The Lost Heart of Asia (33 page)

I heard craven excuses dropping from me. ‘It's not my country's custom . . . .'

‘You don't eat mutton?'

‘Not like this . . . .'

I felt a hypocrite. These men gluttonously acknowledged what they were eating, whereas my sensibilities had been manicured. But they did not mind. Sherali opened another bag and poured out a mound of moist, rather bitter
haloumi
for me. Then they upended the sheep's skull and dug their fingers into the cheeks and brains. It was grey, soft meat. They sucked their hands luxuriously. Even Oman, after fruitlessly offering round our tuna, settled down to cram his mouth with filmy morsels. Sadik tried to dig out the eyes with his penknife, and snapped the blade. Sherali levered one up with a fork and popped it joyfully into his partner's mouth. I heard Sadik's teeth crunching the eyeball. ‘These are wonderful!'

‘I've heard.'

Within five minutes the head was stripped to a
memento mori.
It looked hopelessly reduced, like a fossil. Its spirit seemed to have transmigrated into Sherali and Sadik. Their tongues caressed their lips in remembrance, and they grinned collusively at one another, as if they had shared the same woman. Their business partnership was rooted in childhood friendship, which the war had not yet disturbed. Uzbeks still numbered one quarter of Tajikistan's populace. Uzbek troops, alongside Russians, had even been called in to shore up the
status quo.

‘Me and Sadik never faced anything like this before,' Sherali said. ‘Some people resent our friendship now. Nationalists. But we'll keep on together.' Yet they were starting to feel threatened. Their self-conscious pledge of comradeship might be the first sign of its disintegration. ‘Who would ever have thought the Soviet Union would fall the way it did?' The war brought on Sherali's look of bewilderment. ‘Just one man brought it down . . .'

The searching sharpness of his features still prejudiced me to believe him more intelligent than Sadik with his pancake cheeks and dead eyes. But now Sadik said: ‘No, that empire was ripe for falling. Its own system did it. It was rotten.' Then he turned to me with his corrupt whisper. ‘What will you give me? You see my knife is broken. Do you have a knife?'

‘Only from Fergana.'

‘That will do. Anything from you . . . .' His stare never changed. He said: ‘Tell me, who takes more drugs, do you think, England or Tajikistan?' He injected his arm with a phantom needle.

‘I don't know.' But I wondered what was in his cigarettes.

‘I'm telling you, England does . . .'

I snapped: ‘But Tajikistan grows and exports them.'

‘That's just business.'

I was starting to hate him. I turned to the others, while his eyes tormented the back of my head. He began: ‘Who fucks more . . .?'

But Sherali was lamenting his country's deepening crisis. He did not understand it. Nothing but a quiet pragmatism fell within his understanding. ‘I'm a working man. I just want to feed my family, and get on with my living.'

Oman nodded. ‘Lenin at least said one good thing: “Politicians are all prostitutes!'” The vodka was out, and his eyes had started their sweating. ‘Just think. Here we all are – Uzbek, Tajik, English – and we're all friends! Why can't it always be like this? Why can't . . .?' Then the fatal bottle passed between us, and the toasts started their rounds, and set in train grandiloquent musings. So, in this close room under the cleansing mountains, we dropped into the recurring lament of travellers who find themselves released from race and class and context, and momentarily entered a heart's region freed from all differences.

But in the morning I found my knife had gone.

For 200 miles, as we made for the capital Dushanbe, the river prised apart the valley where streams of scarlet and ice flowed side by side. Nothing seemed natural. Fluffy clouds dangled in the mountains, as if hung up for a court masque. The snow-peaks stacked above green hills, and the crimson gash of river-beds drew us through a country of white, emerald and synthetic red, as if the national flag (a similar confection) had bled over the landscape. From time to time our track still disintegrated into a rutted causeway where an avalanche had passed, and tilted up putty-soft scarps or squeezed to a sliver under cliffs. But little by little the snow withdrew, until only the Pervogo ranges far to the south shone white.

In their villages of clay and brushwood, the Tajiks walked in harlequin colours and a touch of defiant grace. Longest settled of all the Central Asian peoples, they had been driven from the Zerafshan valley and into the mountains by Arab and Turkic invasion almost thirteen centuries ago. They had intermarried with Mongoloids, but an Iranian physiognomy prevailed, and from village to village the faces changed. Some were inbred and delicate. They showed long, European features and heavy noses. Sometimes the hair curled russet or auburn above their high brows, and their faces shone with blue or green eyes. All the colour which had drained out of the Kirghiz towns returned on this side of the mountains. Even the old men glittered in gold-threaded quilts and bright-hued skull-caps: biblical patriarchs with dripping beards, who crouched still limber on their haunches by the wayside. Children sported embroidered shirts and dresses, and the lean, handsome women walked in fiercely brilliant gowns with their headscarves tied piratically around their foreheads.

Within a few months, during open war between Moslems and the old Communist regime, this secluded valley would be invaded by its clan rivals from Kulyab to the south, and swept by Russian tanks, and the refugees would be pouring from the villages in their thousands on the way to Afghanistan. But for the moment the land dropped westward in hushed apprehension. Beneath us the river inscribed idle hieroglyphs over its flattened bed. Sometimes now it measured half a mile across, while a hundred tributaries meandered to meet it, carving up the hills like cake. Then the flow would narrow to a flood, slap-ping itself into rapids, until it left our road altogether, plunging south, and we followed a milder river towards Dushanbe. The country softened round us. Its lower slopes were tinted with vetch and rock roses. Their scent gusted over the road. Orchards filled with yellow grosbeaks and the darting of blue-green rollers, and a booted eagle coasted across our path.

We limped towards the outskirts of Dushanbe, nursing two broken brake-discs. Vigilantes and armed police flagged us down as we entered, and searched us. Armoured cars waited in the alleys nearby. Beyond them the city had gone unnaturally quiet. Scarcely a car moved in the streets. Ranks of plane trees muffled and darkened every avenue, where a few trams and taxis jittered. Fear of earthquake had built the city low, and its offices and apartments lined the boulevards with three-storey façades washed in faded buff and blue. Here and there some sop to oriental taste had sanctioned a rank of pointed arches or a filigreed balcony. But there was an old Russian feel of life rotting away behind appearances. The municipal rose-beds seemed to be blooming in solitude, for themselves, and the pavements looked too wide for the pedestrians. In this half-Moslem ambience, the sexes walked separately, and the slender women still wore their native brilliance. But people hurried in preoccupation, mostly alone. Nobody raised his voice. When men met, the eloquent language of Moslem handshakes – the cordial double-clasp or the perfunctory touch, all the graded signs of friendship or distrust – was magnified in the tense streets. The hovering mountains bathed them in cold air, and turned the avenues into gleaming culs-de-sac.

This was the ghost-city which the Russians were leaving. Before 1917 it had been a small village, but with the arrival of the railway in 1929 the Bolsheviks had made it their own, and until recently only half its people were Tajik. In common with all Central Asia, its factory workers and the bulk of its specialists had been Russian. But every month they were streaming home in their thousands, and now, during an armed stand-off between government and opposition, a paralysis had settled over the city. Its appearance of peace was only the stillness of suspense or the stagnation of closure. Along its avenues, in the serenely banked façades of flats and businesses, windows were boarded up or blocked, balconies sagging and crevices leaking weeds. In half-abandoned newspaper kiosks the familiar Western icons – posters of karate and bodybuilding heroes, Pink Floyd, prints of Solzhenitsyn selling for three roubles – looked foolish or redundant.

I walked along the old Lenin Prospect (renamed Rudaki Prospect after the Tajik national poet) which made a dog-leg through the city's core. It was suffocated in chenar trees eight deep, but empty of traffic. In Independence Square, the previous month, a huge demonstration of Moslems and liberals had threatened to assault the Supreme Soviet in session. After a fourday protest, fluttering with green Islamic flags, they had forced the resignation of the whole Presidium. Close by in Freedom Square, two days later, a counter-demonstration had seethed round the president's office shouting pro-Communist slogans. The pink and white government buildings still shone surreally in front of us, flying the national flag; but opposite, the Lenin colossus raised in 1960 had left behind only a plinth of shattered marble.

Within a few months the old regime would reassert itself; but already it was dressed in Tajik colours, and paid lipservice to a mild Islam. The certainties of doctrinaire Communism were gone. Instead the city was sinking into a chasm of nationalism and tribal feud. I wandered it in ignorant misgiving, and occasionally, where a Marxist memorial or a slogan remained, was touched by foolish nostalgia. In the contemporary chaos, these statues immortalising work and learning seemed invocations to a more enlightened time, and the heraldry of Communism – the slogans urging men to paradise – imbued with some lost knowledge and even a moral sweetness.

In the windows of the Firdausi Library busts of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Gorky mingled with those of Persian and Tajik classical writers. A few years before this would have smelt of insidious colonialism: the absorption of native heroes into the Russian body. But now they looked innocently ecumenical, and echoed with ruined ideals. So I forgot for a while the corruption and evangelistic cruelty of the old empire, which had handed these people the poisoned chalice of a split identity, and understood those who wanted the Soviet Union back.

In the library next day, I roamed among the deserted stacks where old, permitted titles mingled with fledgling new ones. Lenin's
On the Defence of the Socialist Motherland
and
Can the Bolsheviks retain state power?
nestled beside D.H. Lawrence's
The Rainbow.
Only Lenin's hypocritical tract
The Rights of Nations to Self-determination
rang with irony.

‘All this will go up in flames soon,' said a Russian teacher hunting the card-index beside me. ‘These people are ripe for burning books.' She was stout and bitter, with cropped hair. She worked in a small town in the hills, an enclave of mines and factories which had once been full of Russians. ‘The Tajiks are hopeless,' she went on. ‘They just trade and trick. All merchants. Our Russian technocrats have already mostly gone, and the others are following – factory-workers and teachers. Everybody.'

‘You have no Tajik friends?'

‘I do, but this nationalism is growing every day. You can feel it all round you.'

‘And your school?'

‘Our classes are down from thirty to fifteen, and all amalgamating. Everybody's planning to go. And I'll go too, in the autumn, back to the Ukraine. People work properly there.' Her face quivered with memory, perhaps too rosy. ‘It's good in the Ukraine.'

In my hotel the only other foreigners were Afghan merchants and students. Oman said they were trading in opium and heroin, which would find its way through the Baltic ports to the West. On the tarmac outside, a drift of youths was selling bootleg brandy and French (they said) champagne, and fraternising with a slovenly troupe of police. From time to time they moved in and out of the lobby in a tremor of secrecy and suspicion. Their eyes raked the doors for custom, while the handshakes and embraces rose to a crescendo. Friends or rivals would be plucked aside for a sudden confidence, and Oman would catch fragments: ‘ . . . seventy roubles . . . I can manage . . . ninety . . . as a favour . . . .' Then the restless circles and pairs would reconvene, and their conspiracies start all over again. ‘My friend . . . tomorrow . . .
dollars . . .?'

The sight of the hotel terrace made Oman sick. Twenty years before, he had finished his military service in Dushanbe as the building was being completed, and a tile had dropped off the roof and killed his closest friend.

While I was rambling the streets, he would set off to view the tea-houses and barracks of his past, but always returned a little melancholy. There was nobody left whom he knew, and the friends he remembered were mostly tragic. One had shot himself; another was killed when his tank tipped over a ravine. Then there was the Polish woman he had loved: a ravishing creature, he said, but married. Every night, while her husband was away, he had escaped the barracks to visit her, and returned before dawn. Even now her memory turned him maudlin. ‘I still know where she lived. Perhaps she's still there. She was so beautiful, like a dream to me. I was just twenty-two.' His fingers clasped and unclasped the remembered body. ‘But she would be fifty-three now, and our women don't last like yours do. So I think I'll not go. I'll keep her memory.' But he looked miserable.

In the evening he would often winkle out scraps of meat from some half-closed shop, and would grill them into tough kebabs in the hotel yard, and brew up tea. But at other times I returned to find him slumped in tousled gloom among discarded newspapers and cigarette stubs, drunk. Then we would open our iron rations of tinned fish and calamary, and I would reassure him that we would soon be gone, for he was growing bored.