The Lost Heart of Asia (25 page)

His imagination was roaming at will now. He inhabited a cloud of dreams. He did not see that the Uzbek provincialism which he so despised was also his own. ‘I want to sell my military expertise to South Africa. That's the country. East Germans are doing this too, selling their knowledge there, I know. You can do what you like now. It's all open.' But whenever his secretaries' chatter fell silent on the sofa opposite his voice dropped into confidence, and now he was almost whispering: ‘But I can't get through to South Africa . . .'

The world was beginning to bewilder him, a little.

‘Then I'd try somewhere else,' I said.

‘I applied to UNESCO for a fellowship, last year. I heard there were very few applicants. I made a breakdown of my project about Soviet concepts of the West, and word-processed it myself on this' – he pointed to the god-like machine. ‘But that was months ago, and I haven't had an answer. I don't understand this.' He fumbled in a drawer. ‘There was a man going to help me in England . . . his name was Stewart Davis. Do you know him?' He handed me a crumpled card. ‘I haven't heard from him. We get no information here. If I want to telephone someone in England, I must wait three days.'

Yet this man, I reminded myself, was the head of a government institute.

‘You must excuse me.' He suddenly stood up. ‘I have to see my wife in hospital. She has just given me a son, but she is producing no milk. That is the problem with our modern women.' He repeated his gesture of hopeless shortfall. ‘Shall we meet tomorrow in your hotel? I have a publishing project I wish to discuss . . . .'

I agreed to this with foreboding, wondering what favours he would ask. But I need not have fretted. Next day I waited for him at the arranged time, and for a further three hours, but he did not come.

For a long time, immersed in the challenge and strangeness of a new country, I imagine I am missing nothing of my own. Then an intruding memory – a chance thought, a facial resemblance – ignites a transient but overwhelming homesickness, like some unacknowledged weariness, and I try to return for a moment into my own mislaid tradition. So, after weeks of hearing only Turkic folk music and pop song, I went nostalgically to the state playhouse where the Russians had once planted opera and ballet as the ambassadors of their empire.

It was a hefty, mongrel building, raised half a century before by the architect of Moscow's KGB headquarters and of Lenin's tomb in Red Square. Its charmless façade had been truncated by lack of funds, and instead of rising to a skyline of victorious statuary, it petered out in a row of apologetic turrets. But an icing of Islamic decoration frosted all its surfaces, and continued over the auditorium and lobbies in a wintry beauty of white and pastel stucco. Along the upper hall, busts of the Turkic poets mingled coldly with Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Moussorgsky, and dish-shaped chandeliers of latticed plasterwork mottled the ceilings with a net of fractured Islamic light.

This patina of native culture, usually devoted to the mosque, had been subtly enrolled into the Communist scheme of things. Secularised, it had thrown a superficial sanction round the propagandist dramas and ballets of the day, and in return it had lost its soul. So I wandered round the halls in guilty pleasure. They had a snowflake delicacy. I was almost alone. A few Russian matrons were promenading with their daughters, but they looked lost and dowdy. Their high heels echoed over the wooden floors. And when the curtain rose on
Esmeralda,
an old ballet hectic with gypsy child-stealers, distraught heroine and murderous priest, the auditorium was barely quarter full.

Yet habits died hard. Over loudspeakers the dancers were still announced by their grandiose Soviet titles – ‘People's Artist of the USSR . . . . Honoured Artist of the USSR . . . .'– and the ballet unfurled in a shameless melodrama underscored by subTchaikovskian music. At its end a limping beggar triumphed over religious despotism by tossing the lecherous priest over the battlements, and the auditorium sent up a splutter of applause.

As we trooped out into the vestibule I saw, of course, that the spectators were mostly Russian. They were cooing and purring. Perhaps this theatre, with its fleeting, sentimental ceremony, was all that remained to them for a shrine. But they were so few in its gaunt spaces, they seemed embattled. The Moslem decor looked newly liberated around them. Where once it had appeared tainted, even sinister, it had now entered into its own.

Ludmilla had been to
Esmeralda
too, and had thought it beautiful. At the age of thirty she lived with her mother in a cramped flat near the city centre, and her life was devoured by books and music. Russian friends introduced us, but I might as well have met her in the pages of nineteenth-century literature. She was suffering from a nameless allergy, which often made her faint, and she shook my hand frailly. She had Polish, Ukrainian, Tartar and even Uzbek blood, she said, but she looked wholly Russian. She talked about books while her fingers writhed in her lap. She had contracted a synthetic, Slavic charm, whose veneer had eaten inward, like acid, until its lilting voice seemed to have become her own. A fountain of auburn hair dangled about her shoulders and sprouted in a mauve-ribboned knot on the crown of her head; and from the centre of this cascade watched a white, pinched face with intelligent eyes and delicate, enquiring lips. Yet she swayed and wriggled her shoulders in shock at any-thing she said, as if it must be foolish or betraying.

‘No, I never studied literature. It's just . . . a passion.' Her tone at once embraced and repudiated such a thing. ‘My father thought the only proper professions were medicine and engineering. I wasn't interested in either, but when I was seventeen I went to study construction in Leningrad. All the time I really loved the arts, but of course nobody asked
me
what I wanted.' She laughed ornamentally, without bitterness. ‘I just did as my father said.'

‘You don't regret that?'

‘No . . . no. Then I went to Kiev and studied to teach computer technology. It's a safe job.' She said wistfully: ‘It's the future.'

‘Your father wanted that too?'

‘Yes.' She tilted her head with the charm which was not quite hers. ‘But he died seven years ago.'

Her passions revolved around sporadic concerts of Vivaldi and Mozart, and flowed into the privacy of her reading. She nursed an aberrant love for Dostoevsky and an indifference to Tolstoy – she fluttered with embarrassment at this – and had read European classics in the old translations of Russian Parisian immigrants: ‘They wrote a cleaner language.' She had long ago devoured Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn in
samizdat,
and had developed an obsession for science fiction and fantasy.

‘But it's strange,' she said. ‘Nobody seems to read any more. Before, Tashkent was full of cultured people. But not now. Maybe life has become too hard, I don't know.' As a young girl, perhaps, she had entertained the illusion of a world run by cultivated men, and it had left behind this melancholy afterglow. And when she said ‘No, I've never married,' she did so as the waif on the train from Samarkand had done, as if at thirty all possibility were gone. ‘My parents were very strict. It wasn't easy to meet men.'

Yet she announced this coolly, unsoured. As the veil of stylised sweetness slipped a little with the ease of conversation, I thought I discerned in her the scrupulous, rather particular and intelligent nature which some men might fear. It was a gentle but not a generous face, the eyes alert and only conditionally giving: a face discreet and a little sad.

She toyed with her dress collar. Five friends were precious to her, she said: women who had cherished her during her elusive illness. ‘But many others have gone away, and live in Israel or even Spain. I had a lot of Jewish friends, and now they've gone. They were the most interesting here. My best friend left a year ago for Tel Aviv, and for months I wept . . . .'

Into this circle of female comradeship, I thought, the intrusion of men could be coarsely disruptive. I asked: ‘Will you leave too?'

‘No, I'm happy here,' she said, ‘although it's growing harder. If you're honest here, you're poor. It's becoming difficult for decent people to survive at all. You have to belong to a mafia. But I don't think the future will be very good anywhere.' A flutter of her hands dispersed it. ‘I think the whole Revolution was a mistake. We could have improved ourselves gradually, steadily, without that chaos. And now everything's hopeless with us, poor Russia. We've become an example to the world of what not to do, how not to be!' She smiled with ornate irony. Here Russia's spiritual mission had reached its tragic obverse: its failure had taught the world only a negative truth. ‘And think of the blood . . . .'

But it was hard, sitting beside her, to realise that the Revolution had happened and been undone at all, because she seemed to predate it. In her bleached, old-fashioned dress and reclusive frailty, she belonged in the country houses of Chekhov. Her Ukrainian ancestors, she said, had arrived here with an eccentric cousin of Czar Nicholas II, whose palace still decorated the city's centre. She should have been reclining there. She kept touching her wrist to her forehead. Perhaps convalescence was her nature, I thought. Talking with her, I had the fancy that the Revolution was still brooding below the skyline, that Lenin was waiting in Switzerland again, and the czar still on his throne.

The advance of suburbs and boulevards had eroded the old Moslem quarter, and left it under siege. Its insanitary tangle of clay walls and twisted tarmac, the tunnelled entranceways and secretive yards and roofs where spring tulips grew, had always been anathema to totalitarian rulers, and were often threatened with demolition. It was too hidden from them, too various and unaccountable. But the 1966 earthquake which ravaged the modern town had left this subversive warren eerily intact. Its beams and walls had merely shuddered a little, shed a skin or two of dust, then subsided.

I explored it fitfully. Its derelict mosques were starting into life again, but humbly. In cemeteries murmuring with willows and doves, the gravestones were inset with photographs of a severe, portly people, who flaunted Soviet service medals but were buried under the Islamic crescent.

I strayed into the courtyard of the Imam Bukhari medreseh, the highest seat of Islamic learning in the country. It was soft with apple and persimmon trees. Three years before it had been permitted twenty-two students. Now they numbered 300 youths who devoted their days to the Koran and the Traditions, the study of Arabic and Islamic law, with a little mathematics and English. I peered through the classroom doors. Arabic grammar was scratched over the blackboards. In the language laboratory the cassette-players were all broken, and the desks tufted with snapped wires. Poppies sprouted through the concrete of an abandoned volleyball pitch.

But a feel of leisured study prevailed, steeped in old certainties, the rhythms of a life denied for seventy years, and instead of apprehension I was filled by a fleeting nostalgia for this halflost faith in the scented garden, for the shy students with their clasped books who talked pleasantly with me under the arcades, for their conviction in an overseeing Father. There was no breath of the excluding anger which I had once encountered in pre-revolutionary Tehran.

By evening the men had gone away, and 500 women students flooded into the courtyard. Thin veils snowed their hair and shoulders. It was the end of term. One girl – a pretty teenager whose veil slipped from her curls – incanted a prayer of thanks to God and to her teachers, while her father stood beside me and wept with pride.

In the residence of the Grand Mufti, the galleries murmured with wimpled secretaries and delegations. A throng of several hundred men and women crowded the central hall for the announcement of their pilgrimage to Mecca. Thousands would go eventually, where a few years before barely a pilgrim had been released.

I lodged a plea with the Mufti which I feared would be refused. In his library, I knew, was reputedly the oldest Koran in the world. It had belonged to the caliph Othman, third of Mahomet's successors. In AD 655 he was murdered in Medinah, and it had fallen blood-stained from his hands at the
aya: ‘And if they believe even as ye believe, then are they rightly guided. But if they turn away, then are they in schism, and Allah will be thy protection against them
.' Soon afterwards the adherents of the fourth caliph Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, were bloodily overthrown and the kinsmen of Othman succeeded him, and from that time there began the deep Sunni-Shia rift in Islam.

I waited uncertain in the library courtyard, where children were shaking mulberry trees. After three hours the squelch of the young fruit underfoot announced the librarian, a middle-aged man with a spade beard. ‘You have a camera?' he demanded. ‘You have a recorder?'

He relaxed when I shook my head. He led me into a reading-room of baroque charm, where gilded pillars upheld a little gallery with a crescent of desks, and a staircase spiralled up. The painted ceilings shone delicate under a lanterned skylight, and in showcases along the walls glowed Koranic manuscripts of minuscule beauty. I admired them cautiously. The librarian's stare scoured me. Under his robe I heard the telltale clink of a key. Shamelessly I let drop my scant knowledge about the caliph's Koran, and translated the blood-stained
aya
into stumbling Russian. He said gruffly: ‘You know this?' But he was looking pleased, almost genial. Then he just said: ‘Come.'

An iron door opened in the wall, and we entered a tiny room. Behind us crept an old mullah from Urgench, whom I had befriended in the courtyard. The librarian backed away. In the wall before us hung a massive copper safe, fronted by thick glass. ‘Our holiest book.'

And there it was. It resembled no other Koran that I had seen. It bore no illumination, nothing exquisite at all, but was strong and utilitarian, with the beauty of something primitive. It lay mounded on itself in separate pages: thick, deerskin leaves. The script flowed long and low over them, like a fleet of galleys going into battle. The strokes were broad and strong. They belonged to the harshness of history, not the embroideries of faith.