The Lost Heart of Asia (19 page)

‘They don't believe in working. They don't produce. They just buy and sell things.' The stale complaint slurred on the Russian's lips. He was peering at the announcement of a dog auction to be held in the Spartak football stadium. ‘And they're getting more nationalistic by the minute. But how do you leave here?' He gazed at me with the smeared eyes of the perpetually drunk, and the uninvited monologue. His fingers were ochreous with nicotine. ‘I've been here all my life. My father was killed in the battles round Smolensk during the war, and this is my mother . . . .' She was staring vacantly at the market. ‘She's never known anywhere but here. We've nowhere to go in Russia. Her and me, it's too late for us . . . . I haven't enough left.' His orange finger-tips trailed over the notice. ‘We'll die here.'

The old woman shuffled up beside us, her face withdrawn inside a tattered shawl. ‘What are you saying?' she piped. ‘What's happening?'

‘We're talking about the dog auction.' She drifted away again. ‘Look at her. She's already ending her days. But what do we do? We have no homeland now.'

So he was buying a dog.

Watching his creased face, I realised how deeply my concept of the Russians had changed. Suddenly everything which they had achieved here – in education, welfare, administration, however corrupt and limited – was threatening to collapse. The old, bullying propaganda – the Marxist invocations to work and unity – all at once looked like benign common sense, a plea for the future. The familiar certainties were in retreat. Russian arts – literature, music, ballet – which had once seemed the treacherous tools of colonialism, now resembled instead the rearguard of a gracious civilisation, fading away before my eyes.

Even the Soviet sops to local custom had changed. Not a moment ago, it seemed, the oriental street-lamps, the tulip domes above restaurants and police-posts – even the mock-Islamic latticework in the tourist hotels – had sent up a sinister smokescreen behind which a people's heart was being stolen away. Now, instead, these
kitsch
concessions seemed innocently integral to local life, like a lifted curse.

Only plastic tiles coated my restaurant, whose floor was littered with crusts and fish-bones. Beggars limped from table to table. They had torn coats and split boots. They hovered above the tables as if no one was sitting there, picking at the customers' bread and drinking their tea, while the conversation went on obliviously below. As I left, one of them shambled over to my place and emptied my bowl of its mutton-bones.

I went out into the ruins of the Bibi Khanum, feeling an obscure self-reproach. Even in desolation the mosque seemed to tower out of an era more fortunate than my own (but this was an illusion). Tamerlane had built it as the greatest temple in Islam. Thousands of captured artisans from Persia, Iraq and Azerbaijan had laboured to carve its marble floors, glaze its acres of tiles, erect its monster towers and the four hundred cupolas bubbling over its galleries. The emperor flailed its building for-ward. He considered too small the gateway completed in his absence, pulled it down wholesale, hanged its architects and began again. But the mountainous vaults and minarets which he envisioned crushed the foundations, and the walls started to fracture almost before completion. People became afraid to pray there. It towered above me in a megalomaniac reverie, raining the sky with blistered arches and severed domes. Cracks pitched and zigzagged down the walls. Tiles flaked off like skin. The gateway loomed so high that the spring of its vanished arch began eighty feet above me, and completed itself phantasmally in empty air. Gaping breaches had split the prayer-hall top to bottom, and the squinches were shedding whole bricks.

Everything – the thunderous minarets, the thirty-foot doors, the outsize ablutions basin – shrunk the visitor to a Lilliputian intruder, and peopled the mosque with giants. In the court's centre a megalithic lectern of grey Mongolian marble had once cradled a gargantuan Koran, but its indestructability, and perhaps its isolation in the mosque's wrecked heart, had touched it with pagan mana now, and it had become the haunt of barren women, who crouched beneath it as a charm for fertility.

As I sat nearby, three young worldlings, urban and confident in high heels and tight skirts, went giggling and nudging towards it. Their shrieks rang in the ruins. Then, separately, they dropped on all fours and crawled in and out between the lectern's nine marble legs. At first they ridiculed one another at this place where fun and superstition merged. But once unseen by their companions, creeping through the marble labyrinth, an unease descended. Covertly they touched their palms to its stone. One of them kissed it. Then they emerged, straightening their stockings, and tripped away.

Sitting by a mosque under silver poplars, Tania had inherited the gross, maternal look of Russian peasant women in poor lands. Her ginger hair dangled corkscrews round a slovenly, vegetable face, whose nose and eyes had capsized in the fatness of her cheeks. We had fallen into conversation by chance, and only as we walked together under the trees did she start to surprise me. She pointed out the grave of a Naqshbandi statesman, which stood still honoured on its mound. It was unlike a Russian to know this history, and I glanced at her in puzzlement. ‘I'm married to a Moslem,' she said.

She looked so rooted in the earth of her own people that I blurted out: ‘Isn't that difficult?'

‘It's always difficult.' She stopped and contemplated the calligraphy on the gravestone, as if it might yield a solution. ‘Moslem men are more patriarchal than us. But I don't fight with mine. He manages the money, I manage the house. But he's a wonderful cook!' She gave a hoarse, burbling laugh. ‘Yes, I boss him a bit. I've stayed independent. That's why I understand my cat.'

She started to walk again, wavering fatly on her high heels. Her body conveyed a torpid, Russian strength. Her marriage was obsessing her at present, she said, because her husband was not happy. He could not relinquish his past, the memory of his first wife, who'd been a harpy. ‘After she left him he sat five years alone, sulking and drinking, and he's still affected by her. He can't deny their daughters a thing.' Her face puckered in revulsion. ‘They're our chief source of argument, those daughters.' She splayed out her fingers, which were stubbled in garish rings. ‘And there's the cat. We argue about that. He can't accept that animals are really humans, which of course they are.' She sighed unlaughing. ‘A Moslem, you see.'

I could salvage no insight from this rush of detail.

‘I know other Russian women married to Tajiks and Uzbeks,' she went on, ‘but each one is different. Even the prejudice. Some of my husband's family feel so violent that they can hardly bring themselves to see me. But others have been kind. There's no pattern to it.' Yet her voice was tinged with recklessness. I realised there was something I did not understand at all. ‘It's hard for any Moslem's wife. But sometimes the men may start to recognise a Russian woman's intelligence. Native women are often lazy. They just sit and gossip while their children run wild. They can prepare meals, of course, but often they can't even sew. No wonder Moslems need several wives.' She was striding beside me now, with colonial self-confidence. ‘Yes, I know Tajiks who keep more than one wife – they celebrate second or even third marriages in secret with some mullah. It's hard on everyone.'

We had reached a side-gate of the mosque, whose guardian recognised her. He said quaintly: ‘Guests and good men are always welcome here,' and we entered a courtyard murmuring with old men in blue turbans who leant on their sticks under the trees and dozed or hobnobbed on weathered benches. A balm of companionship filled the air, of past ways returning.

‘I wanted you to see this,' Tania said. She spoke a halting Tajik with the mosque officials. They asked her where we came from, and looked pleased. Islam had always been tolerant in Central Asia, she said, without accuracy, but I knew what she meant. She did not fear religion, but politics. ‘It's the politicians manipulating for their own ends – that's what frightens me. Clans. We're overrun by cliques like extended families.' Their rivalries and subterfuge crept up to the highest levels of government, I knew, and created a delicate power-axis between Samarkand, Tashkent and the Fergana valley. The country's apparent unity splintered apart as you thought about it.

‘But young people sometimes talk as if they had a nation now,' she said. ‘They talk of being Uzbeks or Tajiks. It never used to be like that.'

‘You think they feel it?'

‘I don't know, I don't know.' She sounded suddenly harrowed. Some distress welled up in her whenever we touched on the future. Perhaps the old concept of a family of peoples, with Russia at its helm, was too painfully entrenched in her emotions.

We went back past a medreseh, and peered in. It was the largest in the city, but it seemed deserted. The student cells were locked, and pigeons massed undisturbed under the porticoes. No caretaker emerged to greet or deflect us.

Only days later did I learn the reason. According to hearsay, one of the clerics had raped a pupil. While news of this whispered through the city, the boy's relatives had assembled to tear the man to bits. But instead, after negotiations with him, they had watched while he hanged himself.

Unknowing, Tania and I walked in bewilderment through the school's silence. ‘You will come and visit me soon?' she asked. Her high heels rang on the cobblestones. ‘Yes. Come to us.'

The north-east suburbs break against a grassy plateau which undulates for miles. Colonies of ground squirrels stand sentinel at their burrows, and a shepherd drives his black flock over the cemetery-like ground with sharp cries. Its abrupt banks and mounds betray an earlier Samarkand decaying into the grassland. The earth seems to writhe underfoot. Sometimes it splits open on abandoned excavations. The glittering mountains stare in. Wherever the bricks rise exposed, their tamped clay has reverted to earth. The walls have become natural cliffs whose fissures had once been gates, and the ground is ripped by gullies where streets had gone, or tossed into shapeless citadels.

From the sixth century BC this ancient Samarkand, named Maracanda, was the capital of a refined Iranian people, the Sogdians, who traded along the Zerafshan valley and beyond. Alexander took the city in 329 BC, and here, in a fit of drunken hubris, transfixed his favourite general ‘Black' Cleitus with a spear. But the Sogdians outlasted the fragile dynasty of Alexander's followers. Famous for their literacy and commercial cunning, it was they, perhaps, who taught the Chinese the art of glassmaking. The Romans reported that their city walls ran seven miles in circuit, and they endured here until the Arabs conquered them in 712. Then, little by little, they dwindled away, until Genghiz Khan wrecked Maracanda in 1220, and put the past to sleep under the loam-filled earth. Later peoples named the site from the Giant Afrasiab, a mythic king of Turan: after failing to take Maracanda by assault, they said, he had buried it in the sand.

In a museum nearby, the Sogdians falter back to life. Russian archaeologists pulled their corroded swords out of the compacted dust, their bangles, their buttons and bone clothes-pins. They seem to have worshipped early Persian gods, at a time of resurgent Buddhism. Monolithic altars and carved ossuaries emerged, and some precious fragments of seventh-century fresco, in which the Sogdian king (if it is he) receives embassies from as far away as Tang dynasty China.

They advance to meet him against a hyacinth-blue field in cavalcades of dignitaries mounted on dromedaries, horses and elephants. In airy perspective they ride harmlessly above or beneath one another, but the plaster has dropped from them in obliterating grey flakes, as if they processed through storm-clouds. The lumber of elephants' feet and the prance of hooves emerge fitfully out of the decay, while a file of egrets parades inexplicably behind. The Chinese tribute-bearers carry goblets and wands in a humbled cluster of girlish eyes and close-plastered hair, and their starched dresses, embroidered with wolves' heads, seem to have hypnotised the painter. The king, meanwhile, walks forward to honour the image of his people's god. His prodigiously pearled robes woven into lozenges, his dripping ear-pendants, his soft, jewelled headdress and the necklace which dribbles nervously from his fingers, invest his kingdom with an effete strangeness. Yet his subjects' slender noses and delicate hands may have left behind their shadow in today's Tajik people.

I stumbled all afternoon over the indecipherable city, and emerged at evening by a tributary of the Zerafshan. Perched almost inaccessibly above it, under five grassy domes, was a half-forgotten tomb. An aged caretaker, slumbering nearby, opened its door in mumbled confusion, and there burgeoned before me into the gloom a monstrous mound. ‘This is the tomb of the prophet Daniel,' he said. Tamerlane, he added, had brought him here from Mecca.

Like the graves of other half-legendary figures revered by the Moslems – the tombs of Noah and Nimrod in Lebanon, the sepulchre of Abel near Damascus – it was built for a titan. Local people had believed that Daniel went on growing even after death, and they lengthened his grave every year until it stretched over sixty feet. Through the decades of Russian persecution it had been silently remembered. Its walls were still black with candle-flames.

I must have cut a weary figure as I trudged back along the road to Samarkand, because after a while a young Tajik in a clattering Moskvich offered me a lift. Shavgat was returning from a three-week job as a driver, and invited me home to meet his little son and old father. He was handsome in a slender, Iranian mould. Alert, candid eyes gleamed in a long head smoothed by jet-black hair. But an Islamic maleness overbore his home. He had been away three weeks, but when his young wife came to the door – a wide-eyed girl who was not quite pretty – he extended no greeting to her, only ordered her to hurry up a meal. I never saw them exchange an intimate word. Yet she was smiling and proud; for she had borne him a son.