The Lost Heart of Asia (30 page)

‘Only three or four people saw him die,' a man told me in the derelict camp-site that evening, ‘and my father was one of them. It happened after Khamza had announced that the tomb of Ali should be demolished. Then the mullahs and the people gathered to protest, and a great anger started up. But he wasn't stoned to death at all. He ran away down an alley and collided with a blind beggar, a giant, who just strangled him with his hands. My father saw this with his own eyes. But there are barely twenty men left who know of this first-hand, because the Communists shot a hundred and ninety people in retaliation for that one death, and the village was scattered. But that is the truth of it.'

Under louring storm-cloud I started to descend the hill past the grave of Ali, where the workmen were still tapping the bricks. Who really lies buried here is unknown: some early holy man, perhaps, or a pre-Islamic chieftain. Ali himself was probably entombed at An Najaf in Iraq, where the caliph Haroun er Rashid was supposed to have rediscovered his grave in 791.

By the time I reached the bottom the three monuments clustering the summit had paled back into their contending strangeness. They would not coexist for long, I guessed. The old divinity was returning, and all the works with which the Russians had hoped to stamp it out, or steal its power, must soon be swept away. The war-memorial, perhaps, would be the first to go, followed by the museum and tomb of the lecher-poet, leaving alone on the summit the grave where the stout, rather naïve Ali of history was being turned into a saint.

At the hill's foot, photographers were still buttonholing passers-by to pose before their canvases, while the peacocks screamed alongside. Each backdrop showed a fairy-tale version of the hill. Toy mountains sprouted behind the domes floating on its crest, while steps cascaded beneath it to a jungly Eden of outsize tulips and an azure river. The real-life hill, meanwhile, stood in full view opposite: a mess of concrete and dead fountains. But nobody was being photographed near it. People were posing instead against these gaudy dreams. And perhaps it did not matter, I thought, as the first rain began to fall. Because the monuments on the hill were as dreamlike, in their way, as any picture could make them, and as little troubled by fact. They were memorials, rather, to the manipulation of minds and the corruption of history.

It was a hill of lies.

Next day the river accompanied us back into the Fergana plain, and by afternoon we were driving between blue-stuccoed houses into the silk town of Margilan, whose inhabitants had been so cruelly lampooned by Jura. I sensed a deepened Islam. But the little I knew of the town proved out of date. Where was the old fortress, I enquired? Its rubble lay under the central square, a man said. And where was the famous statue of Nurkhon, the first Uzbek woman to have cast away the veil (for which she was killed by her brothers in 1929)?

Oh, Nurkhon,' said the same man: he complied mesmerisingly with Jura's honeyed parody. ‘She was taken down a few weeks ago.'

‘Why?'

‘So that everything will be more beautiful.' His hand fluttered up to caress his heart. ‘You see, our times have changed. We used to have nothing. Now we have our freedom.'

‘So you pull down statues of women?' I was brewing up a Pygmalion affection for Nurkhon. ‘I thought the people of Margilan were milder . . . .'

‘Ah, we are.' Effete smiles suffused him. ‘We're a sweeter people than the others. We are more feeling. We believe more strongly in Islam. We wish everybody well.' His voice was a sugary glissade. ‘We make no distinction between one race and another. We welcome everybody.'

‘Then why . . .?'

‘Because we need order,' he lilted. His smile was like makeup. ‘Stalin, I think, was a good thing, whatever anybody says. My father fought through the war for him and even took his picture. We need somebody cruel here now.' He went on in the same fastidious, courtly tone: ‘Cruelty is good for people.'

I said: ‘Your mosques would be shut down again.'

‘We don't need the mosques. I learnt my Islam from my father, and from old men in the tea-houses when I was a child. It was alive then, and we all listened.'

‘But . . . .' I faltered. This was like handling water, or the slithery local silks.

Our families here are everything,' he simpered. ‘We are each a little dynasty, all merchants.' His fingers touched his heart again. ‘They say we can sell anything.'

An enormous family of merchants and teachers, to whom a Turkic friend in England had given me an introduction, lived near Namangan in the countrified suburb of a town famous for its craftsmanship in steel. Oman and I arrived unheralded, and found ourselves peering into a labyrinthine courtyard, thronged with fig and persimmon trees and traversed by a rivulet where roses bloomed. Somewhere in this compound's heart lived an ancient progenitor, whose sons, grandsons, nephews and their families inhabited the households all around in a maze of kinship which I never unravelled.

A suave English teacher named Hakim, the youngest of this brood of sons, ushered us into his reception-room, where a rosy wife bustled and children marvelled at us through beautiful, dark-lashed eyes. Hakim spoke a bookish English. My friendship with Fatima – a distant cousin whom he had scarcely seen – and my penetration to his home filled him with fitful amazement. Periodically his face would loosen into a rather sensuous concourse of alert eyes and mobile lips, and he would breathe out: ‘How remarkable!'

All day and far into the night Oman and I sat in one of those big rooms whose pastel-painted walls and ceilings were familiar now, while a procession of relatives, flushed out by the news of our coming, trooped in to share our pilau and tea. Grave, open-faced men, flecked by moustaches and accompanied by silent wives, settled around us in ceremonious enquiry, dignified in their dark jackets and skull-caps. Sometimes they resembled a meeting of shy farmers, their thick hands splayed over their knees or tunnelling discreetly into the pilau. Their eyes shone in passive scrutiny. Formally they asked about Fatima, who began to take on a half mystical presence among us. To many of them she was only hearsay, but they grew sad when I told them she had parted from her husband, became intrigued by her car and flat, and revived when they heard she was succeeding in journalism. Sometimes, under the pressure of their questions, I found myself reinventing her to please them. I expressed her enthusiasm for returning to Uzbekistan, but I did not know when this might be. I enquired after babies and school diplomas on her behalf. They answered with sober pride. But yes, I said, she was well, she had not forgotten them – and their faces split into ranks of silvered teeth.

For a brief half-hour I slipped into the courtyard under the persimmon trees, where a niece of Hakim found me, and we sat on one of the throne-like Turkic benches. In the branches above us a tame quail sang in a cage. The girl was seventeen, and physically adult, but her face looked empty of experience, like an infant's. She was studying to enter university, she said, and wanted to specialise in English, but she was too shy to speak it to me.

What would she do with this English, I asked?

‘I'd like to be an interpreter,' she replied, smiling at me, ‘for the KGB.' Her legs swung childishly. The prismatic trousers of
Atlas
silk had eased a little up her slim, unshaven calves. ‘I think that would be interesting work.' The KGB was just a job, an institution which had always been there, like the army or the local collective farm. ‘But I think they don't often take women, they prefer men.'

‘What else could you do?' I asked anxiously. ‘What do you enjoy?' It was like talking to a ten-year-old.

‘I like tennis.'

‘Tennis?'

‘Yes. You know, at a table. And I'd like to travel. I love travelling.' But she had not ventured beyond Bukhara, and when she asked where I had been her gaze settled on me with a soft wonder. ‘That's what I want to do: travel. I don't want to marry before I'm twenty-five. Twenty-five is late, but I won't sit at home all my life.'

‘Not a good Moslem wife!' I was beginning to believe in her future.

She wrinkled up her nose. ‘I don't go to the mosque. That's only for men. I don't like that sort of thing.'

‘You wouldn't wear a veil?'

‘
No
!' It was a hushed, violent monosyllable. ‘I think that's revolting.'

At nightfall, from every house in the compound, the men converged on our reception-room. While Oman and I occupied the place of honour opposite the door, they circled out from us in a cross-legged ring, like a pow-wow of tribal elders, and a timehonoured banquet unfolded. No woman was present, but even the young boys ate with us, and from time to time Hakim rocked a wooden cradle where his infant son lay tied with scarlet sashes. From a makeshift catheter attached to the baby's penis, a potty in the cradle's base was filling with urine. He lay there immobile as a mummy, howling.

The men, meanwhile, touched their faces in self-absolution, and launched into drink. More insidiously than any propaganda, I thought, vodka had leaked into their culture and undermined their Islam. They toasted in the Russian way, the cups emptied wholesale down their gullets – pledges to peace, to Fatima, to their arrival in London one day (I tried vainly to imagine this), and to my safety – before dipping their
lepeshka
bread into bowls of oily mutton, or seizing handfuls of strawberries.

Then the conversation darkened. They spoke of troubles in neighbouring Namangan, where women had been browbeaten to accept the veil and self-appointed vigilantes had administered Islamic law, parading petty criminals. Recently the police had moved in and arrested fifty of these zealots, they said, and a good thing too.

‘They were only a few hundred,' said a young man. ‘A lot of them were people without work, I think, bitter people. Youths.' He looked only a youth himself.

‘They wanted to create their own power-block,' said a merchant, ‘their own mafia.'

‘Just mafia!' Oman cried. The word always electrified him. ‘We don't want them! What we need is business. Freedom to do business!' I dreaded this. Vodka turned him voluble almost at once. Two or three toasts, and he was throwing his arms about and discharging a battery of theories and platitudes. ‘Islam wasn't meant to be like that!' he clamoured. ‘Where is it written in the Koran that women have to wear veils? It isn't, it isn't!' He started punching the air. ‘It's not appearances that matter but the heart!'

The others began to look embarrassed while his voice mounted and his eyes swam with a fevered glitter, as if he might weep. They all agreed with him – they were nodding in stately unison – but he was snowballing into an uncontrolled passion which they mutely repudiated. They fingered their spoons and cracked nuts and looked a little away. Only when he subsided did they return to life. Then, with homespun decorum, they rejected fundamentalism and ‘the Iranian model'. They would follow ‘the Turkish model', they said. Their Islam would be their own, temperate and hospitable.

‘Our people aren't like the Iranians,' somebody said. ‘We think in a different way.'

They tacitly despised them. All that emotion, they implied, was unmanly. They settled back on their cushions.

‘In time we'll create our own system,' boomed a giant. A short beard fell from his chin like a tattered bib. ‘But at the moment, you see, we have no feeling about ourselves as a nation. History is the key, and the Soviets took ours away. We were sold a mass of Bolshevik stories, and nothing of our own. In secondary school, where I teach, the text-books devoted only two lines to Timur, the world conqueror.
Two lines!
And they just described him as rotten.' He spoke with gruff irony. He clenched his fists and said: ‘But now our books are being rewritten by Uzbek historians, who have proper access to the archives!'

I wondered how much truer these would be. The past here seemed to change all the time. It was impossible to foretell it. I wondered, too, how he had felt, teaching a certain truth one year, then overturning it the next. After
perestroika
, I asked, how had he faced his students?

It was a cruel question, but his jovial smile remained. ‘I just explained to them that the facts were unknown to me too! I hadn't known them either! But that now it was possible to know the truth, so we were starting again. What first opened our eyes, you know, was the invasion of Afghanistan. They say that nearly half the Soviet force came from Central Asia, and I believe it. Moslems ordered to fight their fellow-Moslems, Uzbeks against Uzbeks, Tajiks....'

Had they been sent, I asked, on some mistaken propaganda notion, or out of simple ignorance?

‘Ignorance,' a gaunt merchant intruded. His eyes flickered back and forth, as if he were missing out on some deal. ‘The Russians never learnt anything. Not from anybody.'

‘I don't know,' the history teacher said. ‘I'm afraid I don't know. But they were still sending us in long after the start. It made a terrible bitterness. My brother was one. Many just deserted, and are still living over there. And in the end people started refusing to fight.'

‘Refusing?' I asked. ‘Here in Central Asia?'

For the first time his face fell, and his smile vanished. In a tone of puzzled shame, he said: ‘No. Sadly, there were none here. The conscientious objectors were all Russians. They demonstrated in Moscow. But we . . . we just did as we were told.'

Then I thought of the paradox in these people: their mixture of rustic sturdiness and fatal acquiescence. Even in the last century travellers had remarked how they took on the protective colouring of whatever power was dominant. As my hand came to rest on the edge of the stilled cradle, I found myself wondering about this helplessness in which as babies they were bound for months, and a herd of Freudian dogmas lumbered into my head, drifted away . . . .