The Lost Heart of Asia (18 page)

Then mortification overtook him. ‘I am ashamed to be offering you so little. Our life here . . . . The land is hopeless. Even if we fulfil our quota, the government scarcely makes a return to us. We have no machinery. We gather everything by hand. And the cotton doesn't grow properly – barely this high!' He levelled his hand at knee-height.

I said: ‘Can't you grow vegetables or fruit?'

‘The soil is too bad. It can't bear it. You've seen it. It's just salt.'

‘Salt,' repeated Kakajan. ‘Everywhere.'

Yes, I said, I'd seen it. I had grown aware of it insidiously, as if it were the bitterness to which everything reduced: salt along the canal banks, salt in every hollow, salt crusting the fields, in the air, the water, the lungs. Legend ran that it was the dried tears of the despairing inhabitants.

I could understand now why the director looked hopeless, broken. All his defeat seemed compressed in his self-mocking mouth. ‘And you in England have everything. I'm sorry I'm ashamed, Mr Colin.'

I had heard that the fields could be rejuvenated by scraping off the saline topsoil and piling it up for the rain to leach. But the director shook his head. ‘Even the rain is salty here. I've seen it lie in pools after a fresh downpour, and when it evapo-rates, there's salt. It's because of the Aral Sea drying up. The clouds collect its vapours and deposit them here,' He looked almost contrite, as if what was happening were his own doing. ‘So the clouds rain salt.'

‘The Aral will disappear one day,' Kakajan said. ‘There used to be rest-houses and beaches there, but now you have to go farther every year if you want to find water at all. And the fish have almost gone, it's so polluted, or they're very small. When I was young, we used to catch monsters . . .'

It haunted their minds like a despair: the delicate Aral, withering to our north. All evils were attributed to it: from the whinging tears of their sick children to the changed weather-patterns. ‘The air has become cold,' said Kakajan. ‘It never used to be like this.'

Already a hundred years ago the sea was so shallow that nomads waded with their cattle to an island eight miles from the shore, and a strong wind might blow the waters back from its bed for as far as the eye could reach. But now the two great rivers feeding it were being bled away down networks of canals, seeping and wasting. More than half its water was gone, and the main port lay stranded sixty miles from its edge.

‘There's no future here,' Kakajan said. ‘People in this region get everything, Mr Colin. Skin rashes, stomach problems, problems with hearing and sight. My brother, too. His eyes are failing now.'

The director dropped a sad smile. ‘I can see during the day, but not at night, I don't know why.' He took off his thick-rimmed spectacles and his eyes shrivelled. ‘And now even in the day it's getting hard. Everything's blurred at the sides. I can only see straight in front of me.'

He turned to me to test them, and I imagined myself suddenly at the antipodes of his fogged tunnel, and smiled at him. ‘The doctors can't do much,' he said, ‘and the mullahs only pray. Nobody can prevent the salt. All our water is contaminated with it.' He laughed cynically and picked up his bowl of tea. ‘Now let's drink!'

Then, as if hunting for someone to toast, I enquired after Kakajan's family. I should have known better. No man voluntarily wanders his country homeless here. Instantly his face became hard – like the intensification of a hurt which had been there all the time – and fixed the floor without speaking. ‘It was in a road accident,' the director said. ‘The car overturned. My brother lost his wife and only son.'

Kakajan remained motionless. I found nothing to say, only placed my hand on his knee while his brother pulled a
dutah
from its cover, and began to play. So this, I thought, was why Kakajan led his mendicant life, passing from brother to sister, or sitting with the mullah like a mercantile gypsy in his shiny hat and boots, always a guest, surrounded by other men's children, making himself useful. The
dutah
whined and twanged. The director was agile-fingered, but would not sing. The notes arose as if from far away, miniature and lonely, like distillations of fuller and more passionate sounds being played somewhere else. The director smiled at my listening with a loose-lipped smile and heavy eyes, and shook his head a little, while Kakajan sat upright, his palms lifted on his knees as though praying, and the night wore on.

We slept in a row on the floor. For a while, in darkness, the brothers conversed in the soft, disconnected voices of people who lie close but cannot see one another.

Once I said to Kakajan: ‘At least you have a family of brothers and sisters . . . .' The words floated bodiless in the night.

He murmured stoically: ‘Yes. Many.'

At last their voices blurred into sleep, and I lay listening to silence. Out of the thatch a few insects dropped metallically on to my hair, and I brushed them away until I slept.

In the grey morning Kakajan was contemplating something, sitting bolt upright with his trilby set whimsically on his head. This soiled hat, and the black eyes shifting beneath it, dissolved his melancholy to an entrepreneurial watchfulness. We ate the hard bread together, with some tasteless jam. His brother had already gone. After a long silence of considering, he said: ‘Mr Colin, would it be possible for me to accompany you to Nukus?'

‘Of course.' Nukus was the capital of the Karakalpakia region where I was going. (It turned out grim and characterless.)

Silence. Then: ‘Mr Colin, would it be possible for me to accompany you back to Novi Urgench too?'

‘Yes it would be possible, but perhaps boring for you.'

‘I will not be bored,' he smiled sadly. ‘I have today free, and tomorrow free . . . .'

Guiltily I thought of this life, and agreed. Perhaps to him any companion was better than none, and I had the novelty of foreignness, and seemed kindly. But after another pause, in which his fingers curled no longer prayerful on his knees, his sun-blackened face looked up and said: ‘I have a brother in Novi Urgench who collects dollars. He needs them for a car he wants to buy. Mr Colin, if I was to accompany you to Novi Urgench, could you perhaps afford

‘I need all my dollars,' I said, with the traveller's ruthlessness. The idea of this nagging presence suddenly palled. I could not tell what he was thinking. The mournful widower was fading in my mind, and somebody more resourceful and sly was emerging.

He said neutrally: ‘Then I will accompany you to the bus station.'

I parted from the family with a sense of desertion. The older daughters appeared suddenly at my going, then disappeared in embarrassment, leaving their mother to wave farewell from an undertow of small sons whose future nobody knew.

At the bus compound, where I prepared to take the long road through Nukus to Bukhara, Kakajan said: ‘The bus drivers always cheat you. Give me three hundred roubles and I'll bargain. He won't cheat me.'

Five minutes later he gave me back a ticket and a pitiful handful of notes, and it was obvious what he had done. I forgave him without speaking, a little sadly. He had almost nothing. But now his burnished head wobbled and shone on its neck like a sunflower in delight, and his eyes poured out something like love to me. I had covertly given him perhaps a week's wages. ‘Oh Mr Colin! It's been so . . . oh . . . .' Then he could not resist asking this inexplicable foreigner: ‘When you get back to England, could you send dollars to me?'

I said: ‘Only through Ashkhabad. Then they'd be stolen.'

His face fell, but recovered as I clambered into the bus. ‘Goodbye, Mr Colin. Really, you . . . .' He wanted to thank me, but could not. ‘I'm so very glad we met!' And the next moment he was gone.

But a few minutes later, as my bus lumbered into the street on its way north-east, we overtook him. Jaunty in his dented hat, he was prancing along the roadside, counting my money.

By early May I was moving east from Bukhara through a land gentling into fertility, among villages of whitewashed clay, towards Samarkand. At last the deserts and plateaux which glare for a thousand miles east of the Caspian were falling away, and I was following a river basin towards the foothills of the Pamir. Behind me the Bukhara oasis paled into fields where the water sidled green along thinned canals. In scattered villages the only signs read ‘Shop' or ‘Baths' or ‘Food' in the heartless Russian way. They looked like frontier-posts. Black cattle plodded across wastelands slung with pylons and telegraph poles. Once or twice the arch of a ruined mosque appeared, or a minaret stood in emptiness.

My bus crashed through the conurbation of Navoi. Hot-water pipes swarmed across its scrub, and its rundown factories throbbed and retched unabashed, as if still trumpeting Socialism. The effluent that had poisoned children, orchards and livestock all over the republic, and filled its water with sulphates and aluminium waste, blackened the sky from an antiquated sprawl of chemical plants and power stations. The air reeked.

The next moment we were out in the bleakness of cotton-fields, but now tractors were trawling them in plumes of dust, and there unwound along the road a feel of leisured and untidy life. Orchards thickened. Under wind-breaking belts of trees the banks had turned green, and cows were grazing in the ditches. The horizon ahead of us hoisted faint, sky-coloured hills.

‘You be careful in Samarkand,' said the man beside me. ‘Bukhara's a quiet town, but they're violent in Samarkand. They all live on the black market.' He was old and he came, of course, from Bukhara. ‘Everything's getting worse. Our people are changing. Young people don't work any more, and nobody can afford anything. You watch out . . .'

On my other side a Russian geologist was making for Tashkent with his two children. Among these dark people his blondness turned him raw and guileless. His upper lip let fall a Viking moustache. For years he had worked excavating gas in the south, he said, and his Uzbek friends had begged him to stay. But the future was too uncertain, and he was heading for the Ukraine. ‘I've never been out of Central Asia before.' He was gazing at it through the window in passionless farewell. His children lay against him, fair and sleepy, with bubblegum dry on their mouths. ‘My wife's Ukrainian, and I'll work there as a labourer, just to stay alive. I'll build a house, and give my boys a future.'

Around us the hills were starting to squeeze the valley, while a sharp wind curdled the unsown fields. We were following the arc of a river which trickled down from its high glacier in the western Pamir. The flecks of gold which sparkle uselessly in its water lent it the name Zerafshan, ‘the gold-strewer', and even the ancient Greeks knew it as Polytimetus, ‘very precious'. A hundred years ago, travellers described orchards blossoming all along its course: almond, peach, blue plum, cherry, fig and apple, and the finest apricots and nectarines in Asia.

Now the trees were split by vast cotton-fields, and the river meandered through its shallows to our north, depleted by irrigation-canals. Sometimes last year's cotton harvest still bulged in hills above the yards of collective farms. It had been the hope and bane of the whole country: cotton. A hundred years ago the Russians introduced an American species, and the Soviets rushed into its expansion, increasing the yield per acre by almost two-thirds. They became the largest cotton producer in the world. Moscow bought it cheap and raw from Central Asia, and turned it into clothes.

Under Brezhnev, who rose to the presidency from his power-base here, the corruption of local officials grew outlandish. The routine inflation of statistics, and the diversion of cotton on to the black market, poured subsidies into the lap of the Uzbek supremo Rashidov. Some of his henchmen ruled like feudal lords, with their own estates, prisons and concubines. The mafia embezzled more than five thousand million pounds in fifteen years. Only after Brezhnev's death did a spy satellite by chance photograph vacant fields where cotton should have been, and the more flagrant mafiosi were brought to trial in a welter of executions, suicides and imprisonments.

Meanwhile, the cotton itself was failing. Deep-rooted and thirsty, it was leaching the soil and the rivers, and growing feebler. Defoliants and pesticides were spreading disease among the harvesters: cancers, anaemia and hepatitis. Infant mortality rose. Only now, gradually, were people starting to talk of imposing limits and diversifying crops.

‘Rashidov's still a hero to these people,' the Russian said. ‘He cheated Moscow. He even built football stadiums with some of the money. They love that.'

‘Samarkand' conjures no earthly city. It is a heart-stealing sound. Other capitals of Islam – Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul – glow with an accessible, Mediterranean magnificence. But Samarkand inhabits only the edge of geography. It rings with a landlocked strangeness, and was the seat of an empire so remote in its steppe and desert that it only touched Europe to terrify it. For centuries after it slept under obscurity, it shimmered in people's imagination. It was the fantasy of Goethe and Handel, Marlowe and Keats, yet its reality was out of reach. Even in the famous verse of the diplomat-poet Flecker, who travelled no farther east than Syria, its merchants took the golden road as if to a perilous mystery.

Over an ocean of fields and half-connected townlets, my bus made landfall at last in a nondescript depot, but I glimpsed to the east the surge and glitter of another city, circled by snow-lit mountains. For the last few miles I approached it sentimentally, on foot. I went through motley suburbs and an upthrust of flat-blocks and public buildings. A mountainous statue of Lenin was in place in a jaded square, where the slogans still bleated unread from the rooftops: ‘The affairs of the world are in the hands of the people.'

From these surburban heights there opened below me a flotsam of red and grey rooftops – tin and asbestos wreckage floating on a swell of trees – studded with turquoise domes and minarets. Beyond them a long spine of snow-peaks glimmered with an unearthly radiance, and seemed to mark some ancient protection.

I went down through lorry-clogged streets. The way became sordid and ramshackle. A new harshness was in the air. An old man was praying among rose-beds on a traffic island, but had forgotten the direction of Mecca. Then, rounding a corner where buses clamoured under a flyover, I saw above me a sheaf of shattered domes and pinnacles. It started up in intermingling fawns and blues, as if a whole secret city had died within the modern one. Even in decay, it was huger than anything around it. The stubs of its entrance-gate and spring of broken arches hung above the lower town as if in another ether. It was the mosque of Bibi Khanum, built by Tamerlane the Great.

I circled it in purposeful delay, past big, dim shops down avenues of plane and chestnut trees. The people looked rougher, more secular, than in Bukhara. The city was more expansive, less uniform. The wreckage of its past hovered close against its present. While Bukhara had been a warren of obscurantism, Samarkand still owned the ghostly structures of an imperial capital.

Round its old market square, the Registan, three medresehs ranked in near-perfect symmetry. It was almost deserted. Once the centre of the world, it was now the centre of nothing. Even foreign sightseers had gone. Over the bare flagstones where I went, its enclosing majesty broke like a flood. In each of the three façades, a mammoth
iwan
made a gulf of shadow, and was flanked by walls tiered with shallow bays. Gate for gate, minaret for minaret, they echoed and confirmed one another. They overbore the square with an institutional solemnity, sureties of royal power and the immutability of God. To the Western eye the minarets, whose flattened tops were under-hung with honeycomb decoration, conjured stout Corinthian columns supporting nothing. Earthquake had set them leaning with a crazed, plastic ease, which had teased nineteenth-century travellers into theorising and dropping plumb-lines from them, and never quite believing it.

The tilework of their façades does not drench the eye in a faience curtain like the mosques of contemporary Persia, but splashes the brick with cool, rather cerebral designs. The colours were familiar: grape blue, turquoise, wax yellow. The buff brick interknit and sobered them. Only here and there did a ceramic frieze blaze out complete. Beneath the entrance to the fifteenth-century Ulug Beg medreseh, the oldest of the three, some of the panels resembled lustrous carpets, and across the
iwan
of the seventeenth-century Shir Dar a pair of heretical lions chased white does across a field of flowers.

The doors still swung over polished thresholds, but when I entered the courts the only noise was birdsong. In the arcades the student cells had been locked behind their doors for decades. Some peasant women were wandering bemused over the flagstones. They followed me listlessly about. For religious students the treasures of these courts must have been the beautiful ribbons of Arabic script – always pure white against peacock blue – which overswept the arches of the
iwans
or rippled beneath their vaults. But I could not read them. Their Kufic epigraphy seemed locked away in some exquisite battle with itself.

Yet it is in these courtyards, too, that the illusion of the square evaporates. Here, suddenly, I was backstage. The grandiloquent façades, I now saw, were little more than that: an overbearing theatre-set. They had no depth. Their backs were only lightly decorated, or not at all. Their duty was over. These were not shapes to be viewed in the round, but bullying stage-flats which loomed over the square below in heady propaganda.

Some deadness of restoration, too, shadows all this with emptiness. The Soviets found the Registan collapsing, and began to repair it with the same diligence as they bestowed on their czarist palaces in the west. Here a dome was reconstructed wholesale, there a minaret jacked upright; while over every dilapidated surface swept a meticulous veneer of new tiles and bricks. The interior of the central mosque, in particular, is mesmerising. From the centre of its ceiling, in spectacular
trompe l'oeil,
a shower of gilded leaves and flowers radiates down a dark blue sky, while the vault above the
mihrab
unfurls a fan of stalactites in coral and gold.

Only when I entered the medreseh of Ulug Beg did I realise what had been lost. He was the most attractive of the grandsons of Tamerlane, a scientist and astronomer who urged his pupils into secular learning. Here, in a courtyard more intimate than the others, the original decoration was still in place. It kept a subtle, broken beauty. The jigsaw of its tiles was shedding pieces everywhere, fragments easing loose from their ornamental whole, petals dropping, tendrils breaking. But for the moment it was suspended in a sweet opulence of decay. Its threatened restoration was necessary, of course; but something vital would disappear for ever. These bricks and tiles betrayed by their ageing that they belonged to the first creation: to the piety and flare of their conceivers, not to the duty of a later time. They belonged with the past. Even if the restoration were identical (and some of it is suspect) its purposes would be modern, and would leave the imagination cold.

I wondered what would happen now that Soviet rule had ended. Such mammoth reconstructions would perhaps stop, or go forward more cautiously, piecemeal. I sat for a while under the arcades, and thought ungratefully of this, while the birds were screaming in the courtyard trees, and the tiles silently, unnotice-ably, were easing from their plaster and dropping into dust.

Inflation and instability were on everybody's lips. Everyone feared the future. In the streets the drab men and high-coloured women coalesced into crowds which consorted only asexually, men with men in shoulder-hugging embraces, women sauntering together with linked arms. Tajik-speakers, their faces yet showed every permutation between the Turanian and Iranian worlds; blunt features and eagle features, full mouths and tight.

In the government emporia, where bags of rusks, noodles and bottled fruit were stacked, almost nobody lingered. Everywhere, free markets were stirring. Yet even in the central bazaar there was no bustle, but a cautious, ambling passage in which an hour might pass in the purchase of a few carrots. It was oddly quiet. Farmers heaped their rented stalls with pomegranates, radishes, mounds of liquid cheese. But nobody had any money, and every quoted price elicited hissing and upturned noses. In the courtyard stood a blank-faced giant with a Chaplin moustache. Stripping his shirt from a massive beer-gut, he lay down sacrificially under a pair of planks while a bus drove over him, then got up again, still expressionless, and circulated a money-can.

He was fuller employed than many. The pavements were dark with knots of loitering youths. They were the new unemployed, and there were over a million of them in the country. They wore T-shirts inscribed ‘New York' or ‘Chanel'. If I were carrying my rucksack, they would eye it like psychopaths. They thought I was Estonian. ‘Didn't you bring anything to sell?' they demanded. They tried to work me out. ‘Why are you here?' If I were seated somewhere, one of them would be sure to perch beside me like a shrike and nudge my knee or jolt my shoulder with every question, as if I had to be tormented into answering.

‘Where do you come from?'

Wearily: ‘Britain.'

‘How is your life there? Do you get plenty to eat?'

‘Yes.' I would remember, as if down a long tunnel, a race obsessed with slimming and cholesterol.

‘How much do you earn?' Prod. ‘How much is meat?' Prod. ‘How much is a car?' Bang on shoulder. ‘Will you get me a visa to Britain? How much . . .? How much . . .?'

Affectionately I would recall the old men in mosque courtyards, who greeted one another with a sober hand on the heart, and with only dignified enquiry. Then I would remember remorsefully that these youths, with their lost past and precarious future, their restless eyes and talk of dollars, lived in a new void, and what did I expect of them? On and on the inquisitors would nag, while I halved or quartered my income and tried to explain a world of tax and mortgage. But nothing stopped them. My prodded knee would become psychosomatically inflamed. So would my temper. And however shrivelled my earnings or qualified my answers, this dialogue always left cupidity glittering in the hard young eyes.