him. He was a trader in salt over the border in Iran.’ He gestured at the mountains. ‘He married my mother over there – Turcomans spread all over the border – but he was arrested as a kulak in 1936 and taken away to Siberia. My mother is ninety now, but still remembers. He returned to her for a month, then was rearrested, and years later she got a letter from a fellow-exile, saying he had died out there, near Novosibirsk. That was how we knew.’
For a while, beneath the mountain walls, a paler line of ramparts had been rising, and now loured on its hill to our south. It was a Parthian palace-city, over two thousand years old. And that was the sorcery of this land. For miles it lay empty of anything but modern villages or state farms, and then – as if the intervening centuries had concertinaed – the dry air or shifting sand would have preserved an ancient era in dreamlike isolation, like this city of Nisa.
Barely eighty years after Alexander the Great marched through this region to India, the half-nomadic Parthians rebelled against his successors and were establishing their own empire. Nisa must have marked the northern limit of their domination, and it looked formidable still. Nothing stirred there. But near its gates a shy greeting sounded and we glimpsed in the spectral light a red-headed boy with pale eyes. He vanished into the ruins. He might have belonged anywhere: to Persia or Macedon or even (my imagination vaulted) to those broken Roman legionaries whom the Parthians marched eastward after the battle of Carrhae.
Ahead of us the city seemed as ghostly as he. Built of baked earth, it shared its colour with the dust around it. Wind, rain and the pulverising sun had eliminated all its detail and left behind a tawny labyrinth of walls and towers. I tramped its corridors in fading anticipation. So substantial were its halls that I expected any moment to encounter something intimate or particular. But the sixty-foot ramparts and the bastions knuckling out of them were smoothed to precipices, and the passageways ran beneath like natural gulleys. Even the circular throne-room, once statued with the half-deified princes who ruled here, showed only a shell. The earth was absorbing the whole city back into itself. It was falling out of focus.
Mentally I tried to furnish it with artefacts I had seen in the Ashkhabad museum. They had betrayed a city infected by a mongrel Hellenism. I remembered statuettes in translucent marble, and stupendous ivory drinking-horns. Only from these horns could I dimly sense the city. Their bases flowered into carved dragons with ebullient tusks and firebird wings, but the decorative tiers swarming up their stems were ringed by half-Greek figures, who made war or sacrifice in postures of faded grace, or clashed their cymbals at some forgotten rite.
Yet the city itself had died. My feet fell disembodied in its dust. Here and there courses of hefty baked brick still showed clear in the walls, only to be engulfed again. I was wandering a monochrome maze. An east wind beat in my ears, but seemed to touch nothing else. Once only, on a distant battlement, I glimpsed the uncanny, red-haired boy, watching.
We approached Geok-Tepe at dusk. Safar was neither bitter nor reverent at reaching his people’s Calvary, but chattered on with a hardy brightness. Southward, the mountains lifted to grassy plateaux rolling with thunder-clouds. We crossed a lonely railway-line.
‘That was why we went to war with the Russians,’ Safar said. ‘They wanted to bring the railway here, but we Turcomans hated it.’ Unconsciously he was peddling a Soviet version of the conflict, I suspected: an interpretation of czarist imperialism which made the Turcomans look backward. As for the Russians, a confusion of motives – the greed for trade and raw materials, a hunt for secure borders, outrage at the slave-traffic in Slavs – drove the czarist empire piecemeal to the walls of Geok-Tepe. In the end the void and weakness of all this land – a simple power-vacuum – sucked the Russians in.
At first we glimpsed nothing but a small town scattered in the distance, and the quiet railway. Then we were driving beside the concrete enclosure of a collective farm, which masked other, older walls. Intentionally, perhaps, it had been sited here to lay the past to sleep. It was called ‘Peace’. But after a while its vineyards petered out, and there moved over the pastureland a low switchback of earth ramparts, like the spine of a serpent buried in the scrub.
We scrambled up it. Beside us a crenellated outwork had disintegrated to a stump, bristling with artemisia. A drift of barbed wire crowned the summit. As I reached it, I stopped in amazement. Below me, as far as I could see in the dusk, there fell open an immense quadrangle of ramparts almost three miles in circumference. It glimmered over the plain and was utterly deserted. Here 35,000 Tekke tribespeople, with 10,000 mounted warriors, had assembled in a teeming tent-city. Some of the battlements stood only twelve feet high now – after the siege their upper courses had been stripped away to cover the slain – but for hundreds of yards they rose eerily intact. Their double parapet ran in a worn corridor where the loopholes and rifle-pits had eroded to cracks or wholesale breaches. In those embrasures, after the battle, many men were found still sitting where they had been shot, some of them dead for days, their heads slumped between their knees.
We came to where a new tomb was being built. Its foundations enclosed a stone marker with the name of the dead leader and the fatal date, 1881. Safar dropped to the earth, whispering prayers, then we circled the grave together. I asked if it had been accurately remembered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Local people remember these things. And they paid for the tomb.’
For a while, in the thickening twilight, we stumbled along those haunted ramparts. They ran before us in hillocks of connected earth, slashed by floodwaters and artillery. Beyond the mound where the Turcomans had set up a battery and observation-post, the southern walls had melted into twilight and the fatal breach was subsumed beneath the collective farm. Somewhere nearby the Russians’ redoubt had pushed to within seventy yards of the fortifications as they mined beneath them, so that their soldiers could hear the Turcoman sentinels chatting together, wondering why the infidels were drilling their snouts into the ground like pigs. After the mines exploded and the breaches were stormed, panic had swept through the Turcoman camp. Most of the fighting men took to their horses and streamed out through rents in the walls where we now walked, and hordes of terrified civilians followed them. For more than ten miles the Russians pursued them over the plains, scything them down in their thousands: old men, women and children.
Now, as we strayed inside the enceinte, I realised that all around us the earth was rumpled into mounds. They lapped to our feet in a pitiful ocean. It was impossible not to tread on them, they were so many, spiked with camel-thorn and all unmarked. The morning after the battle, 6500 corpses had been counted inside the fort, with 8000 more who had been massacred in flight.
‘Nobody knows who lies there,’ Safar said. ‘It was the Russians who buried them.’
I gazed numbly. They had simply been covered with earth where they fell.
By the time Safar and I returned to the car it was dark, and we had both gone silent. Our headlights wavered bleakly over the road. Opposite the main breach, I had read, the Russians raised a memorial to their fallen. ‘I saw it three months ago,’ Safar said. ‘It’s nothing much.’
But guiltily I asked to visit it. The tolerance which had left it standing touched me with bemused warmth.
Yet as we circled along the railway Safar grew bewildered. ‘I thought it was here,’ he said, ‘I’m sure it was.’ Three or four times we traversed the same road, but he recognised nothing. Around us the town had become a warren of underpowered lights in blank windows.
Suddenly he lifted his hands in perplexity. ‘There it is!’
I craned forward. ‘Where?’
‘There!’
Wanly, as if throwing a tenuous halo round an object of dubious sanctity, our headlamps had alighted on a hillock of dust and rubble. Safar wrenched the car away from it. ‘They made a job of that!’
We asked a passer-by what had happened.
‘I don’t know,’ the man answered. ‘It just disappeared.’
‘How?’
The man’s face puckered into a laugh, then he said with grave matter-of-factness: ‘They say God did it in the night!’