The Lost Heart of Asia (11 page)

Then he said: ‘It was like this. Near the village where I live was a graveyard, and one year two men were buried there. They were Moslems, but they were drinkers, which is against our faith. Now you know that our dead are buried with the face exposed . . . .' He went silent again and glanced up at the latticed window, which filtered a wan light. Then he said in a cold burst of memory: ‘When one man was laid in the grave, his eyes suddenly shot open. Yes, they were wide with fear! White and staring. Terrified.' His own eyes were fixed on mine, and had dilated too, filled with the marvel and terror of the thing. His words were a breathy rush. ‘And when they lowered the other man into his grave – what do you think?' His fingers were clutching the edge of the table. ‘It was filled with snakes!' He gaped at me. ‘Our dead are buried two metres down at least, but even so there were these snakes, dozens of them, waiting for him in the grave. It was dreadful. Everybody spoke of it.' All the calm had left him. ‘I know this because my uncle was the gravedigger there. From that time I began to pray and read our scriptures, and I came to understand.'

I stared back into his callow mask of face – the sad arc of its eyes, echoed by the gossamer eyebrows above – and I had the fancy that the blinding moment of his revelation had imprinted itself permanently there, leaving behind a trace of petrified surprise.

‘You're European, so I think you're Christian.' He was suddenly urgent, pleading. ‘Now Mahomet's uncle, who acted as his guardian, was a Christian too [this was untrue] but he came to believe in Islam. He chose Islam over Christianity.' He caressed the word again:
‘Islam'.

‘I know someone who was brought up with no religion,' I said. ‘He studied several. And he chose Buddhism.'

This produced a pained silence. Then he said: ‘But you
must
believe. When you return home, read our books, read more.' He was looking at me with a hurt, puzzled gaze, where the horror still lingered. ‘You see, at the Last Day, at the end of the light, there'll be a parting of the peoples, and only the Moslems will be saved.' He illustrated this separation regretfully, but firmly, with morsels of bread across the table. ‘Only the Moslems! As for the rest, the Hindus, the Communists, the Jews, the Christians . . . .' He swept the unbelieving crumbs on to the floor. ‘Finished!'

His eyes were imploring me.

The next moment it was time for prayer, and we trooped back, a little crestfallen, to the gateway. He took my hand sadly in parting. His look of perplexity remained, as he said: ‘I think you're a good man.' Some glimmer of another justice, I think, had touched him for a moment. Far inside, perhaps, he wondered why I, who had shared his bread and tea, deserved a fate so different from his own.

‘You should study and believe.' His hand lifted to his heart. ‘Then you must come back to us.'

One building, and one era, overbear Bukhara like a disfiguring memory. For over a thousand years successive incarnations of a vast palace-fortress, the Ark, have loomed against the north-west walls. Shored up in secrecy, its final, monstrous embodiment is withdrawn out of human reach on a dishevelled glacis, which the binding timber-ends speckle like blackheads, and the ramparts which crown it are forty-foot scarps. Of the ruined buildings inside, only a few cupolas and an arcade can be glimpsed from below; but behind, it disintegrates into a rectangle of rotted bastions which blunder round its plateau in half-pulverised brick. It seems to have slipped down entire from a more savage era. Yet it kept much of its old use until 1920, when the last emir fled, and it is this incongruence in time — it is a museum now, but was a bloodied court within living memory – which perpetuates around it a peculiar disquiet.

As I approached its ramped gateway, this displacement intensified. Two tall towers squeezed the way to a needle's-eye. In the loggia above, ceremonial musicians had once set up a macabre thump of drums and bray of horns. A mechanical clock had hung here, contrived by an Italian prisoner who temporarily bought his life with it in 1851; but it had gone now. A covered passage climbed past the cramped chambers of sentries and janitors, then wound up to a series of sterile platforms into emptiness.

I wandered in dulled surprise. Within seventy years the whole elaborate palace-keep, peopled by 3000 courtiers and soldiers, concubines and catamites, had disintegrated to a jigsaw of blank courts. A few rooms housed depressing little museums where schoolchildren were gawping at photographs (leftovers of Soviet propaganda) recording the emirate's cruelty. But the rest were crumbling and uninhabitable.

I was walking over the debris of all Bukhara's later history. After the Mongol sack, the city had revived under the house of Tamerlane, and when the Uzbeks came south and seized it in 1506, they continued its splendour for another hundred years. But by the end of the eighteenth century Central Asia had resolved into three warring states – Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand – lapped by intransigent tribes of Kazakhs and Turcomans. By now the whole region was in decline, and the nineteenth century in Bukhara was spanned by two vicious and degenerate emirs, products of an isolation which had educated them in little but indulgence.

The atrocious Nasrullah signalled his accession by slaughtering his three brothers, and on his deathbed in 1860 ordered one of his wives stabbed to death before his eyes. His son Mozaffir began his quarter-century of despotism by butchering the heir-designate. At first the poorer classes trusted Mozaffir, dubbing him the ‘killer of elephants and protector of mice', for to his ministers and courtiers he was quixotically cruel. But towards the end of his reign one of the few Westerners to reach Bukhara alive described him as a sallow lecher with shifty eyes and trembling hands, whose subjects credited him with the Evil Eye.

I approached his audience-chamber through a ruined gate where a stone lion roared harmlessly, and entered an empty field of paving. The plinths of a lost arcade made orphaned rows of stone. At the end, on a long dais, the canopy of the vanished throne rose on wonky pillars, and touched the dereliction with a trashy pomp. There was nothing else. Even the wealth on which this pantomime rested – the emir's secret gold-mine – was unknown for years after the emirate's fall. Before their retirement, miners routinely had their eyes and tongues gouged out, and travellers were executed on the smallest suspicion that they knew where it was. Only in the 1960s did the Russians locate it and hurry it back into production.

It was the emir Nasrullah who sent a cold tremor through Victorian Britain by executing two army officers on diplomatic mission. Colonel Stoddart was an intemperate campaigner who arrived at Bukhara in the hope of steeling the emir against the advance of czarist Russia. But to this court of touchy etiquette and childish vanities he brought no suitable gifts, and his letter of introduction was signed not by Queen Victoria but merely by the Governor-General of India. Nasrullah played with him like a cat. He either cosseted him under house arrest or entombed him in the
Sia Chat,
the deepest well of his prison. After more than three years Captain Conolly, a romantic and lovelorn officer in the Bengal Light Cavalry, reached Central Asia in an attempt to unite the khanates against Russia, and to retrieve Stoddart. It was he who first coined the phrase ‘The Great Game' to describe the shadow-play of British and czarist agents across Central Asia as the Russian frontiers pushed closer to India. He too was thrown into the well.

The prison stands on a dusty spur behind the citadel. I found its cells crowded with dummies chained by their necks to the mud walls. Beyond them a rectangular hole opened in the paving. In the domed pit scooped out below, from which escape was impossible, Stoddart and Conolly had wasted away among excrement and human bones.

I peered down on two decomposing dummies and a glitter of coins thrown in by visitors for luck. A daemonic inspiration had once stocked the well with a mass of vermin, reptiles and giant sheep-ticks which burrowed into the men's flesh. Within a few weeks their bodies were being gnawed away. I descended by a rope ladder, and alighted in dust twenty feet below. The walls were lined with impenetrable brick and every whisper reverberated. Beside me the rag and plaster effigies had rotted to sick apes, their arms extended in supplication, their legs dropped off. I could not tell who, if anyone, they were meant to be. But I looked up at the terrible, hopeless hole in the apex of the dome, and thought about my last compatriots to have lain here. The walls closed overhead in horror. On 24 June 1842 Stoddart and Conolly were marched out into the public square under the citadel, and made to dig their own graves. Then they embraced, professed their Christianity, and were beheaded by an executioner's knife.

Two years later an eccentric and unwitting player of the Great Game appeared in the diminutive shape of the Reverend Joseph Wolff, the Anglicised son of a Bavarian rabbi. Dressed in black gown, shovel hat and scarlet doctoral hood, and ostentatiously cradling a Bible, he rode into Bukhara to discover the whereabouts of the vanished men. He described the city as if it were a heathen Oxford, but by now its trumpeted 360 mosques and 140 medresehs were mostly in ruins, if they had ever existed. Instead of beheading Wolff, the emir became convulsed by laughter. For weeks the clergyman remained a virtual prisoner in the home of the Chief of Artillery (whom the emir years later hacked in two with an axe). From a nearby garden he could hear a Hindu orchestra from Lahore playing ‘God Save the Queen' in his honour; and he was continually called upon to answer the emir's queries – about the lack of camels in England, or why Queen Victoria could not execute any Briton she wished. Finally, in bemusement, Nasrullah let him go.

But the brutality and self-indulgence of the emirs alienated them fatally from their people. Imperilled by Russia, they could lead no holy war, and breed no patriotism. Their armies in the field were an absurd rabble. Dressed in random uniforms and harlequin colours, they shouldered a phantasmagoria of matchlock rifles, sticks, pikes and maces. On the march they perched astride donkeys and horses, sometimes two or three to a mount, while a few pieces of camel-drawn artillery brought up the rear.

The czarist armies brushed them aside. In 1868 Russia bit off half the emirate, occupying Samarkand, and reduced Bukhara to a client state. In all their Central Asian wars, between 1847-73, the Russians claimed to have lost only 400 dead, while the Moslem casualties mounted to tens of thousands.

The ensuing years brought the ambiguous peace of subservience. The czarist Russians, like the Bolsheviks after them, were contemptuous of the world which they had conquered. They stilled the Turcoman raids and abolished slavery, at least in name, but they entertained few visions of betterment for their subjects. As for the Moslems, who could stoically endure their own despots, the tyranny of the Great White Czar insulted them by its alien unbelief. ‘Better your own land's weeds,' they murmured, ‘than other men's wheat.'

Yet there would come a time when they would look back on the czarist indifference as a golden age.

The poorest foreigner in Central Asia became a millionaire overnight. The rouble had collapsed. A single dollar might equal two days' industrial wage or a week's pension. The most lavish meal (if it could be found) would not cost a pound sterling, and train journeys carried me hundreds of miles for a few pence. But bankcards and traveller's cheques had fallen useless. Only cash prevailed. Foreigners carrying a few dollar notes were walking treasuries, and people were starting to realise this.

‘Things here are different from what you think,' a Russian official confided. ‘It's dangerous for foreigners now.' Even the Uzbeks distrusted themselves. Single tourists, they said – those freakish, lonely aliens with their inexplicable innocence and riches – were natural prey.

My solitary status baffled them. Where was my group? But a private invitation from an Uzbek friend had liberated me from the surviving constrictions of Soviet bureaucracy; my visa was stamped with a medley of destinations, and nobody took responsibility for how, or by what route, I reached them. Yet my few hundred dollars exposed me. I was carrying almost the life-time earnings of a factory workman.

I did not know what to do with them. Half of them I had sealed into a bottle of bilious-looking medicine; the other half I hid in the tinny air-conditioner of my hotel bedroom – an ingenuity which rather pleased me.

But one night I returned late. Nothing definable in my room had altered, yet I had an uneasy sense of intrusion and unhitched the frame of the air conditioner. The money was gone.

It was a creepy shock. Everything else lay undisturbed, immaculate, just as I had left it. I was reminded of how the KGB had searched my room in the Ukraine twelve years before: everything returned impeccably to its place (or nearly), with no sign of a break-in. This time the motive was not political, but coarser and less intimidating, and the residue of my money was untouched in its bottle of malignant medicine.

The hotel summoned plain-clothes police. While two heavyweights dismantled the air-conditioner, questioned me and apologised, a third slight, dark man watched them cynically, smiling a little, and fingered his tie. For a while they attempted to make out that I was mistaken, then recanted. The size of the sum seemed to stupefy them. I knew I would not see the money again. They went uselessly away.

I felt a paradoxical shame, as if I were the criminal. I remembered what Russian friends had told me about the KGB camera surveillance in tourist hotels, and how blatantly I had counted out the dollars on my bed the evening before. Yet for a few days my suspicions fell on half the faces in the hotel, and whenever I returned to my room I would dismantle the ventilation in case the money had magically returned.

Then I thrust it out of my mind.

One evening I returned to Gelia and Zelim in the hope of seeing his paintings. As I arrived, I noticed his mother, huge and somnolent, hunched on a bench at the street corner, watching the world she now hated. The door was opened by Gelia. ‘So you came back!'

We sat in the gaunt room again, waiting for Zelim's return. She had been teaching at the Russian school all day, and looked pale. ‘So many Russians are getting out,' she said. ‘There's talk of our school being amalgamated with others.' She began switching on lights around the room. ‘Even my friends talk of leaving now.'

‘Would you leave?' I asked.

But she answered simply: ‘Where to?'

She was a Tartar and Zelim was half Chechen. They had no real homeland. She understood the confused or muted sense of nation which so many of her pupils felt. This week their religious festivals had followed close on one another, and she had set them projects for the rediscovery of their past: the past which had been denied them. Tartars, Uzbeks, Russians, Jews, Tajiks — they had brought back their ritual foods to school: the Moslem pilau from Bairam, the saltless Jewish Passover bread, the Orthodox Easter eggs. The blamelessness of what was once for-bidden had touched her.

‘But people are bewildered now. A boy came to me yesterday and said, “My father is Ukrainian, my mother Tartar, so what am I? I suppose I'm just Russian.” And I couldn't answer him.' She smiled sadly. ‘As for these Moslems, they don't feel any identity really. They may call themselves Uzbeks or Tajiks, but it doesn't mean much to them. They were Soviet before, and that was that. We all had this idea that we were one people, that we would melt into one another And now we're left with nothing.'

‘Or with Islam.'

‘Maybe.' She looked doubtful. ‘But I think they feel lost, most of them . . . .'

This lack of nationalism among Uzbek and Tajik had drawn them closer over many decades. A century ago the conquering Uzbeks and the long-settled Tajiks despised one another. The Uzbeks had been nomadic warriors. Many had disdained trade, which they left in the hands of Tajiks and Jews, while farming was done by an army of Persian slaves. An Uzbek (I had read) would introduce himself by race and clan, the Tajik merely named himself by city. But now even this diffused Uzbek sense of race seemed to have dimmed. ‘They belong to big families,' Gelia said vaguely. ‘Perhaps that is enough for them . . . .'

Yet in 1924 Stalin, carving out the Central Asian states which had never before existed, often followed ethnic realities with scrupulous accuracy. He was attempting to divide and rule, nagged by the Soviet fear of a united Moslem ‘Turkestan'. But sometimes people were so interknit as to defy delineation, and the Uzbeks and Tajiks of Bukhara and Samarkand were the most entangled of all.

Gelia said darkly: ‘Perhaps you're right, and they can find themselves only in Islam.' She picked up her spectacles and squinted comically. ‘I don't want to think that. I was always frightened of religion. When I was small I once stayed with a Christian schoolfriend, and spent all night in terror that her mother might come in and make the sign of the Cross over me! I've never been to a church.' She smiled at my surprise. ‘But I've changed in the last year, I don't know why. Perhaps I'm getting old – my teeth, my eyes are not good any more. Now I think about religion a bit, I never used to.' Suddenly her girlish gaiety was brushed by melancholy. Youth and middle-age seemed to coexist in her. ‘I sometimes wonder now if it is not a sin to live without God.'