One building, and one era, overbear Bukhara like a disfiguring memory. For over a thousand years successive incarnations of a vast palace-fortress, the Ark, have loomed against the north-west walls. Shored up in secrecy, its final, monstrous embodiment is withdrawn out of human reach on a dishevelled glacis, which the binding timber-ends speckle like blackheads, and the ramparts which crown it are forty-foot scarps. Of the ruined buildings inside, only a few cupolas and an arcade can be glimpsed from below; but behind, it disintegrates into a rectangle of rotted bastions which blunder round its plateau in half-pulverised brick. It seems to have slipped down entire from a more savage era. Yet it kept much of its old use until 1920, when the last emir fled, and it is this incongruence in time — it is a museum now, but was a bloodied court within living memory – which perpetuates around it a peculiar disquiet.
As I approached its ramped gateway, this displacement intensified. Two tall towers squeezed the way to a needle’s-eye. In the loggia above, ceremonial musicians had once set up a macabre thump of drums and bray of horns. A mechanical clock had hung here, contrived by an Italian prisoner who temporarily bought his life with it in 1851; but it had gone now. A covered passage climbed past the cramped chambers of sentries and janitors, then wound up to a series of sterile platforms into emptiness.
I wandered in dulled surprise. Within seventy years the whole elaborate palace-keep, peopled by 3000 courtiers and soldiers, concubines and catamites, had disintegrated to a jigsaw of blank courts. A few rooms housed depressing little museums where schoolchildren were gawping at photographs (leftovers of Soviet propaganda) recording the emirate’s cruelty. But the rest were crumbling and uninhabitable.
I was walking over the debris of all Bukhara’s later history. After the Mongol sack, the city had revived under the house of Tamerlane, and when the Uzbeks came south and seized it in 1506, they continued its splendour for another hundred years. But by the end of the eighteenth century Central Asia had resolved into three warring states – Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand – lapped by intransigent tribes of Kazakhs and Turcomans. By now the whole region was in decline, and the nineteenth century in Bukhara was spanned by two vicious and degenerate emirs, products of an isolation which had educated them in little but indulgence.
The atrocious Nasrullah signalled his accession by slaughtering his three brothers, and on his deathbed in 1860 ordered one of his wives stabbed to death before his eyes. His son Mozaffir began his quarter-century of despotism by butchering the heir-designate. At first the poorer classes trusted Mozaffir, dubbing him the ‘killer of elephants and protector of mice’, for to his ministers and courtiers he was quixotically cruel. But towards the end of his reign one of the few Westerners to reach Bukhara alive described him as a sallow lecher with shifty eyes and trembling hands, whose subjects credited him with the Evil Eye.
I approached his audience-chamber through a ruined gate where a stone lion roared harmlessly, and entered an empty field of paving. The plinths of a lost arcade made orphaned rows of stone. At the end, on a long dais, the canopy of the vanished throne rose on wonky pillars, and touched the dereliction with a trashy pomp. There was nothing else. Even the wealth on which this pantomime rested – the emir’s secret gold-mine – was unknown for years after the emirate’s fall. Before their retirement, miners routinely had their eyes and tongues gouged out, and travellers were executed on the smallest suspicion that they knew where it was. Only in the 1960s did the Russians locate it and hurry it back into production.
It was the emir Nasrullah who sent a cold tremor through Victorian Britain by executing two army officers on diplomatic mission. Colonel Stoddart was an intemperate campaigner who arrived at Bukhara in the hope of steeling the emir against the advance of czarist Russia. But to this court of touchy etiquette and childish vanities he brought no suitable gifts, and his letter of introduction was signed not by Queen Victoria but merely by the Governor-General of India. Nasrullah played with him like a cat. He either cosseted him under house arrest or entombed him in the Sia Chat, the deepest well of his prison. After more than three years Captain Conolly, a romantic and lovelorn officer in the Bengal Light Cavalry, reached Central Asia in an attempt to unite the khanates against Russia, and to retrieve Stoddart. It was he who first coined the phrase ‘The Great Game’ to describe the shadow-play of British and czarist agents across Central Asia as the Russian frontiers pushed closer to India. He too was thrown into the well.
The prison stands on a dusty spur behind the citadel. I found its cells crowded with dummies chained by their necks to the mud walls. Beyond them a rectangular hole opened in the paving. In the domed pit scooped out below, from which escape was impossible, Stoddart and Conolly had wasted away among excrement and human bones.
I peered down on two decomposing dummies and a glitter of coins thrown in by visitors for luck. A daemonic inspiration had once stocked the well with a mass of vermin, reptiles and giant sheep-ticks which burrowed into the men’s flesh. Within a few weeks their bodies were being gnawed away. I descended by a rope ladder, and alighted in dust twenty feet below. The walls were lined with impenetrable brick and every whisper reverberated. Beside me the rag and plaster effigies had rotted to sick apes, their arms extended in supplication, their legs dropped off. I could not tell who, if anyone, they were meant to be. But I looked up at the terrible, hopeless hole in the apex of the dome, and thought about my last compatriots to have lain here. The walls closed overhead in horror. On 24 June 1842 Stoddart and Conolly were marched out into the public square under the citadel, and made to dig their own graves. Then they embraced, professed their Christianity, and were beheaded by an executioner’s knife.
Two years later an eccentric and unwitting player of the Great Game appeared in the diminutive shape of the Reverend Joseph Wolff, the Anglicised son of a Bavarian rabbi. Dressed in black gown, shovel hat and scarlet doctoral hood, and ostentatiously cradling a Bible, he rode into Bukhara to discover the whereabouts of the vanished men. He described the city as if it were a heathen Oxford, but by now its trumpeted 360 mosques and 140 medresehs were mostly in ruins, if they had ever existed. Instead of beheading Wolff, the emir became convulsed by laughter. For weeks the clergyman remained a virtual prisoner in the home of the Chief of Artillery (whom the emir years later hacked in two with an axe). From a nearby garden he could hear a Hindu orchestra from Lahore playing ‘God Save the Queen’ in his honour; and he was continually called upon to answer the emir’s queries – about the lack of camels in England, or why Queen Victoria could not execute any Briton she wished. Finally, in bemusement, Nasrullah let him go.
But the brutality and self-indulgence of the emirs alienated them fatally from their people. Imperilled by Russia, they could lead no holy war, and breed no patriotism. Their armies in the field were an absurd rabble. Dressed in random uniforms and harlequin colours, they shouldered a phantasmagoria of matchlock rifles, sticks, pikes and maces. On the march they perched astride donkeys and horses, sometimes two or three to a mount, while a few pieces of camel-drawn artillery brought up the rear.
The czarist armies brushed them aside. In 1868 Russia bit off half the emirate, occupying Samarkand, and reduced Bukhara to a client state. In all their Central Asian wars, between 1847-73, the Russians claimed to have lost only 400 dead, while the Moslem casualties mounted to tens of thousands.
The ensuing years brought the ambiguous peace of subservience. The czarist Russians, like the Bolsheviks after them, were contemptuous of the world which they had conquered. They stilled the Turcoman raids and abolished slavery, at least in name, but they entertained few visions of betterment for their subjects. As for the Moslems, who could stoically endure their own despots, the tyranny of the Great White Czar insulted them by its alien unbelief. ‘Better your own land’s weeds,’ they murmured, ‘than other men’s wheat.’
Yet there would come a time when they would look back on the czarist indifference as a golden age.
The poorest foreigner in Central Asia became a millionaire overnight. The rouble had collapsed. A single dollar might equal two days’ industrial wage or a week’s pension. The most lavish meal (if it could be found) would not cost a pound sterling, and train journeys carried me hundreds of miles for a few pence. But bankcards and traveller’s cheques had fallen useless. Only cash prevailed. Foreigners carrying a few dollar notes were walking treasuries, and people were starting to realise this.
‘Things here are different from what you think,’ a Russian official confided. ‘It’s dangerous for foreigners now.’ Even the Uzbeks distrusted themselves. Single tourists, they said – those freakish, lonely aliens with their inexplicable innocence and riches – were natural prey.
My solitary status baffled them. Where was my group? But a private invitation from an Uzbek friend had liberated me from the surviving constrictions of Soviet bureaucracy; my visa was stamped with a medley of destinations, and nobody took responsibility for how, or by what route, I reached them. Yet my few hundred dollars exposed me. I was carrying almost the life-time earnings of a factory workman.
I did not know what to do with them. Half of them I had sealed into a bottle of bilious-looking medicine; the other half I hid in the tinny air-conditioner of my hotel bedroom – an ingenuity which rather pleased me.
But one night I returned late. Nothing definable in my room had altered, yet I had an uneasy sense of intrusion and unhitched the frame of the air conditioner. The money was gone.
It was a creepy shock. Everything else lay undisturbed, immaculate, just as I had left it. I was reminded of how the KGB had searched my room in the Ukraine twelve years before: everything returned impeccably to its place (or nearly), with no sign of a break-in. This time the motive was not political, but coarser and less intimidating, and the residue of my money was untouched in its bottle of malignant medicine.
The hotel summoned plain-clothes police. While two heavyweights dismantled the air-conditioner, questioned me and apologised, a third slight, dark man watched them cynically, smiling a little, and fingered his tie. For a while they attempted to make out that I was mistaken, then recanted. The size of the sum seemed to stupefy them. I knew I would not see the money again. They went uselessly away.
I felt a paradoxical shame, as if I were the criminal. I remembered what Russian friends had told me about the KGB camera surveillance in tourist hotels, and how blatantly I had counted out the dollars on my bed the evening before. Yet for a few days my suspicions fell on half the faces in the hotel, and whenever I returned to my room I would dismantle the ventilation in case the money had magically returned.
Then I thrust it out of my mind.
One evening I returned to Gelia and Zelim in the hope of seeing his paintings. As I arrived, I noticed his mother, huge and somnolent, hunched on a bench at the street corner, watching the world she now hated. The door was opened by Gelia. ‘So you came back!’
We sat in the gaunt room again, waiting for Zelim’s return. She had been teaching at the Russian school all day, and looked pale. ‘So many Russians are getting out,’ she said. ‘There’s talk of our school being amalgamated with others.’ She began switching on lights around the room. ‘Even my friends talk of leaving now.’
‘Would you leave?’ I asked.
But she answered simply: ‘Where to?’
She was a Tartar and Zelim was half Chechen. They had no real homeland. She understood the confused or muted sense of nation which so many of her pupils felt. This week their religious festivals had followed close on one another, and she had set them projects for the rediscovery of their past: the past which had been denied them. Tartars, Uzbeks, Russians, Jews, Tajiks — they had brought back their ritual foods to school: the Moslem pilau from Bairam, the saltless Jewish Passover bread, the Orthodox Easter eggs. The blamelessness of what was once for-bidden had touched her.
‘But people are bewildered now. A boy came to me yesterday and said, “My father is Ukrainian, my mother Tartar, so what am I? I suppose I’m just Russian.” And I couldn’t answer him.’ She smiled sadly. ‘As for these Moslems, they don’t feel any identity really. They may call themselves Uzbeks or Tajiks, but it doesn’t mean much to them. They were Soviet before, and that was that. We all had this idea that we were one people, that we would melt into one another And now we’re left with nothing.’
‘Or with Islam.’
‘Maybe.’ She looked doubtful. ‘But I think they feel lost, most of them . . . .’
This lack of nationalism among Uzbek and Tajik had drawn them closer over many decades. A century ago the conquering Uzbeks and the long-settled Tajiks despised one another. The Uzbeks had been nomadic warriors. Many had disdained trade, which they left in the hands of Tajiks and Jews, while farming was done by an army of Persian slaves. An Uzbek (I had read) would introduce himself by race and clan, the Tajik merely named himself by city. But now even this diffused Uzbek sense of race seemed to have dimmed. ‘They belong to big families,’ Gelia said vaguely. ‘Perhaps that is enough for them . . . .’
Yet in 1924 Stalin, carving out the Central Asian states which had never before existed, often followed ethnic realities with scrupulous accuracy. He was attempting to divide and rule, nagged by the Soviet fear of a united Moslem ‘Turkestan’. But sometimes people were so interknit as to defy delineation, and the Uzbeks and Tajiks of Bukhara and Samarkand were the most entangled of all.
Gelia said darkly: ‘Perhaps you’re right, and they can find themselves only in Islam.’ She picked up her spectacles and squinted comically. ‘I don’t want to think that. I was always frightened of religion. When I was small I once stayed with a Christian schoolfriend, and spent all night in terror that her mother might come in and make the sign of the Cross over me! I’ve never been to a church.’ She smiled at my surprise. ‘But I’ve changed in the last year, I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m getting old – my teeth, my eyes are not good any more. Now I think about religion a bit, I never used to.’ Suddenly her girlish gaiety was brushed by melancholy. Youth and middle-age seemed to coexist in her. ‘I sometimes wonder now if it is not a sin to live without God.’
I heard myself say: ‘I don’t know about God.’ Everyone seemed to be hunting for Him now: God as a means of identity, of throwing back a bridge to the past over the Soviet chasm.
Gelia said: ‘Nor do I.’
Her mother-in-law padded in and sat by us, watchful and uncomprehending. Her gaze seemed slowly to inundate the room, until it drowned us. Gelia said, as if excusing her: ‘She has nothing to do now. She just reads memoirs by Soviet marshals.’ The old woman went on staring. The weak electricity shed a dimness round us. ‘Her world has gone away and won’t return, and she knows this. But she’s loved Zelim all her life, and now my sons, and perhaps she loves me because I love him.’
I said weakly: ‘I hope so.’
Her voice roughened in exasperation. ‘But she spies on me. She rummages through everything. She wants to know everything. She wants to know what we’re saying now.’ A mischievous triumph entered her tone, then faded. She said: ‘This house isn’t mine, you see. It’s hers. I’m like a guest here.’
Yet from time to time the sadness of her words was suffused in contralto laughter, and her Tartar cheekbones and auburn hair looked vivid and beautiful in the soft light. Laughter, I supposed, was the only bearable companion to these facts: that she was a guest in another’s house, in another’s country, probably for ever. And when Zelim returned, murmuring a greeting with his curtained politeness, I was reminded how nobody here truly cohabited, how the old woman occupied a vanished Soviet empire, while Zelim lived in some hinterland of his own.
We went out into the bare courtyard and down a stairway to his studio. I was reminded of a priest entering a chapel: the sanctuary of his mind. He seemed perpetually stooped, not physically but emotionally stooped. We came into a room where hundreds of canvases and sketches were stacked with their faces to the walls. I did not know what to expect as he turned them shyly towards me. They were nightmares: scenes of savage transmutation. Men had become animals, and animals half-men. Even in Bukhara street scenes, the familiar domes tilted vertiginously above lanes where a distorted donkey trotted or a man-vulture flapped. The ordinary had turned threatening, and daylight proportions vanished. A man’s turbaned head slept on a mosque cupola, as on a pillow. Flocks of high-coloured sheep grazed nowhere; horses’ heads were shriven to skulls.
Gelia said quaintly: ‘There’s no smile in them.’
Zelim said nothing. They had become his words. Often he had painted lonely sites where a few trees bent over ruins or swaying grass. ‘He loves places like that,’ Gelia said. ‘They frighten me.’
But in a rare oil portrait she had been stripped to a pink doll whose face was annihilated, staring ruthlessly away. Other paintings were abstracts. ‘He himself is an abstract,’ she said, as if he were not there. ‘He does not know what other people do. That’s why he is happy.’ She looked at him. ‘He flies in his dreams.’
Zelim saw my interest. Slowly he turned more and more paintings to the light, but as his racked, vibrant world unfolded, and I asked to buy one, he demurred again and again. One painting, perhaps, was important to his past, to some personal novitiate; while the next belonged to his future and was a blueprint.
I admired a Matisse-like Madonna and Child in pink and grey, and wanted it; but this was part of a cycle. ‘It has simplicity,’ he said. ‘I’m aiming for that all the time now. Simplicity.’
‘You come and steal it,’ said Gelia. ‘Perhaps then he’ll love something else – maybe me!’ She laughed, the lilting, sad sound which came too easily. Zelim turned Madonna and Child to the wall.
In the end I found a watercolour of primordial horses which he was willing to relinquish. But he worried over how it would be framed, insisted it be hung in shadow and that it should be set in a grey border, tilted askew. Secretly I wondered if I would ever get it back to England intact. He furled it up gently for my rucksack, and I noticed for the first time his disproportionately powerful hands.
‘Oh yes,’ Gelia said, as we all emerged into the street. ‘He used to carry me on his hands like this!’ She held out her palms. ‘But now he’s too weak – or I’m too fat!’
He smiled distantly, as if she had nudged some remote happiness, and we ambled to the limit of the walled town. A rare shower had turned the lane’s earth moist underfoot; it stretched empty under a belt of stars. Where the old town ended and the modern one began, they stopped. For the second time, we parted. I kissed Gelia farewell, and Zelim enclosed me in an embarrassed Russian hug, then I started back to my hotel across the overgrown parklands of the new city. Sunset had pulled a blanket of silence over everything. After a minute I looked back up the lamp-lit lane where Gelia and Zelim were walking home, and saw that he had taken her hand in his.
The town’s war memorial stood where the old woman’s family had once owned a dacha. The inscribed names of the dead – almost ten thousand of them – were faintly legible under the stars, their Islamic surnames tagged with Slavic – ovs and – em. Weeds were pushing through the paving-slabs. Nearby I passed the plinth where Lenin had stood. It rose in a ghostly white plat-form, abandoned, as if he had stepped down from it in the starlight, and walked away.
The north-east fringes of the early Islamic empire were rife with alien cults and dangerous forms of worship. Sufism arose in Central Asia as early as the eighth century, and in time the whole region became riddled with mystical brotherhoods centred on the tombs of their founding saints. By the nineteenth century their theology belonged to the distant past, but the holy places were still crowded with devotees, chanting and swooning under matted hair and candle-snuffer hats, while hemp-crazed kalender went whirling and prostrating themselves through the streets.
With the advent of Communism the brotherhoods went underground. Official Islam was brutally persecuted and tens of thou-sands of the religious were executed. Stalin closed down 26,000 mosques, and by 1989, in all Uzbekistan, there were just eighty left. But under this thin carapace of institutionalised worship, whose leaders were forced into compromise with Moscow, there swarmed an undergrowth of unofficial mullahs and holy men. The most fervent centres of worship became not the regulated mosques but the shrines of venerated Sufis, objects of secret pilgrimage. This covert Islam bred paranoia in Moscow. Communists traced the malign influence of the Sufi networks everywhere, and the KGB failed to penetrate them.
Yet everybody I had asked described the brotherhoods as peaceful. Their adepts were engaged on an inner journey, a puritan recoil from the world decaying round them. Sufism became a haven for the spiritually oppressed. In the outer world its murids were craftsmen, traders, even soldiers and Party members, but in the hermetic secrecy of their circles they found repose in uncontaminated worship and chanting.
The most powerful of these orders was the Naqshbandi, whose founder had died in Bukhara in 1389. A century ago its warrior-dervishes had fought against the Russians in the Caucasus, and had re-emerged in 1917 to harass the Bolsheviks. The mausoleum of the saint had been closed down under Stalin, then turned into a Museum of Atheism. But widespread memory of it must have survived, I knew, because in 1987, during abortive demonstrations, it was to this forbidden tomb that the Bukhara protesters had marched, as if to the last symbol of purity in their city.
Far on the outskirts I glimpsed its sanctuary clustered round a flaking dome. Two mosques – one for men, one for women – embraced it in faded arcades, and a lopsided minaret tapered nearby. But all around it a fury of restoration had arisen: the drone and rattle of machines rebuilding. It had reopened three years before. Elaborate guest-rooms were going up, and a bazaar. The pilgrims were flooding in. There were several hundred there now, gossiping, feasting, praying. A glow of celebration enveloped them. Infinitely extended families picnicked under the willows, squatting on their divans and delving into hillocks of pilau, carrots and cucumber.
I wandered at ease. The place seemed virgin, unreal. No modern traveller that I knew had ever been there. I came upon a party of gypsies – a people even here despised and unaccounted for – who were crouching in a hollow, butchering one sacrificial sheep while gorging on another. Beyond them a colossal tree seemed to have crashed to the ground in prehistory, and petrified. Its crevices were stuffed with votive rags and messages, and its limbs polished raw by caressing hands. It had been planted as a seed at the time of the saint’s birth, said the gypsies, and had fallen the day he died. Now, like him, it had acquired holiness. It induced fertility, and cured backache.
A melancholy trio of men was circling it anti-clockwise. One of them winkled off a splinter with his knife. The whole trunk was flecked with these incisions. After them came a flock of peasant girls, brilliant and chattering. They paced familiarly round the trunk, and stooped beneath it where the greyed body arched from the ground. As they went, they caressed its knobs and fissures like lovers. Then they tied silk ribbons to it, and walked blithely away. Behind them tripped a sad-faced woman in middle-age. She wore a tight skirt and high heels. She ran her fingers over the twisted torso, as if searching for something she had left there, then massaged her belly violently against it, with little cries.
I pushed through a door into the shrine’s central court. It was very quiet. The mosque arcades enclosed it on two sides. Their portico ceilings were coffered with deep polygons and stars which were easing loose from one another now, punctured by sparrows’ nests, and the blue and gold paint dimming. A line of pilgrims was approaching the grave along a carpeted path. Men and women went together, as if on holiday. The girls paraded in their festival dresses and pantaloons, their plaits scalloped up at the base of the neck under garish clasps, or cascading beneath embroidered caps. They threw coins into the dry fountain whose waters had been holy four centuries ago, and kissed its stones. Then each group settled on its haunches at the path’s end, while an austere young man chanted a prayer. Above them a forked mast hung like a gibbet, its horsetail trophy gone. On a terrace beyond, the saint’s followers and descendants lay under rough stone cubes. Two women were sweeping away the dust for a blessing. Beside them, a high, imperishable rectangle of grey stone was all that remained of the Sufi’s grave.
The faithful went sauntering round it with a rapt, processional dignity. They touched its stones, then bathed their faces in their hands. They knocked their foreheads softly on its walls, and kissed them. They kissed the black slab said to come from Mecca (and sovereign against headaches) encased in one façade. A fusion of sacred and secular lent a mildness to their worship. Their pilgrimage seemed to progress with the ease of a promenade, in which blessing and companionship, the pleasure of picnics and the chance of childbirth, were harmonised in the sanctity of ordinary things – stone, wood, water.
The midday devotees came and went, and the courtyard emptied. The austere-looking man who had conducted prayers under the gibbet-banner turned out shyly accessible. Yes, he said, there were still Naqshbandi Sufis in the city, but he could not guess their number. ‘Even they don’t know how many.’
Everyone declared the sect’s numbers few now. The Soviet fear seemed suddenly absurd. But the Sufis’ purity of worship had held up a dangerous ideal, as if they were the people’s heart. They had maintained their anonymity even here, in their own Vatican.
‘Perhaps the shrine’s imam is Naqshbandi,’ I ventured.
The man looked momentarily embarrassed. ‘Only he knows.’
‘But they must have remembered this place all the time it was shut down.’
‘Yes, yes. Everybody remembered it. For seventy years. We came here secretly at night and prayed against the walls.’ His voice blurred with the wonder of that time, as if it were already long ago. ‘Some of us even climbed over in the dark and embraced the tomb.’
‘And you, you’re a mullah here?’
‘No, oh no.’ He smiled. ‘I’m an ordinary man. I was a carpenter before, but I taught myself the prayers in Uzbek and Arabic, and came to serve here.’
He made it sound simple, and perhaps it had been. But when I asked why he had chosen this, he answered, ‘Only God knows.’ God’s knowledge everywhere overwhelmed his own. He scarcely knew the history of the saint he served, but lapsed into Communist jargon, describing him as a stakhanovite holy man who achieved through work, and planted melons.
Had the black stone embedded in the tomb, I asked, really been taken by the saint from the black stone of the Kaaba, the lodestar of Islam?
But he answered: ‘Only the stone knows.’
As we sat under the worm-pocked columns of the faltering mosque, he unfolded a laden napkin and shared his pilau and bread with me. At once a mad labourer ran up, his eyes rolling and his trousers covered in blood. With a democracy old in Islam, he sat down at our meal, seizing rice and bread in crazed mouthfuls, so that the sparrows seethed down to peck up his flingings.
‘People bring all their griefs here,’ the young man said, as if explaining him. ‘They bring them to forget them, to open themselves without secrets before God. Then God instructs them.’ He fell again into the spine-chilling Communist argot. ‘Without instructions, you can’t do anything.’
The builder’s eyes, which had rolled to the back of his head, returned suddenly and fixed us with two incendiary black pupils. All at once he stumbled upright and careered away, dragging a club foot. ‘He’s a little ill,’ said the man. ‘This place may cure him.’
‘How?’
‘You find it strange. Perhaps Christians don’t have such beliefs.’ Ruminatively he folded up the napkin and returned it to his basket. He went quiet. To him the magic tree was less inscrutable than people drinking the transfigured blood of a slain god or believing He had a son. But he said at last: ‘We all have the same father and mother, and God knows all we think.’
A few pilgrims had trickled back into the courtyard. The man was embarrassed at being found with me, but only a little. They crouched round him with their palms upraised, not in the secretive closure of Christian prayer but in the ancient Eastern gesture of receiving, as if to catch raindrops. To some Moslems a journey here ranked second in sanctity only to the Mecca pilgrimage. All was tranquil and at ease in the sunlight. The Shia shrines of Iran and Iraq, bitter in their exclusiveness and grievance, seemed far away. Sufism itself, familiar all over Central Asia, is abhorrent to the radicals of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Its survival here was like a pledge of peace.
These thoughts lulled me, perhaps dangerously, in the wormeaten arcades of the reawakening shrine, until I fell into an ecumenical sleep, tranquillised by the pad of barefoot worshippers, and the burble of rose-headed doves under the eaves.
My ramblings in the outskirts next morning led me through a multi-coloured gateway like the entrance to a funfair, and into the summer palace of the last emir. The building was completed in 1912: a bauble confected of East and West. Across its façades the pediments and pilasters were jungled in Turkic plasterwork, which wriggled fatly over every space. Arab arches sat in Chinese porticoes. Burmese domes swooped up from mongrel pavilions.
When I peered inside, I saw that every surface had been tortured into a surreal brilliance. Tiers of niches cascaded down whole walls, while others bloomed into muralled flowers which reared from their vases in spatular sprays. I dawdled down glittering aisles of mirrors and stained glass. Gilded ceilings spun overhead, and Dutch delft ovens loomed out of corners. Sometimes I felt I was sauntering through pure carnival, and sometimes through a playful, jaded refinement: the last niceties of Central Asia sinking under a ton of trivia.
The Hall of Ceremony and the Chamber of Ministers fell behind me in a concoction of delicate plasterwork and looking-glass kitsch. From the bedraggled parklands outside arose the crazed scream of a peacock. Here, under Russian tutelage, the last emir Mahomet Alim had governed the rump of his state in tinsel pomp. His lavishly framed photographs bestrode several tables. Even in dress he was the bastard of two worlds. Fabulously sashed and turbaned like his ancestors, he was weighed down with epaulettes and fatuous czarist honours: a stout little sensualist, whose tax-collectors had terrorised the country.
His palace betrays him. It is an intricate, proportionless toy. I wandered about it in shameless pleasure. Outlandish kiosks appeared to have dropped off its body: follies of dazing ingenuity and lavatorial tiles, where cuddly stone lions looked as if they might mew. In one of these pavilions I found the robes of the emir and his wives.
‘But I think he had only one wife,’ said the girl beside me. She was looking without envy at the cabinets of dresses. O r maybe two.’ She herself had discarded traditional dress for a lumpy cardigan over an ankle-length skirt. ‘Do people have more than one wife in your country? No? They don’t with us either.’
I said: ‘I’ve heard that some men keep . . . well . . . .’
She burst into giggles. ‘Yes, they call them sisters. But it’s not allowed.’ I looked into a sunny face. She said stoutly: ‘I don’t agree with it.’
‘And the veil?’
Her face turned blank with astonishment. ‘Do they still wear that anywhere? Nowadays?’
‘Yes,’ I said. We peered back into the cabinets.
‘I hate it!’ She turned her back on them. ‘I don’t feel a thing for that history. Nobody does. It was long ago. That last emir?’ She pranced to the door. ‘He was rich’ – and this seemed to put him beyond her thought.
I went down through orchards to a stone-flagged pond, where an outsize belvedere hovered on gangling stilts. It was reached by stairs in a fanciful tin minaret, and overhung the green pool. From the loggia nearby, it is said, the emir would watch his harem splashing in the waters, and would toss an apple to the beauty of his choice. Or perhaps he wouldn’t. He was, it appears, an inveterate voyeur – his palace is riddled with peepholes and hidden stairs – and he seems to have preferred boys.
Yet he found a moment of power between the collapse of imperial Russia and the advance of Bolshevism. In 1918 he repulsed the Red invaders from his city in a welter of treachery and fanaticism which saw the murder of hundreds of Russian civilians. Two years later, before the advance of General Frunze, he abandoned Bukhara and his 400-strong harem to the Red Army, and eventually fled over the Amu Dariya into Afghanistan, shedding behind him a trail of choice dancing-boys.
He left no affection or regard behind him; but he was a Moslem who did not tamper with his people’s customs, and there would come a time when his boorish indifference would be recollected as merciful. Compared to the Communist proselytism which followed, his rule was blessedly unprincipled. Mass ideological repression and forced collectivisation were beyond his horizon.
Somehwere along drolly named Central Street – a lane which cars could scarcely enter – I found the synagogue of an early Jewish community. It was sunk behind iron gates in the street’s wall. Inside hung the old Soviet slogan ‘Peace to the world’, and the halls beyond were astir with evening prayer. In one I glimpsed the dwarf chair, draped in red silks, where boys were circumcised. In another some twenty men sat cross-legged under walls hung with dedications, and rested their prayer-books on low tables covered with dirty linoleum. Genially they beckoned me in. Under their skull-caps and berets, most were indistinguishable from ordinary Bukhariots. But others looked sensitised, paler. In another place or time, I thought, they might have been scholars or poets.
Instead they gabbled their prayers with a sunny robustness. They were cobblers, tailors, street photographers. And their hall had seen better days. They sat exposed under striplights, and a skein of dangling wires and bulbs criss-crossed every wall. Instead of flames the seven-branched candlestick sprouted light-bulbs, mostly extinct, and four different clocks hung on the walls, all stopped, as if Time were out of true.
And so it was. Barely a century ago the Bukhariot Jews had dominated the city’s banks and bazaars. They had owned the camel-caravans which wended into Afghanistan and over the Pamirs to China, and had controlled the precious silk market. Above all they knew the secret dyes which glowed in the Bukhara rugs. It was they who mixed an intense crimson from the crushed and roasted bodies of insects found on ash and mulberry trees, and squeezed a beautiful, enduring yellow from a species of larkspur. The hands of half the city’s Jews were stained to the knuckles with dye.
Now they looked poor. They had tired faces and rough hands. They spoke no Hebrew (and for centuries never had). Foreign Jews had been horrified by the unfamiliarity of their customs. I sat amongst them while they mouthed their prayers out of little books sent from Israel (offering Cyrillic phonetics for the Hebrew words, but no translation). Four or five men eagerly picked up the chain of prayer from one another. A lean-faced youth breathed it at the ceiling in whispered bursts of memory, and a heavy patriarch intoned before the Ark. But while one recited, the rest gossiped, sipped tea and occasionally chatted down a discoloured telephone.
Seated beside me, a tiny, cadaverous cobbler sent up a cloud of furtive questions. ‘What food do you have in England? . . . How much does a middle-ranking person earn? . . . Here’s some tea . . . come to my home for supper Have your sons been circumcised? . . .’ He gestured at the wall above us. Behind its gold and scarlet silks, the scrolls of the Law nestled in their cupboards. ‘How long have there been Jews in England? We’ve been here since Tamerlane . . .’
‘Longer! Longer!’ a neighbour barged in. ‘We came over two thousand years ago, after the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem!’
‘More like three thousand years,’ said another.
‘Not correct,’ insisted a pedant. ‘I believe we came in 1835, from Persia and Afghanistan.’
‘No, no. We came . . .’
But nobody really knew. Two hundred years ago Moroccan missionaries had convinced the community that their origins were Sephardic, and they liked to trace their diaspora through Persia and even Tunis. Some scholars believe that Tamerlane brought them from Shiraz or Baghdad, or that they arrived from Merv early in the eighteenth century.
‘It was Tamerlane,’ maintained the cobbler as we debouched into the street. ‘He moved everyone about. We grew rich after that, I’ve heard, but now we’re all poor. Look at my hands.’ They were ringed with callouses. ‘Those are a working man’s. Most of us are barbers or watch-menders, or deal in clothes.’
He led me into an untraceable maze of alleys. In the dark his smallness made me feel I was following a child. But his talk was a long lamentation on his people’s hardships. Half of them had already emigrated, he said: those who were richer or more daring. They had gone to the Americas or Canada or Israel. ‘There are only seven hundred of us left now. Most of my relatives have gone.’
‘What do their letters say?’
‘It’s hard out there in America. They thought it would be soft, but it’s hard. The government gave them eight hundred dollars a month. Eight hundred dollars!’ His voice sank into disillusion: ‘But that’s what a month’s rent costs. He rapped on a low door in a blank wall. ‘But they’ve found work now, and they’ll be all right.’
The door opened on a pretty, bird-like woman. I guessed she was his wife: he did not acknowledge her. He and his brother lived in clusters of rooms at opposite ends of a long courtyard. As we crossed it, a shoal of small sons and nephews circled us. The darkness swam with their blackcurrant eyes and wan faces. Inside, the rooms were indistinguishable from those of city Moslems. The walls and floors were clothed in cheap carpets, and photographs of ancestors perched above hangings just under the sitting-room ceiling. The quilts, the black-and-white television, the china cabinet, were all in place. Only on one wall hung a high-coloured print of Moses clasping his tablets, and some prayer-shawls had been sent by an uncle from Canada.
All their windows were barred, but hostility towards them was still muted, the cobbler thought. Far to the north-west in Khiva, anti-Semitism had become so fierce that the Jews had all fled, and it was growing ominous in the Fergana valley to the east. ‘Nobody knows what will come.’ Perestroika had licensed them to worship openly and to start their own schools, he said, but it had also released around them this dark racism, and perhaps it was for this that they assembled in the synagogue every morning and evening now, and searched their scriptures.
As the family settled to supper, drawn in a quiet rectangle round the half-lit room, they seemed already tinged with the bereavement of refugees. The boys were ragged and wary. The fine-boned wife looked preternaturally delicate. A speechless grandmother, whose husband had died fifty years before, huddled like a plinth among the children, while opposite lounged the cobbler’s brother, a morose fanatic with bulbous cheeks. They dipped into the pilau with old teaspoons. The grand-mother’s homemade wine gurgled into tooth-mugs. Only the woman’s spoon, after searching out shreds of chicken, never reached her lips but travelled into the mouths of her small sons.
‘This is the reason we can’t befriend the Uzbeks easily.’ The cobbler dangled a scrap of chicken. ‘We can’t eat with them. Ours is kosher. Theirs . . . .’ He dropped the morsel formally into his mouth. ‘Our communities have never intermarried. With Russians, occasionally. But with Moslems, never.’
‘With Russian Christians?’
‘No, just Russians.’ A tiny sigh seemed to stick in his throat. ‘Life was better then, under the Communists. Now things are happening too quickly for us. Did you see they’ve taken the statue of Lenin away? I don’t think they should have done that.’
I asked in faint surprise: ‘Why not?’
He frowned. Everything was more tenuous now. Lenin had signalled a kind of continuity. ‘In your country I think they do this: whether a king was good or bad, his monument still stays. It’s part of history. You don’t demolish history like that.’
But his brother charged in. ‘Who wanted that statue?’ He spoke in staccato shouts. ‘Who wanted anything they did? Look what I got from them!’ He flung up his shirt. ‘That was in the Afghan war!’ Across his hirsute stomach travelled livid, parallel scars. ‘Shrapnel!’
Everyone fell silent. These repudiated scars were his dignity. Words were meaningless against them. But the cobbler murmured to me: ‘Our local astrologist says that in forty-five years America will go down and Moscow will come up again. You think that’s true? He says he knows the future, and that Communism will come back.’
‘Not in its old shape.’
‘It’s rubbish!’ shouted the brother. ‘That’s all finished! Fooof!’ His nose and cheeks ballooned over his face, squeezing his eyes to hyphens. ‘Gone for ever!’
Perhaps it was in reconciliation that they switched on the music they had played and recorded together. It emerged from a cracked cassette-player: sounds of unexpected tenderness. I listened for any strain of Hebrew melody, but could discern none. While the cobbler was playing an Uzbek dutah, his brother was singing Tajik folk-songs from Afghanistan. Whatever music their people had carried here centuries ago had been obliterated in the Central Asian vastness. In time, I had read, the Jews became court musicians to the emirs, but their repertory delved deep into an indigenous Moslem music. As the brothers’ recorded noises mourned in the room’s closeness, they strained to hear, as if it were all new.
My soul is a house in ashes,
You are its destroyer
The cobbler’s fingers pattered on his knees, while his brother, seated in sudden melancholy, repeated the words of his recorded voice – lyrical, almost sweet – as it sounded back to him. It was as if only in the insulation of music, in this disconnected passion, could any gentleness come to him.
O nightingale of my heart
Sing me that I was right to trust you....
The young women listened to this abstract love in unreadable stillness, while the small boys lapsed into sleep. I felt unease for them. Subjects of an empire now crumbled into nationalism, their vulnerability sent up unsettling echoes from their people’s longer history. Even here, the Jews were set apart. Barely a century ago they had been obliged to wear girdles of common rope and to ride only on donkeys. There had even evolved a sect of crypto-Jews named chalas, ‘half done’, the fruit of forced or pragmatic conversion to Islam. Shunned by both Jews and Moslems, they became sickly through interbreeding and had almost dispersed, but their giveaway surnames were still despised.
Now the Tajik songs had faded from the tape-recorder, and the children were being bundled into their quilts. I got up to go, wishing I could offer something. But as I parted from the cobbler in the pitch-dark street, he only said: ‘Don’t tell anyone you were here. It’s against the law.’
‘Not any more.’
He smiled, a little ashamed. The fear still guttered in his eyes. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘But still.’
On my last afternoon in Bukhara I drove out with Zelim to a melancholy necropolis which he had haunted as a young painter. His mother levered herself into the car too, ribboned in her war-medals, and pointed out along the road the improvements which Communism had brought. She looked pale, and sometimes trembled, but she gazed through the windscreen with a baleful pride. ‘Thirty years ago you’d have seen a hundred horses and carts here for every one car,’ she said. ‘It was just a filthy track . . .’
Zelim said in his faraway voice: ‘I remember the horses as a boy. They didn’t churn up the mud like cars do.’ He loved horses. They crowded his canvases with heavy heads and dissolute manes. He painted them more affectionately than he did humans.
The old woman said: ‘These suburbs used to be a disgrace.’
After a few miles we arrived at a graveyard tumbled round a shattered mosque. The building had been raised in the sixteenth century around a three-sided courtyard, but its central structure had collapsed, leaving two magisterial prayer-halls separated in the dusk. Under one arcade stood a blackboard and some benches, where Koranic lessons were starting up.
‘Just ruins,’ said the old woman, as she heaved out of the car. She hated the place at once.
But a mullah had emerged to greet us – a tall man with a pared, angry face – while a cripple stumbled complaining after him. The mullah remembered Zelim from years before and began to regale us with the history of the cemetery. He exuded a fierce, sweated energy. But behind him the cripple, his white head bound in a frayed turban, followed like a deflating shadow, undermining his talk with down-to-earth asides. As we tramped between mounds of dust and into half-restored enclosures crammed with engraved cenotaphs, the mullah reeled off the names and qualities of the dead in bursts of parrot learning.
‘They don’t want to hear all that,’ the cripple said. ‘You can leave that out.’
But the mullah barked on in a harsh monotone, as if he were addressing not us only, but the mosque, the dimmed sky and the surrounding dead. He trumpeted the genealogies of all its buried saints, who had lain here longer than the mosque itself, some of them, and hushed into sorrow at inscriptions worn away or defaced; while the cripple, playing Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, grumbled and refuted and threw in belittling innuendoes. Often the mullah spoke too fast for my understanding. As for Zelim, he had gone deaf to words, and seemed only perfunctorily present. He was watching the textures and shapes of the cemetery in the painterly twilight, and after a while he drifted away.
The old lady, hobbling after us, grasped my arm suddenly, almost affectionately, in her unsteadiness. ‘It’s from the war,’ she said. ‘My spine was broken.’ Her fingers hooked frailly over my forearm. She glanced at the carved headstones: their Arabic script had paled to wraiths. ‘I don’t know whose ancestors these are.’ She grimaced and looked away. ‘Some of mine’, she added vaguely, ‘had blue eyes and fair hair. I think they were descendants of Alexander of Macedon’s soldiers. Those men intermarried here.’ She regarded these later graves with dulled contempt, and after a time she shuffled back towards the car.
I was left alone with the mullah and the cripple. Graves seemed to have dogged my way ever since entering Central Asia. Everywhere they were being restored, reconsecrated, refrequented. Sometimes they were less graves than tribal memories. They were the newly dignified past. The Soviets had tried to amputate history, but now every historical artefact – a tomb, a mosque, an inscription – was a milestone along the half-obliterated road back. The dead had become the conduit by which the living were reintegrating themselves.
The mullah’s voice rasped and flared among the tombs. Yet whenever I intruded on this rush he listened with a frowning intensity, and fell quiet. He struggled to disentangle the Kufic script on headstones, but could not. Like many others, he said, he was trying to learn Arabic, but his Uzbek teachers could only read the language haltingly, and did not speak it at all. Around us the earth tossed and heaved beneath its memorials, tilting them left and right. Sometimes it gaped on empty crypts, then closed again where the cenotaphs above had been lugged into shaky order. The mullah pointed down at a warren of breached vaults. ‘Those are the tombs of Naqshbandi sheikhs.’ His voice lifted in wonder. ‘See how big they are! People were taller in those days. Look. Three metres long! All of them. And look at the modern ones.’ He gestured at some forlorn mounds. ‘Two metres at most! People are small now. We are not like they used to be.’
‘Food is rationed,’ said the cripple. ‘That’s why. Even cookingoil.’
I asked: ‘There are still Naqshbandi Sufis here?’
‘Yes, yes,’ the mullah answered. ‘There are many still living in the city. But their dress shows nothing. They are like invisible ones!’ He struck his ribs and half chanted: ‘What matters is in the heart! It is only the heart that matters!’
I said: ‘Perhaps you are one.’
The cripple laughed cynically. But the mullah did not reply, only rushed on with a new genealogy of dead holy men. There had been a time, he said, long before the Prophet, when this place was a shrine of fire-worshippers, and a matriarchy. ‘That is why some women still worship fire.’
‘Women? You’ve seen them?’
‘You see them often. They pray at tombs. These people are fire-worshippers. When they do that, they are remembering the matriarchy, honouring it.’
He was rabid again, glittering. I could not tell if this supposed heresy outraged or excited him. I asked: ‘And you?’
‘I can pray only to God, not to tombs. Everything’s changing now. We have a class here where forty children come after school to learn the Koran. Our mosque is being restored with the money of ordinary people, although the government gives nothing and it will be finished when God wills.’
He seemed at once exultant and angry. I wondered how to ask him the question which went on rankling in me. But among those cold graves, in the sudden twilight, it asked itself: ‘Do you want fundamentalism here?’
He turned to me with dagger-bright eyes. ‘No! That won’t come.’
‘Why not?’
He answered: ‘In the Koran it is written that the Jews and Christians are close to us.’ He rubbed his fingers together in amity. ‘We cannot stand against one another.’
Then he turned and launched into a new encomium on the dead. Always the dead! The whole past seemed to have risen in retribution. But his strident harshness appeared a habit now, just a way of talking. At last he said: ‘You must excuse me. I have to pray.’
He entered a hut and re-emerged in a coat and snowy turban. A few bats came whispering out of the trees. Already faint chanting sounded inside the walls of the half-ruined mosque, and through one door, over a brilliant lake of carpets, I glimpsed a rank of kneeling men.
Zelim’s mother, the war veteran, was waiting in the dusk. She had been frightened by a rush of doves out of the graves, she said, and had returned to the car. Zelim too had been tramping miserably over the corrugated earth. The loss of the central façade, which had united the two prayer-halls, filled him with dismay. It had stood here only two years before, he said. As a boy he had come often, sometimes on foot, and returned to paint it again and again. ‘It was quiet then. Ruined. There was nobody. Just trees.’
What was it he had loved so much, I asked: the melancholy, the wilderness of graves, the silence?
But he said: ‘No. You see, the mosque has proportion. The whole building is in one style. I like that. Its harmoniousness.’
He walked away to view it from another angle, as if this might return to him some illusion of its old self. It was almost dark, and a rash of stars was descending the sky. But for a full five minutes he went on staring up at the building, trying to re-create in his head the harmony which he remembered as a boy.