It was almost July. For over a hundred miles the Alatau mountains, the western ranges of the Tienshan, shadowed my bus south along the Kirghiz border, while the road ran dead-straight in their lee, seeking out a pass. Beyond a velvety massif of foothills, the snow-peaks frothed in backlit clouds, as if swept by pale fire.
Beside me sat a shy Kazakh girl who was studying electrical engineering, and was going home. Sometimes she turned a child’s face to mine and questioned me about Europe. She spoke in a whisper, through goldfish lips. Whenever I asked anything about her, she whispered ‘Who? Me?’ as if no one had ever enquired about her before. She got out in the middle of pastureland, clutching a watercolour of roses, and walked away towards a herdsmen’s village in the hills.
After two hours the bus crested a pass and entered tablelands of grey rock sheened in grass and flowers. We had crossed unsignalled into the mountain state of Kirghizstan, the easternmost reach of Central Asia before it drops into the deserts of Xinjiang. Of all these troubled nations, this was the most remote: an Alpine sanctuary of less than four and a half million people. When independence came, power slipped from the grip of the old Communists, and the liberal president – alone in Central Asia – ruled by political concensus, and was trying to free the economy.
Around me in the bus sat the nation in miniature: some Russians, Uzbeks and a scattering of fugitive minorities. But in the ascendant, a jovial, rustic people – perhaps related to the Kazakhs – bellowed and slumbered and guzzled gross picnics. Seven hundred years before, the Kirghiz ancestors, harried by the armies of Kublai Khan, had migrated from the Yenisei river in Siberia, and centuries later percolated the Tienshan, mingling with the valley tribes. Their Islam was thin. They were nomad warriors, whose currency was the sheep and the horse. Divided by steep valleys, they had thought of themselves less by nation than by tribe, until Stalin rooted them in villages, and decided who they were. Then their language was codified with Russian loan-words to split them from the Kazakhs, and their boundaries fixed.
Towards sunset our bus climbed to a rain-swept plateau which rolled its polished rocks to the skyline. In the distance, shoulders and haunches of mountain came lurching out of clouds. Then farms and small factories appeared, and the long suburbs of the capital, Bishkek: Slavic cottages with carved eaves and fences frail in a tangle of vines and vegetables. Blonde women were basking on the verges in the last sunlight, grazing a goat or a few chickens. Everything seemed smaller than elsewhere: the flat-blocks, the streets, even the statues of Lenin diminutive in their workshop courts.
Night had fallen before I reached a hotel – an ornate Stalinist survivor, rowdy with Kirghiz farmers in from the mountains. But I was sick of the leathery mutton and solyanka soup in the hotel restaurants, with their sodden rice and sweet fruit juices, and I wandered out, warm with expectation, into the town’s dusk.
It was filled with the scent of chestnut trees, and a sliver of moon was rising. I felt I was not in a city at all. It seemed only obscurely inhabited. Every path and avenue was wrapped in a thronging bank of trees, where the streetlights hung in lonely orbs, like outsize fairy-lights. It was as if its builders had tunnelled the place out of forest, gouging dark glades and country lanes, which sometimes opened on woodland clearings inexplicably ablaze with buildings.
From end to end of the city’s heart, the boulevard once named from Dzerzhinsky, but now Peace, pushed through indecipherable foliage where a few lovers sat, not kissing or fondling, but curled together in a kind of speechless longing. Once a gaunt equestrian statue loomed above me. Its arm stretched black against the black sky, but I could not discern its face, nor read its inscription. I stopped on a railway bridge of rotting wood. A Russian couple was embracing in silence, her back arched over the parapet as they kissed. From here the city lights glimmered against a starlit glacis of mountains, and I suddenly dreaded the daylight, which might return the place to Soviet drabness.
Yet at first, dawn revealed nothing. It seemed a city built for farmers. Rustic cottages crammed its alleys, slithering with canals where gardens of cherry and apricot flowered. A rural invasion of Kirghiz was infiltrating the suburbs and crowding the shops. They looked like last-generation herdsmen, coarser and burlier than their Kazakh cousins. I watched them in fascination. They lumbered along the streets as if breasting mountains, and would drop unthinking to their haunches on the pavements. Their mastiff necks rolled into barrel chests. Their hair was cropped into a utilitarian black bush, beneath which the jowled, brachycephalic heads belonged in Mongolia. In fact a physiognomic map (if it omitted Tajikistan) would find Turkic features inexorably flattening eastward from the Caspian, until it arrived at these shambling, short-legged mountaineers with their full lips and ruddy, fierce-boned cheeks. Many looked like pantomime peasants. Their rolling-pin arms swung out from muscle-bound shoulders, and their felt hats lent them a doltish gaiety. But within a generation they could refine to a tenuous urbanity, and these other Kirghiz too were all about, running small businesses in the liberalised economy, percolating the civil service.
As I neared the city’s centre, the streets still burrowed through oak and acacia, and parks blossomed with syringa and handkerchief trees; but the forest was teeming with traffic now, and at the end of streets I glimpsed factory chimneys.
Suddenly, without warning, the greenery opened on stonepaved desolation. On one side stood the marble parliament, with the marble state museum behind. There was a pale hotel complex and a blank war memorial. A bullying Lenin, huge on his pedestal, commandeered the main square. All at once the city had lost touch with its people, who clattered round it in old Zhiguli and Moskvich cars, or walked numbly in the void.
Yet in a city still full of Russians, this Soviet order, I supposed, evoked nostalgia for a time when prices were stable and people knew where they were. Now everything had changed. The future belonged to the backwoods Kirghiz.
‘They’re flooding in everywhere,’ said a Russian lorry-driver. ‘When my people came down from Siberia in 1945, this town was all Russian and Ukrainian, with a few others. You didn’t see these black people about. You have blacks in England? What’s their position?’
‘It’s different.’
‘Well, we have these blacks in the city now, as many as forty per cent. They come in from the state farms because they don’t want to work. I don’t remember them here when I was a boy. We used to go out into the countryside and view them there, like monkeys. And now they’re here, not working at all, just buying and selling and apeing about.’ A pair of Kirghiz girls sauntered by, trim in black skirts. ‘They can dress all right,’ he went on, ‘because they’re in commerce. They even get foreign money.’ His eyes drifted over me, then unfocused. ‘But they haven’t got anything else. No industry, no brains.’
‘But they’re getting jobs.’
‘There aren’t any jobs. My sons have to work as teachers, on hopeless salaries. But where can we go? My parents are buried here, and my young sister . . . .’ A spasm of misery twitched him. ‘I can’t go back to Siberia, so I’ll stay. But many have gone, many, many . . . anyone who could.’ He planted his legs apart, and spat. ‘Now these blacks think they’re the bosses.’
I crossed the bleak spaces to Lenin Square, and walked along the tended rose-beds of the presidential office. Out of the quiet came the long ringing of an unanswered telephone. I mounted the podium under Lenin’s statue, and stared down on the avenue for those vanished May Day parades of orchestrated happiness. All round the square the loudspeakers tilted disused on their posts, and in the podium centre, where a microphone had once relayed leaden exhortations, the wires drooped in a tangle of dead worms.
I descended a flight of derelict steps to the rooms locked beneath. The marble passageway was discoloured and its balustrades falling. I trod gingerly, as if backstage. A broken water-pipe was dripping into the stair-well, and there was a stench of urine. The steel doors were barred, but already rusting away, and I peered through them into a sanctum of fetid emptiness.
Trespassing off First of May Street along the stairs and passageways of the Writers’ Union – once a bureaucratic hub of mediocrity and obstruction – I met a writer named Kadyr. His urbanity and circumspection, even the cadaverous sensitivity of his face, seemed to set him generations away from his compatriots in the hills. Yet he had been born in a mountain village, he said, on the borders of China.
We sat in someone else’s office by a deserted boardroom, on whose door the name of Chingiz Aitmatov, the expatriate Kirghiz novelist, was inscribed reverentially as if he were still inside. I asked what people did here now.
‘They don’t do anything,’ said Kadyr. ‘We’ve hundreds of writers, but no money . . . and our publishers can’t get paper. It used to come to us from Russia, but now everything’s atrophied. So at last we have our freedom to write – but no paper!’ His lank hair and glasses lent him a juvenile charm which drifted on and off. An ingrained wariness pervaded him. Questions turned him vague. ‘There was always too much that we couldn’t say. We couldn’t draw on our traditions or write our own history. Now our spiritual situation is richer, far richer, but our material one is hopeless.’
‘What did you used to write about?’
‘My novels were about nature,’ he said quickly, as if exculpating himself from something, ‘how the mountains sit in people’s spirits, and how people relate to them and to one another. There are inhabitants of Bishkek like that, and I suppose I’m one of them.’ He studied his hands. They looked too big for his body, which tapered away. ‘People call us “the mountain people”, because we’ve never really left the wilds.’
To write of the mountains, I supposed, was a covert way of expressing patriotism.
‘It wasn’t dangerous,’ he said. ‘Nature is nature, whoever is in power.’ He picked a paperback from a shelf. ‘This is by me . . . .’
It was a flimsy guidebook to Kirghizia. Opening it at random, I read: ‘Just as the eagle flies up from his eyrie my people have risen to the heights of unprecedented creative achievement thanks to their Soviet homeland . . . .’
‘Did you ask to write this book?’
‘Yes, yes. I approached the publishers in Moscow – and they said Fine, fine.’ His wariness had slipped away. He looked proud.
I fingered the passage miserably, then pushed it under his eyes. I heard myself say: ‘Did you have to write that”
He stared at it. ‘It was a kind of . . . well . . . formula.’ He did not look at me. We both laughed abruptly. For who was I to blame him? I had not lived in his grey nightmare. He began: ‘There’s nothing like that in my novels, of course. They’re about how the mountains sit in people’s spirits . . . .’
But his voice flaked away.
The Lenin Museum had been renamed the History Museum, but the history inside it was thin and distorted. Its lower halls were given over to a shadowy tide of Turkic peoples: Tartar warriors who had ridden these valleys in the eighth century with their battle-maces and round shields, sleepy stone menhirs that had stood above nomad graves, bronzes from lost Buddhist temples.
To these the nineteenth-century remnants of the Kirghiz lent only a more intimate variation. The rag dolls of their children were here; so were their lutes and square-shouldered fiddles which had wailed to the chanting of the Manas – the Kirghiz’ Iliad which contains their whole history like a mighty palimpsest. With such instruments it was for centuries carried from yurt to yurt by the manaschi, travelling bards with prodigious memories, who only died out a generation ago. In the museum vitrines were goatskin bottles too, and leather funnels for the fomenting of mares’ milk, while the mountain horses – tireless creatures with stone-hard hooves – had left behind fragments of harness and stirrup-irons.
Yet within the decade of the thirties this timeless cycle had dropped to earth. Even the most remote yak-herders were collectivised, and the first wheat-fields were creeping over the valleys. Bolshevism was celebrated in the museum’s upper storeys by a collection which was already itself history. It was like wandering the church of a dead religion: life-size gilded maquettes of canonised historic episodes, and cabinets of facsimile letters and documents, all caressingly laid out as if they were originals. But in fact there was nothing here at all: just the memory of propaganda. The busts of its proletarian gods and saints seemed to gaze out from centuries ago. They were soon to be removed.
On the floor above, newly installed, were photographs of Stalin’s purge victims and of the exhumation of a mass grave.
One morning, as I strayed round a collective warehouse near the western market, I heard distant chanting. At first I thought somebody had left a radio playing, then I emerged from passageways into a room hung with striplights. A woman in white chiffon was playing on an electric harmonium, while a projector threw on to a little screen some Baptist hymns in Russian. Among makeshift chairs some thirty people were singing in wavery unison. They looked like stocky Chinese: clear-eyed women and children in pressed frocks, three fresh-faced youths and a line of eldedy men. Nobody had dared remove the Communist standards dripping from the walls of their rented hall. The only other decoration was a vase of plastic carnations beside the harmonium.
Mortals built a house, and the rains came,
And the floods rose, and the house fell....
Above them the head of Lenin bristled out of a poster charged Our beloved leader’, and a red banner was slung along the back wall, blazoned ‘The People and the Party are One’. Sometimes the crash of lorries intruded, rolling through the market beyond, and the distant shouts of bargaining.
This house is built by you, and the rains come
And the floods rise, but the house stands,
The house built by Jesus . . . .
A pretty woman with a ravaged face conducted the congregation by hand, smiling with a pert, manic radiance, and the people copied her gestures as her hands fluttered and twirled in illustration of the hymns. ‘Jesus loves me’ – the palms alighted on the heart. ‘Jesus loves you’ – and the fingers shot out in front of them. ‘Jesus....’
It dawned on me that they were Koreans. They sat motionless, as a pastor addressed them. He came, I later learnt, from South Korea, and was speaking the native language which many of them had forgotten. He stood with his feet together and his hands laced in front of him. A puerile lock of hair fell over his face, which shone with a strenuous happiness. Towards the end of the service he called out the name of a girl new to the congregation, and summoned her to ‘bear witness’. She stepped up in terror, dressed in an embroidered velvet jacket and matching hair-ribbon. ‘I am very glad,’ she began, ‘I am so glad . . . . I am so happy . . . happy . . . .’ then faltered into blushing silence, while everybody clapped.
Then the pastor noticed me. ‘We have a guest,’ he said. He beckoned me up, and I heard my voice announcing my pleasure that I was amongst them, while the ranks of faces smiled back out of their excoriating goodness, and I grinned weakly. It was inspiring to see their little church growing out of oppression, I said — and as I uttered the words, they became true.
Yet their happiness, their conviction of divine sanctuary, was tremblingly frail in the banner-hung hall, and now the din of the bazaar – where Kirghiz and Russians mingled – almost drowned out their singing.
Jesus forever loving
Beautiful Saviour . . . .
At the end everyone embraced his neighbour on each side, murmuring the ritual ‘I love you’, and I found myself in the arms of an embarrassed taxi-driver. The community had only been worshipping here seven months, he said, and I must excuse the red banners. The hall was rented from a defunct Komsomol.
But how had Baptists evolved in Central Asia, I asked’
The taxi-driver knit his brows. ‘After independence a rich Korean Christian came here from Los Angeles and asked us what we were. We said we thought we were Buddhists, but we didn’t know. But the man said No, you’re Christians. And so we became Christians.’ The tale on his lips took on a biblical weight. His frank eyes examined me from a trusting face. Only a frail smile twisted his mouth, which seemed to acknowledge some strangeness in this. ‘Now there are seven hundred of us Baptists, and we increase all the time.’
We walked into the blinding sun. I saw that his eyes were softened in smile-lines, and his springy hair touched with grey. His people had lost their history, he said. Even his name, Pasha, sounded synthetic. His ancestors had moved from Korea to Sakalin island. ‘But in 1937 Stalin transported them in cattle trucks to Kazakhstan. I was born there, and my father died . . . .’
‘Why did your people leave Korea?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Were you Buddhists before?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked faintly distressed. ‘But we became Communists in a way. I was a Young Pioneer and a member of Komsomol. But we didn’t believe anything. We were nothing.’
We had turned our back on the market and were walking along a lane where a line of poverty-stricken youths and women squatted on wooden boxes. Each had laid out a few garments, cigarettes and tooth-paste on dirty newspaper in front of him, but two policemen were harassing them to go.
‘They’re selling things you can’t get in the shops,’ Pasha said. ‘They buy them up cheap on the side. That’s the only way they can live.’
They sat in resigned tiredness, while the police harangued them. Then, slowly, they upturned the boxes and packed their goods away. They couldn’t afford the price of a market stall, Pasha said.
An old man craned angrily above them. He clutched a vodka bottle wrapped in a cloth. ‘I work!’ he bellowed. ‘But what do these young people do? Sitting in the dirt!’ Work: it was the Communist shibboleth, from the years of faith and full employment. ‘Why don’t they do something manly?’ He shook his stick, but no one was listening. Behind his smeared, drunk eyes sat a whole era of failure.
‘What can they do?’ said Pasha. ‘We’re all just sitting about now. I spend my life waiting at the railway station. But there aren’t any tourists, and only two trains a day from Moscow.’
The police had gone, and the black marketeers were setting out their wares again.
Pasha said: ‘For seven years we’ve been told everything will get better, but I don’t believe it. Nobody here believes it.’
The giant equestrian statue which had loomed above me in the night turned out by day to be a monument to Mikhail Frunze, the Bolshevik conqueror of Central Asia. In a standing insult to those whom he had vanquished, the town was renamed Frunze in 1926, and only reverted to the homely Bishkek with independence. But his statue still rode its plinth undamaged, and the thatched cottage where he had been born remained enshrined in a portentous museum. Piously preserved artefacts filled its modest rooms: ink-wells and gloves, a hanging cradle and a miniature rocking-horse, the veterinary bag of his Moldavian father still lying in the hall. Respectable poverty shaped the ideal Soviet shrine.
But I was the only visitor, and someone had plastered the door with ‘I love Kirghizstan’ stickers. The Kirghiz attendant sat engrossed in a romantic novel. When I asked what people thought of Frunze now, her nose wrinkled. Old people may like him, but young people don’t.’ She flushed. She was very young. ‘He killed too many.’
On a Sunday evening an old lady sits in the oak-filled park near Frunze’s statue. Her blue eyes are filmed over, and their brows almost gone. Her hands interlace over the haft of an ebony walking-stick. But beneath her headscarf the face shows an intermittent brightness, as if some memory woke it. Then the sunk eyes seem to see again, and she smiles a pale-lipped smile, and looks almost beautiful. ‘What is the time, young man?’
I always get the time wrong in Russian, and she laughs. She is not Russian, she says, she is Polish, born in Vilna.
‘And what did you do there?’ I ask.
I am used to Polish immigrants claiming titles and estates; but she says: ‘We had a back garden, and some pigs, and we grew things.’ Through the shifting oak-branches the street-lamps light up a face webbed in lines and hung with a fragile nose. ‘But the Germans came and smashed the town, and burnt our cottage.’ She strikes an imaginary match against her dress, ‘And we fled.’ I realise suddenly that she is not talking about the Second World War, but the First. ‘Then I worked in a hospital.’
‘As a doctor?’
‘No, I’m not educated. Just as a helper.’ She shudders, even in the warm night. Her legs disappear into woollen socks and bedroom slippers. She looks institutionalised. ‘Then I went to Vladivostok and was married to a surgeon – but he died long ago – and I came to Almaty and then here.’ Her stick taps the ground. ‘I’m ninety-six years old now, and my daughter is seventy-four, and some of my grandchildren are worrying about their pensions. So I’m old.’ She laughs almost coquettishly at the thought, it still seems to surprise her. ‘Look, wrinkles!’ She lifts her face to me. It is pale and sunk, but her eyes have come alive in it. ‘And my hands!’ She spreads them before me. ‘Look at them.’ Their veins coil like ropes under the mottled skin. She gazes at them as if they were someone else’s. ‘But whether things are worse with other people, or the country, I don’t know. I’m an old woman and I don’t know anything. I never did know about politics.’ Perhaps some inner safety-valve locks them out. She has not lived through the Stalin years for nothing. ‘And what do you do? You’re from England, ah yes, and you have your family there,’ she decides, ‘and things are peaceful.’ She locks her fingers over the stick again, pleased. ‘Yes.’
Across the footbridge over the railway trickled workers from the suburbs, with a drift of the unemployed bent on petty trade, or on nothing. To the north the city crouched in its forest, throwing up an occasional roof or a factory above the trees, while to the south the Alatau mountains shadowed the high-rise suburbs with a glitter of cloud-hung snow. Sometimes the whole bridge shook under me as a train packed with mountain marble rumbled west towards Russia, and hot diesel fumes blasted up from the track.
Marble was handsome building material, said the man beside me, but the Soviets had always bought it cheap. He was a builder himself: a haggard Kirghiz on sick-leave. He glared down on the cargo rattling below. ‘My firm put up half the old buildings here,’ he said. ‘We even built the ministries. But now look! These new blocks are hopeless. Their concrete’s made of sand and little pebbles, and stuck up with steel bought from Russia. They don’t last. The rooms are boiling in summer and freezing in winter.’
‘And the work’s made you ill?’
‘It’s an illness of my profession. I’m a plasterer, and I’ve got trouble with my arms. They ache all the time.’ He looked older than his thirty-four years, all the youth worn out of him. ‘That’s the block we’re working on, there!’ He jerked his head at a concrete shell where a crane stooped idle. ‘But the work’s stopped because the steel hasn’t come through. It’s all like that now. I’m on half pay anyway, sixteen hundred roubles a month.’
That was less than fifteen pounds. ‘You have a family?’
‘My wife looks after the children at home. That’s our Kirghiz way.’ He turned his back on the suburbs. A momentary happiness entered his thoughts. ‘I’ve got a little plot of land where I grow carrots and tomatoes, and one day I’m going to build a house somewhere, away from all this.’
‘That’s hard....’
‘The law allows it now, but often nothing happens. If you want to buy land, the local collective farm may just say No, and you’d have to bribe a chain of officials to get it. It’s all mafia.’ He was sounding like Oman now. ‘One day, when I’m finished, I’ll go back to the mountains. But it takes four days to reach my home village, first by plane, then on the hill tracks, it’s that far. People work for almost nothing there, but that’s where I’ll go back.’
He was smoking fiercely, then throwing the half-finished stubs on to the track below. ‘Look at this town. It never used to be like this. Even I can remember when it was grass and trees.’ He gazed bitterly at the city as if it were a steelyard. Above it the mountains were shaking off their clouds across half the horizon. ‘In those days a cool wind came in with the summer night,’ he said, ‘but skyscrapers shut it out now.’ He looked down at the rail-track, gripping the parapet. In its flaking brown paint were lightly scratched graffiti. His wrists were like white stalks.
I could not suppress the feeling that his illness flowed from some mental hurt. He had drifted into the city as a labourer, learnt on the job and married at twenty-one. Then his life had set. For fifteen years he had built a town he increasingly hated. Concrete was so much coarser than the old brick, he said, and even brick was inferior to the native saman, which you never saw now. Perhaps the sickness in his arms was as much a toxin from his mind, so deep was his reaction against the suffocation of his mountains. He said again: ‘In the end I’ll go back there.’
The bridge was shuddering under our feet above another goods train. Someone had stuck a Soviet flag to its prow. He gave it a mock salute. An old instinct for labels, for the comfort of identifying, made me ask: ‘You don’t feel Soviet?’
‘No.’ It was a dislocated sound, as if he were answering some unfamiliar language. ‘Or not very.’ He was looking expressionlessly at the mountains again. The lines pinching his eyes were already scarring his cheeks too. ‘Soviet? Soviet? They tried to make us feel that about Afghanistan, but nobody did.’
‘You served there?’
‘No, but many of my friends served, and some never returned. Only Moscow knows how many disappeared, deserted perhaps Others came back in coffins, to be buried here. None of them wanted to fight. My friends say that whenever they aimed their rifles they thought “Shall I fire or not?” But of course they were afraid.’
‘There are Kirghiz in Afghanistan?’
His voice fell out of focus again. ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so.’ Even nationality clothed him only thinly.
‘But fellow-Moslems . . . .’
‘Yes.’ He contemplated this. ‘Although we Kirghiz are not strong Moslems.’
‘No.’ Their Islam was like the Kazakhs’, I knew: drawn lightly over nomadic shamanism.
The builder seemed, for a moment, to elude all personality: a man on a railway bridge, in a grey suit and sandals. ‘But look at Afghanistan now. How useless it all was!’ He dropped his last cigarette butt on to the departing train. ‘You know, if anybody started shooting from a village, the Russians just wiped that village out: old people, women, babies. It still makes my friends sick talking about it. And they participated.’
We went on looking down on the track. Soot-coloured crows were pecking among its sleepers. The man’s knuckles clenched white on the parapet. Beneath them in the paintwork somebody had scratched ‘Aleksis loves Anfisa’. I wondered vaguely who had carved it, Aleksis or Anfisa.
The man said: ‘Those Afghan people are more like us than the Russians are.’
‘Yes.’ A lingering pedantry made me want further to place him. But if he looked grim, I knew, it was because he was wondering about his family, not his nation. It was I, not he, who was teased by the flux of his identity: by the light or half-repressed Islam of all these lands, their diminished loyalty to clan or tribe, their Soviet veneer, their shallow-rooted sense of nation. But he did not much care. He did not miss allegiances which his people had never felt. He had his wife and children in a brick-built flat to the north, and a patch of tomatoes. Only I was trying to redefine him. He, meanwhile, was stranded at a watershed timeless in this land: the divide between the urban and the pastoral.
He wanted to go back to the mountains.
Outside the railway station at dawn, I found Pasha, the Korean Baptist waiting for the first Moscow train of the day, dozing in his taxi. An hour later we were driving eastward down a silent valley to where the Tienshan cradle Lake Issyk-kul and carry the last thrust of Kirghizia into the Chinese deserts. To our south, out of sleepy hills, the Alatau massifs cut up a blue sky. To our north the Chu river idled through meadows. The air was thin and cool. The valley’s fertility, ringed by its astral mountains, bathed it in an illusion of happiness.
But the Russian and Ukrainian cottages along the way marked the bloody incursions of nineteenth-century Cossacks, and in 1916 a Kirghiz uprising was savagely repressed. The herdsmen’s flight over glacial passes eastward into Xinjiang was repeated in the 1930s, as over quarter of a million tribespeople fled collectivisation, driving their horses, yaks, camels and sheep deep into the Pamir.
Now the valley seemed at peace. Other dwellings interspersed those of the invaders, and soon their villages dwindled away altogether and we moved down avenues of willows and wheat-fields. In this solitude, close by the river, all that remained of the city of Balasagun was sinking into fields of horse-high grass. It had been founded in the tenth century by a wave of Karakhanid invaders, and had petered away with their empire.
Pasha had no heart for it. He took out his Bible, wrapped in an old Izvestiya, and settled in the taxi’s shade. I was left to wander the town alone. It lay inscrutably in ruin. A rectangle of crushed ramparts traced itself in the grass, and a farmer was grazing his donkey among the thistles over a buried palace. Nearby rose the minaret of a vanished mosque. Earthquake had broken it in two, but the eighty-foot stub, banded austerely in decorative brick, burgeoned from a huge octagonal plinth in a lonely manifestation of the city’s power.
I roamed the site in ignorance. A millennium before, it had blossomed into scholarship and piety. The Silk Road, splintering through the valley, had deposited here a flotsam of trade and knowledge, and the bodies long crumbled in its mausoleums had left behind Chinese coins and bracelets of Indian cowrie shells. Iron swords, bronze lamps and amulets had been found too, and crosses carved in stone by Nestorian Christians: and a little museum had collected them all.
Straying round the levelled walls, I came upon a crowd of stone effigies, gathered here from distant nomad graves. Flat boulders, lightly incised, they were survivors from the vast western kaganate of Turkic tribes which had overswept the southern steppes and hill valleys between the sixth and tenth centuries. Now some eighty of these balbali stood in the long grass. Thin columnar noses bisected their faces, and dribbled slight moustaches. They were at once crude and unsettling. They looked like profane dolls. Beneath their pear-shaped chins they cradled goblets, and sometimes swords. Their close-set eyes held a sleepy simplicity. They seemed to be portraits: or slabs of stone which had grown expressions. Some believe them to be the images of slain enemies who become servants of the dead in the underworld.
A woman was scything the grass around them in careful strokes. She spoke of them affectionately, caressing the word balbali as if they were her babies. She understood the pagans’ creating them, she said. Her own people, at Bairam, would banquet round their family graves and would imagine that the dead were feasting with them. That, she supposed, was the purpose of the balbali. She looked round them in tender authority. ‘They are alive in a way, and they share with us.’ She fondled a stone head. They stared away, all facing the dawn.
On the anniversary of a funeral, she said, her family would set aside food for the departed. But women never wept at the graves. They had to weep at home, or their tears would disturb the dead. She said this hotly, as if she wished it otherwise. Around us the variety of stone expressions, carved by intent or the wind, turned the balbali to a living audience. If mourners wept, she added, the waters would rise round the ghosts, and they would drown. ‘All the same, we pray there,’ she said, caught up in some private grief, ‘and we imagine he is with us.’
Eastward the Chu river closed in and the grass peeled off the valley-sides from rocks of crumbled gold. As we neared Issykkul, we twisted through a defile and passed a spring hung with the rags of pilgrims. Then, suddenly, the cliffs cracked open and we looked down at mountains parted along a 120-mile corridor of sky-coloured water, dusted with tiny clouds.
A lacerating dryness had descended. The whole land looked burnt. A commotion of flayed foothills gnawed at the snowline, and around us the willows and poplars had gone prematurely russet, as if scorched by a sirocco. Westerly winds habitually blew the lake’s evaporation eastward, where it fell on hills out of sight. But here the shore stretched unsoftened, like an abstract painting.
Beyond the town of Balikchi we started along the northern coast in mesmerised silence. Across the water, and far ahead of us, the foothills were thinned away by haze, but strung above them, thronging the sky from end to end, the snow-peaks of the Tienshan hung in unearthly amputation. No wind touched the water. Close in to shore it shone aquamarine, but farther out it darkened to a deep, intense indigo, in which the reflected summits left a chain of icy lights.
Our road was deserted. It ran down a shelving passageway between mountains and sea. Sometimes the stain of a watermark 200 feet above lake-level, or a deep, pebble-strewn strand, signalled that for centuries the water had been evaporating. This was a mystery. Many streams flow into it, yet none ever flows out. Brackish, pure, oddly warm, it marinates in its own solitude. For 3000 square miles – five times the size of Lake Geneva – it smoothed before us in a glittering wilderness: the deepest mountain lake on earth.
Pasha drove at a stately 40 mph. He had been here as a boy, he said, on an expedition with the Young Pioneers, when his Communist zeal was still intact. ‘And that was long ago!’
I did not know he had ever felt such zeal, I said.
‘Yes, I did. Yes.’ He smiled. The lake’s calm soothed him. ‘Even when I was in the Komsomol, I believed a little. It was like a religion, you see. But when I started my first job – then I gave up. When I saw how the local Party bosses cheated us of our wages, and how they secured perks, then I gave up believing.’
‘You were seventeen?’
‘Even younger.’ He was talking with vague surprise, as of a distant relative. ‘But my generation was the last to believe like that. My two sons never wanted to attend those political meetings. They just played truant. Everybody did, not only we Koreans. The Russians, too. They thought it all boring and laughed at it. And that was the end.’ He had turned a little sombre. ‘When I think how my parents trusted Stalin, even though he repressed them! They thought he could not have known about their persecution – as if he was elevated above it! People died in the war with his name on their lips, you know . . . .’
His separation from his native Korea, I thought, had fitted him a little for Communism. It had offered a new sureness. He still hankered after Soviet rule, when everything, he said, had been at peace. ‘I’m not sure exactly where my people came from. We were in Sakalin for two hundred years maybe, I don’t know. It’s wrong not to know your history. Educated people know their history. But here nobody knows.’
‘Haven’t you traditions left?’
He frowned. ‘We have a special way of preparing noodles! And some of the older people sing songs which we younger ones don’t know. But even our language has changed. When I talk with our pastor from South Korea we can hardly understand each other.’
We stopped near the lakeside to eat a picnic of dried bacon, kept cool in his Chinese thermos. The sunlight dazzled the thin air. I ambled across the shore, where boulders had been cast up by the withdrawing waters, to a miniature bay of mouse-coloured sand. The ground was starred by mauve and white convolvulus, and sea-lavender sent up a dry, crushed fragrance. The silence was absolute. Grey and salmon pebbles scattered the sands with a pastel delicacy. There was no sign that anyone had ever trodden here. The lake lisped in warm wavelets against my hands. Opposite, fifty miles across the water, the snow-peaks hung in nothing.
As I rested, a dinghy glided out of nowhere and cast anchor in the bay. Two fishermen, bearded piratically and almost toothless, clambered ashore with home-made rods to dig for bait. A century ago the lake had so brimmed with fish that the Cossacks of the Russian explorer Semyonov had harvested 400 pounds of carp by slashing at the surface with their sabres. But now, said the fishermen, a vicious pike-perch introduced from the Volga had upset the natural balance by gobbling herrings. Yet the bottom of their boat brimmed with blue-tinted scales, and soon they rowed laughing away, calling after me: ‘England! . . . Football! . . . Hooligans!’ Their voices died over the silence. ‘Better off . . . here . . . fishing . . . .’
Into the afternoon Pasha and I dawdled east. Half way along the shore, where the rains begin to colour the hills, a straggle of holiday camps and sanatoria appeared. Then came a presidential rest-house, built to simulate the cruiser Aurora, whose guns sparked the October Revolution. But beyond, the solitude intensified. A few villages, pretty with toy cottages, clustered among cherry and apricot orchards, and in the Kirghiz graveyards the castellated mausoleums looked grander than the houses of the living, crowned by Islamic crescents or the Communist star, or both.
But as the lake narrowed, and evening glassed it over, the Tienshan rose in jagged fangs to the south-east, angrier and even higher, streaming with clouds. They were reaching towards their savage climax, still invisible beyond, where the syrt plateaux hang in unchanging ice and stone, and glaciers laden with boulders and limned in bluish weeds slide imperceptibly down the chasm shoulders. In this tremendous labyrinth the Syr Daria rises, while other rivers spill over the watershed into Xinjiang; Khan Tengri, ‘Lord of the Spirits’, erupts in a trihedral pyramid of pink marble, and the 24,400-foot Mount Victory glimmers over China.
Yet where we went, skirting the lake’s end, the river had left sodden meadows. The marijuana crop which had flourished here in the Brezhnev years had been put to the torch; but the Chu valley was still full of it, Pasha said – half the farmers smoked it – and from all over Central Asia, I’d heard, the white opium poppy was finding its way as heroin to Europe via the Baltic and Ukraine. Yet for the moment only acacia was in flower along the shore, and as we approached the whitewashed town of Karakol, the orchards became lush tangles of apple trees, where cockerels and ganders paraded.
In Karakol, for the first time, we felt the closeness of China. On a bluff high above the lake, where the explorer Przhevalsky was buried in 1888, a bronze eagle spread its talons over the unfurled map of his journeys: the Gobi, the Kun Lun, Tibet.... A cuckoo was cleaning its wings in the birch trees above.
The town was full of Uighurs, whose ancestors had migrated from Xinjiang a century before, and we came upon a mosque built in 1910 by Dungans who had fled the Taiping rebellion. It was surrounded by a Russian stockade, and its shutters and window-frames might have belonged to a Ukrainian cabin. But the dragon cornices and smiling roof were those of a Chinese temple; it was built in unfamiliar, grey-blue brick, and its minaret was a wooden pagoda.
Pasha stared round it blankly. ‘They come from China, but they face Mecca! How did they grow to believe in this?’
I said: ‘I don’t know. How did you believe in Christianity?’
He turned a tranquil, humourless face to mine. ‘I grew curious,’ he said. ‘I wanted to see this South Korean pastor who was sent to us. We all did. Because he came from the Capitalist world.’ We had stopped where the stockade sprouted a Chinese gate with upswept eaves. ‘But later we went on going to church because we felt a bit sorry for him. If we didn’t go, he’d be alone. And he’d come all that way . . . .Then I found I was starting to believe. I don’t know why. But at that service everything’s happy. You’ve heard how we sing. I feel my heart lighten.’ He lifted up his palms. ‘Out in the streets everything’s getting grimmer. There’s no peace any more, and nobody knows what may happen. But in there . . . . I think we need God, don’t you? If a man commits a crime, and there’s no God, how can he be made to fear?’
These questions fell unanswered under the Chinese porticoes, with their synthetically painted beams. God gave meaning in a chaotic world, he said, He was a vital commodity. Sometimes I could not decide if Pasha were naïve or cynical.
I said: ‘You can’t create God because you need Him.’
But Pasha had read through the New Testament twice. While I had been admiring the pagan balbali in the grass at Balasagun, he had been finishing the Revelation of St John the Divine. ‘I used to worry all the time about the future,’ he said, ‘especially about my children. But now I’ve stopped. After all, if God gives something, that’s good. If he doesn’t give, that’s His will also. So what have I left to worry about?’
It was easy to understand: the cloistered refuge of the little chapel, with its clean people singing of forgiveness, and the love of a Father less fallible in history than Lenin hectoring from his poster. ‘I think many are there because they are unhappy,’ Pasha said. ‘Their husbands have died or left them. And nobody knows the future now that the Kirghiz and Russians are grating worse on one another.’ He ground his knuckles together. ‘But when we sing, we forget that.’
‘You have Kirghiz converts too?’
‘Yes, almost seventy, and it’s harder for them. They’re frightened the Moslems may kill them.’ We peered into the prayer-hall spread with Chinese rugs under Chinese lanterns. Its strangeness seemed to deconsecrate it. ‘Islam isn’t really strong in Kirghizia, but nobody can read Arabic, so people don’t know what the Koran says and if some mullah yells “Kill all the Christians” – they just may.’
These nightmares filled people’s imaginations now. The misty promises of Communism and perestroika had peeled away from a horizon of black ignorance. For Pasha, the Marxist paradise-on-earth had been delayed too long, and all his people, he said, had long ago sickened into disbelief. ‘But I suppose the Bible says that too, doesn’t it?’ he asked suddenly. ‘That there’s a future paradise.’ He looked quaintly disconcerted.
I said: ‘Yes. I think the Bible says “Wait.”’
‘Wait,’ he repeated wanly. Something familiar and bitter was clouding him. ‘Ah yes.’
The eastern end of Issyk-kul is haunted by tales of drowned cities. Early maps located a thirteenth-century Nestorian monastery here enshrining the corpse of St Matthew, and a century ago Russian expeditions glimpsed brick foundations under the surface, where the waves cast up shards and human bones. Dim memories circled a creek near the village of Koysary, and Pasha drove there next morning in tired fatalism. While I had found a dormitory in a bleak hotel that night, he had slept in his car to prevent it being stolen. ‘Fear of the law fades out here,’ he said.
We crossed fields of young wheat. A heron clattered into the sky like a broken umbrella and descended ungainly at the lagoon’s mouth. Then our track ended at a gateway between high turrets, and a secretive huddle of buildings in barbed wire. It was an armed naval base. It looked run-down and its watch-tower hung empty. But we had blundered almost to its gates, and I glimpsed a sentry’s blond, nonplussed face, before Pasha swerved aside down a track along the inlet.
I joked: ‘The Soviets are still here!’
‘That’s our army too,’ Pasha said. ‘The Commonwealth of Independent States . . . .’ He seemed to be trying out the idea. ‘There are our men in it.’
I had heard of a secret Soviet installation on the lake years before, built for the testing of torpedoes. Inhabitants of Bishkek had been mystified by naval uniforms appearing in the streets of a city fifteen hundred miles from any ocean. Now Pasha stopped the car among trees and I walked alone along the shore. There was no sign that the lake-level had ever receded. Instead its banks plunged to lapis-blue inlets glazed with water-insects, then eased into momentary rock-shelves and sank out of sight. I looked in vain for any drowned building. Only an abandoned flour-mill hovered above a cove among fir trees raucous with crows. Farther out, the lake was smeared with tracks like the wake of vanished ships.
I squeezed between the locked gates of the mill. On its jetty the wheels and hoists were rusting away, and the shadow of a barge lay ghostly and aslant beneath the water, under a sparkling rain of gnats. Nearby, a few blocks of granite shone on a spur, as if some citadel had been half absorbed into the earth.
I loitered here in faint bemusement. For a long time nothing moved or sounded except the wheeling crows. Then I heard something stir behind the gutted mill, and I remembered that I was trespassing, perhaps in a military area. If I were a soldier from the naval base, I thought, and discovered an Englishman with an air navigation chart of his region and a journal full of indecipherable notes, I would demand an explanation more convincing than some tale of an underwater city. I padded to the mill’s perimeter and squirmed under the wire. A sand-coloured hare skittered into the trees. Covered in dust, I prowled round the outer wall and found myself face to face with an old woman.
Her red fist was closed round a walking-stave, and her body heaved in its threadbare coat. We stopped a foot from one another. I looked into a primordial Slavic face, its nose a retroussé stub. But in it I saw a maternal and eccentric benevolence. She was beaming. I had encountered this face, I thought, a thousand times in the vanished Soviet Union. It looked old yet benignly half-formed: the gross, fleshy protoplast of Mother Russia.
I began chattering, trying to explain my presence. It was a beautiful shore, I said, but it looked so derelict now. I thought of the half-abandoned naval base. Everything seemed in retreat, I said. My gaze floundered over her frayed jacket and dress. Life had become so hard . . . .
But she cut me off. ‘No! Everything’s fine, it’s wonderful!’ Her jaw set. ‘When people say how terrible everything is, I ask Why? What does everybody want?’ She planted her trousered legs apart. They descended to woollen socks and split boots. She seemed instantly to have forgotten the oddness of meeting a gap-toothed foreigner coated in dust. ‘Why can’t people be content? I have a little garden over there’ – she waved at the skyline – ‘where I grow cherries and nuts, and there’s a plot of land for pensioners where we plant potatoes. I’ve got everything I need. My teacher’s pension is just nine hundred and five roubles a month but it’s all right. The sun’s good, the earth’s good and the winters are mild here!’
I grinned back at her. Her comfortable face dispelled all anxiety. Where had she come from then?
‘I arrived from Siberia thirty years ago. Everything was good up there too. Hard, but good. We had three cows, and that was enough. Milk, cheese, butter! Everything’s fine, and it always was.’ She rooted her stave between her feet. Our Gorbachev did the right thing.’
It was the first time I had heard anybody here praise him. ‘Yes, in the West we admire him. I know he made mistakes
‘Who doesn’t make mistakes? Nobody is walking on this earth who hasn’t made mistakes. But it’s a good thing the old Union has split up. It was finished anyway. And now these small countries will have to stand on their own feet. They’ll have to grow up! They’ll have to work!’ She thumped the dust with her stave. ‘Let every nation own its own earth, and every person own a little bit of it! Then they’ll feel responsible.’
Only once her expression of gritty contentment buckled into displeasure. ‘But I was ashamed,’ she began, ‘yes, ashamed, when Gorbachev said his pension was insufficient, and when Yeltsin asked the West for charity. Ask for credit, yes, but not for charity!’ Her voice darkened with disgust. ‘And our Gorbachev! When he complained about his pension, I wrote him a letter offering him two hundred roubles out of mine! I told him I could manage on seven hundred and five, even if he couldn’t get by on four thousand.’
I stared at her in astonishment. She dashed back the white hair drifting from her scarf. Her quilted coat gushed wool stuffing out of every seam. I said: ‘Did he reply?’
‘No, of course not,’ she answered. ‘He was too busy lecturing in America, making money.’
Then she laughed stoically, and marched away.
Pasha and I left the lake behind us in a fading afternoon. For a while we followed the Tiup river through valleys awash with lucerne. The water ran golden between green banks below us. We were travelling along the last salient of Central Asia eastward before its mountains unravelled into China. In the villages the Russians had vanished. Red stars disappeared from the cemeteries; Islamic crescents multiplied. Burly men clasping whips and booted on their horses followed their sheep-flocks across the hills, and women stood up in the meadows to watch us pass. Hunters of gazelle with the goshawk and the falcon, these tough herdspeople were nourishers of handsome cross-bred horses and astrakhan wool. With every few miles their villages became wilder and more Mongoloid. Their black eyes were slit almost to biindness; wispy moustaches and Mandarin beards trickled from their nostrils and chins.
Abruptly the valley narrowed. Pastures lacquered in creamy flowers swept against the road as we ascended, and fir trees gathered on the hills. Beyond them on either side, the unchanging snow-peaks kept pace with us, channelling us to China.
Once, from a roadside watch-post, three policemen flagged us down and ordered us out of the car. They had harsh, ignorant faces, and fingered revolvers. ‘Are these maps secret?’ They turned on Pasha. ‘Is he a spy?’
‘No,’ said Pasha matter-of-factly. ‘He’s a historian.’
They scrutinised my passport and noticed old Chinese visas. The road to China was closed, they said. The only pass open lay through Torugart, far to the south. We were not travelling to China, I said, and they sent us away.
Our road turned to stone. Around it the hills crowded in velvet spurs, shutting out the mountains. The river spun below. In this sudden emptiness, at once verdant and sombre, only a few glossy and masterless herds of horses wandered. For miles the hills folded about us like lightly covered bones, then their rocks burst through the grass and littered the valley-sides. We passed another police-post, abandoned. For the first time Pasha became nervous. The sun set, but in the cleft of the pass ahead its after-glow illumined a surge of glacial mountains, the last barrier before Xinjiang.
Here, at the end of the world, on the rim of a bare valley, we came upon a monstrous kurgan, a grave-mound of rocks sprawled in a grim tumult fifty feet high: the sepulchre of some Scythian or Turkic chief. I reached it over a grassland light with buttercups and harebells. But a cold wind sprang up down the valley, and the mountains were waning in the last light. Around the excavated crater of the grave, an arc of shrubs shivered with votive rags. But no one was there. They might as well have been tied by a pilgrimage of ghosts. I peered down into the pit of the tomb. It was two thousand years old or more, and violated long ago.
Beside it reared the hill of stones. Steel-grey, russet or pink, and silvered with lichen, they might have numbered fifty thou-sand: it was impossible to compute. They had been raised in awed memory of a single man; but a legend had accrued to them. It was said that Tamerlane, passing east with his army, ordered every soldier to gather up one rock and pile it in the pass. Years later, on his return, each man took away his stone to Samarkand, and those that remained became a cenotaph to the fallen.
As I climbed them in the silence, they rattled and clashed against one another. Each was the size that a man might carry. Under that twilit sky, circled by mountains, they became a nameless commotion of dead: a monument raised by the wasted to themselves. A few were blood-red or marmoreal white. They clattered like skulls under my feet and rolled down on one another.
Then I heard Pasha calling me to return. It was late and dark, he said, and this was not our country.