A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road (8 page)

Thanking the Mayor, and commissioning a restoration budget from the chief architect, we returned to my house to discuss matters further. It was now late October, and we hoped to begin training the following March or April, once spring had begun and the weather was warm enough for fermentation
dyeing. This also gave me time to finish the guidebook, oversee the madrassah restorations and buy the looms, dyes and other paraphernalia. Barry handed me a list that his American consultant, Jim, had drawn up for the sister workshop in Bukhara. It read like a coven wish-list: ‘Six large copper cauldrons, 25kgs oak gall, 25kgs madder root, 30kgs pomegranate skins – dried …’

I would do my
best to find all these dye-stuffs, and also a master dyer. Quite where I’d find one, given that the art of natural dyeing had faded out, I wasn’t sure.

‘What we need,’ suggested Barry, ‘is someone who’s already a craftsman, who knows colour and design and has some basic artistic talent.’

I asked Koranbeg, who was sitting with us, if he knew of anyone through his work contacts. He thought
for a moment.

‘I have a brother, Madrim. He is unemployed right now because there are no more contracts for restoration work. He is a very hard worker and he is an excellent craftsman with many years of experience in restoring the Khan’s ceilings. He understands colour and patterns
very well.’

I wasn’t keen on employing one of Koranbeg’s relatives, hoping to avoid the usual nepotism
prevalent in Khiva. Still, I had no other suggestions and Madrim, once summoned, seemed to be keen; he was given an address in Bukhara where Jim was conducting a training session and told to join them there the following day. Madrim was to become our master dyer and the untiring manager of the workshop.

* * *

The next few weeks were devoted to the long list Barry had given me, as I
worked out what items of equipment needed construction – including looms, drying racks and skein-winders – and which items needed purchasing. In the midst of this, events took place on the other side of the world with an effect that would ripple out as far as our workshop in Khiva.

Koranbeg, while lurching home after a heavy drinking bout, had tripped on the uneven stone paving outside our
house, breaking his leg in the process. He was now ensconced in a huge cast with Zulhamar fussing over him. She’d installed him in the downstairs bedroom and even moved the television there. It was one evening in September that, idly flicking channels, he watched world events unfold.

Calling for me to join him, I rushed in to see CNN footage with Russian dubbing. The headlines read: ‘America
under attack!’, with a shot of a plane hurtling into a skyscraper and bursting into a fireball. The scene cut to the newsroom in Moscow where an ice-queen presenter who rarely had a hair out of place had just dropped her earpiece and was looking flustered.

I asked Koranbeg what was going on and he explained that no one knew for sure but that a large building for trade in New York had been
hit by two planes. At first they thought it was an accident, but after the second plane crash it was clear that this had been planned. People were jumping off the buildings and many were trapped inside by the blaze. Just then, with a loud yelp from the Russian commentary, we watched as the buildings disintegrated, spewing huge clouds of dust everywhere. We both sat stunned, wondering if a third
world war had just been unleashed.

More reports came in about other planes: one had hit the Pentagon and another was thought to have been aimed at the White House. I asked Koranbeg to check the other channels in case there was more news. The other Russian channel was showing a film and the two Uzbek channels were showing nothing but cotton harvest propaganda. It was harvest-time and Uzbekistan’s
largest export was being hand-picked by happy workers, who briefly stopped to assure journalists that this year was a bumper crop and that they were sure to fulfil their quota. Serious-looking factory bosses stood in front of large machines vomiting what looked like stuffing onto huge mountains of raw cotton.

I’d become inured to state devotion to the cotton plant. ‘Cotton-picker’ was the
name of the main metro station in Tashkent, the national emblem was emblazoned with cotton, and all over the capital a three-bolled cotton head appeared on the sides of buildings, on walls and even on most teapots and drinking bowls. Still, the dramatic events unfolding in New York might have seemed worthy of briefly interrupting the cotton news. Instead the event was ignored by the Uzbek media,
until a week or so later it became clear that Islamic fundamentalists based in Afghanistan had been responsible. At this point, the Uzbek government realised the propaganda value of 9/11.
After heavy criticism by Western human rights groups for the arrest, torture or killing of suspected radical Muslims, the government could now claim that they were simply doing their bit for the ‘war on terror’.
Footage of happy cotton workers was replaced with endless replays of the planes smashing into the Twin Towers, followed by sermons expounding the evils of radical Islam and the need for its eradication.

Further good news for the government came later that year as America invaded Afghanistan. While the moderate opposition groups in Uzbekistan had been largely exiled, imprisoned or assassinated,
the radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan had conducted a violent guerrilla campaign to overthrow the Karimov regime. Their main training centres were in northern Afghanistan and they were thought to receive funding from Al Qaeda, making them targets for an American army seeking revenge.

A flurry of anxious emails from home arrived, enquiring when I’d be leaving Uzbekistan. This seemed
an odd suggestion, as not a lot had changed in Khiva. However, most people in the UK watched footage of angry crowds of flag-burning, effigy-stamping, bearded fanatics chanting outside the homes of Westerners in places like Pakistan and assumed it must be the same for me. In reality, most Muslims in Uzbekistan had far fewer rights and freedoms than in the UK, and anyone remotely radical had either
been arrested or had disappeared to northern Afghanistan. Young men were detained for merely sporting a beard, such was the persecution of anyone suspected of radical intentions. Anyway, most people in Khiva were far more interested in what was happening in the Brazilian soap opera than the war raging just a border away.

Hysterical American parents of Peace Corps volunteers demanded an immediate
evacuation of their children from Uzbekistan, with little regard for any actual danger. The Peace Corps capitulated, despite protests from most of the volunteers that this was an unnecessary knee-jerk reaction. Each volunteer was given 24 hours to get to Tashkent. They could take one small item of hand-luggage with them – their other bags being sent on later. Andrea and I helped a heartbroken
Peace Corps couple wind down their affairs. They loved Khiva and didn’t want to leave. Soon we were once more the only foreigners in Khiva.

The Taliban were defeated and the rebuilding of Afghanistan began. It was at this point, in March 2002, that the ripple hit our workshop: Jim, our trainer, decided to pursue far more lucrative UNESCO contracts in Afghanistan. Barry was livid but powerless,
and unsure whether anyone else could take Jim’s place. This left a big question mark over who would train us. Barry was looking into alternatives but wasn’t feeling too positive.

I made regular visits to the madrassah, overseeing its restoration and pretending I knew what I was doing. I’d commissioned Zafar the wood-carver to build four wooden looms and another wood-carving friend, Erkin,
to work on drying racks, storage shelves and a skein-winder. Zulhamar, my Uzbek mum, helpfully located a mammoth double loom that stood idle in a nearby factory. Once repainted it took pride of place in the winter mosque room, which was the only place large enough for it.

My biggest headache was locating copper cauldrons needed for the natural dyeing. The coppersmiths at the bazaar would
beam at my request and rummage through their piles of dismembered samovars, teapots and water-pipes. I obtained a battered old cauldron that needed patching, and a magnificent piece with inscriptions around the rim and large handle-rings. It took a trip to coppersmiths near the Chorsu bazaar in Tashkent to locate two more, as well as madder root and oak gall – both needed for making red.

The list of items still needed wasn’t getting any shorter, and I decided to employ Madrim two months before our training began, to locate industrial thermometers, a magnifying-glass, weights, scales and more. We needed several large earthenware pots for fermentation dyeing, which proved problematic as most potters weren’t used to making anything quite so large. The buying of silk, heaters and walnut
husks had been left to the workshop in Bukhara, as they were also making their own purchases of these, and we arranged to come down and pick them up.

* * *

The trip there, tightly wedged in a crowded van driven as if the road contained no pot-holes, was relatively uneventful. We stopped in a tiny oasis made up of a few trees, a vegetable patch and a small tea-house. This one was home
to an aggressive colony of ducks who quacked incongruously in the middle of the desert. They gathered expectantly around our plastic table on the veranda and were soon wolfing down pieces of bread and taking cannibalistic delight at the scraps of fried egg I threw their way.

Further on we drove through the petrol oasis. I wasn’t sure of its real name, but at this fork in the road there were
some scraggy trees and some cobbled-together dwellings. Young boys in ragged clothes hawked petrol freshly smuggled from Turkmenistan. Petrol-filled Fanta bottles balanced on bricks beside the road – like offerings to the god of urine samples – indicated that petrol was for sale.

The journey to Bukhara always felt long and tiring, and my first thought on arrival was to head for the homom.
There was one for men and a separate one for women in another part of Bukhara’s old city which I’d seen once from the outside a year earlier when my sisters had visited Uzbekistan. Both were keen for a good scrub, but I had been shooed away near the door, leaving them to fend for themselves. Sheona was self-conscious about entering the homom naked, and had opted for a towel, but this – she told
me afterwards – was whisked away by a sturdy matron who ushered her, squealing, into the washing area. Well scrubbed, Helen was first to receive a massage. She described it as a painful series of pinches from a large, middle-aged woman who placed the sole of Helen’s foot squarely between her drooping bosoms and began pummelling her legs. Helen watched, dismayed, as the tan she had surreptitiously
acquired on my secluded balcony sloughed off.

The men’s homom, on the other hand, was familiar territory. We stripped off and opened the heavy wooden door, blasted by thick, humid air. Inside the dimly lit chamber, men sat on stone slabs shaving, steaming or dousing themselves with pans of water. Old bearded men gossiped on the marble slabs, their leathered faces abruptly whitening where
their turban tan-line began. Young men scrubbed each other’s backs while a flabby middle-aged Bukharan was contorted into some surprising positions on a central slab by a masseuse, the scent of balm hanging heavily in the steamy air. There was a cooler chamber for general chatter, and next to this an antechamber where men shaved their armpits and pubic hair in a timeless alternative to deodorant.
Some men were naked, others wore a wrap-around sheet of cotton. There was no fashion, no indicator of what century we might be in, just hot stone slabs, the murmur of conversation, the sound of sluicing water and bowls of spiced tea.

Emerging a few hours later refreshed and invigorated, we made for the Bukhara carpet workshop. I knew the area fairly well and had been told that the Eshani
Pir madrassah was past the synagogue in the warren of alleyways that make up the old town. We wandered down an alley between a surprisingly well-stocked Soviet-style grocers and an internet café for tourists, then past the synagogue. Glancing through the large gates, I noticed a few old men sitting around inside. Until a few years ago there had been a thriving Jewish community in Bukhara that had
existed there for centuries. Although as non-Muslims they were heavily taxed and forbidden to ride horses, wear belts or marry non-Jews, they had flourished. Now the lure of Tel Aviv and New York proved too great and the only Jews left were the elderly, living comfortably on remittances sent back by children and grandchildren. There were also the
challa –
Jews and their descendants who had converted
to Islam and were rejected by the Jewish community yet never truly accepted by the Muslims.

We were welcomed by Fatoulah, the chief dyer of the workshop, a short, plump, wide-hipped man in his late forties with an ingratiating manner. He was keen to make a good first impression, as Barry had decided that our only option in Jim’s absence was for two of his Bukharan progeny to come to Khiva
and train us. One trainer would be Fatoulah, the other Ulugbeg, a cocky young Tajik with a bulbous nose who was to provide the weaving tuition.

We were given a tour of the workshop and examined some of the photos of miniatures that Jim had provided, intricate carpet designs visible in each picture. Fatoulah had purchased the items on our list and had saved bribe money at the silk factory
by ordering for both workshops simultaneously. He’d also found a large brass pestle and mortar which we would need for pounding the dyes. We made arrangements for the training sessions, which would take place over six weeks, and set off back to Khiva.

There were at least three police checkpoints on the desert road, and I’d learnt how to negotiate them. I’d written an official letter on Operation
Mercy stationery, explaining our purpose of travel and stamped and signed by my director. If this didn’t dissuade a bribe-hungry policeman, then my first course of action was to feign linguistic incompetence.