The Lost Heart of Asia (29 page)

Then we were out again in chastened sunlight, on the edge of Shachimadan, and were soon lounging in a tea-house under willows by the river. Oman ordered up
lagman,
a soup which he loved, thick with noodles and treacherous flecks of mutton fat. He had never been to Shachimadan before, but he had heard of it for years, he said. Everybody had. It had been renamed Khamzabad by the Russians, and was sacred to a Communist saint, Khamza Niyazi, a poet and playwright devoted – as propaganda ran – to the ideals of the Revolution. Moscow had canonised him as the founder of modern Uzbek literature, but he was murdered here in 1929 by reactionary mullahs (it was said) and entombed gloriously in the town's heart.

‘But that Khamza fellow . . . .' Oman slurped dismissively at his soup-bowl. ‘My uncle was at school with him, and everybody knew how he chased girls. A playboy.' He flickered his hands back and forth, regulating a procession of eager women. ‘History may say one thing, but people remember another. He was talented all right. I've read some of his stuff, and heard his plays. But not
so
talented.' He did not qualify for Oman's pantheon, alongside Dostoevsky and Jack London. ‘Middling, I should say. His characters are black and white, as the Soviets wanted them to be.' He went on robustly: ‘But in their hearts people know that reality is not like that, that life is different. When it's true, they recognise it. There are many people in all of us.'

These thoughts fell from him not as learnt platitudes, but urgently, like personal discoveries, with a kind of warm ruefulness. ‘We are both black and white, aren't we?' He dug his thumbs into his twin shirt pockets, as if exhibiting himself. ‘There are two Omans.'

‘Many Omans,' I said. I had already witnessed six or seven: the inveterate merchant, the embittered drunk, the tea-house philosopher, the poignant friend, the sentimentalist, the hedonist.

‘Each of us is too many people.' He tipped the last noodles down his throat, as if this might homogenise him. He asked suddenly: ‘Are you an atheist?'

The word always hurts. ‘I don't understand about God . . . .'

He said: ‘Nor do I. And how can we know?'

‘But you're a Moslem.'

‘Of course!' His culture, he said, was Moslem, and in this person he prayed to God. But another Oman was cynical, and could not locate Him.

We talked with sudden abandon about the inability to know, and I realised that at some time he had suffered over this. Then grandiose clichés turned into confidences. If we had been drinking, this would have explained us. But there were only the dregs of the
lagman
soup, and cups of green tea, and the whispering river. We ruminated sentimentally over the limitations of the five senses, and the possibility of there being hundreds or thousands more. We complicated Time into different stereotypes. Perhaps it was not linear at all, but circular, or could be opened anywhere like a book, and so on. But the mystery, we agreed, was that we were here now, with the eternities of death and prenascence in front and behind us, and that we were conversing under these willow-trees, drinking green tea (which was getting cold) and munching some suspect meat pancakes.

Oman had a theory that the best of our thoughts and feelings survive us, and go to heaven. ‘Heaven is a bank,' he announced. ‘What isn't put in gets spent and vanishes.' He saw my look of doubt. ‘Well, when we die, we'll know . . . or perhaps we won't know.' He sighed. ‘And I will look up from the Moslem hell and say Colin, help me, and perhaps you in the Christian heaven will tell God something, and He'll say Come up, Oman . . . .'

This unlikely script filled us with lugubrious affection, smiling at each other over the chasm of faith and race. We poured each other the cold tea, and drank to some future. A few bats darted in the failing light.

‘But perhaps we aren't immortal,' Oman rambled, ‘and only our sons will continue us.' He stopped. ‘But you haven't got one.'

‘No,' I said.

‘And mine are useless.' The light had suddenly gone out of him. It was as if somebody had thrown a switch. ‘I tell my eldest, if you don't work you'll have to do manual labour, and he just laughs. I say I'll chuck him out, but he doesn't believe me.'

And what of his mysterious middle son, I asked. Where had he gone?

I had no time to regret the question, although an instant's silence fell. Oman's face had taken on its punch-drunk defensiveness. ‘He was by another wife. He lives with her. We separated years ago.'

‘You had two wives together?'

He stared expressionlessly into his tea. ‘Yes, with us that happens. I was rich. I kept two. Our Moslem law sanctions it. My marriages were celebrated and blessed by a mullah. It's nothing rare.' But he spoke with distant regret. ‘In Tashkent our mosques were never really closed. They went on working secretly. People were buried by mullahs too. The Communists here just copulated with Islam.' He gestured obscenely. ‘Most of our officials were Moslems at heart, after all.' He said almost in afterthought: ‘I married neither woman for love. I married because my friends had. I was already twenty-six when I took Sochibar, and my parents favoured it, and I wanted children.' He sounded tired. ‘But not for love.'

It was almost night. The lights of Shachimadan winked along the river ahead of us. Oman said: ‘I think our law will come to authorise polygamy. It already turns a blind eye. Our women wouldn't stand for the veil, but in marriage law they'd be offered a choice of contracts.'

I enquired if the choice might include several husbands.

But Oman did not smile. He sensed some buried criticism. He only said, for some reason: ‘The world is soiled.'

After nightfall a caretaker took us into a deserted holiday camp, where beside the rustling stream, under overhanging mountain-flanks, a few damp huts stood, and lamps tilted in the grass. In the suddenly cold night, sitting out on a broken-down verandah, we shared a biblical picnic of bread and fish. The caretaker was young and cheerfully defamatory. People came here in late summer, he said, with their vodka and shashlik meat and Russian mistresses, to escape the lowland heat, and nobody thought about Khamza, the mediocre playwright, any more.

‘People still climb the hill where he's buried, of course, but they'll demolish that grave in time.' He wiped it away with one hand. ‘I saw a film once portraying how he was stoned to death by mullahs. But the Communists made it up. He wasn't stoned to death at all.' His cigarette flared in the dark. ‘There are plenty of old men in the town who remember those times well, and they say two men came up to Khamza in the street and put a knife into him. They were the brothers of a girl he'd violated, I think . . . .'

He gave a heartless chuckle. For a while we gazed down towards the sound of the river, while he and Oman shared a cigarette. A gaunt moon rose, and shed a mortuary pallor into the camp. The glade was littered with decayed ovens and latrines, decomposing tables and stools, and the drunken lamps. Above the torrent I could make out a range of wooden kiosks, like parodies of Moghul water-pavilions.

‘There are two graves for pilgrims on the hill now,' the caretaker said. ‘There always were, but the other was secret. Stalin levelled it. They say it's the grave of Ali, cousin of the Prophet Mahomet, and are rebuilding it.'

I asked: ‘You think that's true?'

‘Oh, yes.' He gave a cynical laugh. ‘It's true for the moment.'

A clear dawn polished all the shapes which night had blurred. The mountain angled in the valley above us forked down in a razor pyramid to the river. Its snow looked a hand's touch away. In the town's centre two streams glittered out of their heights and collided at the base of the hill where Khamza was buried. A carnival frivolity was about. Bazaars had broken out along the banks, and photographers had set up fanciful canvases of the hill, against which they could snap your picture with a live pea-cock. Oman, sighting the markets, cried in self-parody ‘Business, business!' and laughed light-heartedly, as if he were returning to somebody he had been years before. Then he disappeared to bargain, while I made the ascent alone.

A flight of monumental steps scarred the hill from base to summit, ascending out of a faded park of street-lamps and weed-sown fountains. I wandered up uncertainly. Beneath me, a naked rush of mountains filled the valley, and nut-brown houses bunched along its river. The stairway lifted into quiet. Far below, from a children's playground, a ferris-wheel rotated against the snow-peaks.

Directly above me, at the head of the steps, sprang up a Soviet memorial to victory over the
bosmachi
in 1921: a hectoring cluster of brandished rifles and fists. Cynically insulting, it had been raised here in the heartland of the conquered, to wring out gratitude for their own defeat. And it had been sited, with cruel bravado, to extinguish the memory of the tomb of Ali, which Stalin had demolished just behind.

But he could not demolish a myth, of course. Even during persecution the tomb had been covertly rebuilt, destroyed again by Communist officials, clandestinely rebuilt again, destroyed again, on and on. Now a gang of bricklayers was replenishing it with a domed enclosure, where the great plastered grave was waiting under sheets, and across the hill-crest a multitude of old men perched on tea-house divans, proffering blessings, and praying.

One of these, the historian of the place, spread a quilt for me and motioned me beside him. He was benign with authority as he muttered a brief prayer. Ebony beads twined in his fingers. Then he recounted to me the biography of Ali, how he had been favoured by the Prophet with the hand of his daughter, and become the fourth of the caliphs of Islam. But after this, the old man meandered out of history. He never mentioned that Ali had been murdered by a heretic at Kufa, or how the powerful Ommayad clan secured the caliphate to themselves and slaughtered his younger son; and he ignored the tragic schism which had flowed from all this – how the Sunni had adhered to the Ommayad line of caliphs and almost thirteen centuries of their successors, while the Shia clung to Ali's martyred inheritance with a sleepless, rankling outrage to this day.

Instead the old man branched into a kindlier story. Somebody brought us bread and cloudy tea. He watched me with teacherly concern, assessing my attention. I stared back into a face swept by white bristles and smudged with a nose netted in red veins. But out of this steppeland visage the eyes shone out disconcertingly young. He spoke of Ali not with the harsh exclusiveness which I had encountered years ago in Iran and Iraq, but with reverent laughter and collusion and wry smiles. Ali had indeed been murdered in Kufa, he said, but blamelessly. Besides his own two sons, he had adopted a third, a little orphan. His palms patted the air at the height of a three-year-old. ‘Already God had told Ali that he must die while he was reading the scriptures, so when he wished for heaven he paid this boy to kill him in the mosque.'

The old historian beamed with the simple beauty of this, in which nobody was at fault.

I asked: ‘How did he come to be buried here?'

‘Well, the orphan made a poor job of it.' He shook his head in regret. ‘Ali lay dying for four days, while seven pall-bearers descended on Kufa, all wanting to carry the body to separate parts of the empire. Each one was told to dig a grave and pray, and that in the morning one would be favoured. And in the morning all seven graves contained his body!' The old man's mouth gaped open at this multiplication of Alis. ‘So each pall-bearer took him away to different destinations, and he is buried in all these places.'

He recounted this untroubled, with an easy acceptance of miracle, secure in the imprimatur of half-remembered books. So Ali, he said, was buried here, and in Jidda too, and Afghanistan and Kufa and Almaty and Najaf and . . . he could not remember the last.

Then, as if shifting into some other element, he said: ‘But personally I know that the real body is here. In 1918, when the tomb was desecrated, a villager witnessed it — I heard this myself from that man's son. He saw the shin-bone of Ali sticking out of the rubble, and it was twice as tall as a man!'

Out of his wintry bristles the eyes sparkled artlessly. He was filled now by a gentle irrefutability. I smiled back at him. I wondered where his strange learning had come from, and who he was. These saints' tombs attracted an underworld of Sufis, I knew. The Communists had feared them. Sufism posited a world which they could not touch: a migration back into the heart. It was, in its way, profoundly subversive. But the old men scattered across the hillside might have been typical of it: private, benevolent, introverted.

I asked: ‘Is this a place for Sufis still?'

Outside cities, the word had usually evoked bewilderment. But the historian's mouth quivered in a crescent of disordered teeth. ‘Yes, it always was. There are still Naqshbandi here.' He saw my quickened interest. ‘If you were a Moslem, I would teach you how they pray and what they do, and how we tell our prayer-beads.' His grammar had slipped painlessly into the truth. The beads fidgeted in his hand.

‘So it's secret . . . .'

‘It is not exactly secret, but we don't speak of it.' He said apologetically: ‘Only if you become a Moslem, I could tell you about these things. But . . . .' – he suddenly roared with laughter – ‘first, you'd have to be circumcised! ‘

We guffawed uncouthly together. He looked uncannily as I would have expected of a Naqshbandi: a timeless innocent, lit by those unsettling eyes. For a while we sat there while storm-clouds dragged over the mountains, and the blue sky was ripped away. Then I got up and thanked him. He said: ‘This place is holy now. That's why they call it Shachimadan, “King of Men”, again. There is no Khamzabad any more. Khamza, who was he? I don't know him.'

I crossed slowly to the poet's tomb: a temple built in the same red granite as Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square, but coated in Islamic plasterwork and pierced by Arabic arches. The devotional benches spaced around it were all empty. Dandelions pressed between the steps. Inscribed on the gravestone, one of Khamza's verses suggested that Oman's verdict on him had been accurate (‘Not quite as good as Jack London'). Nearby stood one of those old-style Soviet museums which are collections of photo-graphs and propaganda. The manner of his death was clouded over, but laid at the door of ‘the evil forces of obscurantism'.