The first foothills folded round us under a cloudy sky. Horsemen overflowed the road with flocks of mud-clogged sheep and goats, descending to drink at a distant tributary of the Syr Dariya which meandered beside us. We were entering a half-pagan country of summer nomads. Once or twice we passed a wayside grave speared with horsetail banners and rams’ horns, and here and there a herdsman’s yurt crouched like a dirty igloo on slopes spotted with cattle.
Then the valley narrowed. The earth-built cowsheds of winter villages appeared, deserted now. The river cut through the earth in a silty torrent, and flash-floods spinning down the gulleys had torn off chunks of tarmac and dropped them into its valley. Thunder-clouds rolled from every defile and rose from the summits as if they were steaming. The lowland heat had gone. Ahead of us arteries of snow trickled down the mountain-flanks, and the earth darkened to a sooty shale where wind had broken the ridges into blackened spikes. Oman let out bleak noises of foreboding. The snows had withdrawn late this year, he’d heard, or not at all.
Then our road mounted into a stadium of white peaks which shook out black streamers of cloud thousands of feet above us. Crows flew in the valleys like blown ash. The river turned green. Wherever the road had torn a cutting, it exposed a stark magenta earth, which sometimes splashed bloodily to the snow-line. Below us I glimpsed red and white crags tossed up through the clouds. Then the road turned to dirt and for an hour no vehicle passed us. The police posts were all deserted. As we spiralled above the snowline, clouds plunged across our track and we entered a monochrome void. A harsh, blurred light refracted from the snowfields. The road hung in disconnecting whiteness. Once we brushed past a gang of shepherds – black-faced men with forked Mongol beards – and the headlights of a solitary lorry glowed out of the pall. Then we emerged from the clouds into a planetary upland without sun or shadow or colour. The rounded hills and mountains looked exhausted and disembodied, as if the land had grown ill, and flowed before us unbroken into a white sky.
The Alai range – the northern bastion of the Pamir – was behind us now, and soon we were descending into a wide valley. Here, at over 10,000 feet, the headwaters of the Kizylsu, the Red River, gathered to slide westward 400 miles, until they had swollen to a raging force which deluged into the Amu Dariya on the edge of Afghanistan. But in the silent valley the river was only a shallow twine of streams. Herds of chestnut horses cropped their banks. As we turned west, the mainstream, crimson with silt, was wreathed about with ice-green tributaries, running side by side. The grass twittered with invisible birds. Their sound – and the weak patter of the rivulets – deepened the silence.
But we had crossed some indefinable divide. The air was utterly still, and the whole sky transfigured to a vivid, artificial blue. The snow-peaks to our west stood in Tajikistan; those to our east were glittering out of China. In front of us, in a glacial palisade which shadowed the valley for a hundred miles, the Transalai mountains – the Pamir heart – shone in the sky as if formed from some rarer element than ours.
We stopped by the shingly streams, and gazed. Along our whole horizon the mountains made a frozen tumult of spires and ridges, erupting to over 23,000 feet. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo recalled that even birds did not survive here. The plateaux are sprinkled with frozen lakes and lie under so intense a cold that their stones crumble away and the earth unlocks its plants for only a few summer weeks. The impact of the Indian subcontinent, pressing into Asia’s underbelly, still squeezes up the Pamir at a rate of two-and-a-half inches a year; but the ranges to the south-east are rising even faster, and over the millennia the monsoons have dwindled away. They have left a region of mummified emptiness. In the permafrost of its high valleys even the snow is only a dust and the wind blows not in storms but as a nagging, sandpaper restlessness in the starved air. Against this awesome cold, some of the bulkiest mammals on earth have developed: the yak, the Marco Polo sheep, and Ursus Torquatus, the world’s weightiest bear. Even now, in late May, icicles fringed the river banks, and when a west wind sprang up it cut like a scythe.
A young shepherd, riding up on a brindled colt, shared our bread with us, resting in the saddle. Winter kept its snows for the valleys, he said. Sometimes they reached above his shoulders – he raised his hand eloquently to his neck – then his people coralled away their herds and fed them by hand. They called this valley paradise, yet suffered the highest proportion of still-births in the world, I’d read. He glanced along the road where we were going. Two days earlier, he said, it had been severed by a torrent of red mud For an hour we drove west along the ghostly causeway of the valley, arrow-straight down a gravel track. Once we passed a faded hoarding which still read: ‘Glory to the Defenders of the Soviet frontiers!’ Beyond it a cemetery streamed with horsetail standards. And always to our south the mountains kept pace in a phantasmal counterpoint of scarps and pyramids, where cloud-shadows spread a dim commotion, and hawks wheeled.
Less than thirty miles from the Tajik border we reached the village of Darvat Kurgan, and found a lorry depot where we downed a meal of noodles and cold soup. It was from here that in 1871 the Russian explorer Fedchenko had looked across with longing at the Transalai, and had given his watch to the Kokandi garrison commander as a bribe to let him proceed. But at once the watch stopped – the commander had childishly wound it to death – and permission was withdrawn. Only later did Fedchenko return and discover the glacier – almost the largest in the world – which sprawled out of sight for fifty miles in the massif across our valley. Now the Kokandi fort had become a warehouse and was crumbling away, its towers half collapsed and its loopholes blocked with mud.
Three miles farther, in the impoverished village of Chak, our track disappeared among mud alleys. They looked abandoned. A few bald-headed Bactrian camels stood among the hovels, and did not stir as we nosed our way through. We splashed over a gulley, and found the only path out of the village. Ahead of us hung a wooden bridge whose struts stood thin as sticks in the river. My heart sank. It was the only way west. I thought we might edge on to it and test its strength. Then suddenly Oman shouted ‘We’ll see!’ and set the car at it headlong.
For a second it crackled like dry biscuits under us. Then we were over and charging up a precipitous bank.
I yelled: ‘Weren’t you afraid?’
‘Of course I was!’ he yelled back.
Now the mountains engulfed us. Their flanks crowded the track in vertiginous gulfs and spurs. Through their flaccid earth the river had dropped sheer, opening up purple veins, and soon it was winding in a blood-coloured trickle a thousand feet below us. Our route was a maze of ruts and stones, and we went in clouds of reddish dust which clogged our hair and eyes.
Oman settled at the wheel with a strange, sombre glee. I had misjudged him. It was not hardship or challenge which turned him morose, but the emptiness of ordinary living. But now crisis freed him into near-recklessness. His only sign of nerves was a dangerous urge to smoke, and once, glimpsing the track fringing the precipices in front of us, he blessed himself. He never paused before a new wave of congealed mud or stones, simply drove his twelve-year-old Lada at it full tilt, and bullied us through or over.
But we had entered a deepening wilderness. Beneath us the river plunged unseen through a corridor of chasms and gulfs barely forty feet wide, while we wandered along its rim high above. Across our track the snowfields poured down shale and melted ice, turning it to a sepia rink. And it was these mud-slides which most threatened us. Set loose by shifting glaciers or rains, they descended in noiseless slicks which sometimes engulfed whole villages, leaving nothing behind. A few days earlier, unknown to us, a Tajik hamlet of a hundred souls had simply vanished from sight under an avalanche of liquid earth.
All afternoon we laboured on. Once only the liver-coloured slopes which walled us in burst open on a white gallery of mountains, brilliant and untouched, peak piled on peak, and desolately beautiful as they shone down on the wastes through which we blundered. At last a landslide turned our path to quagmire. Oman set the car at it again and again, but we dropped axle-deep into an ocean of red mud. We clambered out and piled stones round the wheels, but nothing moved. Bit by bit, we were sinking. I imagined enduring the night here, our doors locked against wolves, while we waited for any help. But after an hour a truck-full of Kirghiz shepherds arrived from the other direction, their bedding and chattels mounded about them – wild men with flayed cheekbones, who heaved us clear with a rope.
We pushed on through fallen rocks and snow, and somehow we never stuck again for long, but wove and charged our way out, with no man or vehicle in sight, and the light failing. At sunset we came to a stream under an alpine meadow, where cattle grazed, and we washed, exhausted, and Oman eased the car into its ford and swabbed it tenderly down. In the ageing light above us an eagle circled. There was no sound but the boiling of the distant river in its canyon.
Somewhere we had crossed unnoticed into Tajikistan. No military or police post marked the border. ‘They think there’s no road through,’ said Oman, with a glint of pride.
But this was a country in civil war. It was the poorest and least urbanised of all the republics of the old Soviet Union. It endured the highest birth-rate, but its population was barely five million. Alone in Central Asia, its people were not of Turkic but Iranian stock and language, and some made common cause with their fellow-Tajik mujahedin over the Afghan border. Now, in the capital, an incongruous alliance of Moslems and democratic liberals was confronting the ex-Communist government. Their schism was heated by clan rivalries and by the dichotomy between an industrialised north and an impoverished south; and within a year war was to claim some 20,000 dead, and set loose a torrent of refugees.
But this evening, at sunset, nothing disturbed the mountains which circled our sky. As we eased west into the night the crowding slopes receded, and we descended into a broad valley. My map disclosed a few villages on the north bank of the river, and in the first starlight we crossed a bridge over a tributary among apple and cherry orchards. As Oman negotiated a room in a bleak inn, curious faces multiplied round us. In this region, at least, a tenuous peace prevailed. But nobody believed we had come from the east. The track was impassable even to horses until May, they said, although a heavy lorry might get through. Who were we really, they seemed to be asking? And from where had we actually come: an Uzbek and an Englishman?
As we sat in our room, opening a celebratory tin of tuna fish, we were joined by a Tajik and an Uzbek who owned a bus for transporting village wedding-parties. Sherali was a copybook Tajik. His fierce, Iranic features were drenched in a silky black beard and set with rapier eyes. Yet often he looked indefinably bewildered, and his suave courtesies seemed to have been borrowed from somebody else. His Uzbek partner was a near-dwarf named Sadik, who proffered a curved arm in handshake, as if he had suffered a stroke.
In the cool night we huddled round a table and exchanged road and war news, and a little food, and dim philosophies. The villagers here were still quiet, Sherali said. It was the mountains that should be feared. ‘People don’t understand them. The mountains can be very sensitive, very terrible. A man may go hunting and fire off a shot and it sets the whole valley moving, or people shout to one another, and even the reverberation of their voices is dangerous, and finishes them.’
‘We’ve seen those avalanches.’ Oman had swelled like a bull-frog. ‘We crossed six or seven.’
‘Last year,’ Sherali went on, ‘in those mountains where you were, forty-two climbers disappeared. They were caught in a mud-slick and buried. Only one was separate from the rest, and got back to tell us.’
The dwarfish Sadik, meanwhile, was insinuating his lit cigarette between the others’ dangling fingers, allowing each a puff before he retrieved it. From time to time he stared into my face with the half-evolved eyes of a lizard, then nudged me with a question. But his voice came always in a venal near-whisper as if everything he said must be secret or ugly. I at first thought him a little imbecile. ‘Who are the most famous footballers with you?’
My mind went blank. I’d been cut off from England too long. A few months earlier, I was sure, I could have named several.
Sherali continued with a kind of fiery sadness: ‘Those mountains have claimed more lives than any war . . . .’
But Sadik’s saurian gaze was still on mine. Perhaps he was doubting if I were English. He said resentfully: ‘England is the birthplace of football . . .’
Then, in a fit of recall, I said: ‘Gazza!’
He had not heard of him. ‘He must be young,’ he said, and went on questioning me. ‘I knew an Englishman once who gave me a coat. What clothes do you have?’ He reached through my jacket flaps and fingered my pullover.
But Sherali broke in: ‘Look! We’re just back from a party!’ He delved into his bag and lifted out something wrapped in newspaper. ‘We drove two soldiers back to their village after service in Siberia. Their family killed a sheep and gave us some!’ Jubilantly he unwrapped a steamed head, complete in its skin. ‘I’ve never met an Englishman before! We’ll celebrate!’ The skull had been sliced laterally, shearing off its mandible and exposing the meat inside the cranium and upper jaw. He dangled it in front of me. ‘Delicious!’
I stared at it uneasily. Its eyes were closed under dark lashes half steamed away. Its ears stuck out delicately, like a deer’s.
Sadik said: ‘This Englishman gave me a suit . . . .What will you give me?’
But Sherali had stripped away the sheep’s skin in a flash. Its yellow skull ogled the ceiling. ‘Eat!’
I heard craven excuses dropping from me. ‘It’s not my country’s custom . . . .’
‘You don’t eat mutton?’
‘Not like this . . . .’
I felt a hypocrite. These men gluttonously acknowledged what they were eating, whereas my sensibilities had been manicured. But they did not mind. Sherali opened another bag and poured out a mound of moist, rather bitter haloumi for me. Then they upended the sheep’s skull and dug their fingers into the cheeks and brains. It was grey, soft meat. They sucked their hands luxuriously. Even Oman, after fruitlessly offering round our tuna, settled down to cram his mouth with filmy morsels. Sadik tried to dig out the eyes with his penknife, and snapped the blade. Sherali levered one up with a fork and popped it joyfully into his partner’s mouth. I heard Sadik’s teeth crunching the eyeball. ‘These are wonderful!’
‘I’ve heard.’
Within five minutes the head was stripped to a memento mori. It looked hopelessly reduced, like a fossil. Its spirit seemed to have transmigrated into Sherali and Sadik. Their tongues caressed their lips in remembrance, and they grinned collusively at one another, as if they had shared the same woman. Their business partnership was rooted in childhood friendship, which the war had not yet disturbed. Uzbeks still numbered one quarter of Tajikistan’s populace. Uzbek troops, alongside Russians, had even been called in to shore up the status quo.
‘Me and Sadik never faced anything like this before,’ Sherali said. ‘Some people resent our friendship now. Nationalists. But we’ll keep on together.’ Yet they were starting to feel threatened. Their self-conscious pledge of comradeship might be the first sign of its disintegration. ‘Who would ever have thought the Soviet Union would fall the way it did?’ The war brought on Sherali’s look of bewilderment. ‘Just one man brought it down . . .’
The searching sharpness of his features still prejudiced me to believe him more intelligent than Sadik with his pancake cheeks and dead eyes. But now Sadik said: ‘No, that empire was ripe for falling. Its own system did it. It was rotten.’ Then he turned to me with his corrupt whisper. ‘What will you give me? You see my knife is broken. Do you have a knife?’
‘Only from Fergana.’
‘That will do. Anything from you . . . .’ His stare never changed. He said: ‘Tell me, who takes more drugs, do you think, England or Tajikistan?’ He injected his arm with a phantom needle.
‘I don’t know.’ But I wondered what was in his cigarettes.
‘I’m telling you, England does . . .’
I snapped: ‘But Tajikistan grows and exports them.’
‘That’s just business.’
I was starting to hate him. I turned to the others, while his eyes tormented the back of my head. He began: ‘Who fucks more . . .?’
But Sherali was lamenting his country’s deepening crisis. He did not understand it. Nothing but a quiet pragmatism fell within his understanding. ‘I’m a working man. I just want to feed my family, and get on with my living.’
Oman nodded. ‘Lenin at least said one good thing: “Politicians are all prostitutes!’” The vodka was out, and his eyes had started their sweating. ‘Just think. Here we all are – Uzbek, Tajik, English – and we’re all friends! Why can’t it always be like this? Why can’t . . .?’ Then the fatal bottle passed between us, and the toasts started their rounds, and set in train grandiloquent musings. So, in this close room under the cleansing mountains, we dropped into the recurring lament of travellers who find themselves released from race and class and context, and momentarily entered a heart’s region freed from all differences.
But in the morning I found my knife had gone.
For 200 miles, as we made for the capital Dushanbe, the river prised apart the valley where streams of scarlet and ice flowed side by side. Nothing seemed natural. Fluffy clouds dangled in the mountains, as if hung up for a court masque. The snow-peaks stacked above green hills, and the crimson gash of river-beds drew us through a country of white, emerald and synthetic red, as if the national flag (a similar confection) had bled over the landscape. From time to time our track still disintegrated into a rutted causeway where an avalanche had passed, and tilted up putty-soft scarps or squeezed to a sliver under cliffs. But little by little the snow withdrew, until only the Pervogo ranges far to the south shone white.
In their villages of clay and brushwood, the Tajiks walked in harlequin colours and a touch of defiant grace. Longest settled of all the Central Asian peoples, they had been driven from the Zerafshan valley and into the mountains by Arab and Turkic invasion almost thirteen centuries ago. They had intermarried with Mongoloids, but an Iranian physiognomy prevailed, and from village to village the faces changed. Some were inbred and delicate. They showed long, European features and heavy noses. Sometimes the hair curled russet or auburn above their high brows, and their faces shone with blue or green eyes. All the colour which had drained out of the Kirghiz towns returned on this side of the mountains. Even the old men glittered in gold-threaded quilts and bright-hued skull-caps: biblical patriarchs with dripping beards, who crouched still limber on their haunches by the wayside. Children sported embroidered shirts and dresses, and the lean, handsome women walked in fiercely brilliant gowns with their headscarves tied piratically around their foreheads.
Within a few months, during open war between Moslems and the old Communist regime, this secluded valley would be invaded by its clan rivals from Kulyab to the south, and swept by Russian tanks, and the refugees would be pouring from the villages in their thousands on the way to Afghanistan. But for the moment the land dropped westward in hushed apprehension. Beneath us the river inscribed idle hieroglyphs over its flattened bed. Sometimes now it measured half a mile across, while a hundred tributaries meandered to meet it, carving up the hills like cake. Then the flow would narrow to a flood, slap-ping itself into rapids, until it left our road altogether, plunging south, and we followed a milder river towards Dushanbe. The country softened round us. Its lower slopes were tinted with vetch and rock roses. Their scent gusted over the road. Orchards filled with yellow grosbeaks and the darting of blue-green rollers, and a booted eagle coasted across our path.
We limped towards the outskirts of Dushanbe, nursing two broken brake-discs. Vigilantes and armed police flagged us down as we entered, and searched us. Armoured cars waited in the alleys nearby. Beyond them the city had gone unnaturally quiet. Scarcely a car moved in the streets. Ranks of plane trees muffled and darkened every avenue, where a few trams and taxis jittered. Fear of earthquake had built the city low, and its offices and apartments lined the boulevards with three-storey façades washed in faded buff and blue. Here and there some sop to oriental taste had sanctioned a rank of pointed arches or a filigreed balcony. But there was an old Russian feel of life rotting away behind appearances. The municipal rose-beds seemed to be blooming in solitude, for themselves, and the pavements looked too wide for the pedestrians. In this half-Moslem ambience, the sexes walked separately, and the slender women still wore their native brilliance. But people hurried in preoccupation, mostly alone. Nobody raised his voice. When men met, the eloquent language of Moslem handshakes – the cordial double-clasp or the perfunctory touch, all the graded signs of friendship or distrust – was magnified in the tense streets. The hovering mountains bathed them in cold air, and turned the avenues into gleaming culs-de-sac.
This was the ghost-city which the Russians were leaving. Before 1917 it had been a small village, but with the arrival of the railway in 1929 the Bolsheviks had made it their own, and until recently only half its people were Tajik. In common with all Central Asia, its factory workers and the bulk of its specialists had been Russian. But every month they were streaming home in their thousands, and now, during an armed stand-off between government and opposition, a paralysis had settled over the city. Its appearance of peace was only the stillness of suspense or the stagnation of closure. Along its avenues, in the serenely banked façades of flats and businesses, windows were boarded up or blocked, balconies sagging and crevices leaking weeds. In half-abandoned newspaper kiosks the familiar Western icons – posters of karate and bodybuilding heroes, Pink Floyd, prints of Solzhenitsyn selling for three roubles – looked foolish or redundant.
I walked along the old Lenin Prospect (renamed Rudaki Prospect after the Tajik national poet) which made a dog-leg through the city’s core. It was suffocated in chenar trees eight deep, but empty of traffic. In Independence Square, the previous month, a huge demonstration of Moslems and liberals had threatened to assault the Supreme Soviet in session. After a fourday protest, fluttering with green Islamic flags, they had forced the resignation of the whole Presidium. Close by in Freedom Square, two days later, a counter-demonstration had seethed round the president’s office shouting pro-Communist slogans. The pink and white government buildings still shone surreally in front of us, flying the national flag; but opposite, the Lenin colossus raised in 1960 had left behind only a plinth of shattered marble.
Within a few months the old regime would reassert itself; but already it was dressed in Tajik colours, and paid lipservice to a mild Islam. The certainties of doctrinaire Communism were gone. Instead the city was sinking into a chasm of nationalism and tribal feud. I wandered it in ignorant misgiving, and occasionally, where a Marxist memorial or a slogan remained, was touched by foolish nostalgia. In the contemporary chaos, these statues immortalising work and learning seemed invocations to a more enlightened time, and the heraldry of Communism – the slogans urging men to paradise – imbued with some lost knowledge and even a moral sweetness.
In the windows of the Firdausi Library busts of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Gorky mingled with those of Persian and Tajik classical writers. A few years before this would have smelt of insidious colonialism: the absorption of native heroes into the Russian body. But now they looked innocently ecumenical, and echoed with ruined ideals. So I forgot for a while the corruption and evangelistic cruelty of the old empire, which had handed these people the poisoned chalice of a split identity, and understood those who wanted the Soviet Union back.
In the library next day, I roamed among the deserted stacks where old, permitted titles mingled with fledgling new ones. Lenin’s On the Defence of the Socialist Motherland and Can the Bolsheviks retain state power? nestled beside D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Only Lenin’s hypocritical tract The Rights of Nations to Self-determination rang with irony.
‘All this will go up in flames soon,’ said a Russian teacher hunting the card-index beside me. ‘These people are ripe for burning books.’ She was stout and bitter, with cropped hair. She worked in a small town in the hills, an enclave of mines and factories which had once been full of Russians. ‘The Tajiks are hopeless,’ she went on. ‘They just trade and trick. All merchants. Our Russian technocrats have already mostly gone, and the others are following – factory-workers and teachers. Everybody.’
‘You have no Tajik friends?’
‘I do, but this nationalism is growing every day. You can feel it all round you.’
‘And your school?’
‘Our classes are down from thirty to fifteen, and all amalgamating. Everybody’s planning to go. And I’ll go too, in the autumn, back to the Ukraine. People work properly there.’ Her face quivered with memory, perhaps too rosy. ‘It’s good in the Ukraine.’
In my hotel the only other foreigners were Afghan merchants and students. Oman said they were trading in opium and heroin, which would find its way through the Baltic ports to the West. On the tarmac outside, a drift of youths was selling bootleg brandy and French (they said) champagne, and fraternising with a slovenly troupe of police. From time to time they moved in and out of the lobby in a tremor of secrecy and suspicion. Their eyes raked the doors for custom, while the handshakes and embraces rose to a crescendo. Friends or rivals would be plucked aside for a sudden confidence, and Oman would catch fragments: ‘ . . . seventy roubles . . . I can manage . . . ninety . . . as a favour . . . .’ Then the restless circles and pairs would reconvene, and their conspiracies start all over again. ‘My friend . . . tomorrow . . . dollars . . .?’
The sight of the hotel terrace made Oman sick. Twenty years before, he had finished his military service in Dushanbe as the building was being completed, and a tile had dropped off the roof and killed his closest friend.
While I was rambling the streets, he would set off to view the tea-houses and barracks of his past, but always returned a little melancholy. There was nobody left whom he knew, and the friends he remembered were mostly tragic. One had shot himself; another was killed when his tank tipped over a ravine. Then there was the Polish woman he had loved: a ravishing creature, he said, but married. Every night, while her husband was away, he had escaped the barracks to visit her, and returned before dawn. Even now her memory turned him maudlin. ‘I still know where she lived. Perhaps she’s still there. She was so beautiful, like a dream to me. I was just twenty-two.’ His fingers clasped and unclasped the remembered body. ‘But she would be fifty-three now, and our women don’t last like yours do. So I think I’ll not go. I’ll keep her memory.’ But he looked miserable.
In the evening he would often winkle out scraps of meat from some half-closed shop, and would grill them into tough kebabs in the hotel yard, and brew up tea. But at other times I returned to find him slumped in tousled gloom among discarded newspapers and cigarette stubs, drunk. Then we would open our iron rations of tinned fish and calamary, and I would reassure him that we would soon be gone, for he was growing bored.
After dark, when the traffic drained from the streets, the city went silent and a rash of stars glittered in our window. Then, from some distant suburb, we would hear bursts of automatic fire, which Oman recognised as Kalashnikovs, and hundreds of awakened dogs would howl from alley to alley in a mournful counterpoint. Morning brought news of men killed by random skirmishes in a city filled with armed civilians.
These disturbed nights goaded Oman into vodka-loosened ramblings about the mafia, his troubled parenthood, or the whereabouts of God. His past was scarred by loss and hardship. His mother’s father had been a wealthy man, he said, and had owned a restaurant and a small factory, and was shot in the Stalin years simply for being what he was. Oman’s mother was only seven then. His father had been wounded in the Russo-Finnish war, and invalided out to Novosibirsk where he met and married her. Oman was the lone result. His father never truly recovered, and died when his son was ten. Oman posthumously adored him. It was this dimly remembered father who had built their family home at the epicentre of the 1966 Tashkent earthquake: a traditional brick-and-timber house which had survived when all around it the Soviet buildings crashed. ‘They were built inflexibly of concrete,’ he said. ‘So they just disappeared overnight.’
On one of these distracted evenings, when the crash of small-arms fire kept us up late, the question of national identity nagged at me again, and I asked him if he were proud of being Uzbek. No Latvian or Georgian would have responded tepidly to such a question, but Oman answered: ‘It’s hard to feel it much.’ He looked a little bewildered. ‘Yes, I suppose I’m proud . . . but I’m proud of being Moslem too.’
Yet I knew he was not a believer. Rather he felt part of the Umma, of the wider family of Moslem peoples: a generous but vague identity. Staring at his smoothed face, as at a cryptogram, I realised that this absence of national clothing did not seem a lack to him, only to me, soaked as I was, unthinking, in my own. His true nation was his extended family. It was this which surrounded him with the comfort of belonging, the womb-like flesh of his own kind.
‘I can trace my people over two hundred years,’ he said. ‘It used to be common among us, but it’s dying out now. So I’m teaching my youngest son the same.’ Then the old, stubborn hurt darkened his voice. ‘I don’t want to be forgotten after I’m dead.’
I said exactingly: ‘Is it so important? A name?’ I was wondering what it really meant: the transient survival of some syllables in the collective memory.
But he did not understand this. ‘I want to be honoured,’ he said. ‘I want my place back.’
‘Back?’
‘Yes, back.’ A fusion of anger and self-pity burnt just below his words. ‘I’ve been wronged in this life.’
I said: ‘How?’, and at once regretted asking. He was seated at our table like a sulky child. Vodka swam in his voice and heated eyes, and I anticipated one of his generalised tirades.
But instead he looked down at his hands on the table and said: ‘Nine years ago I was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. For something I never did.’ He gazed at me for my reaction. I don’t know what he saw. But I was aware, beneath shock, of unexplained things slipping into place. And now the words gushed helplessly from him, as if they had long been waiting: his terrible inner anger and sadness. His face tightened with inconsolable memories. ‘In those days I was director of a big combine, and somebody wanted my position. So he rigged a case against me, said I’d agreed to accept a bribe. There was nothing I could do. It was a mafia job.’ His voice pulsed to a rhythmic crescendo, as if he were singing himself into fury. ‘So I was sent to prison on rigged evidence’ – he caught at the scruff of his neck – ‘and half a year later that man had a heart attack, and soon afterwards was sent to prison himself for something. Where he is now, only God knows.’
I asked softly: ‘What was prison like?’
But he turned quiet. His face convulsed. ‘I can’t even talk about it.’ And this silence was more potent than anything he could have said. He started pacing the room as if it were a cell, while his creased vest and trousers touched up the illusion of a convict. ‘I was already forty. But when they took me I just went into shock. I remember standing in that place dazed for almost three minutes. I just went on repeating, “There’s no sun, there’s no sun, there’s no sun.’” He glared upward. Then his words came in declamatory hammer-blows. ‘The cells were two metres by five . . . with six convicts in each one . . . three bunks to each wall. And sometimes another six were shoved in too . . . and they slept on the floor. We were cattle.’
He struck the room’s wall with his fists. His eyes had filled with water. ‘Then after a year and a half I was sent to a labour camp not far from Tashkent, and in some ways it was worse than prison. We worked in the fields all day, and sometimes in that region, you know, the temperature climbs to forty degrees Centigrade, and we just laboured under that sun, so that our necks and ears swelled to twice their size . . . .’
As he went on, I realised that for a long time inarticulate questions had been rankling in me, because all at once he seemed resolved. His air of private hurt and self-reliance, all his rancour and solitude, appeared natural now. It was a rare Uzbek official, I thought, who had never accepted a bribe, but I believed in Oman’s innocence. The rage which came riding out of him was too intense for show.
‘I wrote letters to everybody, on and on,’ he said, ‘even to Gorbachev and Lukyanov. And in the end the state procurator came down from Moscow to review my case, and asked me why I was so outraged and writing all these letters. I told him I was angry because I wasn’t earning anything and so was depriving the government of income tax’ – this joke momentarily ironed out his forehead – ‘and he asked me off the record what had happened, and I told him – just as I’m telling you now – and because of him I came out of that place after three years, and I thought: so after all, there is a God, and He is watching me.’
He dropped into his chair again, his anger withered away. ‘Do you know, when I got out the policeman who had arrested me came and apologised and said “What could I do?” although he’d known I was innocent.’ He crossed his arms over his chest in ironic penitence. ‘”I’m sorry,” he said, as though he’d dented my car, “I’m so sorry!’”
He cradled the vodka bottle against his chest, then one plump arm came up and covered his head in remembered despair. ‘After that I didn’t want to see anybody – not my old friends or work-mates, nobody. I took to working on the railway as a mechanic – I’m good at that – mending the refrigerators on trains.’ His voice rose again in a momentary, pathetic outrage. ‘I did that alone for three years!’
I began: ‘You’ve started again now . . . .’
But he was not listening. ‘Somebody should write my story. Why don’t you write it? I couldn’t write it.’ The vodka trembled into his glass. ‘I’ve got a stack of papers and documents. It would make a bestseller! Like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich!’ The drink was overwhelming him. ‘Did you know that one in thirty of our population goes to prison? And I reckon half of them are honest men, blackmailed.’
I said: ‘But you’ve a fine house now, and good work. And your son’s married well . . . .’
‘Yes, but . . . .’ He gestured hopelessly. ‘I can’t enjoy them. I can’t be happy there. Not in my real heart.’
In some vital part of him, I realised, he was broken. However much he travelled with his vans striking lucrative deals, this lesion would not heal. He looked flushed and spent. I did not know what to say. My arm around his shoulders brought his head half sobbing against mine, while the dogs began barking all over the city in the wake of new gunfire.
In the 1930s, at the height of Stalin’s persecutions, a pious citizen of Dushanbe opened his house for the secret prayers of Moslems, and around this modest building there grew up the country’s central mosque and the residence of its spiritual leader, the Qazi. Now the Qazi’s faction, in alliance with the Islamic Renaissance Party (soon to be banned), was tasting a precarious power. But no delegation clogged the doorways, and nobody barred me from entering the courtyards, where a few builders were cutting sheets of marble at a lathe. The 160 medreseh pupils had just dispersed for the summer vacation, and an air of dereliction was about.
But one student had been left behind. He could not afford the train home, he said, and was waiting for a cheap bus fare. ‘My father’s just a mechanic. He hasn’t the money to pay for me.’
So we sat together under the sleepy porticoes. He was half Tajik, half Uzbek, and across his open face I fancied that the two worlds did battle, and that periodically the sturdy Turk in him was being sabotaged by a volatile Iranian. But he was callow and earnest. ‘We have to live on a stipend, you see,’ he went on. ‘Three hundred roubles a month. It’s not much. It gets paid by our brothers in Iran. Our government gives nothing for religion. They hate us.’
I glimpsed a spark of anger, which was snuffed out at once by his enthusiasm. ‘But it’s all changing now! You heard about our demonstration? People came from everywhere! From the factories and collectives and state farms – old, young. When the police blocked the roads, they just went in on foot. And they were half starving. Some of them hadn’t received pay for six months, and there was nothing in the shops: no sugar, no meat, bread. Nothing.’
But he was jubilant with the certainty of future triumph. His had been one of the thousands of faces massed in Independence Square a month before, and he had seen and felt their power. ‘This government is still run by old-time Communists,’ he said, ‘and that system was atrocious. Nobody could speak or believe as he wished. Now our law gives freedom of belief, but Islamic law will be better.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Will it also give freedom of belief?’
He began: ‘Yes . . . .’ But he sounded subtly dissatisfied, as if Islamic law should magically unite everything, and cleanse it. ‘It will come. Perhaps in five years, perhaps in ten. But it will come like it did in Iran.’
This chill certainty fell mildly from him. It seemed to him, after all he had witnessed, that an irreversible wave were gathering. Only five years ago barely twenty mosques were open in the country. Now there were 2500. He said. ‘I think the Iranians are the best Moslems.’
‘But they are Shia,’ I said, sowing discord. The Tajiks were almost all Sunni.
‘There may be a few Shia,’ he answered quixotically, ‘but most are Moslems.’
I gazed at him in wonder. Iranian propaganda must have evaded all grounds for friction. He seemed infinitely manipulable. I asked: ‘You think there will be a revolution here like Iran’s?’
‘I pray God not. I believe it will happen gently.’ His fingers sieved the air, as if welcoming a breeze. ‘Some of our women are fearful, but the Ayatollah Khomeini said that women might work – and why not? – for five or six hours in the morning, and that afterwards they should tend the house. But look what they endure now! They slave from dawn to dusk in the collectives and get paid a pittance a month! As for the veil, that should just cover the head.’ He outlined a wimple, and smiled at me for approval. All this seemed decent to him, even free. Only his freedom was not mine, and I was scowling ungratefully. I was familiar with this recipe for cowled servants by now.
I said: ‘Perhaps women should decide what women do.’
‘But that’s what they wear in Iran,’ he rushed on. ‘They cover the head and they look very attractive, the women, dressed like that.’
‘You’ve seen them?’
He looked incredulous. ‘Of course not! I’ve watched it on television.’ He grinned at the simplicity of this. ‘Maybe I’ll study in Iran one day, or in Saudi Arabia’ – the possibilities filled him with awe as he spoke – ‘they give students a hundred dollars a month in Saudi Arabia! I couldn’t earn that in a lifetime! They have Islamic law there, but the biggest millionaires in the world!’ His eyes glittered. ‘That’s the place!’
In his face the Turk and the Iranian had momentarily made peace, hypnotised by lucre. ‘But some of us will go to Pakistan after our four years here,’ he went on. ‘They have the best colleges there, because they teach English. Next year we will be learning English in this medreseh too . . . .’
‘Why?’
‘It’s the world language. It’s the one you have to know. But Saudi Arabia would be best!’
Somewhere in his imagination there shone a paradise of Islamic justice and gross riches. It restored his native pride, yet promised dollars.
But wasn’t Islamic law hard on money-making, I asked? It condemned usury, limited private property and amputated thieves’ hands.
‘Amputation?’ He looked astonished. ‘Our law wouldn’t do that! No, no, it’s not like that at all. Only if you steal something big. A car, say. But if you steal something small, or steal for the first time, they’ll just cut off a fingertip.’ He held up his splayed hand. ‘Just a little, a very little. ‘ He laughed in depreciation, charmingly. ‘And the second time you steal, they’d still only cut off that, and then that and that . . . .’ He sliced off an imaginary sheaf of fingers. They dropped soundlessly on to the portico floor, until his hand was a stub. He was smiling at me now. It all seemed irreducibly logical to him, beautiful even. ‘Only then would the hand come off!’
He was not really cruel, I knew. He simply belonged to a harsher world: the poor mechanic’s son.
‘You don’t agree with it?’ He looked astonished. ‘Why not?’ His face was a childlike question-mark. ‘But it works!’
Among the racketeers and bootleggers adrift in my hotel lingered a lecturer in the department of physics at Dushanbe’s university. He supplemented his breadline income by siphoning off hotel guests into private lodgings. When Oman had bargained at the reception-desk, this delicate figure had emerged from the lobby’s shadows, offering a list of private rooms – but they all lay too far from the centre. With a pucker of deference he had not pressed their merit, and returned to the shadows.
But four days later I met Talib again, walking near the university. The fervid face, gentled in shelving hair, had been changed by its location from diffidence to self-esteem, and he invited me home. He lived in one of those flat-blocks whose tiers of splintered stairs and padlocked doors scarcely vary all the way from Minsk to the Pacific. But inside, his apartment had been prettified with alcoves and little chandeliers. His wife was cooking supper for their eight-year-old son in the kitchen, and his daughter, perched in the sitting-room, was playing on a Cyrillic typewriter.
She was the perfect type of those lissom girls who chattered in flocks along the boulevards, holding hands and flaunting Atlas silks. She had the slender face and alert eyes of her tribe, and ran barefoot about the flat on long feet with prehensile toes, giggling and flirting a little. Out in the streets these urban shepherdesses, speaking their mysterious Tajik, seemed touched by enigma. But in the house Sayora suggested some international teenager, by turns sulky, warm and abruptly independent. She was reading economics to become a book-keeper.
‘Maybe she’ll marry and it’ll be hard for her,’ said Talib. ‘It’s always hard for women working. But I don’t believe Islam will change things for her. We’ll make our own Islam here. Can you imagine our women wearing the veil?’
Sayora levelled a playful hand across her nose. Her black eyebrows converged at the centre in the way the Tajiks admire. She played on her beauty like an instrument. Her portly mother, bustling about us with sweets and nuts, made me at home with domestic questions which she answered herself. ‘Are you all right? . . . No, you’re not, here’s another cushion . . . . You will eat with us? Yes, of course, there will be pilau in a moment
‘Things will get better in this country,’ said Talib, infected by her homely commotion. ‘I don’t just think this, I know this. I even delivered a lecture to my students about it. It’s up to you, I said, you’re young, it’s your world. I’m an old man, I told them [but he was my age] and I can’t do much. But you can.’ He raised a frail fist. ‘And nobody dissented.’
This belief in the future was ardent and mercurial, like him, rooted more in his desires than in reason. He burnt with patriotic longings. He belonged, I guessed, to the fragile alliance of democrats and Moslems which opposed the old government. ‘I used to be a Party member,’ he said. ‘You had to be, in the university. But hardly any of us believed in it, although a few did, and their world crashed overnight. Now we’ve had seventy years of Communism to mitigate our Islam, and perhaps it’s been civilising. I’m a Moslem like any other, but there comes a time when you feel: It’s enough!’ He thrust out his palms in repudiation. ‘Islam can be mild, you know.’
Then his little son ran into the room firing a space-gun. He was thick-set and boisterous. He shot us all dead, twice. Talib, who was teaching him the poetry of Rudaki, disarmed him and tested him on an opening rubaiyat. The boy pressed his knuckles to his forehead, dislodging himself into duty. Then he stood to attention and chanted:
Many a desert waste existeth
Where was once garden glad;
And a garden glad existeth
Where was once desert sad....
Talib turned to me. ‘You hear how beautiful the words are! And that was a thousand years ago!’
His bookcase brimmed with Tajik poets, and he annexed all Persian culture to his nation, from Hafiz to Omar Khayyám (who had been a formidable mathematician). ‘And we knew about Communism long before the Bolsheviks came! Listen to this . . . .’ His eyes went dreamy as he quoted the poetry of Abdulrachman Jami, on how Alexander the Great was astonished to come upon a city in Sogdiana where everyone was equal, and all houses and gardens held in common, and poverty unknown.
I asked: ‘And what did he do?’
‘He thought that they should have a czar,’ said Talib, ‘and he destroyed them.’ But this denouement did not trouble him. What mattered was the pre-eminence of the Tajik culture. More than two millennia ago his people had known and absorbed Communism. What could the Russians ever teach them?
‘But they’ve already taught you,’ I said. ‘Even in your university.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Talib tacked to this graceless wind. ‘But it’s good they’re getting out now. So long as they were here we could sit back and let them do the work: in administration, in the factories, everywhere But now we’ll be forced to learn ourselves, and that’s right. We’re losing our nurse and we’ll have to grow up.’
He spoke with rueful warmth and only muted optimism. Perhaps, I thought, I was listening to the birth-pangs of his nation. For him, I slowly realised, it was a deep-set mission: the returning of his people to their own heart and tongue. He had already published six works on chemistry in Tajik for secondary school and university students. They were the first of their kind. And now, he confided, he had completed a dictionary of physics terminology, converting each concept from Russian into Tajik. It had taken him fourteen years.
‘But nobody will publish it. My publishers promised, but they have no paper now.’ He gathered up the typescript to show me. It was formidably long. I recognised the protective way his fingers riffled and stroked the paper. ‘It’s not the money I care about. It was something I had to do.’
‘Of course.’ This detraction of money touched me with affection. It was the first time I had heard anyone here say he disregarded money. ‘Someone must publish it.’
‘They will, in time,’ he said. But he left the typescript in his lap like an orphan. Sometimes, he said, he had gone back to early Tajik manuscripts, hunting for synonyms where the modern language had none; at other times he had been forced to invent them himself, struggling to conflate existing Tajik roots and suffixes. A single neologism might consume a week.
Fourteen years! And at last this Casaubon-like enterprise teetered on the brink of the light. ‘But nobody’s interested in things like this now,’ he said, ‘just in demonstrations and in shooting one another.’ Abstractedly he weighed the book by sections on his palms, as if assessing its value or meaning, or its chance of surviving at all.
His doubts were to be justified. Within a few months pro-government insurgents from the south would rampage through the city killing Moslem sympathisers, and I never discovered what happened to Talib, or his gentle family, or to the painstaking book which was to coax his people towards civilisation.
Next morning in our hotel room an ancient black telephone sprang to life, and Oman started flirting with an unknown woman at the other end. She had dialled the wrong number (she said) but he would not let her go. He joked, cajoled and teased her, flattered a little, and reeled her in. She was a teacher, was she? How strange! He had thought of teaching himself . . . . Wasn’t that a Tashkent accent he heard? It was! Might he meet her in half an hour, then? Yes! His would be the green Lada parked outside the Lakhuti Theatre on Rudaki Prospect. He very much looked forward Wonderful!
He replaced the receiver with an anticipatory ‘Oooh!’ Who was she? He had no idea. ‘They’re usually tarts telephoning from outside,’ he said, ‘but she sounded genuine . . . with a pretty voice.’ He writhed into a clean shirt. ‘I think she just wants a man!’
He scrutinised the Oman in the mirror, patted his hair for several minutes, and spent a long time in the broken-down bathroom. Then he emerged to dab his ‘Moscow-Paris Eau de Cologne’ around his neck and on his chest, and made for the door. ‘I’ll see you this evening!’ he called, and added from the corridor: ‘She sounded young!’
I trailed off puritanically to the Orthodox church of St Nicholas, brushed by a transient loneliness. Momentarily I invested the siren voice with an ondine’s body, then promptly forgot her. Under the church’s vegetable dome and blazing cross the women in the gardens were old, and had turned themselves to God. Shuffling among the terraces in rubber boots and worn-out slippers, sipping water from a holy well, begging, praying, waiting – one of them stark mad – they seemed to be dying piecemeal and contented.
But inside the church a mass christening was in progress. Some 200 Russians crammed into a side-chapel while a garrulous, whirlwind priest anointed their children and babies – on foreheads, eyes, wrists, chests, hands and feet – with a phial of oil and a wispy brush. He looked overworked, and had run out of pomp. But he dabbed crosses on the elder children as if touching up masterpieces. Then a batch of babies was slipped from its underclothes and plunged one by one into the font water, which he scooped over their heads in a gabble of names and a triple blessing.
For an infant or two, this ceremony passed in stunned silence. Then there broke out a terrible, contagious howling. It spread from baby to baby in a bush-fire of unappeasable terror. Even the stoutest broke down. As each baby was returned wailing and sinless to its parents’ arms, it was instantly enveloped in shawls and kisses, but bawled remorselessly on. Dummies and bottles were rushed unavailing to the rescue. Cooing and burbling fell on scream-deafened ears. They urinated miserably over the floor or down their mothers’ arms.
A few adults, meanwhile, reaching Christianity after the years of its persecution, bowed their heads over the font. Then, as the hubbub shrank, the priest marched among the babies and sliced off a damp tress from every whimpering head with a pair of kitchen scissors. Each curl he passed to the old woman following him, who kneaded it into a paste, while I watched with the bewilderment of any intruding Moslem.
I imagined that these embattled Russians were experiencing a resurgence of faith. But when I asked another priest, walking in the overgrown gardens that evening, he said No. Our congregation used to number two thousand or more. There was scarcely room for them. But they’re less than five hundred now, and the baptisms, as you saw, were only fifty today, when there used to be twice as many.’
He strode beside me in a gold soutane and hobnailed boots. But under its purple cap his face was fretted with lines, and his peppery beard turning white. Our people have gone back home – plane-loads and train-loads of them.’ He thrust out his arm at the setting sun, and I sensed in the gesture a homesickness, out of this deepeningly alien land, for the refuge of once-Holy Russia. ‘I’ve served here twenty years and I’ve never seen so few believers.’
But now that the other religion, Communism, had died overnight, were people not renewing their identity in this one?
No, he said bluntly, they were fading away. ‘Only after the troubles earlier this year a few grew afraid, and came to be baptised because of that. Fear is a great baptiser.’
As we passed the church’s shop, stocked with a few pamphlets and icons, he burst out: ‘But people can read about their faith now! At last, after so long! Look!’ He pointed in the window. It was still a luxury to him. ‘The laws of God!’
At first he had reminded me of those East Mediterranean priests who smelt of incense and garlic and mild corruption. But now I was starting to like him. I asked: ‘What about the future?’
His stride did not falter. ‘I just go day by day. I’m not thinking about it.’ We passed the enclosure where the priests before him lay buried, remembered under flowers. ‘So long as there is just one old woman left in my congregation, the church will be open, and I’ll be here to serve her.’
They were sitting, four or five babushkas, in the warming sun of the courtyard as I left. But by the time I reached the hotel, it was dusk, and Oman’s Lada was parked smugly in the yard behind. I remembered the siren voice of the schoolteacher, and felt a pang of irritated envy. Oman was seeing life!
But I opened the door on a crestfallen back. ‘She never turned up,’ he said. ‘I suppose she was just joking.’ He saw my face and fell into rueful laughter. ‘Yes, there I was, running after her like a besotted boy.’
But the indignity went on rankling. Why had she not come, he wondered? Did she never intend it? Perhaps something had delayed her. Or had she lost her nerve? ‘I’ve never had any trouble finding girlfriends in Tashkent. No, they’re not prostitutes. Some of them are married. We just meet in a dacha for a little holiday – half a day, perhaps, a day . . . .’ His lower lip jutted out like a child’s. ‘Why didn’t she come?’
I couldn’t tell, of course. But one explanation did not occur to him, and I never mentioned it: that the young schoolmistress had glimpsed the stout and ageing Oman waiting there, and had walked past him without a sign.
One morning I woke early after a night jolted by gunfire and Oman’s snoring and, in the thin light trickling through the window with the call to prayer, felt suddenly that we should be on the road. For a while now a mood of jaded restlessness had descended, and a sense of being trapped. The passes to our north were blocked by late snow, deflecting us towards the Afghan frontier before we circled back to Tashkent, and Oman too wanted to be gone: idleness provoked his demons.
The moment we were on the move again, his ebullience returned. He smote the air and declared the Lada ready for anything. Its brake-discs had been mended and the red mud sluiced from every crack. So where would we go now?
‘To the grave of Enver Pasha,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know where it is.’
‘Nor do I. But we’ll find it!’
So we started on a tortuous search, in the wake of a story seventy years old. Enver Pasha had risen from humble origins (his father a railway worker, his mother an undertaker’s drudge) to become a leading architect of the Young Turk revolution in 1908 and head of the triumvirate which ruled Turkey during the First World War. Proud, glamorous, ruthless, he was a master of conspiracy and an erratically ambitious general. No one could predict him. An avowed republican, he married an Ottoman princess. He was rumoured the finest swordsman in the empire. But by 1918 he was in flight from his country, and under sentence of death. Lenin welcomed him in Moscow as a revolutionary tool, and in 1921 despatched him to Central Asia, where the basmachi guerrillas had been tormenting the Bolsheviks for three years. Lenin seems to have hoped that the reputation of the charismatic Turk would entice rebels into the Communist fold.
But Enver was dreaming something different: a jihad which would rouse the Turkic regions of Asia and weld them into a Pan-Turanian empire from Constantinople to Mongolia. The moment he reached Bukhara he escaped the city, went over to the basmachi, and proclaimed a full-scale holy war against the Russians. Messengers rode out to every guerrilla leader, urging their unity. He secured the support of the exiled emir of Bukhara, and arms and personnel from King Amanullah of Afghanistan. Thousands of recruits poured in. A shock of early victories, and the capture of Dushanbe, swept him to a brief glory. He declared himself ‘Supreme Commander of all the Armies of Islam’ and kinsman of the Caliph (through his wife), the legate of the Prophet on earth.
But now the battle-tempered Bolshevik war-machine steamrollered east against him. The ill-armed and disunited basmachi could not halt it. One by one their strongholds were overrun, and they melted away, while Enver’s little army fell back on the Pamir foothills. His position was hopeless. He might have fled into Afghanistan, but flight was not his nature. Ten days before the end he wrote a farewell letter to his wife, saying that his men were being mercilessly pursued and could not adapt to defensive warfare. With it he sent a twig from an elm tree on which he had carved her name.
On 4 August 1922, while the Bolsheviks closed in, he celebrated Bairam with a handful of his closest followers in the village of Abiderya. Soon afterwards, as his outposts opened fire on the advancing enemy, he leapt into the saddle, drew his sabre and charged the Red machine-guns head on, followed by twenty-five companions. They drowned in a rain of bullets.
The Russians did not know whom they had killed. One of the dead, spattered by seven bullet-holes but still dapper in a Turkic jacket and German field-boots, was carrying papers and a small Koran. These they sent to Tashkent for identification, and left the bodies where they had fallen. Two days later a passing mullah recognised the corpse of Enver Pasha. The news spread. The villagers of Abiderya streamed out to bring his body back, and thousands of mourners appeared like magic out of the hills. He was buried in a nameless grave under a walnut tree by the river. He was just forty. Even now, it is said, on the anniversary of his death, the descendants of his comrades-in-arms come from as far away as Turkey to pay homage at his grave.
But confusion surrounded this story. Three years after his death an Austrian carpet-dealer, Gustav Krist, claimed to have spoken with the commander of the Red attacking force, who told him that Enver and his adjutant had escaped to a nearby spring, where Russian agents murdered them. Scouring my maps, I could find no trace of the old names. No Satalmis, where Enver wrote his last letter. No Abiderya, where he was interred.
For two days Oman and I threaded roads across the bare hills. In Kurgan Tube, soon to be war-ravaged, we came upon a giant mosque half-built. Its work-force of Moslem faithful, who had given their labour free, had sensed the coming storm and trickled away in fear, leaving the architect alone there, boasting of its future size, while it disintegrated round him. He had never heard of Enver Pasha.
The commander of the Red force had apparently told Krist that Enver was cornered near the town of Denau, and killed at the Aqsu spring nearby. We found the Denau fort circling its mound in a breached ring, and goats grazing in the town streets; but when we blundered up a track to the nearest Aqsu (the common Turkic word for ‘spring’) its inhabitants met our questions with baffled frowns.
We took to badgering tea-houses along different roads. Every twenty miles or so we would stop off and question their habitués. Satalmis? Abiderya? Old men listened to us in puzzled confabulation, sitting comfortably in their tattered beards, and fingering scraps of bread. In the Tajik tea-houses our questions sometimes started up a gale of answers and counter-claims, which cancelled each other out. But in the Uzbek ones (for we were weaving between the two countries now) heads were scratched, moustaches tugged in sober rumination, and looks of honest vacancy appeared. Many claimed to know where Enver had fought. ‘But nobody knows where he was killed,’ they said. ‘Somewhere up there in the mountains . . . .’ Then tea-cups would be raised to pursed lips, brows would corrugate in surmise, and everybody’s gaze drift to the east.
In a cloud of frustration, as we were driving south of Denau towards the Afghan border, we stopped at the local military commission. ‘These fellows know everything,’ Oman said, and we marched brazenly in. A surprised Russian captain received us, grew interested, and telephoned an old comrade, who asserted that, yes, Enver Pasha was buried in the nearby village of Yurchi, with other basmachi in an unmarked grave.
We drove there in high hopes. On the edge of a deserted football-pitch dotted with cattle, we came upon the tomb of the regional Bolshevik commander: a concrete mound under an iron star. It was simply inscribed: ‘Licharov 1889-1924’. He had been killed two years after Enver.
Then we reached a hill overgrown by graves, with a tiny mosque below. Its ancient caretaker, lean and bright in a sky-blue gown and turban, ascended the cemetery before us on noiseless feet. A breeze sprang up and nudged white butterflies out of the scrub. A pair of rams’ horns, old companions of prestige and death, curled on a post in shamanistic sorcery. To the west the mountains shone like Christmas decorations. The village spread below, and a thin canal.
We came to a pit on the lip of the hill. Thorn bushes were crowding into it. The old man stood on its brink. ‘I’m too young to remember that time,’ he said. ‘I was only seven. But the people who guarded the graveyard before me told me what happened here. After Enver Bey’s last battle the captured bosmachi were shot at the foot of the cliff below.’ We peered over the hill’s edge on to an empty track and a sprawling fig tree. ‘Then their bodies were thrown into this well. It was a hundred metres deep, so you can imagine how many of them! And they said that the body of Enver Bey was among them. That’s what they said.’
Wind-blown thistles rasped against the headstones. ‘Do pilgrims ever come?’ I asked.
‘People come.’
‘On the anniversary of the battle?’
He looked baffled. ‘I don’t know when the battle was.’
I waded over the hill-crest through shin-high grass and cow-parsley droning with bees. Nothing fitted the official story. No river skirted the grave, and the only walnut tree shaded the mosque. The village, above all, had always been named Yurchi. Here was only the memory of an execution-ground. Enver Pasha, I now felt, had died farther east, in the Beljuan hills near Kulyab. But we could not go there. The region was sinking into war, swept by the killings which the Kulyab tribesmen would soon visit on the capital. As for the Yurchi mass grave, it only added another layer of enigma and confusion to the story.
I asked the man: ‘There was never a river below?’
‘Ah yes,’ he said, resurrecting a phantom doubt, ‘there was a river here twenty years ago, instead of the canal. It forked beside the graveyard then.’
A call to prayer rose from the mosque below in a throaty wail, to which nobody answered. Then the only sound was again the scratching of the thistles against the stones.
As we neared the Afghan frontier, the mountains to our west and south sank into haze, and desert hills glared in their place. The air shimmered in a 110°F stillness which blistered the fields. Gangs of women were breaking the soil with spade-headed mattocks, or culling the cotton in blackened hands. Just north of Termez, where the Russians had built their bridgehead into Afghanistan, we swung into a sordid scrubland crossed by pylons and wasted canals. Beside us the Amu Dariya moved through a sliver of green, and Afghanistan lay flat and yellow in mist beyond. We turned north where a crimson river wound between mud-flats. The slopes reddened into angry mounds and ridges, and the yurts and pens of goatherds appeared. But after an hour we crested a watershed, the river had gone and a clear stream was flowing with us where cornfields dribbled round champagne-coloured hills.
Since leaving Dushanbe we had described a frustrated loop almost to Samarkand. The euphoria of being on the road again had evaporated days ago, and hours passed in silence. Our differences were suddenly exacerbated. Oman longed to speed home with the car radio yelling. For him only occasional bazaars punctuated the barren stretches in which his inexplicable companion contemplated scenery, talked with somebody useless, or wandered a ruin. He was pining after other companionship. Yet whenever we reached a hotel he regarded my desire for a separate room as wasteful and a little insulting, and I rarely achieved it. He did not want to be alone.
As for me, a long-festering irritation had risen to the surface, and Oman was suffering for it. The remorseless cupidity which surrounded me day after day had brought on intolerance. In the town streets the eyes raking over me saw only an assemblage of material possibilities – a watch, a pen, a chance of dollars – and I began to long for any disinterested curiosity or pleasure. And now this misanthropy spread to Oman. I bridled at his habitual cheeseparing in restaurants, and the monotonous cataloguing of inflation. He could not resist economy. Although I had given him a gift worth several times the cost of our journey, he was subtly absent whenever a bill had to be paid. The sums were always paltry, but they left me resentful.
In penitence now, belatedly, I record how costly life had become within two years: the price of a chicken had risen from four roubles to 300; a sheep from 300 to 5000; even a box of matches from one kopek to 1.30 roubles. Petrol had gone up 150 per cent in less than a year. Flour, cooking oil, butter and sugar were all rationed. Money was on everybody’s lips, except mine.
Meanwhile, as Oman and I sipped lagman or munched samsa meat-balls in streamside tea-houses, our rambling talks, conducted in a clash of disorganised Russian, became sparser and more abstracted. And Oman’s impatience to be home had been exacerbated by the gradual failure of the car. For over 200 miles between Termez and Shakhrisabz he nursed an overheating engine, until we were topping up the radiator with spring water every quarter hour. This deepening setback fired him into a new round of invective against crime – he thought he had been cheated by mechanics – until he burst out in favour of Islamic law.
‘Yes, I think it would be good here!’ His voice had tensed to its self-hypnotised sing-song and his hands flew about the steering-wheel. ‘People don’t understand anything else! You in Europe say that it’s uncivilised, but civilisation is a process. It’s gradual.’ He lifted his levelled hand in a jagged procession of generations. ‘These people need to fear.’ He was almost shouting. ‘It’s the Russians who brought in this thieving and prostitution! I remember my father telling me that in his day nobody stole. Doors were left unlocked everywhere, even by jewellers! Then in the thirties thousands of Russians came down from Samara during the famine and ever since then Tashkent’s been full of robbery.’
So it was all the Russians’ fault. I felt the legend of his nation’s purity growing before my eyes: the conviction that evil does not erupt from within, but is imposed from without. ‘Islamic law may be cruel,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t that cruel. In the reign of the last emir of Bukhara, I’ve read, only eight or nine people were executed by being thrown from the Kalan minaret. I know it wasn’t very nice, but it wasn’t many.’ Yet his face remained foolishly merciful. Once or twice he swerved on the road to avoid killing sparrows. ‘If only there were a thousand honest, intelligent and energetic people in Uzbekistan – just one thousand out of twenty million! – we’d be all right. But where are they? Where?’
As we ground to a halt in Shakhrisabz, where I had been happy two months before, he discovered that the engine was exuding water. ‘I think the cylinder block’s gone,’ he said. ‘It’s a big bit of trouble.’ He peered under the bonnet. ‘I’ll have to find a lorry to tow us back to Tashkent.’
‘But that’s over two hundred miles away.’
‘Yes.’
I watched his face for violence, but none came. Petty expenses and boredom turned him stingy or sad, but this disaster seemed to release something in him, as if he needed it. A strange calm welled up. He grew carefree, even buoyant. When I asked him how much the repair would cost, he shrugged and puffed across his palm, dissipating a mountain of roubles into the air. ‘Don’t worry! It’s not your problem. To hell with it. Let’s eat!’
He was his old self. He paid for a lavish supper and talked about his pantheon of writers: Maupassant, Jack London, Rousseau, James Hadley Chase He spoke of happier, commercial travels, before the days of his disgrace: how as a young man he had taken ten lorries packed with melons into Siberia, and made a killing. Once he had flown 250 tons of fruit and vegetables to the Kamchatka peninsula. There hot geysers created natural saunas, and many Russian women, whose husbands were away fishing or with the battle-fleet, languished uncontrollably But all this, he said with a nostalgic sigh, happened in the golden Rashidov years of corruption.
We left the car in a yard labelled ‘Autorepair No. 35’, and strolled at sunset under the gates of Tamerlane’s palace, where Oman became lost in astonishment, and talked about the building’s splendour without once mentioning its cost, and traced the swoop of swallows round the broken arches. Swallows had nested in the lamp-brackets of his home in Tashkent, he said, and Sochibar had planned to expel them. ‘But I threatened to expel her first!’ He laughed like a boy. ‘And look how they built in those days! Six centuries ago! Our hotel will be gone in a few years, but this . . . .’ He paused and glanced up. ‘But I think it needs repairs.’
I could not blame him for having repairs on his mind. ‘I prefer it unrestored.’
‘But imagine it completed! It would be magnificent! If I were a Rockefeller . . . .’
The damage to the Lada turned out lighter than we had feared: only a worn-out gasket. Next morning Oman bullied five languid mechanics into replacing it, while I rambled irresponsibly along a nearby river, planning a last sortie into the Pamirs.
But that evening I returned to our hotel to find that Oman had been arrested. Apparently he had come back drunk an hour before me, and had instinctively identified a KGB officer in the lobby, and insulted and tried to assault him. My heart sank. I had no idea what they would do with him. By old Soviet standards, his behaviour was insane, and the Uzbek KGB had not changed with independence.
I tracked him down to a pavement police-post near the hotel. The door had been left momentarily ajar, and I glimpsed inside. It was like viewing an old, ugly lantern-slide. The cramped room was lit by a single bulb, which cast an orange glow on the circle of uniforms and plain clothes. Oman stood in the centre – small, stout, intransigent – while a sleek-faced man in an anonymous suit was questioning him from behind a desk. Above hung a photograph of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police. In Moscow his statue had been toppled by chanting crowds the year before. But here he presided undisturbed. I heard Oman’s voice rising with its impassioned hurt, and saw his arm starting to lift in fury or helplessness. Then the door slammed shut.
I sat on a wall outside. Two or three other men were loitering in curiosity. ‘They’ll probably beat him up,’ one said. But Oman had not seemed afraid. Instead, drink had blinded him, and dropped him into a pit of anger and self-pity. I was afraid he might antagonise them further. In his sudden aloneness, engulfed by humiliation and memories, all the old, wronged bitterness would be welling up in him. Perhaps it would inhibit them, I thought, if they knew he was with a foreigner. It might be harder to treat him as they wished.
I pushed open the door in assumed naivety. He was seated now. The plain-clothes officer was haranguing him. The others stood above him like clichés: square-built, expressionless, out-of-date. Dzerzhinsky glowered from the wall. Oman was my driver and friend, I said to his interrogator, and I would be responsible for him . . . . A second’s bewilderment passed. The officers’ eyes all turned on me. Oman’s head suddenly bowed. For a moment the cross-examiner looked baffled, then a big, pale-eyed officer loomed against me, pushed me back without a word, and closed the door softly in my face.
I lingered outside for what seemed a long time. I could no longer hear the voices of either Oman or the police. The loiterers grew bored and drifted away. A few cars passed down the warm street, and a half moon rose. Then the door burst open and Oman emerged alone. His shoulders were hunched in fury. He was hopelessly drunk. He turned round and bellowed at the emerging officer. ‘I’m a man, I’m not a sheep! I’m – not – a — sheep!’ His fists shook in the air. It was faintly ludicrous. I pulled him away along the pavement, while the big, bland officer stood and watched. Oman turned and bawled: ‘I’m not afraid of you, sonny!’
‘Don’t you call me sonny,’ the man said wearily, as if this had been going on a long time.
‘Sonny! Swine!’ yelled Oman. ‘Swine! Sonny!’
I flung an arm round his shoulders and propelled him away. ‘They called me a sheep!’ he cried. ‘They said, “You’re just a sheep, a Soviet sheep!’” He was close to tears. Soviet was a term of abuse now, it seemed. To be Soviet was to be a traitor. ‘Well, if it’s true, for the first time I say “Glory to the Soviet Union!’” His fists whirled in the air again. ‘Glory! Glory!’
Eastward, where the Zerafshan river descends from the northwest ranges of the Pamir, a splintered road followed it under a mottled sky. At first it crossed empty flatlands. Then the mountains grew out of the horizon, lit by isolated sunbeams, and gathered along a valley corridor which led us unnoticeably up. Oman was overwhelmed by posthumous shame, and nothing I said could lift it. He drove in a sombre oblivion. We were climbing back into the westernmost spur of Tajikistan. As we neared the border a platoon of Uzbek soldiers stopped and searched us, but there was no other sign of a frontier.
It was up this causeway that the Tajik ancestors, the Sogdians, had fled from Arab invaders in the eighth century. For more than fifteen hundred years they had lived along the Zerafshan in a loose-linked galaxy of oasis princedoms. These, with Bactria to the south, were the cradle of the Iranian race. But Turkic and Arab incursions at last confined them to the great cities, where their Tajik descendants survive, or drove them deep into the mountains, and the valley which we followed still seemed to echo their desolate migration.
Near modern Penzhikent, one of their last towns stood in ruin above the river. Rain and wind had compacted its clay brick to yellow bones, so that houses, streets, gates, temples all traced themselves over the earth in a sleek cipher. The modest compass of its ramparts, half sucked back into the ground, exuded domestic peace. Its people had been craftsmen and Silk Road merchants, above all, and ingenious farmers. It was the Sogdians who gave wine to China, and apricots to the world.
I left Oman brooding in the car, and entered the city. A sea of wild flowers overswept the battlements – purple heliotrope, pink vetch – and through the roofless passages and breached rooms spread a lake of poppies. I blundered between enigmatic doorways and culs-de-sac, then out along avenues to where the ruler’s citadel crested its mound in a cluster of chambers and towers. Even in ruin, a feel of private opulence survived. The mansions, many free-standing, had crashed in two storeys about their pillared reception-halls, but here and there an early iwan – the vaulted porch of a later Persia – showed in some façade a little grander than the rest.
Among the debris of roof-beams, stairs and carbonised wooden statues cluttering the courts, archaeologists had uncovered fragments of fresco: pigments faded to damson, maroon and a backdrop of smoky blue. They portray a rich, ceremonious people at banqueting and war. In their idealised faces the features show delicate and small. An unearthly luxury pervades the nobles seated cross-legged as they feast. They converse unsmiling in a flutter of thin white hands. Their embroidered tunics are caught in at the waist, and beneath their tiaras the hair is immaculately trimmed, or falls in black sidelocks. Swords and daggers droop ornamentally across their laps. They carry wands of almond blossom. It is hard to know who is a god and who is a mortal. The warriors who gallop or saunter to battle on magenta chargers are the stuff of Persian epic. But the bangled beauty who plucks at her harp might be a human or a celestial. For the city, it seems, was home to many gods and heresies, infused by Buddhism and a host of Iranian deities and resurrection cults.
The long, crestfallen faces of the Sogdians’ frescoes survive in their Tajik descendants. But as the Sogdians fled east, pushing into gorges now choked with their wrecked castles, their language and their blood became mixed with others’. The Sogdian tongue seems to have lain close to the Persian of the great Achaemenian kings, and to the sacred language of Zoroastrian scripture. But it was already dying out among the Zerafshan oasis peasantry a thousand years ago, and the ancient idiom of Persia – the language of Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Xerxes – had vanished long before.
But high in the Zerafshan watershed, I had heard, where Oman and I pursued our way in silence, a few villages of the secluded Yagnob valley still spoke a remote dialect of Sogdian. Their isolation had fossilised them. Squeezed between precipitous mountains, and cut off half the year by snows, they had lived in enforced wretchedness and purity. Somewhere, I hoped, just beneath the avalanche-blocked pass of Anzob, we would find the valley entrance. But Oman only sighed at this foolishness. Such a people no longer existed, he said.
Around us bloomed orchards of pomegranates and the ancestral Sogdian apricot, until the Zerafshan dropped into a long abyss, and the villages found only precarious perches on mats of green beside it. We clanked over a bridge and up a jagged gorge, following the Fandariya tributary. The villages grew guttural Sogdian names. I imagined a half-lost elegance about their birdlike women, whose hair occasionally flamed from their dark heads in a shock of auburn. The farmers seated in the tea-houses seemed to mimic their frescoed ancestors; but their bowls brimmed with noodle soup instead of wine, and in their laps the gilded swords had perished to knobbled sticks.
Sometimes the river stilled to a flood below sheer cliffs, and our road weaved alongside between precipices which refracted each other’s light and sound, and tossed down threads of water-fall for hundreds of feet. We were close beneath the pass now, and had entered a stark gallery of ravines, roughed up by winds which blasted through them inexplicably.
Soon afterwards our road crept under hanging snowfields through the shepherds’ villages of Takfon and Anzob. The people seemed to grow ever more inbred. We came upon fragile academics crowned by high brows, women with bewitching green eyes and old men sporting Roman noses and Dundreary whiskers. Occasionally I would glimpse a disconcertingly European face, as if some friend from England were scrutinising me from under a skull-cap.
A little farther on, where the Yagnob valley opened, we found two men heaving goats into the back of a truck. They wore old jackets and split boots. Shyly, feeling suddenly intrusive, I asked them their origins.
Yes, they said, they were Yagnobski. They all spoke Sogdian in the home, young and old, and had inherited the language from their parents, by ear. They sat before me by the river: an old man with a face of grizzled peace, and a pale-eyed youth. They shared the same lean features and retracted brow and chin. For months a cassette-recorder had lain neglected in my rucksack, but now I pulled it out and asked the old man to talk for me.
He settled nervously before it. The only sound was the rush of the river. Then he began to speak as if in a reverie: an elusive language filled with gutturals and soft plosives, and a sad, rhythmic energy. He concentrated on it as if remembering a song, his eyes overhung by tufted black brows and his knees locked in big, liver-spotted hands. He kept his stare on the recorder’s winking lights. The youth joined him in a pattering tenor, and fell into the same melancholy cadences, until all their sentences seemed to wilt away in disillusion.
I listened almost in disbelief. This, I told myself, was the last, distorted echo of the battle-cries shouted 2500 years ago by the armies of the Great Kings at Marathon and Thermopylae, all that remained from the chant of Zoroastrian priests or the pleas of Persian satraps to Alexander the Great. Yet it was spoken by impoverished goatherds in the Pamirs. Once or twice some fragment floated up to me with the eerie resonance of a common Indo-European tongue – ‘road’ sounded identical in English, ‘nose’ was ‘nez’ – but the rest was incomprehensible.
I thought they must be declaiming poetry or saga, but no, they said in faltering Russian, they were simply talking about the hardness of their lives. They bought goats in these mountains and sold them 200 miles down into the plains. As for the past, the old man knew that his people had been driven here by invaders, and that they had carried with them records inscribed on horse-skin vellum. But he was vague about all dates.
The young man too looked blank. The Yagnob villages were dying, he said. Life there was too isolated, too cold. In the early sixties people had begun to leave for Dushanbe and for lowland towns to the north. He himself had been born on a state farm in the plains. ‘That’s where our people are now. On the collectives. We hear Sogdian only in the home. I had three years in school, and nobody taught it.’ He looked content with this. ‘It belongs to the past.’
Oman and I returned down the bitter valley of the Fandariya, then up over the last range of the north-west Pamir, meeting the snowline at 11,000 feet, where he dashed icy water recklessly over the boiling radiator and engine. Then we descended to grasslands and at last into the farmed and industrial plains which flow north towards Tashkent. He stopped only to buy two giant carp at a fish-market, then sped on grimly into the night. We were both exhausted as the city outskirts limped past us. But as we neared the house we became aware of a blaze of lights and merriment, and a horde of children ran out to kiss him.
He looked bewildered. ‘We’ve got guests.’
Then Sochibar and his daughter-in-law ran out too, and embraced him. It was his eldest son’s birthday, and he had clean forgotten it.
The party was on its last, drunk legs, and half the forty guests had gone. The remainder were all relatives, together with Oman’s mysterious middle son and a clutch of in-laws. Two long tables had segregated the sexes, and still groaned with uneaten salads, fruit and sweets.
A hard core of celebrants greeted us, and in no time we were sunk in shouting revelry. They were gross, simple men who bawled jokes in Uzbek, which scarcely bore translation, and plied me with mutton and vodka. Everyone was drunk. I sat between a post-office official and a chef on the railway, who jabbed me in the ribs or shoulder whenever he wanted to speak. I felt numbly detached. Meanwhile the women murmured together at their own table, not drinking, or fluttered about their husbands, hoping to leave. But the men went on bellowing and quipping and roaring in crescendoes of boorish glee.
Sochibar’s father – a tiny, gnarled teacher, long retired – sprawled across the table to kiss and embrace me. ‘I know all about English history,’ he babbled. ‘You have a dynasty, the Stuarts, and your queen is Elizabeth III now . . . .’ His eyes peered half-seeing into mine. ‘Oliver Cromwell, he was a man of the people . . . .’
Slowly, I realised, the men’s table was dividing. At first Oman had sat wanly toying with his food, and once we had caught each other’s eye and smiled complicitously from the bond of our journey. But now he was drunk again, and was accusing his sons of fecklessness. The eldest boy, in whose honour the party was being given, stared doggedly back from the head of the table, waiting for his relatives to go, while Oman’s words reeled about him. Sometimes his pretty wife darted up behind, whispered things and took his arm. But Oman railed on, now turning on his second son, who sat down resignedly beside me. He was a handsome twenty-year-old, with an undirected urge to work in pop music, and a look of helpless charm. Once he tried to defend himself, but three or four men of Oman’s age at once assailed him, shouting and wagging their drunken fingers.
During a lull the youth turned to me and said: ‘My father just talks. He only ever talks. My mother’s wonderful. I owe everything to her . . . .’ Oman, I knew, had deserted her long ago, and perhaps some buried guilt prompted his raging. ‘I don’t need his help,’ his son went on. ‘I don’t need anybody helping me. Nobody.’ And this too must have been Oman’s trouble, that his authority was not embraced.
An hour later, as a new squall broke out, the men’s voices jacked themselves up to a battering climax. A few Russian phrases laced the Uzbek clamour, so that from time to time a shred of meaning floated across to me. At first rival gangs of supporters had restrained Oman and one of his brothers-in-law from hitting one another. But now they all rose in fury and soon a battle was raging under the verandahs. At its root lay the dispute over Oman’s sons, but other vendettas were rankling to the surface, and fighting had broken out among their supporters too, huge with grappling and fisticuffs, into which several wives threw themselves in a useless plea for peace, while the neighbourhood dogs set up a long, delirious baying.
The eldest son, whose birthday had slipped away at midnight, continued to look bored at the head of the empty table. I sat there too, an inviolable guest, surprised at my own peace. Once I thought of intruding; but I imagined their shame afterwards, and kept my seat. Meanwhile the fantasy of the extended family toppled in dust about me: its happiness, its pliant union. The figures dimly battling round the porch were raw with their own truth: parents who stop loving their children, ageing people who have no place.
Yet these families, I thought, more surely than Western ones, outlive their individual members, and cushion every loss. For better or worse, they superseded every loyalty outside, and often rendered public life shallow and nearly meaningless. And now Sochibar and others were breaking up the fights one by one, pushing and complaining at the men, while gradually the flung punches cooled to bravado and the pugilists disappeared through the gates still shouting their imprecations, and some grudging reconciliations and handshakes began.
As the last guest departed, the remaining women cleared away the china then folded the table-cloths over the debris of glass and cherry-stones and drained bottles. Meanwhile Oman was smoking, staring over the verandah into darkness. ‘I’m sorry, Colin. I don’t know why they behave like that. They were defending my sons against me . . . .’ He was black with misery. For a long time he went on lighting cigarette after cigarette. How these sons had wounded him, why fecklessness so infuriated him, I never really knew: whether his own hardship had turned him intolerant, or whether he feared to see in them some continuance of his self.
We were deprived of any long farewell. It was scarcely dawn, and our heads were reeling. On the station platform we clasped each other numbly.
More than any facial expression, more than the dejected warmth with which he said goodbye, or the pudgy arms embracing mine, I remember Oman’s back as it dwindled towards the exit. Steeped in a dogged gallantry, it seemed to voice in its small span all his resistance to the unjust world. I felt at once relieved and bereft as it receded without turning into the crowds, and my train began slowly to heave itself northwards into the steppes of Kazakhstan.