The Lost Heart of Asia (12 page)

I heard myself say: ‘I don't know about God.' Everyone seemed to be hunting for Him now: God as a means of identity, of throwing back a bridge to the past over the Soviet chasm.

Gelia said: ‘Nor do I.'

Her mother-in-law padded in and sat by us, watchful and uncomprehending. Her gaze seemed slowly to inundate the room, until it drowned us. Gelia said, as if excusing her: ‘She has nothing to do now. She just reads memoirs by Soviet marshals.' The old woman went on staring. The weak electricity shed a dimness round us. ‘Her world has gone away and won't return, and she knows this. But she's loved Zelim all her life, and now my sons, and perhaps she loves me because I love him.'

I said weakly: ‘I hope so.'

Her voice roughened in exasperation. ‘But she spies on me. She rummages through everything. She wants to know everything. She wants to know what we're saying now.' A mischievous triumph entered her tone, then faded. She said: ‘This house isn't mine, you see. It's hers. I'm like a guest here.'

Yet from time to time the sadness of her words was suffused in contralto laughter, and her Tartar cheekbones and auburn hair looked vivid and beautiful in the soft light. Laughter, I supposed, was the only bearable companion to these facts: that she was a guest in another's house, in another's country, probably for ever. And when Zelim returned, murmuring a greeting with his curtained politeness, I was reminded how nobody here truly cohabited, how the old woman occupied a vanished Soviet empire, while Zelim lived in some hinterland of his own.

We went out into the bare courtyard and down a stairway to his studio. I was reminded of a priest entering a chapel: the sanctuary of his mind. He seemed perpetually stooped, not physically but emotionally stooped. We came into a room where hundreds of canvases and sketches were stacked with their faces to the walls. I did not know what to expect as he turned them shyly towards me. They were nightmares: scenes of savage transmutation. Men had become animals, and animals half-men. Even in Bukhara street scenes, the familiar domes tilted vertiginously above lanes where a distorted donkey trotted or a man-vulture flapped. The ordinary had turned threatening, and daylight proportions vanished. A man's turbaned head slept on a mosque cupola, as on a pillow. Flocks of high-coloured sheep grazed nowhere; horses' heads were shriven to skulls.

Gelia said quaintly: ‘There's no smile in them.'

Zelim said nothing. They had become his words. Often he had painted lonely sites where a few trees bent over ruins or swaying grass. ‘He loves places like that,' Gelia said. ‘They frighten me.'

But in a rare oil portrait she had been stripped to a pink doll whose face was annihilated, staring ruthlessly away. Other paintings were abstracts. ‘He himself is an abstract,' she said, as if he were not there. ‘He does not know what other people do. That's why he is happy.' She looked at him. ‘He flies in his dreams.'

Zelim saw my interest. Slowly he turned more and more paintings to the light, but as his racked, vibrant world unfolded, and I asked to buy one, he demurred again and again. One painting, perhaps, was important to his past, to some personal novitiate; while the next belonged to his future and was a blueprint.

I admired a Matisse-like
Madonna and Child
in pink and grey, and wanted it; but this was part of a cycle. ‘It has simplicity,' he said. ‘I'm aiming for that all the time now. Simplicity.'

‘You come and steal it,' said Gelia. ‘Perhaps then he'll love something else – maybe me!' She laughed, the lilting, sad sound which came too easily. Zelim turned
Madonna and Child
to the wall.

In the end I found a watercolour of primordial horses which he was willing to relinquish. But he worried over how it would be framed, insisted it be hung in shadow and that it should be set in a grey border, tilted askew. Secretly I wondered if I would ever get it back to England intact. He furled it up gently for my rucksack, and I noticed for the first time his disproportionately powerful hands.

‘Oh yes,' Gelia said, as we all emerged into the street. ‘He used to carry me on his hands like this!' She held out her palms. ‘But now he's too weak – or I'm too fat!'

He smiled distantly, as if she had nudged some remote happiness, and we ambled to the limit of the walled town. A rare shower had turned the lane's earth moist underfoot; it stretched empty under a belt of stars. Where the old town ended and the modern one began, they stopped. For the second time, we parted. I kissed Gelia farewell, and Zelim enclosed me in an embarrassed Russian hug, then I started back to my hotel across the overgrown parklands of the new city. Sunset had pulled a blanket of silence over everything. After a minute I looked back up the lamp-lit lane where Gelia and Zelim were walking home, and saw that he had taken her hand in his.

The town's war memorial stood where the old woman's family had once owned a dacha. The inscribed names of the dead – almost ten thousand of them – were faintly legible under the stars, their Islamic surnames tagged with Slavic
– ovs
and
– em.
Weeds were pushing through the paving-slabs. Nearby I passed the plinth where Lenin had stood. It rose in a ghostly white plat-form, abandoned, as if he had stepped down from it in the starlight, and walked away.

The north-east fringes of the early Islamic empire were rife with alien cults and dangerous forms of worship. Sufism arose in Central Asia as early as the eighth century, and in time the whole region became riddled with mystical brotherhoods centred on the tombs of their founding saints. By the nineteenth century their theology belonged to the distant past, but the holy places were still crowded with devotees, chanting and swooning under matted hair and candle-snuffer hats, while hemp-crazed
kalender
went whirling and prostrating themselves through the streets.

With the advent of Communism the brotherhoods went underground. Official Islam was brutally persecuted and tens of thou-sands of the religious were executed. Stalin closed down 26,000 mosques, and by 1989, in all Uzbekistan, there were just eighty left. But under this thin carapace of institutionalised worship, whose leaders were forced into compromise with Moscow, there swarmed an undergrowth of unofficial mullahs and holy men. The most fervent centres of worship became not the regulated mosques but the shrines of venerated Sufis, objects of secret pilgrimage. This covert Islam bred paranoia in Moscow. Communists traced the malign influence of the Sufi networks everywhere, and the KGB failed to penetrate them.

Yet everybody I had asked described the brotherhoods as peaceful. Their adepts were engaged on an inner journey, a puritan recoil from the world decaying round them. Sufism became a haven for the spiritually oppressed. In the outer world its
murids
were craftsmen, traders, even soldiers and Party members, but in the hermetic secrecy of their circles they found repose in uncontaminated worship and chanting.

The most powerful of these orders was the Naqshbandi, whose founder had died in Bukhara in 1389. A century ago its warrior-dervishes had fought against the Russians in the Caucasus, and had re-emerged in 1917 to harass the Bolsheviks. The mausoleum of the saint had been closed down under Stalin, then turned into a Museum of Atheism. But widespread memory of it must have survived, I knew, because in 1987, during abortive demonstrations, it was to this forbidden tomb that the Bukhara protesters had marched, as if to the last symbol of purity in their city.

Far on the outskirts I glimpsed its sanctuary clustered round a flaking dome. Two mosques – one for men, one for women – embraced it in faded arcades, and a lopsided minaret tapered nearby. But all around it a fury of restoration had arisen: the drone and rattle of machines rebuilding. It had reopened three years before. Elaborate guest-rooms were going up, and a bazaar. The pilgrims were flooding in. There were several hundred there now, gossiping, feasting, praying. A glow of celebration enveloped them. Infinitely extended families picnicked under the willows, squatting on their divans and delving into hillocks of pilau, carrots and cucumber.

I wandered at ease. The place seemed virgin, unreal. No modern traveller that I knew had ever been there. I came upon a party of gypsies – a people even here despised and unaccounted for – who were crouching in a hollow, butchering one sacrificial sheep while gorging on another. Beyond them a colossal tree seemed to have crashed to the ground in prehistory, and petrified. Its crevices were stuffed with votive rags and messages, and its limbs polished raw by caressing hands. It had been planted as a seed at the time of the saint's birth, said the gypsies, and had fallen the day he died. Now, like him, it had acquired holiness. It induced fertility, and cured backache.

A melancholy trio of men was circling it anti-clockwise. One of them winkled off a splinter with his knife. The whole trunk was flecked with these incisions. After them came a flock of peasant girls, brilliant and chattering. They paced familiarly round the trunk, and stooped beneath it where the greyed body arched from the ground. As they went, they caressed its knobs and fissures like lovers. Then they tied silk ribbons to it, and walked blithely away. Behind them tripped a sad-faced woman in middle-age. She wore a tight skirt and high heels. She ran her fingers over the twisted torso, as if searching for something she had left there, then massaged her belly violently against it, with little cries.

I pushed through a door into the shrine's central court. It was very quiet. The mosque arcades enclosed it on two sides. Their portico ceilings were coffered with deep polygons and stars which were easing loose from one another now, punctured by sparrows' nests, and the blue and gold paint dimming. A line of pilgrims was approaching the grave along a carpeted path. Men and women went together, as if on holiday. The girls paraded in their festival dresses and pantaloons, their plaits scalloped up at the base of the neck under garish clasps, or cascading beneath embroidered caps. They threw coins into the dry fountain whose waters had been holy four centuries ago, and kissed its stones. Then each group settled on its haunches at the path's end, while an austere young man chanted a prayer. Above them a forked mast hung like a gibbet, its horsetail trophy gone. On a terrace beyond, the saint's followers and descendants lay under rough stone cubes. Two women were sweeping away the dust for a blessing. Beside them, a high, imperishable rectangle of grey stone was all that remained of the Sufi's grave.

The faithful went sauntering round it with a rapt, processional dignity. They touched its stones, then bathed their faces in their hands. They knocked their foreheads softly on its walls, and kissed them. They kissed the black slab said to come from Mecca (and sovereign against headaches) encased in one façade. A fusion of sacred and secular lent a mildness to their worship. Their pilgrimage seemed to progress with the ease of a promenade, in which blessing and companionship, the pleasure of picnics and the chance of childbirth, were harmonised in the sanctity of ordinary things – stone, wood, water.

The midday devotees came and went, and the courtyard emptied. The austere-looking man who had conducted prayers under the gibbet-banner turned out shyly accessible. Yes, he said, there were still Naqshbandi Sufis in the city, but he could not guess their number. ‘Even they don't know how many.'

Everyone declared the sect's numbers few now. The Soviet fear seemed suddenly absurd. But the Sufis' purity of worship had held up a dangerous ideal, as if they were the people's heart. They had maintained their anonymity even here, in their own Vatican.

‘Perhaps the shrine's imam is Naqshbandi,' I ventured.

The man looked momentarily embarrassed. ‘Only he knows.'

‘But they must have remembered this place all the time it was shut down.'

‘Yes, yes. Everybody remembered it. For seventy years. We came here secretly at night and prayed against the walls.' His voice blurred with the wonder of that time, as if it were already long ago. ‘Some of us even climbed over in the dark and embraced the tomb.'

‘And you, you're a mullah here?'

‘No, oh no.' He smiled. ‘I'm an ordinary man. I was a carpenter before, but I taught myself the prayers in Uzbek and Arabic, and came to serve here.'

He made it sound simple, and perhaps it had been. But when I asked why he had chosen this, he answered, ‘Only God knows.' God's knowledge everywhere overwhelmed his own. He scarcely knew the history of the saint he served, but lapsed into Communist jargon, describing him as a stakhanovite holy man who achieved through work, and planted melons.

Had the black stone embedded in the tomb, I asked, really been taken by the saint from the black stone of the Kaaba, the lodestar of Islam?

But he answered: ‘Only the stone knows.'

As we sat under the worm-pocked columns of the faltering mosque, he unfolded a laden napkin and shared his pilau and bread with me. At once a mad labourer ran up, his eyes rolling and his trousers covered in blood. With a democracy old in Islam, he sat down at our meal, seizing rice and bread in crazed mouthfuls, so that the sparrows seethed down to peck up his flingings.

‘People bring all their griefs here,' the young man said, as if explaining him. ‘They bring them to forget them, to open themselves without secrets before God. Then God instructs them.' He fell again into the spine-chilling Communist argot. ‘Without instructions, you can't do anything.'

The builder's eyes, which had rolled to the back of his head, returned suddenly and fixed us with two incendiary black pupils. All at once he stumbled upright and careered away, dragging a club foot. ‘He's a little ill,' said the man. ‘This place may cure him.'

‘How?'

‘You find it strange. Perhaps Christians don't have such beliefs.' Ruminatively he folded up the napkin and returned it to his basket. He went quiet. To him the magic tree was less inscrutable than people drinking the transfigured blood of a slain god or believing He had a son. But he said at last: ‘We all have the same father and mother, and God knows all we think.'