A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (21 page)

It was the usual cosmetic approach: the more important the
visitor, the more impressive this illusion of progress became. During one presidential visit, the Mayor of Urgench had once even arranged for the dwindling canals to be filled with water during a summer of drought – as if the realities of life might prove too much for the President to bear. These little fictions served no purpose – a game of charades with no winners.

Barry called to confirm
Hatice’s arrival in Tashkent.

‘Chris, I think I’ll come up with her and stay for the first day or so, just to make sure that she’s OK. She doesn’t speak much English and obviously my Russian is useless on her. She seems a little … overwhelmed.’

They arrived at lunchtime, Hatice looking around warily, obviously ill at ease. I greeted her in Turkish and managed to explain that I was
born in Ankara and that she could call me Aslan. She was tired, so we postponed a workshop tour until after lunch and took her to the Arkanchi Hotel, just across the orchard from our workshop.

The hotel interior boasted kitsch on a lavish scale. Fussy net curtains, festooned with rainbow garlands of plastic flowers, competed with gilt-framed pictures of tigers and deer reclining beside waterfalls,
and an iridescent picture of Mecca that flashed when switched on. As if this wasn’t enough, the rooms were warm, and a good spread was prepared for us. Hatice looked around in dismay.

‘I don’t understand,’ she began. ‘Why have you put me here? Where are the good hotels?’

Barry gave me a look.

‘This is the best hotel in Khiva,’ I explained, ‘and you’ll be really close to the workshop!’

Hatice was not impressed.

‘I’m sure you’ll be well looked after,’ Barry added with false jollity.

‘What is this?’ Hatice asked in disgust as I poured green tea from a round teapot emblazoned with cotton motifs.

‘It’s tea,’ Barry replied.

‘Tea?! But it has no colour’ – she took a judicial sip – ‘and no taste.’

‘It’s green tea. That’s what people drink here. Would
you prefer black tea? I can ask them if they have any,’ I replied civilly.

‘And what’s this?’ Hatice continued, pointing at the bowl I was filling.

‘It’s called a
piola
in Uzbek or a
kassa
in Khorezm dialect. It’s what everyone drinks tea from,’ I explained.

‘But it has no handle and it isn’t a glass! How can you drink from it?’ Hatice swept it aside, dismissing the whole primitive
concept of drinking from a bowl.

The soup was too oily (a fair point, in fact), the plov passable – although Hatice blanched as I began to eat with my fingers. Her bedroom was not acceptable and nor was Barry’s, which he offered in exchange. I tried to make much of the beautiful view, but we weren’t off to a good start.

After lunch we gave Hatice a tour. She enjoyed looking at the
looms, and Zamireh seemed particularly adept at catching the meaning of her Turkish. She asked Hatice to teach her a few Turkish words, at which point our visitor began to cheer up.

We, however, weren’t feeling quite so cheerful, having discovered that Hatice knew almost nothing about natural dyes and didn’t have a great deal to teach about carpets, preferring her favourite subject: the
innate superiority of Turkish culture over anything Uzbek.

I put Ulugbibi in charge of Hatice as penance for not working harder, and she was soon picking up Turkish words – Hatice refusing to learn Uzbek. Matthias was popular with Hatice because he was German and therefore modern. Ever since my hand-eating episode I was considered suspect, with a few too many ‘native’ characteristics.

One evening Madrim invited Hatice to his house for some traditional Uzbek hospitality, along with Matthias, Ulugbibi and myself, greeting each of us at the door with a jug and basin of warm water. Madrim’s wife, Mehribon, had produced a table heavy with salads, nuts, fruit, cookies and cake.

‘But where are we to sit?’ asked Hatice. ‘There are no chairs. Surely you don’t sit on the floor?’

I was getting tired of this routine.

‘Chairs are so uncomfortable,’ I replied, ‘so Uzbeks have modernised and sit on these mattresses called corpuches. They’re much better than chairs. Don’t you have them in Turkey?’

We sat down and Madrim uncorked a bottle of wine as Hatice toyed with some Korean salad on her plate, explaining to Ulugbibi how much better the salads were in Turkey.
I had asked Mehribon to cook an egg ravioli dish unique to Khorezm, and Hatice managed to eat this without complaint. We relaxed until Hatice whispered to Ulugbibi that she needed to ‘rest’. Madrim became visibly tense as Ulugbibi escorted Hatice out of the back door and down to the toilet at the bottom of the garden.

Returning, Hatice was clearly shaken. She had barely sat down before she
turned to Matthias. ‘Germany, modern,’ she said, and then to me: ‘England, modern. Turkey modern!’ Then turning on Madrim: ‘Uzbekistan, why?! Why?!’

Madrim, turning crimson, apologised that there was no sewer system in this part of town and that flush toilets were not permissible. I cut him off and told Hatice not to be so rude, and that, should she ever step outside of Ankara, there were
plenty of toilets far less modern then the one she had just used. After an awkward pause I suggested that now might be a good time to leave, and asked Madrim if he would give us permission, praying a closing blessing on the food. We cupped our hands but Hatice protested.

‘You cannot pray! Look! We have been drinking wine. It is a sin for Muslims to drink. How can you pray after we have sinned?’

When I pointed out that Madrim hadn’t drunk anything other than tea, she gave her grudging approval.

* * *

The evening with Madrim was also a farewell dinner of sorts. My bags were laden with knitted slippers, carved cutting-boards, Koran-stands and even an impressively carved Scrabble set – beautifully executed by Erkin the wood-carver after a lengthy explanation on my part.
Zulhamar had baked flat pastries to give to my mother, and I had visions of the unlimited hot water, gas and electricity that awaited me.

I made one last round at the workshop, admonishing Ulugbibi the usta to weave more and Madrim to work less. The weavers and dyers saw me to the door and passed on greetings to my family and friends whom they’d never met.

Three months was a long time
for things to go wrong, and I wondered how they would cope on their own. My aim was for the workshop to become self-sustaining, and this would provide an excellent trial run.

But what state would I find things in on my return?

10

Navruz and new beginnings

The accommodation here is three tiers high – that is to say three layers of shelves, and all of them packed with humanity, its bundles, its bedding, its kettles, its stinking dried fish and garlic sausage.

—Ethel Mannin on Central Asian trains,
South to Samarkand
, 1936

I arrived back at Tashkent airport in March 2002 after ten
days hiking in the Canary Islands with my family. Feeling tanned and trim, I hoped to avoid the usual exclamations of ‘How beautifully fat you’ve become.’ My bags bulged with books on miniatures and I had brought with me the article on Timurid carpets by Amy Briggs. My head was full of new ideas for the workshop.

After paying Barry a visit and showing off my finds, I made for the northern
train station. The recent completion of a new rail track meant that the train no longer meandered into Turkmenistan. Turkmen border guards were notorious for demanding imaginary documents and extracting large ‘fines’ for all manner of fictitious infractions. The worst incident I knew about concerned a luckless Peace Corps volunteer on his way from Urgench to Tashkent. Forced off the train in Turkmenistan,
his passport was confiscated and the train left without him. The guards returned his passport in exchange for all his money and belongings, leaving him with no other option but to walk back to the border and then swim across the Amu River – fearful of patrolling guards – into Uzbek territory. He then hitched back to Urgench, relying on Uzbek sympathy, and their unifying dislike of Turkmens,
for the remainder of his journey.

This new train track followed the old one as far as Navoi before veering northward, cutting through the Red Desert as far as the Three Wells oasis before bending to the left towards the oasis of Khorezm. I loved this trip, despite the twenty hours it took. No longer was I enduring bus journeys of blaring Uzbek pop in a foetal position for eighteen hours,
with constant checkpoints. It was always me, the foreigner, who held up the bus and created extra paperwork, redeeming myself only by submitting my passport to the scrutiny and pawing of every single passenger. No longer would summer bus travel incur the wrath of aged matriarchs, bundled up in 45°C heat and complaining loudly if a window was opened. Nor would I arrive in Bukhara after eight or nine
hours, sweaty, cramped and aching – the bus submerged in a detritus of sunflower seed shells – knowing that we were merely halfway.

Instead, I arrived at the train station, found my berth and ensured that the unscrupulous
wagonchi
put no one without a valid ticket in the other three berths. Despite stringent security, there were always traders preferring to bribe their way on to the train,
usually carrying several times their body weight in cloth bundles of merchandise and squalling babies.

All train stations in the former Soviet Union were known as
vaksal
– a result of two Russian 19th-century engineers who had visited London. They emerged, blinking, from their first ride on the London Underground at Vauxhall station, and assumed its name to be the generic term for all train
stations.

As we pulled out of the vaksal, I was joined by a young Karakalpak student on his way home for Navruz, disappointed by my lack of porn. Within minutes the train bazaar was under way. Women lurched up and down the aisles selling bottled water and vodka, bread and sausages, hair-dryers, assortments of underwear, magazines and – occasionally – themselves. At each stop, the on-board
traders vied with village women in a riot of colourful headscarves and house-dresses, who ran to the slowing train bearing steaming rounds of bread and salami. Passengers shoved dirty notes through the windows in exchange for these, or for boiled eggs with paper twists of salt.

Train etiquette dictated that food was shared, and I swapped a packet of instant noodles for some stale rolls.
None of the lights worked in our cabin, so I turned in early, woken up in Samarkand by an old man entering the carriage. He fumbled in the dark, stripping down to his underwear – a strengthening odour informing us of his progress.

I woke at dawn as the train passed through the undulating Red Desert. It was the beginning of spring and the desert was
in bloom. Tiny bright pink flowers decorated
nondescript scrub, delicate crocus-like bulbs emerged from barren sand dunes and venom-green plants with waxy leaves erupted everywhere. The old man and the student were both asleep and I savoured the tranquillity, the rocking rhythm of the train as we passed the occasional desert yurt. The wagon toilet – best not described – was a trial, but the berths were comfortable and a communal wagon
samovar was kept constantly on the boil. Some of the windows could even be opened, and a plastic bottle wedged in the gap kept them that way.

By lunchtime the train had reached the edge of the Khorezm oasis and fields of spring green abruptly replaced the desert. We passed flat-roofed mud-brick houses, young shepherd boys with sticks leading cattle, women in the fields pinching the first
shoots of spring clover for making
gok burek
(delicious parcels of pastry that tasted like spinach ravioli), and cheerfully ragged village children waving – excited when a passenger waved back. I was coming home.

* * *

The following day I was given a warm welcome at the workshop and inevitably congratulated on how beautifully fat I’d become. Most of the weavers, by contrast, looked
wan and pallid. It was the time of year when fresh fruit or vegetables weren’t available in the bazaar, except for those who could afford greenhouse tomatoes, and home-made stocks of jarred and pickled produce would be running short.

I wandered through each madrassah cell with Madrim. Four new rugs had been cut from the loom in my absence, one of which in particular, a large one with a medallion
design, looked spectacular. Less impressive were the three centimetres of carpet woven by Ulugbibi the usta, which was all she’d managed during the three months. That night, over gok pastry parcels, Madrim explained how lazy Ulugbibi had become, and how strained relationships were as a result.

I became well aware of this myself, wondering how to fire Ulugbibi in a way that wouldn’t leave
her with a huge beating from her husband. I decided to blame the budget, announcing that we could employ only one weaving usta now that the weavers were trained.

The workshop atmosphere rapidly improved with Ulugbibi’s departure, and we focused on the more enjoyable task of celebrating Navruz. The spring festival – literally ‘new day’ in Persian – was celebrated on 21 March and the workshop
had decided to make sumalek.

Early that morning we drove out to an uncle of one of the weavers and bought huge amounts of wheat sprouts, mincing them into pulp. This was mixed with water and then the pulp squeezed and set aside for Davlatnaza’s sheep. The remaining liquid was mixed with a little flour and was now ready for cooking. A wizened sumalek usta – brought out of retirement for the
occasion – barked orders as a fire was lit beneath each cauldron. She gave a prayer of blessing and then poured in oil and beaten eggs, which spluttered and sizzled. These were removed and kept for lunch. The buckets of raw sumalek mixture – the colour and consistency of single cream – were then emptied into the cauldrons, followed by a tossed handful of walnuts still in their shells.

Now
began the eighteen-hour job of stirring, ensuring that the sumalek didn’t stick to the bottom, burn or become lumpy. Over time this process transformed the starch in the flour and wheat-shoots into sugar. For the first few hours stirring was easy but later, as the mixture boiled to a paste, it would require a lot more muscle. There were two stirring paddles for each cauldron and we took turns at
the pot. I would lose myself in the swirling, mesmerising currents until a billow of wood-smoke left me choking and brought me back to my senses. Our sumalek usta periodically worked her knife around the rim of each cauldron, scraping off the dried paste and popping it back in the bubbling mixture. We hoped to produce a thick malty paste, sweet and rich in vitamins.

Sumalek, I was told,
was first created by Fatima – daughter of the Prophet Mohammed. One early spring day, she searched her kitchen in vain for something to cook for her two young sons. The cupboards were bare, and her small vegetable patch outside seemed devoid of anything green after a long cold winter. On closer inspection she discovered shoots of wheat beginning to sprout, which she collected and minced, throwing
them into a pot with her last handful of flour. She stirred the mixture but, weak with hunger, soon dozed off beside it.

The next day she woke up, remonstrating with herself for not feeding her sons. And yet a rich, sweet aroma pervaded the air; the wheat-shoots had transformed into a thick, nutritious paste. On top of the thickening mixture she saw the imprint of her own hand. Trembling,
she offered up a prayer to God, for who else could have performed such a miracle? Our sumalek usta explained that, God willing, our caldrons of sumalek would also be imprinted by the hand of Fatima as they cooled.

As some stirred and others went for their first watery ice-cream of the year, we prepared for an open-air lunch, laying down plastic tablecloths and corpuches. Friends and casual
passers-by dropped by to observe our progress and to take a turn stirring.

After lunch most of us were free to enjoy the festivities going on outside the workshop. In the Ichan Kala, streets teemed, everyone in their best clothes, and gaggles of teenagers preened and flirted. Photographers equipped with large stuffed toys and plastic thrones offered their services, and there was a sense
of spring in the air, everyone determined to enjoy the most important festival of the year.

I headed for the stadium – the roaring crowd audible from far off. It was crammed with men watching wrestling. A few strapping youths in bright red spandex outfits flexed before sparring, but all eyes were on an older, bare-chested and burly challenger wearing a traditional tunic and heckling the
crowd for a worthy opponent. A teenage boy pushed forward by his mates scrabbled back to the safety of the crowd, and groups of friends challenged the strongest among them to compete. Wrestling, along with football, was the most popular sport in Uzbekistan, with some excellent champions. Bizarrely, the President had decreed tennis – a game little known before independence – as the official sport of
Uzbekistan. Tennis courts were duly built and instructors trained.

The wrestler remained unchallenged and was given a prize. The field was then cleared of all but two men, each tugging a rope with an enormous ram attached. I’d always been against blood sports, but ram-butting, more concussive than bloody, proved extremely entertaining. The two rams, with huge overhanging bottoms, were lined
up by their owners; one was shorn, making recognition easy. With a slap on their wobbling rumps, the two rams charged each other, colliding in mid-air and rebounding with a loud ‘tock’. Dazed, they went back to chewing grass until lined up for a second charge, their fat bottoms rippling as they clashed, accompanied by a lusty cheer from the crowd. On the third charge the shorn ram veered away
to the derisive yells of his owner and the crowd. He was led away in disgrace, and the woolly ram – still a little unsure on his feet – pronounced the winner.

I left after the ram-butting with no intention of watching dog- or cock-fighting, and took a short cut through the park, where the sap had risen in the trees and the first new buds were bursting open. Back at the workshop, the sumalek
had darkened in colour and had steamed down considerably. Shadows lengthened and a nip in the air drove the weavers inside to fetch extra layers. The workshop had arranged for a traditional singer, known as a
halpa
, to entertain us. She arrived sporting an entire set of gold teeth, her mono-brow painted with kohl. Two other musicians came with her, one playing the
doyra
– a round drum held at
the heart – the other a small six-stringed instrument known as a
tar
.

As the sun set, the older, married weavers busied themselves with food preparations, leaving the dancing to the younger girls. At first shy, pushing each other into the circle and squealing before returning to clap at the rim, it didn’t take long before inhibitions were shed and they wove between each other, wriggling
their shoulders suggestively. A gaggle of drunk youths wandered in and made a nuisance of themselves until accosted by our knife-waving sumalek usta. Three local policemen, enjoying a break from bribe-taking, came to stir the cauldrons for a while – the mixture thickening nicely. A few curious tourists drifted by and were beckoned in and invited to dance. The older weavers had brought their children,
and I rolled out a large plastic ‘Snakes and Ladders’ board which kept them entertained.

In the dark, songs of love, loss and passion mingled with woodsmoke and the fragrant steam of sumalek, the hypnotic beat of the doyra and the crackle of logs burning. Older women circled the cauldrons stirring, while the younger women danced in two large circles. The evening took on a dreamlike quality:
a meeting of
Macbeth
and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. I struggled to keep my eyes open and eventually left quietly, hoping no one would notice and that someone would save a jar of thick brown sumalek for me.

* * *

After Navruz we began increasing our staff with four new weaver apprentices. This required a complex re-shuffling of the best weavers to ensure that each apprentice was flanked
by two experienced women. Braced for a storm of protest, we knew that none of our existing weavers would want to leave their loom-mates and train up new girls – the time taken resulting in a loss of earnings. As an incentive, we decided to pay apprentices a mere $10 a month for the first two months, with the additional earnings split between the trainers.