Dawn had not broken when we moved east out of the last suburbs of Tashkent. Our headlights swung over an empty road. We were keen with the journey’s start, Oman singing to himself as he steered around the potholes, while I sat awake in high spirits, and the faintest apprehension.
After a while, as if some deeper shade of darkness had overprinted the night, I became aware of the cones and triangles of mountains standing on the blackness of the southern horizon. One by one they detached themselves into three dimensions, and within a few minutes the sky was lightening and the stars were peeled away.
But Oman said: ‘It’s still dark ahead.’
At first I imagined storm-cloud. But then, as the sun rose and dangled like a weak bulb, I realised that from end to end the earth ahead lay under a leaden ceiling of smoke. Desolating flat-blocks, pylons and allotments of withered sunflowers appeared, and the next moment we were in the coal-mining town of Angren, whose deposits had been torn open in 1942 to feed the Soviet war-machine.
Nothing might have changed since then. In front of us a landscape of primitive horror had opened up. It belonged to Britain’s collieries in the thirties, or to the Pennsylvania coalfields of the Depression. Under that sky of cruelly filtered light, the whole plain was littered with industrial dinosaurs: coal-fed power-stations and factories like old Meccano sets, strangled in their own chutes and pipes, and chimneys belching yellowish waste. Their windows were smashed or blank. Some were dead on their feet, their turbines and gangways left to rot unremoved. Murals of Lenin flaked from their walls. Others looked derelict, yet had only just been built. Silver water-pipes wriggled for miles between them, sloughing their lagging here and there, and overarched the road like abandoned gateways, while on the town’s eastern limits yawned the amphitheatre which tyrannised it, ringed with pink rock. We got out of the car and gazed down hundreds of feet. It plunged beneath us in a black stairway. It looked less like an open-cast mine than a canyon, in whose centre the waste-tip surged in a crumpled mesa. Trains and dump-trucks tinkled and whined far below, while the town teetered and smoked on the excavation’s lip, and the first peaks of the Tienshan, the Chinese ‘Mountains of Heaven’, glittered in the polluted sky.
In this wasteland a depleted colony of Germans remained, deported from the Volga by Stalin in 1941. Among cottagey suburbs, an old man, dozing in his courtyard under a Homburg hat, could still speak a stumbling, lonely German although his ancestors had lived in Russia for over 200 years. Ever since Catherine the Great had ushered in her countrymen as farmers, they had settled on the lower Volga, and the old German could remember from his childhood its modest prosperity. He had the Stoic face of a man whom huge events had misruled. His working hands rested on his knees, and his big shoulders were bowed a little. He spoke in husky Russian.
Everything had been all right until the war, he said. ‘But on August 28th 1941 – that was the blackest day of our lives – Stalin deported us all within three days. My family were taken to northern Kazakhstan, where we worked in military construction. The people hated us, because they knew who we were. A year later my father died, broken, and I was sent to an arms factory in the Urals. We never saw the Volga again.’ He spoke all this placidly, as if its history were long ago. ‘After the war I married a German and worked as an agronomist for the rest of my useful life. Then we came here where my sons and daughter are. It was difficult out there in Kazakhstan on our own. We’re old.’ He straightened his back against the chair as if resisting this. ‘But of course people here don’t understand how we came. Some of them think we’re ex-prisoners-of-war
‘Even now?’
‘Even now.’ He clambered to his feet and returned with a wooden box. ‘But you see I served the Soviet Union well.’ He opened the lid on a row of work medals, and pinned one to his lapel. ‘You see.’
So even he, suffering the immigrant’s split identity after eight generations, had sheltered under the blanket impersonality of ‘Soviet’. I asked tentatively: ‘Have many gone back to Germany from here?’
He looked vaguely troubled. ‘Yes, many.’
‘What do they write back?’
‘They say they’re sad. The shops have everything, but they’re sad.’ A few words of German had strayed into his Russian. ‘I have relatives who’ve gone to Hamburg, and it’s very tough. After all, they were born here. They barely speak German. But at the beginning it’s always difficult. It’s like that everywhere.’ He looked at me as if he had read my thought. ‘No, I won’t go. Who wants me there? No one needs me. I’ll stay here with my old woman. Or perhaps we’ll return to the Volga . . . .’
‘You think that will happen?’ Even now, I knew, politicians were deliberating the revival of the autonomous German region there, and Germany itself was lobbying for it, in a bid to deflect a tide of immigrants from its own borders.
‘I think it may happen,’ he said. ‘And if the republic’s established there, many will go.’ He smiled for the first time. ‘I, too. I don’t want to lose the feeling of belonging to my nation.’
I said: ‘You can’t lose that now!’ But I did not believe that this Volga republic would be recreated, and a few weeks later Moscow refused it. Perhaps the ingrained fear of Germany, or vested interests in the old republic, had proved too strong.
‘The Uzbeks have been fine with us,’ the old man said. ‘But it’s not the same as your own land.’ He folded the medals back into their box. Engraved with Communist stars and portrait-heads of Lenin, they already looked like museum exhibits. ‘And I want to speak my people’s tongue again.’
A few hours later our Lada was circling into foothills. Beneath us the Chirchik river made a wild corridor through the rocks, while the road above us corkscrewed into treeless passes. Erosion had flayed the slopes to powder, spotted with shrubs and gashed by scree-filled ravines. These were the last gasp of a massif which had swept west more than a thousand miles from the borders of Mongolia.
Now, over a pallid membrane of grass, the heights were scarlet with tulips. Once we blundered over the rubble of an avalanche which had shaken loose after earth tremors two days before. Then we were spiralling upward through tightening circles, where crags burst in black fists, and the mountain-crests wheeled overhead in shining parapets of snow. Cloud and rain gusted across the road. The next moment we were over the pass and descending a valley where a stream slithered down a thread of villages. Maple, apricot and silver poplar followed one another in a long brilliance of yellow, crimson and green, while isolated scenes unfurled like a Chinese scroll: a horse grazing under a footbridge, a house decaying, an old woman munching bread on a scarlet mattress. When we wandered into the hamlets of mud and poplar-wood we found farmers and silver miners, Uzbek and Tajik mingled, who fed us fruit and new-baked bread.
At intervals along the road a police-post would flag us down and Oman trudge off to present his papers and return often deprived of some petty bribe: a few cigarettes or a ten-rouble note. ‘We never used to have all this! Never! So why? Why?’ Then the festering anger would erupt and his thick arms pummel the steering-wheel. ‘Ninety-five per cent of our people are poor – how does a peasant live on twenty dollars a month? – and five per cent are rich and corrupt. No wonder people are starting to call for a Stalin! The Mafia in Sicily are a kindergarten compared to ours!’
An hour later we were crossing the Syr Dariya, the old Jaxartes river. Legend claimed its valley to have once been so populous that a cat could stroll from wall to wall, or a nightingale flit from branch to branch of its orchards, all the way from Kashgar to the Caspian. Now a 300-yard pontoon bridge moaned and clanked under us. Beneath it the river poured west in a silt-heavy flood, leached by cotton-fields, before curling north to cross the Kizilkum desert and vanish in the Aral Sea.
By evening we were nosing into Kokand. The old town looked young now, nondescript in its grid of Russian streets, but its past drenched it black, and suffused its most innocent inhabitants for me. It had been called Khoh-kand, ‘town of pigs’, from the boars which infested its marshes, but in time the name grew other connotations. By the start of the nineteenth century, together with Bukhara and Khiva, its khanate had carved up the core of Central Asia, ruling from the rich Fergana valley to the steppes beyond Tashkent. Its citizens were known for cowardice and cruelty. Their khans were murderers and debauchees. Even their subjects loathed them. Their land was stubbornly fruitful — it exported wool, silk, fruit, hides and opium – but within its eight-mile battlements the town eventually became an arsenal shrunk among fields and cemeteries, and its diseased waters turned the inhabitants cretinous with goitre. The Russians absorbed the khanate in 1876, after routing an army of 50,000 for the loss of six dead, and abolished it wholesale.
Yet a moment of tragic distinction visited the town in 1918. In the chaos of the Revolution a Moslem congress assembled here to set up a rival government to the Bolshevik soviet in Tashkent. It was a unique sign of united national sentiment in Central Asia, and a first and last attempt to achieve democratic unity by peaceful means. Claiming that it spoke for the masses, Kokand appealed to Lenin in vain. The Tashkent Bolsheviks attacked the ill-armed town, slaughtered some 14,000 citizens, indulged in an orgy of rape, and burnt or mined every house and mosque. Then a tremor of fury and realisation surged through the Moslems, and within a week the whole region was in flames. It was from this moment that the bosmachi guerrilla movement arose to plague the Red forces – and continued fighting for another five years – and that Moslem faith in Communism was lost.
It was hard to forget this as we strolled among the brick and stucco houses of the Russian streets, and entered the Moslem lanes behind, although they looked idle in the failing sun. Here and there a mosque was reopening, and the flash of women’s silk made a dark fire in the alleys. Oman found a half-empty bookshop and bought a Russian translation of The Castle, available here at last seventy years after Kafka’s death. He loved Dostoevsky, he said, and had heard that Kafka too was a painter of inner worlds.
He found a hotel where we settled for three nights. It was the best in town, but Spartan, rowdy and haunted by black marketeers. We shared a fetid room, and were visited by rats. Oman barely noticed them, nor the stained bedsheets and toxic plumbing. Yet he indulged in fastidious vanities. Every morning he dabbed his thickened neck in eau de Cologne and often visited the barber for a hedonistic shave, and his shabby suitcase was packed with scrupulously clean shirts. Sometimes he would gaze for long seconds into the mirror, as if hunting for somebody who had gone, his shallow-set eyes separated by a double-groove of knotted flesh.
But each evening I returned from exploring the town to find the vodka bottle lowered by his bed, a mound of cigarette-stubs and The Castle still unread. Then he would clamber to his feet, and a fearful anger release itself from him. ‘I just bought some lint. Four roubles! It would have cost less than ten kopeks two years ago! That’s the mafia for you!’ His voice flew up an octave. ‘That’s why this country’s being ruined! If you start any business they’re on to you in a wolf-pack. Everything you buy is old or broken. It’s got to end sometime. One day the people will get on their feet like they have in Tajikistan!’ Then he would seize a shirt or a razor or a packet of cigarettes and yell: ‘You know how much this cost only a year ago? Yes, only . . . and now . . .’
Increasingly I realised how little I knew about him, and I came to dread these sessions. Suddenly all his features would contract into a bitter defensiveness, as if the short nose and blunt chin had been ingested back into his skull. It might have been the face of a boxer, were it not for its compact, fleshly softness, and the hazel eyes, which touched his features with a damaged gentleness.
At last he would go to bed in a pair of crimson underpants, and sprawl above his sheets in the humid dark; but his snoring changed key all night, sometimes pulsing in a deep, body-filling respiration, sometimes gargling and shallow like a death-rattle, until a burp or a cough changed its chord. But by morning, immaculately shaven and spruce in a white shirt again, he would be off to hunt for bargains round the nearest bazaar, jaunty and game in a whiff of eau de Cologne.
The royal palace, built in I860 by the repulsive Khudayar Khan, stretched a long façade above parklands of weeds and roses. Its blank arches and walls were sheened in a medley of garish tile-work, but its rectangle of ramparts had gone, blown up by the besieging Russians to the stupefaction of the townspeople. A heavy ramp still mounted to the gates in a baleful path of unwelcome, and entered between narrow towers. Inside, the 113 rooms had been completed only three years before the Russians sacked them, and their survivors spread round the porticoes of empty courtyards, where I walked in solitude. The whole palace was infected by a grotesque dilapidation which cruelly suited it. In one range of rooms a natural history museum was decaying unvisited, its stuffed animals tottering into dust under the intricately painted ceilings. The inner court, once interlaced with verandahs, stairways and pavilions, had dropped into a lake of rubble, and in the park a children’s playground was disintegrating. Schoolboys splashed naked in the preposterous fountains, and a defunct Aeroflot jet had come to rest among the birch trees. Seated under the weeping willows, a few lovers gazed away from one another in awkward unison, the girls flushed and coy in their earthy silks, the youths silent, their interlaced hands lying guiltily between them on the bench.
The last khan had distributed his harem among his friends as the Russians closed in, then fled to Mecca. But some of his ancestors lay in a cemetery near the Friday Mosque – a wilderness of the dead, dense and secret with trees, where Oman and I found them one afternoon. In a high, turreted enclosure, their graves stood peeling and half-abandoned, with those of their prematurely dead children and a holy man. The courtyard was strewn with branches where worshippers, in pious servitude, brushed away the dirt from the floor. Two pilgrims, praying there, rolled over and over in the dust before the holy man’s tomb, then went on to worship robotically at the royal graves.
All around the mausoleum, among the cubes and headstones of the dead, a flock of lesser holy men – sightless ancients, frosted in scanty beards – dispensed medicinal magic. These were the spiritual descendants of the dervishes who had always infested Islam – holiness and charlatanry inseparable, even in one heart. Their clients sat before them in the dust while the old men, swathed in tattered coats and turbans, breathed over their faces in spitting puffs, and murmured spells. There were masseuses, too, who stretched out passing worshippers fully clothed on benches or stones, gabbling enchantments, and in five perfunctory minutes would slap their arms and legs, tug at their finger-joints and rummage over their heads.
Under the mausoleum’s gate I stumbled on four blind patriarchs crouched round a young couple. They breathed first over her, then over him, on and on, in a crossfire of whistling spittle. The lean husband strained fiercely forward. His young wife, her lips thin in a bitter, withdrawn face, kept her eyes averted from him. Beneath her jacket, close against her breast, she cradled a live chicken, a charm for fertility. For hours, it seemed, the old men swayed and incanted, their eyes shrunk to white slits, while their gusts and spits sought out the couple through their darkness, directed by the man’s nervous shifting on his haunches and the smothered clucking from the woman’s coat. She stared about her with a shamed hope. Sometimes she seemed to wince in terror. She was praying for new life, but was surrounded by death; and these blind sages seemed coeval with it, their second sight coiled unimaginably behind their eye-sockets.
On a bench nearby a sickly boy was being blessed in his mother’s arms. His two sisters were giggling uncontrollably, but the child gazed back at his benefactor aghast, his face frozen and staring, and I thought how years later, if he lived, he would remember this terrifying blessing, and the strange old man with blanks where his eyes should have been, and the mausoleum looming behind. At last the woman got up and gave the man two roubles. His fingers fondled them and he mumbled something to her. Inflation had hit even holy men. So she handed him five roubles more, then went slowly away, cradling her sick son, between the graves.
Oman had a friend in the town, an actor named Jura who was famous there. He was a master of askiya, the theatrical exchange of insults which could still be heard in tea-houses. His face was a mask of polished flesh, where the features were only sketchy afterthoughts, but humour fidgeted chronically beneath, and broke open a mouth fabulous with gold teeth. He had spent forty years on the boards, or bandying tea-house abuse rife with sexual innuendo, surrounded by the toothless hilarity of old men.
His house was as prodigal as he was, thrown round a majestic courtyard overswept by fourteen varieties of vine. He shared it with four married sons, and had fifteen grandchildren scattered round Kokand. Even his gait was a study in amplitude – a kind of rollicking waddle. He wore a baggy, grey-blue suit, like a crumpled Chinese, but when we sat down to lunch its jacket strained to bursting, and his arms bulged like columns.
We ate monstrously in his garish dining-room, sitting beneath a tapestry of damsels cavorting on a barge. Dish after dish arrived in gluttonous procession, all carried in soundlessly by one of those daughters-in-law who seem touchingly enslaved: a thin, frightened girl in flaming silks. She fluttered in and out, and barely raised her eyes.
Jura spoke in a dead-pan monologue. Sometimes in his face I discovered only the cruel oval of the Mongol steppe; then a twitch of plastic flesh would presage a joke, or the mouth open in a second’s gleaming banter. ‘It’s in the blood,’ he said. ‘Humour. I was an only child – an odd thing with us – and my father taught me askiya from boyhood. My grandfather and great-grandfather were court jesters to the khans. And their ancestors before that. All jesters. I don’t think it was a very safe job.’ I pictured, for a moment, a line of Mongoloid hunchbacks and wise simpletons rigged up in cap-and-bells. But he went on: ‘These jesters were most like wits and story-tellers. Sometimes there were many of them. In my great-grandfather’s day, my father told me, there were forty, and he the oldest.’
‘Forty of them . . . .’ Oman echoed his words from time to time in dreamy sycophancy. ‘The khan was hard to cheer up.’
‘The last one was like a wolf, you know, savage,’ Jura went on. ‘He told the forty one evening that if they didn’t make him laugh he’d have them executed. This was his own joke, I sup-pose, but perhaps it wasn’t. Then he sat in front of them, looking grim.’ He depressed his mouth and shoulders in surly xenophobia. ‘And one by one they all failed – thirty-nine of them – until at last he came to my great-grandfather. The khan said, “Make me laugh.” But my great-grandfather just yelled at him, “You mother-fucker, why haven’t you already laughed? What’s wrong with you?” And the khan rocked back in astonishment and started to guffaw!’
This hoary jot of family history coaxed a smile from him, which instantly faded. He said: ‘But the line of humour dies out with me. My sons don’t act. And audiences are smaller now, much smaller. People stay at home watching television.’
In the town’s theatre they acted classics too, he said – Schiller, Sophocles, Shakespeare. He had just played Iago in Othello, and it might have been a chilling performance, for the neutrality of his face seemed capable of erupting into any nature, and I wondered vaguely what other selves might lie beneath it.
He and Oman went on eating long after I was exhausted. I watched them in awe. Fistfuls of potato and sheep’s fat vanished down their throats with a smacking of lips or a carnival burp. They plunged their spoons into the mounded pilau, plucking out choice gibbets of mutton or wodges of scented rice. Sweets and raisins disappeared in a trice. Vodka came and went. ‘And I have wine! From our own grapes!’ Jura flashed his science-fiction smile. ‘We’ll taste the oldest!’
The gentle house-slave brought it in a jug, and we drank. It was pure vinegar. Oman, who had tossed it back like vodka, was racked by gasping coughs. Even Jura looked angry as he sent it away. But their spirits revived with the arrival of sugared sweetcorn and dried apricots, and the vinegar was exorcised in the renewed gurgling of vodka. Only after an hour did Jura lie back on his cushions, sharpening a toothpick with a gilded penknife, and regale us with descriptions of the towns where we were going.
The citizens of Margilan, he said, were delicate and obsequious – his hand fluttered sweetly to his heart in corrupt invitation. ‘They’ll ask you to their home and then go out by the back door!’ Next he brought his fists crashing on to the table to illustrate the coarse robustness of the people of Andijan. And as for those of Namangan, he said . . . well, the men slept with one another. But the people of Kokand? ‘We’re the humourists! That’s our reaction to life. We laugh! The Margilanis simper, the Andijanis bluster, but . . .’ – his face puckered – ‘we laugh!’
This thumbnail scenario was to haunt us during the next week’s travel, when time and again, as if by telepathy, towns-people reproduced Jura’s mannerisms with unsettling accuracy. As we said farewell, he announced with sudden grace: ‘This is not a Margilan man speaking, but my door is open to you whenever you come again . . . .’
As we crossed the courtyard, his daughter-in-law waved to us shyly. I wondered about her – as I often did about such women, living in the extended family of strangers, under the rod of their mother-in-law. But now her look of fear had gone. She was cradling a baby son in her husband’s doorway, and as we went she lifted him up to our view like the badge of her honour, and was smiling.
Next day the long, alluvial corridor of the Fergana valley began to steer us east. It scooped a festering cul-de-sac out of the mountains on three sides: a land more enclosed and volatile than any behind us. It was the easternmost limit of Uzbekistan. The icy tributaries of the Syr Dariya tumbled down from north and south to feed it, netted by dams and ordered through canals, and all about us the waters were sucked away by cotton-fields glossed with green.
Across their giant plantations, and all along the roads, the mulberry hedges had been hacked back to writhing trunks as provender for silk-worms, and now filed across the fields like ghosts. Here and there, where electric cables intersected them, an ungainly stork would be hunched on each pylon above a ramshackle nest and two unsteady fledglings, their beaks ungratefully open.
Half a millennium ago the emperor Babur, who was born here, wrote of the country’s flower-filled meadows, and of fruit so plentiful that melons were given away free on the roadsides. As a youth he had hunted wild ass in its hills, and loosed his hawks to bring down pheasants so plump that the broth of one could feed four men. But he was driven from these lands of his youth and never returned, and their lost paradise haunted him long after he had founded the Moghul empire in India. Even in the last century, before the Russians imposed cotton, travellers described the indolent beauty of brimming orchards, and the charm of tea-houses perched above cold rivers.
While my mental map of the land was starred with historical leftovers and formidable mountains, Oman was travelling another country. His was dotted with promising bazaars and restaurants. He slowed the Lada to a watchful dawdle at any wayside market, then would march in to haggle over a pair of socks or a sliver of silk, for resale in Tashkent. These minor purchases put him at peace. He hummed tunelessly to himself. At every lift of the ground we would look out on a misted plain of orchards and whitewashed villages lanced with poplars, while far to the south the Pamir mountains were trailing their snow-summits across the blue.
Fergana, the industrial core of all this valley, had been founded by the Russians only a century before. It was a centre of textiles and oil refining, but already it looked old. Avenues of plane trees tunnelled through its heart, dappling façades washed in a seductive peacock blue. So its poverty of shops and offices was tempered in this veil of splintered sunlight. Uzbeks and Russians still mingled, and files of blond and black-haired schoolchildren made mongrel undercurrents in the streets. But when I tried to find my way with a two-year-old map (Oman had vanished into the bazaars) half the road names were unrecognisable to me. Karl Marx St had transformed to Fergana St, Communist St to Samarkand St, Kirov to Constitution, Pushkin to Navoi.
I sat down in the central mall. Beside me a man of eighty trembled faintly, continually, with Parkinson’s disease. He was trying to pull liquorice tablets from his pocket, but could not, and turned to me with a shiver of helplessness. Two maple leaves had settled undisturbed on his shoulders. He had worked all his life in the cotton-fields, he said, but did not know if the sprayed chemicals had infected him. He lived on a pension of 1100 roubles a month. I wondered how he survived. Meat alone cost over 100 roubles a kilo. But he had not eaten meat for many years, he said. ‘I live on eggs and bread. Pensioners do.’
‘And what do you do all day?’
‘When the weather’s good, I sit here and watch everything changing.’
He did not see the sun-gentled city of my imagination. He saw threat. He could not fathom it. In 1989 the region’s youths had gone on the rampage against its minority Meskhetian Turks, who had been transported by Stalin from the Black Sea and never returned. Nearly two hundred were killed. The whole valley, dyed with a deeper Islam than the country’s west, was angrier and less predictable.
‘But it wasn’t because of nationalism or Islam,’ Oman told me later, ‘although the Meskhetians are Shiites. It was because of the Turks’ mafia!’ All evil, as usual, was rooted in the mafia for him. ‘The ordinary people had had enough. They said “Get out!’” He chopped the air triumphantly. ‘Out!’
Yet the reasons for these upsurges were enigmatic still; an imponderable mix of economic distress and racial bigotry. In 1990, some three hundred people were killed in the Kirghiz town of Osh, where natives and Uzbeks battled over housing; and in the past few years half the large cities had grumbled with separate crises.
Whenever this happened, Central Asia trembled. The frontiers of its states still ran almost as Stalin delineated them in October 1924, trying to follow ethnic realities. Sometimes they divagated nervously to join mountain headwaters with the plains which they nourished. The results were freakish. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan sliced up the Khorezm oasis bizarrely between them, while Tajikistan was crowned by a horn of lowland reaching almost to Kokand. Kirghizstan (which was shaped in 1926) straddled the Fergana valley like a snapped wishbone; and even now – as I conceived of Uzbekistan as a crouching dog – we were travelling along the creature’s preposterously jowled and bobbled snout as it thrust into Kirghizstan.
Yet despite these convolutions, the peoples of each nation were helplessly interleaved. The Uzbeks overlapped their Kazakh borders, and were numerous in every other state, comprising one quarter of the population of Tajikistan. But the Tajiks formed the bedrock of Uzbek Samarkand and Bukhara, while the little Karakalpak nation, ethnically close to the Kazakhs, lodged discomfitingly in the dog’s groin. Russians littered every nation, of course, especially Kazakhstan, alongside Tartars, Ukrainians, Germans, Koreans, Chinese, Uighurs, Arabs and a host of others.
It was this potential ferment which licensed the diehard government in Tashkent to limit democracy. And the chaos did not end here. Turcomans and Tajiks circled the Caspian into northern Iran; Afghanistan was rife with three million Tajiks and over 1,500,000 Uzbeks, heady with dreams of forging unified states; and in China the remnants of Kazakhs and others still formed petty communities in the grimly beautiful mountains of Xinjiang.
Even now, one of these quirky frontiers faced us as we drove south out of Fergana at evening. The tiny Uzbek enclave of Shachimadan lay isolated in a rift of the Pamirs, just inside Kirghizstan, and was circled on my map by a conscientious international boundary. Even as we drove, the green of our valley ended as precisely as if it, too, had been inscribed across a map, then we were pushing through desert hills along a nervy river, into the Pamir. Clouds and rain descended together. The colour had drained from the world. For twenty miles the road jittered through Kirghizstan, but only a few sodden herdsmen signalled this, swarthy under their peaked hats, and the mountains showed nothing but gnarled and befogged foundations, like the claws of great birds hidden in the clouds.
Then we were out again in chastened sunlight, on the edge of Shachimadan, and were soon lounging in a tea-house under willows by the river. Oman ordered up lagman, a soup which he loved, thick with noodles and treacherous flecks of mutton fat. He had never been to Shachimadan before, but he had heard of it for years, he said. Everybody had. It had been renamed Khamzabad by the Russians, and was sacred to a Communist saint, Khamza Niyazi, a poet and playwright devoted – as propaganda ran – to the ideals of the Revolution. Moscow had canonised him as the founder of modern Uzbek literature, but he was murdered here in 1929 by reactionary mullahs (it was said) and entombed gloriously in the town’s heart.
‘But that Khamza fellow . . . .’ Oman slurped dismissively at his soup-bowl. ‘My uncle was at school with him, and everybody knew how he chased girls. A playboy.’ He flickered his hands back and forth, regulating a procession of eager women. ‘History may say one thing, but people remember another. He was talented all right. I’ve read some of his stuff, and heard his plays. But not so talented.’ He did not qualify for Oman’s pantheon, alongside Dostoevsky and Jack London. ‘Middling, I should say. His characters are black and white, as the Soviets wanted them to be.’ He went on robustly: ‘But in their hearts people know that reality is not like that, that life is different. When it’s true, they recognise it. There are many people in all of us.’
These thoughts fell from him not as learnt platitudes, but urgently, like personal discoveries, with a kind of warm ruefulness. ‘We are both black and white, aren’t we?’ He dug his thumbs into his twin shirt pockets, as if exhibiting himself. ‘There are two Omans.’
‘Many Omans,’ I said. I had already witnessed six or seven: the inveterate merchant, the embittered drunk, the tea-house philosopher, the poignant friend, the sentimentalist, the hedonist.
‘Each of us is too many people.’ He tipped the last noodles down his throat, as if this might homogenise him. He asked suddenly: ‘Are you an atheist?’
The word always hurts. ‘I don’t understand about God . . . .’
He said: ‘Nor do I. And how can we know?’
‘But you’re a Moslem.’
‘Of course!’ His culture, he said, was Moslem, and in this person he prayed to God. But another Oman was cynical, and could not locate Him.
We talked with sudden abandon about the inability to know, and I realised that at some time he had suffered over this. Then grandiose clichés turned into confidences. If we had been drinking, this would have explained us. But there were only the dregs of the lagman soup, and cups of green tea, and the whispering river. We ruminated sentimentally over the limitations of the five senses, and the possibility of there being hundreds or thousands more. We complicated Time into different stereotypes. Perhaps it was not linear at all, but circular, or could be opened anywhere like a book, and so on. But the mystery, we agreed, was that we were here now, with the eternities of death and prenascence in front and behind us, and that we were conversing under these willow-trees, drinking green tea (which was getting cold) and munching some suspect meat pancakes.
Oman had a theory that the best of our thoughts and feelings survive us, and go to heaven. ‘Heaven is a bank,’ he announced. ‘What isn’t put in gets spent and vanishes.’ He saw my look of doubt. ‘Well, when we die, we’ll know . . . or perhaps we won’t know.’ He sighed. ‘And I will look up from the Moslem hell and say Colin, help me, and perhaps you in the Christian heaven will tell God something, and He’ll say Come up, Oman . . . .’
This unlikely script filled us with lugubrious affection, smiling at each other over the chasm of faith and race. We poured each other the cold tea, and drank to some future. A few bats darted in the failing light.
‘But perhaps we aren’t immortal,’ Oman rambled, ‘and only our sons will continue us.’ He stopped. ‘But you haven’t got one.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘And mine are useless.’ The light had suddenly gone out of him. It was as if somebody had thrown a switch. ‘I tell my eldest, if you don’t work you’ll have to do manual labour, and he just laughs. I say I’ll chuck him out, but he doesn’t believe me.’
And what of his mysterious middle son, I asked. Where had he gone?
I had no time to regret the question, although an instant’s silence fell. Oman’s face had taken on its punch-drunk defensiveness. ‘He was by another wife. He lives with her. We separated years ago.’
‘You had two wives together?’
He stared expressionlessly into his tea. ‘Yes, with us that happens. I was rich. I kept two. Our Moslem law sanctions it. My marriages were celebrated and blessed by a mullah. It’s nothing rare.’ But he spoke with distant regret. ‘In Tashkent our mosques were never really closed. They went on working secretly. People were buried by mullahs too. The Communists here just copulated with Islam.’ He gestured obscenely. ‘Most of our officials were Moslems at heart, after all.’ He said almost in afterthought: ‘I married neither woman for love. I married because my friends had. I was already twenty-six when I took Sochibar, and my parents favoured it, and I wanted children.’ He sounded tired. ‘But not for love.’
It was almost night. The lights of Shachimadan winked along the river ahead of us. Oman said: ‘I think our law will come to authorise polygamy. It already turns a blind eye. Our women wouldn’t stand for the veil, but in marriage law they’d be offered a choice of contracts.’
I enquired if the choice might include several husbands.
But Oman did not smile. He sensed some buried criticism. He only said, for some reason: ‘The world is soiled.’
After nightfall a caretaker took us into a deserted holiday camp, where beside the rustling stream, under overhanging mountain-flanks, a few damp huts stood, and lamps tilted in the grass. In the suddenly cold night, sitting out on a broken-down verandah, we shared a biblical picnic of bread and fish. The caretaker was young and cheerfully defamatory. People came here in late summer, he said, with their vodka and shashlik meat and Russian mistresses, to escape the lowland heat, and nobody thought about Khamza, the mediocre playwright, any more.
‘People still climb the hill where he’s buried, of course, but they’ll demolish that grave in time.’ He wiped it away with one hand. ‘I saw a film once portraying how he was stoned to death by mullahs. But the Communists made it up. He wasn’t stoned to death at all.’ His cigarette flared in the dark. ‘There are plenty of old men in the town who remember those times well, and they say two men came up to Khamza in the street and put a knife into him. They were the brothers of a girl he’d violated, I think . . . .’
He gave a heartless chuckle. For a while we gazed down towards the sound of the river, while he and Oman shared a cigarette. A gaunt moon rose, and shed a mortuary pallor into the camp. The glade was littered with decayed ovens and latrines, decomposing tables and stools, and the drunken lamps. Above the torrent I could make out a range of wooden kiosks, like parodies of Moghul water-pavilions.
‘There are two graves for pilgrims on the hill now,’ the caretaker said. ‘There always were, but the other was secret. Stalin levelled it. They say it’s the grave of Ali, cousin of the Prophet Mahomet, and are rebuilding it.’
I asked: ‘You think that’s true?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He gave a cynical laugh. ‘It’s true for the moment.’
A clear dawn polished all the shapes which night had blurred. The mountain angled in the valley above us forked down in a razor pyramid to the river. Its snow looked a hand’s touch away. In the town’s centre two streams glittered out of their heights and collided at the base of the hill where Khamza was buried. A carnival frivolity was about. Bazaars had broken out along the banks, and photographers had set up fanciful canvases of the hill, against which they could snap your picture with a live pea-cock. Oman, sighting the markets, cried in self-parody ‘Business, business!’ and laughed light-heartedly, as if he were returning to somebody he had been years before. Then he disappeared to bargain, while I made the ascent alone.
A flight of monumental steps scarred the hill from base to summit, ascending out of a faded park of street-lamps and weed-sown fountains. I wandered up uncertainly. Beneath me, a naked rush of mountains filled the valley, and nut-brown houses bunched along its river. The stairway lifted into quiet. Far below, from a children’s playground, a ferris-wheel rotated against the snow-peaks.
Directly above me, at the head of the steps, sprang up a Soviet memorial to victory over the bosmachi in 1921: a hectoring cluster of brandished rifles and fists. Cynically insulting, it had been raised here in the heartland of the conquered, to wring out gratitude for their own defeat. And it had been sited, with cruel bravado, to extinguish the memory of the tomb of Ali, which Stalin had demolished just behind.
But he could not demolish a myth, of course. Even during persecution the tomb had been covertly rebuilt, destroyed again by Communist officials, clandestinely rebuilt again, destroyed again, on and on. Now a gang of bricklayers was replenishing it with a domed enclosure, where the great plastered grave was waiting under sheets, and across the hill-crest a multitude of old men perched on tea-house divans, proffering blessings, and praying.
One of these, the historian of the place, spread a quilt for me and motioned me beside him. He was benign with authority as he muttered a brief prayer. Ebony beads twined in his fingers. Then he recounted to me the biography of Ali, how he had been favoured by the Prophet with the hand of his daughter, and become the fourth of the caliphs of Islam. But after this, the old man meandered out of history. He never mentioned that Ali had been murdered by a heretic at Kufa, or how the powerful Ommayad clan secured the caliphate to themselves and slaughtered his younger son; and he ignored the tragic schism which had flowed from all this – how the Sunni had adhered to the Ommayad line of caliphs and almost thirteen centuries of their successors, while the Shia clung to Ali’s martyred inheritance with a sleepless, rankling outrage to this day.
Instead the old man branched into a kindlier story. Somebody brought us bread and cloudy tea. He watched me with teacherly concern, assessing my attention. I stared back into a face swept by white bristles and smudged with a nose netted in red veins. But out of this steppeland visage the eyes shone out disconcertingly young. He spoke of Ali not with the harsh exclusiveness which I had encountered years ago in Iran and Iraq, but with reverent laughter and collusion and wry smiles. Ali had indeed been murdered in Kufa, he said, but blamelessly. Besides his own two sons, he had adopted a third, a little orphan. His palms patted the air at the height of a three-year-old. ‘Already God had told Ali that he must die while he was reading the scriptures, so when he wished for heaven he paid this boy to kill him in the mosque.’
The old historian beamed with the simple beauty of this, in which nobody was at fault.
I asked: ‘How did he come to be buried here?’
‘Well, the orphan made a poor job of it.’ He shook his head in regret. ‘Ali lay dying for four days, while seven pall-bearers descended on Kufa, all wanting to carry the body to separate parts of the empire. Each one was told to dig a grave and pray, and that in the morning one would be favoured. And in the morning all seven graves contained his body!’ The old man’s mouth gaped open at this multiplication of Alis. ‘So each pall-bearer took him away to different destinations, and he is buried in all these places.’
He recounted this untroubled, with an easy acceptance of miracle, secure in the imprimatur of half-remembered books. So Ali, he said, was buried here, and in Jidda too, and Afghanistan and Kufa and Almaty and Najaf and . . . he could not remember the last.
Then, as if shifting into some other element, he said: ‘But personally I know that the real body is here. In 1918, when the tomb was desecrated, a villager witnessed it — I heard this myself from that man’s son. He saw the shin-bone of Ali sticking out of the rubble, and it was twice as tall as a man!’
Out of his wintry bristles the eyes sparkled artlessly. He was filled now by a gentle irrefutability. I smiled back at him. I wondered where his strange learning had come from, and who he was. These saints’ tombs attracted an underworld of Sufis, I knew. The Communists had feared them. Sufism posited a world which they could not touch: a migration back into the heart. It was, in its way, profoundly subversive. But the old men scattered across the hillside might have been typical of it: private, benevolent, introverted.
I asked: ‘Is this a place for Sufis still?’
Outside cities, the word had usually evoked bewilderment. But the historian’s mouth quivered in a crescent of disordered teeth. ‘Yes, it always was. There are still Naqshbandi here.’ He saw my quickened interest. ‘If you were a Moslem, I would teach you how they pray and what they do, and how we tell our prayer-beads.’ His grammar had slipped painlessly into the truth. The beads fidgeted in his hand.
‘So it’s secret . . . .’
‘It is not exactly secret, but we don’t speak of it.’ He said apologetically: ‘Only if you become a Moslem, I could tell you about these things. But . . . .’ – he suddenly roared with laughter – ‘first, you’d have to be circumcised! ‘
We guffawed uncouthly together. He looked uncannily as I would have expected of a Naqshbandi: a timeless innocent, lit by those unsettling eyes. For a while we sat there while storm-clouds dragged over the mountains, and the blue sky was ripped away. Then I got up and thanked him. He said: ‘This place is holy now. That’s why they call it Shachimadan, “King of Men”, again. There is no Khamzabad any more. Khamza, who was he? I don’t know him.’
I crossed slowly to the poet’s tomb: a temple built in the same red granite as Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square, but coated in Islamic plasterwork and pierced by Arabic arches. The devotional benches spaced around it were all empty. Dandelions pressed between the steps. Inscribed on the gravestone, one of Khamza’s verses suggested that Oman’s verdict on him had been accurate (‘Not quite as good as Jack London’). Nearby stood one of those old-style Soviet museums which are collections of photo-graphs and propaganda. The manner of his death was clouded over, but laid at the door of ‘the evil forces of obscurantism’.
‘Only three or four people saw him die,’ a man told me in the derelict camp-site that evening, ‘and my father was one of them. It happened after Khamza had announced that the tomb of Ali should be demolished. Then the mullahs and the people gathered to protest, and a great anger started up. But he wasn’t stoned to death at all. He ran away down an alley and collided with a blind beggar, a giant, who just strangled him with his hands. My father saw this with his own eyes. But there are barely twenty men left who know of this first-hand, because the Communists shot a hundred and ninety people in retaliation for that one death, and the village was scattered. But that is the truth of it.’
Under louring storm-cloud I started to descend the hill past the grave of Ali, where the workmen were still tapping the bricks. Who really lies buried here is unknown: some early holy man, perhaps, or a pre-Islamic chieftain. Ali himself was probably entombed at An Najaf in Iraq, where the caliph Haroun er Rashid was supposed to have rediscovered his grave in 791.
By the time I reached the bottom the three monuments clustering the summit had paled back into their contending strangeness. They would not coexist for long, I guessed. The old divinity was returning, and all the works with which the Russians had hoped to stamp it out, or steal its power, must soon be swept away. The war-memorial, perhaps, would be the first to go, followed by the museum and tomb of the lecher-poet, leaving alone on the summit the grave where the stout, rather naïve Ali of history was being turned into a saint.
At the hill’s foot, photographers were still buttonholing passers-by to pose before their canvases, while the peacocks screamed alongside. Each backdrop showed a fairy-tale version of the hill. Toy mountains sprouted behind the domes floating on its crest, while steps cascaded beneath it to a jungly Eden of outsize tulips and an azure river. The real-life hill, meanwhile, stood in full view opposite: a mess of concrete and dead fountains. But nobody was being photographed near it. People were posing instead against these gaudy dreams. And perhaps it did not matter, I thought, as the first rain began to fall. Because the monuments on the hill were as dreamlike, in their way, as any picture could make them, and as little troubled by fact. They were memorials, rather, to the manipulation of minds and the corruption of history.
It was a hill of lies.
Next day the river accompanied us back into the Fergana plain, and by afternoon we were driving between blue-stuccoed houses into the silk town of Margilan, whose inhabitants had been so cruelly lampooned by Jura. I sensed a deepened Islam. But the little I knew of the town proved out of date. Where was the old fortress, I enquired? Its rubble lay under the central square, a man said. And where was the famous statue of Nurkhon, the first Uzbek woman to have cast away the veil (for which she was killed by her brothers in 1929)?
Oh, Nurkhon,’ said the same man: he complied mesmerisingly with Jura’s honeyed parody. ‘She was taken down a few weeks ago.’
‘Why?’
‘So that everything will be more beautiful.’ His hand fluttered up to caress his heart. ‘You see, our times have changed. We used to have nothing. Now we have our freedom.’
‘So you pull down statues of women?’ I was brewing up a Pygmalion affection for Nurkhon. ‘I thought the people of Margilan were milder . . . .’
‘Ah, we are.’ Effete smiles suffused him. ‘We’re a sweeter people than the others. We are more feeling. We believe more strongly in Islam. We wish everybody well.’ His voice was a sugary glissade. ‘We make no distinction between one race and another. We welcome everybody.’
‘Then why . . .?’
‘Because we need order,’ he lilted. His smile was like makeup. ‘Stalin, I think, was a good thing, whatever anybody says. My father fought through the war for him and even took his picture. We need somebody cruel here now.’ He went on in the same fastidious, courtly tone: ‘Cruelty is good for people.’
I said: ‘Your mosques would be shut down again.’
‘We don’t need the mosques. I learnt my Islam from my father, and from old men in the tea-houses when I was a child. It was alive then, and we all listened.’
‘But . . . .’ I faltered. This was like handling water, or the slithery local silks.
Our families here are everything,’ he simpered. ‘We are each a little dynasty, all merchants.’ His fingers touched his heart again. ‘They say we can sell anything.’
An enormous family of merchants and teachers, to whom a Turkic friend in England had given me an introduction, lived near Namangan in the countrified suburb of a town famous for its craftsmanship in steel. Oman and I arrived unheralded, and found ourselves peering into a labyrinthine courtyard, thronged with fig and persimmon trees and traversed by a rivulet where roses bloomed. Somewhere in this compound’s heart lived an ancient progenitor, whose sons, grandsons, nephews and their families inhabited the households all around in a maze of kinship which I never unravelled.
A suave English teacher named Hakim, the youngest of this brood of sons, ushered us into his reception-room, where a rosy wife bustled and children marvelled at us through beautiful, dark-lashed eyes. Hakim spoke a bookish English. My friendship with Fatima – a distant cousin whom he had scarcely seen – and my penetration to his home filled him with fitful amazement. Periodically his face would loosen into a rather sensuous concourse of alert eyes and mobile lips, and he would breathe out: ‘How remarkable!’
All day and far into the night Oman and I sat in one of those big rooms whose pastel-painted walls and ceilings were familiar now, while a procession of relatives, flushed out by the news of our coming, trooped in to share our pilau and tea. Grave, open-faced men, flecked by moustaches and accompanied by silent wives, settled around us in ceremonious enquiry, dignified in their dark jackets and skull-caps. Sometimes they resembled a meeting of shy farmers, their thick hands splayed over their knees or tunnelling discreetly into the pilau. Their eyes shone in passive scrutiny. Formally they asked about Fatima, who began to take on a half mystical presence among us. To many of them she was only hearsay, but they grew sad when I told them she had parted from her husband, became intrigued by her car and flat, and revived when they heard she was succeeding in journalism. Sometimes, under the pressure of their questions, I found myself reinventing her to please them. I expressed her enthusiasm for returning to Uzbekistan, but I did not know when this might be. I enquired after babies and school diplomas on her behalf. They answered with sober pride. But yes, I said, she was well, she had not forgotten them – and their faces split into ranks of silvered teeth.
For a brief half-hour I slipped into the courtyard under the persimmon trees, where a niece of Hakim found me, and we sat on one of the throne-like Turkic benches. In the branches above us a tame quail sang in a cage. The girl was seventeen, and physically adult, but her face looked empty of experience, like an infant’s. She was studying to enter university, she said, and wanted to specialise in English, but she was too shy to speak it to me.
What would she do with this English, I asked?
‘I’d like to be an interpreter,’ she replied, smiling at me, ‘for the KGB.’ Her legs swung childishly. The prismatic trousers of Atlas silk had eased a little up her slim, unshaven calves. ‘I think that would be interesting work.’ The KGB was just a job, an institution which had always been there, like the army or the local collective farm. ‘But I think they don’t often take women, they prefer men.’
‘What else could you do?’ I asked anxiously. ‘What do you enjoy?’ It was like talking to a ten-year-old.
‘I like tennis.’
‘Tennis?’
‘Yes. You know, at a table. And I’d like to travel. I love travelling.’ But she had not ventured beyond Bukhara, and when she asked where I had been her gaze settled on me with a soft wonder. ‘That’s what I want to do: travel. I don’t want to marry before I’m twenty-five. Twenty-five is late, but I won’t sit at home all my life.’
‘Not a good Moslem wife!’ I was beginning to believe in her future.
She wrinkled up her nose. ‘I don’t go to the mosque. That’s only for men. I don’t like that sort of thing.’
‘You wouldn’t wear a veil?’
‘No!’ It was a hushed, violent monosyllable. ‘I think that’s revolting.’
At nightfall, from every house in the compound, the men converged on our reception-room. While Oman and I occupied the place of honour opposite the door, they circled out from us in a cross-legged ring, like a pow-wow of tribal elders, and a timehonoured banquet unfolded. No woman was present, but even the young boys ate with us, and from time to time Hakim rocked a wooden cradle where his infant son lay tied with scarlet sashes. From a makeshift catheter attached to the baby’s penis, a potty in the cradle’s base was filling with urine. He lay there immobile as a mummy, howling.
The men, meanwhile, touched their faces in self-absolution, and launched into drink. More insidiously than any propaganda, I thought, vodka had leaked into their culture and undermined their Islam. They toasted in the Russian way, the cups emptied wholesale down their gullets – pledges to peace, to Fatima, to their arrival in London one day (I tried vainly to imagine this), and to my safety – before dipping their lepeshka bread into bowls of oily mutton, or seizing handfuls of strawberries.
Then the conversation darkened. They spoke of troubles in neighbouring Namangan, where women had been browbeaten to accept the veil and self-appointed vigilantes had administered Islamic law, parading petty criminals. Recently the police had moved in and arrested fifty of these zealots, they said, and a good thing too.
‘They were only a few hundred,’ said a young man. ‘A lot of them were people without work, I think, bitter people. Youths.’ He looked only a youth himself.
‘They wanted to create their own power-block,’ said a merchant, ‘their own mafia.’
‘Just mafia!’ Oman cried. The word always electrified him. ‘We don’t want them! What we need is business. Freedom to do business!’ I dreaded this. Vodka turned him voluble almost at once. Two or three toasts, and he was throwing his arms about and discharging a battery of theories and platitudes. ‘Islam wasn’t meant to be like that!’ he clamoured. ‘Where is it written in the Koran that women have to wear veils? It isn’t, it isn’t!’ He started punching the air. ‘It’s not appearances that matter but the heart!’
The others began to look embarrassed while his voice mounted and his eyes swam with a fevered glitter, as if he might weep. They all agreed with him – they were nodding in stately unison – but he was snowballing into an uncontrolled passion which they mutely repudiated. They fingered their spoons and cracked nuts and looked a little away. Only when he subsided did they return to life. Then, with homespun decorum, they rejected fundamentalism and ‘the Iranian model’. They would follow ‘the Turkish model’, they said. Their Islam would be their own, temperate and hospitable.
‘Our people aren’t like the Iranians,’ somebody said. ‘We think in a different way.’
They tacitly despised them. All that emotion, they implied, was unmanly. They settled back on their cushions.
‘In time we’ll create our own system,’ boomed a giant. A short beard fell from his chin like a tattered bib. ‘But at the moment, you see, we have no feeling about ourselves as a nation. History is the key, and the Soviets took ours away. We were sold a mass of Bolshevik stories, and nothing of our own. In secondary school, where I teach, the text-books devoted only two lines to Timur, the world conqueror. Two lines! And they just described him as rotten.’ He spoke with gruff irony. He clenched his fists and said: ‘But now our books are being rewritten by Uzbek historians, who have proper access to the archives!’
I wondered how much truer these would be. The past here seemed to change all the time. It was impossible to foretell it. I wondered, too, how he had felt, teaching a certain truth one year, then overturning it the next. After perestroika, I asked, how had he faced his students?
It was a cruel question, but his jovial smile remained. ‘I just explained to them that the facts were unknown to me too! I hadn’t known them either! But that now it was possible to know the truth, so we were starting again. What first opened our eyes, you know, was the invasion of Afghanistan. They say that nearly half the Soviet force came from Central Asia, and I believe it. Moslems ordered to fight their fellow-Moslems, Uzbeks against Uzbeks, Tajiks....’
Had they been sent, I asked, on some mistaken propaganda notion, or out of simple ignorance?
‘Ignorance,’ a gaunt merchant intruded. His eyes flickered back and forth, as if he were missing out on some deal. ‘The Russians never learnt anything. Not from anybody.’
‘I don’t know,’ the history teacher said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. But they were still sending us in long after the start. It made a terrible bitterness. My brother was one. Many just deserted, and are still living over there. And in the end people started refusing to fight.’
‘Refusing?’ I asked. ‘Here in Central Asia?’
For the first time his face fell, and his smile vanished. In a tone of puzzled shame, he said: ‘No. Sadly, there were none here. The conscientious objectors were all Russians. They demonstrated in Moscow. But we . . . we just did as we were told.’
Then I thought of the paradox in these people: their mixture of rustic sturdiness and fatal acquiescence. Even in the last century travellers had remarked how they took on the protective colouring of whatever power was dominant. As my hand came to rest on the edge of the stilled cradle, I found myself wondering about this helplessness in which as babies they were bound for months, and a herd of Freudian dogmas lumbered into my head, drifted away . . . .
‘We have far to go,’ the teacher said simply. ‘We haven’t moved as the Russians have. We don’t have democracy here at all. Just a sham. They talk about it all the time, of course, but do nothing.’
‘At least you’re ruled by your own people,’ I said: so one layer of repression had been peeled away.
They nodded approval. ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’
Oman was rocking the cradle. ‘This is our democracy!’ he cried. ‘It’s just an infant!’
The baby started bellowing again; but his father released him and stood him on his feet, while everyone watched and applauded. He looked like a young Hercules. He was stroked, kneaded, saluted, lectured and kissed. Then Oman seized him and lifted him up and down above his head like a trophy. ‘This is the future Uzbekistan!’ he cried. Tears shone in his eyes. He was dangerously drunk. ‘Here is our country! Look how fine he’ll be!’
He was playing to the crowd, I knew, ingratiating himself. Yet at the same time he was subtly condescending to these provincial teachers and tradesmen, and soon he began preaching against people in Tashkent who thought themselves superior to other Uzbeks. It was absurd, he claimed. Why should they think so? He entirely disagreed with it. But his denial came with a drink-loosened suavity which belonged to the theatre of another civilisation. As he flaunted the baby on his shoulder, the others looked back at him with mixed deference and unease. He engaged and slightly awed them. But they did not trust him.
And now Hakim stretched up and eased away the child from Oman’s alien and uncertain hands. Somewhere, it seemed, he had gone too far.
Our voices leaked into an unhappy silence. Hakim strapped the child back into his cradle, then touched my arm in embarrassment and in his quaint English changed the conversation: ‘I am unable to make known if my English language is good or not. I wonder if you in your office can give me a blank with on it a stamp?’
‘A blank?’
‘Yes, a blank. If I have a blank, I can show to authorities.’
Oman was shifting beside me, drunk, wretched.
‘We don’t have such forms,’ I said. ‘I’m just a private writer . . . .’
‘But if out of your position you would write that I’m good with English, and say you famous English writer, even without the blank, would maybe help.’
So I promised to send him a reference from England (and wrote this shamelessly on my return) and he relaxed again, and went back to rocking his howling son.
The next moment everybody rose in respect. Tiny and frail in the doorway, wrapped in a dusty coat caught round with three sashes, the family patriarch hovered, still light on his feet. He was ninety-four. Under the coil of his turban a pair of light, leprechaun eyes glistened shallow in their sockets, and an ashy beard jutted spryly in front. As he alighted beside me, a semi-circle of earnest, deferential faces turned as one man to listen. My presence became the occasion of his history, which his progeny must have heard a hundred times, but nobody uttered or stirred.
He had been a Silk Road merchant in the old days, he said, carrying gold from the Fergana valley into China’s far northwest, and returning with silk on eight camels across the Pamirs. He had weathered the tracks which the Chinese graded ‘big headache’ or ‘small headache’ passes, but on his last journey, as relations worsened between the Soviets and Xinjiang in the early 1930s, the border bridge was dropped into the Ili river and he’d been stranded on the far side.
‘But the Chinese governor was a man of honour,’ he said: his silvery voice belonged to a faraway age and place. ‘He exchanged our gold for wool and ferried us back across the river. But that was the end of my travelling. I couldn’t go back. So I became a butcher in Almaty, and married there.’
As the men strained for every note of the treble voice, I thought how hopeless had been the task of Communism here – its suppression of the past and hurrying-in of the new. For the past was seated amongst us, innately respected, in its triple sash and worn coat full of years. The true country of these people had been their genealogy, which they used to memorise through generations back into myth (tracing themselves to Adam), and dignity still lay in age. The health and longevity of the old man was a subject of clannish marvel and pride among his descendants, and as his history dwindled away in the abattoirs and domesticity of Almaty, and his offspring warmed back into conversation, he buttonholed me with health tips.
‘I’ve never been ill . . . .’ He was sitting bolt upright, his legs supple under him. ‘I used to drink a bottle of vodka with every meal . . . and my meals have always been the same: one kilo of mutton, one kilo of rice, and half a kilo of sheep’s fat. That’s how I’ve lived on. Remember. I recommend it. I’ve had a little trouble with my left knee this last year, I don’t know why.... But that’s all there’s ever been wrong with me.’
His digestion was perfect, he said, but he had no teeth. One grandson shredded cucumber for him, while another cracked and crumbled some hazel-nuts. I hunted in his face for any clue to his endurance, but found myself staring into a visage of uncanny agelessness: clear and almost featureless, except for its goblin eyes. The bridge of his nose sank untraceably into his cheeks, leaving only an isolated flare of shell-pink nostrils. He had outlived most of his seven children, but his youngest daughter, whom he had fathered at sixty-four, still visited him.
‘But everything was better,’ he began, ‘in the time of . . . of . . . that man Nikolai . . . .’
‘Nikolai II?’
‘Czar Nikolai, yes Those were good years. Nobody bothered you. There were just camels and horses, plenty of horses, yes, and quiet And then the Soviet Union came and everything got collectivised and rearranged.’ He shook his head. His neck trembled with wrinkles, like a lizard’s. ‘And it was a lot of trouble . . . for nothing . . . .’
Towards midnight he got up – ‘I’m going to visit my nephews! I’ll be back!’ – and by the time we had clambered respectfully to our feet, he had tripped away.
An hour later the last guest departed, Hakim unfurled quilts over the floor, and Oman rolled himself up, his voice turned maudlin and tearful: ‘I’m sorry, Colin. It was not me that was talking, it was the vodka.’ Then he snored sonorously, horribly, for hours, shifting an octave whenever he turned over, while Hakim made a lighter, nasal moaning beyond. Finally the patriarch returned at an early hour of morning and lay like a statue on a catafalque, wheezing, with his fingers laced over his stomach, and his beard pointed at the ceiling. Their wind trio rose and filled the room.
At a time before anyone in the town could remember, an itinerant holy man had struck water from its ground and been buried where the cold streamlets descended a hillside. Now acacias and chenars plunged its terraces into a subaqueous light, and tea-houses spread their divans among ornamental pools, where men drank discreetly – for this is a holy place – and women played with their children round the tomb.
A posse of Hakim’s younger relatives took me there in the morning. A few nights before, the town’s Lenin statue had been pulled down (‘they always go in the night,’ somebody said); but the holy man’s tomb was under restoration. All around us, as we squatted before our mountainous breakfast, the tea-house habitués were deep in confabulation, and had hung up their cages of pet quails in the branches overhead. Sometimes, Hakim said, they pitched the birds against one another in a bloodless battle of nerves, and laid bets. But now the aviaries, each one cowled in a black hood, dangled in silence among the leaves, while the quails sulked underneath.
Relaxed in the young sunlight, and freed from the polite reserve of their elders, the young men pummelled me with questions. The West shimmered in an El Dorado beyond their reach, but their black eyes settled on me as its exemplar. Back in England, did I own a house, a car? What did it cost to marry? But the price of a Honda or a flat reeled into meaninglessness. Inflation had already turned their own prices into bedlam, but the disparity between the dollar and the dwindling rouble laid waste all comparisons. A plane ticket to the West would alone have cost them over a year’s salary.
But there was one thing that baffled them entirely. Why wasn’t I married? Later they confessed that they had all been aching to ask me this, and now it sprang from the lips of an open-faced youth who had listened to everything in silence. Here, after all, every man married automatically. Even Hakim looked at me with bewildered charm. ‘You miss all the sweetness of life!’ he cried, and the others gazed at me in mute accord, while the shadows splashed over our half-forgotten meal, and the blacked-out quail cages shifted in the branches, and they waited for a reply.
‘Where is this sweetness?’ I asked. The question held a Socratic quaintness. ‘With the woman or the children?’
Hakim answered at once: ‘With the children, of course, with the boys!’
But in the West, I told them, it was more often the woman who inspired the longing to marry. I could not convey to them a world in which the preciousness of one person might change a life’s course, or the chances of love refute the ordered programme of matchmaking and childbirth.
The callow man echoed: ‘Just the woman?’ He was frowning.
‘Yes.’
They started munching their food again in perplexity. Whatever secret yearnings might rankle in them (and I’d met several who had seduced other men’s wives), there was too much of market-place practicality and clan responsibility in their hard lives to allow of understanding any other. A woman was only a woman, after all. But a child was a descendant, bone of your bone, who would carry on your blood and memory, and secure your continuance in the chain of things. I, as far as they could see, was a cul-de-sac, an unaccountable exception to natural law.
They ranged about for other explanations of me. Women and commerce, they presumed, were the motives for travel. What were Arab women like, they wondered, and the French? Was it true that Japanese women were made differently down there? Had I ever had a Chinese?
In me, I realised, they were being left with an ungraspable paradox; yet to them I inhabited such riches and freedom that perhaps the secret of my solitude lay somewhere there.
The sweetness of life. I saw myself in their eyes, and was touched by a fugitive melancholy. They gave me cherries in parting, and a small knife. Their questions posed an innocent challenge, and to some I had no answer.
For a few days Oman and I dawdled east through a country where cotton-fields were interrupted by alfalfa, wheat and rice paddy. In Namangan we saw no trace of the veil now, and drove on towards the old capital of Andijan where Babur had been born 500 years before. Even its people were beautiful, he wrote, and its meadows, sweet with violets and tulips, would tease him far into his exile. But now, as Jura had intimated, Andijan was rougher and less pastoral, an oil and cotton town whose streets were sober with yellow stucco. So at last we slipped over the Kirghiz border into the town of Osh, and prepared to move south to the Pamirs.
In these towns the hotels were baffled by the arrival of a foreigner. Some accepted us, but quadrupled the price. Others telephoned the police asking what to do, but the police did not know either. The rules had all gone. Then Oman, growing irritated, would stump into the police-station and cry out at every official hesitation: ‘Hasn’t the Iron Curtain come down yet?’ or ‘I thought Stalin was dead!’ and the officers would look foolish and acquiesce, or angrily refuse. Eventually we would succumb in some cramped room reeking of urine, where I would try to write notes under a weak bulb and Oman would smoke and read Arthur Hailey. (He had abandoned Kafka, who scooped about in himself too much, he said.) Then I would return from a night ramble to find him overcome by boredom or sleep, his shapeless body thrown down among his sheets as if by somebody else.
By now we were barely seventy miles from the Chinese frontier, separated only by a neck of mountains where the Tienshan and Pamir converged. It was from the Chinese that the Fergana valley people had learnt precious metallurgy, paper-making and the sinking of wells, while the cultivation of vines and clover had travelled the other way, along with a breed of horses different from the stocky battlers of the steppes. Over two thousand years ago these Fergana horses came to the ears of the Chinese emperor Wu Ti, who coveted them for his new-fangled cavalry. They were said to sweat blood and to be of celestial descent. In 104 BC a Chinese invasion left its dead strewn along the deserts and mountains of a 3000-mile route-march; but the tribute of horses was secured – beautiful, high-strung creatures, akin to the modern Arab.
But in Osh we sensed nothing of China. The frontiers had been sealed for sixty years, and were only reopening far to the north-east. The first blades of intervening mountains rose from the outskirts. Legend ascribed the town’s foundation to Solomon, and by the twelfth century it had become a holy place. Its inhabitants were pious and a little mischievous. When travellers rested in its meadows, the local urchins would open the river sluices and drench them. Now earthquake, decay and Soviet rebuilders had conspired to emasculate it.
I walked here weakly in the morning after a poisoned supper of noodle soup, and left Oman moaning on his bed. He was, in any case, afraid of the town, where riots between Kirghiz and Uzbeks had left 300 dead eighteen months earlier. The Uzbek rumour-mill had placed the killed at over 1000, and he’d seen amateur video-film of the massacres which still drained his face. The agents of these horrors, I knew, must be walking in the streets about me, and the dominance of the Kirghiz – a pastoral race of recent nomads – edged the town with a ruffianly freedom. They were burlier than the Uzbeks, blunter, more secular. Their white felt hats, jaunty with tassels and upturned brims, touched them with an incongruous comedy. Beneath this headgear you might expect to glimpse the blond complexion of a Russian fairytale prince. But instead, an arid plane of Mongol cheeks appeared, and an innocent, unfocused gaze. ‘They’re just shepherds,’ Oman had said, and waved them nervously away.
But the town seemed deceptively at peace. I saw no sign even of the earthquake whose epicentre had trembled here two weeks before (and had rattled the crockery in Tashkent). The cracks in our hotel walls had been there for years.
On the western outskirts a rocky spine of mountain, named the Throne of Solomon, must have given the town birth. Here, pilgrims believe, the king viewed the city which he founded, and on its summit descended into the grave. Solomon’s tomb became a haunt of Sufis, of course, and for decades the Russians tried to halt the secret pilgrimages there. Officials railed against the ‘sectarian underground’ and ‘reactionary Muslim clergy’ with paranoiac anxiety, and in 1987 tried to neutralise the site by encouraging tour-groups of East Europeans there.
Now the spur hovered open above me, tufted in shrubs and grasses. At its foot a stone plinth still trumpeted the dictums of Lenin. Nobody had bothered to remove it. On a municipal hoarding superscribed ‘The Best People in Osh’, the empty boards were dropping apart. Crowds of local sightseers were climbing the path in funfair mood: boisterous youths, and schoolgirls in white-aproned smocks, like truant parlour-maids.
I trudged up after them. Concrete steps zigzagged askew along the mountain’s rim. Bushes and trees were speckled with telltale rags. But all zealotry – Moslem or Communist – seemed past. It had gone under the trampling feet of sweaty weekend vacationers slung with cheap cameras. Flocks of sturdy women had kicked off their high heels to grip the steps barefoot, and seemed to wear their silks not as a national statement but a pretty fashion. On the crest, the Sufis, shorn of their bogey status, remained as they had probably always been: a handful of elderly men in search of peace.
A light wind brushed the summit. The tomb of Solomon was a rebuilt chapel facing Mecca. An old man dispensed blessings, assisted by his son in an Adidas tracksuit. Some say that Solomon was murdered here, and that his black dogs still lurk in the fissures of the rocks, where they lapped his blood and ate his body. In the last century, invalids would press their heads into the crevices as a cure. But now the tomb was screened off by the coarse, flushed smiles of Kirghiz families lined up to photograph themselves, their women’s faces dashed in sweat and rouge. Below us, Osh curled among its trees in a foetal crescent, while beyond surged the nakedness of the Pamirs, whose cloud-coloured peaks infiltrated the sky, then vanished.
I yearned to travel these mountains, but Oman was losing his nerve. On my descent he reported that the road I had chosen into Tajikistan was snowbound. He had been talking to lorry-drivers. He had heard of passes over 10,000 feet, he said. He did not want to go near Tajikistan at all. The country was in civil war. On our hotel television he came upon a blurred news bulletin which reported shooting on the roads around the capital. When I remained obstinate, he started to look miserable and to tramp about with a boyish, hurt air. But he spent the afternoon locating bread, mineral water and soggy strawberries. He made a few bargains. And soon the buoyancy and slight fatalism which I liked in him resurrected, and he cried: ‘Then we’ll go! Let’s try it! We’ll know when we arrive!’
My wanderings in Osh, meanwhile, came to an end in the upper room of a defunct cinema. I had noticed young men loping furtively through a door labelled ‘Cosmos Video Hall’, and had followed them up a dank stairway. At the top I paid five roubles and entered a curtained room. Some fifty men were seated on plastic chairs, leering in rapt stillness at a television hoisted on to the wall in front. As I came in, the screen flashed and up came Blondie, produced by ‘Svetlana’ and filmed by ‘Mr Ed’. It was a hard-porn movie purveying clichés of fantasy sex – multiple, oral, underwater – between four tireless studs and a stable of dyed blondes. Its stock American dialogue had been dubbed slackly into Russian, and its garnish of sports cars, yachts and private swimming-pools suggested a synthetic paradise somewhere in the idle West. From the darkness the men gaped up expressionlessly. Their hands strayed to their crotches. The gulf between their reality and the profligacy on screen yawned so hopelessly that they might have been watching science fiction. They huddled before it like impotent conspirators. How would it seem, I wondered, when they returned to their plain suburbs, to the swarthy, unpampered bodies of their own women?
An hour later they slunk out, shielding their eyes against the sun or the world, where the Throne of Solomon thrust against the sky. I asked one youth what he thought, and he said the film was OK, but expensive at five roubles. Already its gross, depersonalised dream seemed to have dimmed out of his face, and he was returning to other cares and to the qualifying daylight.
The day before we crossed into the Pamirs, Oman and I drove north through poor Kirghiz hamlets to the little town of Uzgen. At roadside police barriers brutal-looking officers flagged down anything that passed, but viewed me with hospitable surprise, and let us go unsearched.
Uzgen clustered below a pass of the Tienshan in a green valley; and here, beside a field damp with poppies and clover, all that was left of an early capital of Mavarannahr lay mouldering in the sun. Three mausoleums and a minaret, raised in the confi-dent simplicity of patterned brick, marked the site of a city whose empire had straddled Central Asia. For a century and a half, between the year they overran the Samanids in 999 and the time they vanished under Mongolian invaders, the obscure Karakhanids ruled here in unreachable splendour at the antipodes of the world. Who they were, I scarcely knew: a Turkic people, I had read, whose loose-knit federation was constantly in flux. Yet their dominions spread huger than India.
I waded through grass to the mausoleums. They appeared to have been restored, and then abandoned. Their portals were scooped from a single façade: tall frames of decorative brick flanked by engaged pillars. Within them, the doorways to the chambers were encrusted with bands of terracotta foliage and colonnettes, from which the colour had long ago been washed away. Columns, friezes, vase-shaped capitals – all were covered with the same perforated blanket of relief work: dry, subtle, exquisite.
One doorway, in particular, stood almost free of restoration, and in that desolateness shone with a honeycomb intricacy. Under a whole gallery of geometric patterns carved foliage oozed and crept, and a sensuous wriggle of calligraphy overswept half the gateway. But the arches led from nothing to nothing. Their dead had gone. Outside, from the ruin’s height above the valley, I imagined the capital poised schizophrenically between cultivation and wilderness. For the Karakhanids were the first of the Turkic dynasties in Central Asia – hesitant precursors of the waves to come – and their site looked pastoral and impermanent even now, cramped on its hill beside the graves of their nomad kings.