The Lost Heart of Asia (36 page)

But Enver was dreaming something different: a
jihad
which would rouse the Turkic regions of Asia and weld them into a Pan-Turanian empire from Constantinople to Mongolia. The moment he reached Bukhara he escaped the city, went over to the
basmachi,
and proclaimed a full-scale holy war against the Russians. Messengers rode out to every guerrilla leader, urging their unity. He secured the support of the exiled emir of Bukhara, and arms and personnel from King Amanullah of Afghanistan. Thousands of recruits poured in. A shock of early victories, and the capture of Dushanbe, swept him to a brief glory. He declared himself ‘Supreme Commander of all the Armies of Islam' and kinsman of the Caliph (through his wife), the legate of the Prophet on earth.

But now the battle-tempered Bolshevik war-machine steamrollered east against him. The ill-armed and disunited
basmachi
could not halt it. One by one their strongholds were overrun, and they melted away, while Enver's little army fell back on the Pamir foothills. His position was hopeless. He might have fled into Afghanistan, but flight was not his nature. Ten days before the end he wrote a farewell letter to his wife, saying that his men were being mercilessly pursued and could not adapt to defensive warfare. With it he sent a twig from an elm tree on which he had carved her name.

On 4 August 1922, while the Bolsheviks closed in, he celebrated Bairam with a handful of his closest followers in the village of Abiderya. Soon afterwards, as his outposts opened fire on the advancing enemy, he leapt into the saddle, drew his sabre and charged the Red machine-guns head on, followed by twenty-five companions. They drowned in a rain of bullets.

The Russians did not know whom they had killed. One of the dead, spattered by seven bullet-holes but still dapper in a Turkic jacket and German field-boots, was carrying papers and a small Koran. These they sent to Tashkent for identification, and left the bodies where they had fallen. Two days later a passing mullah recognised the corpse of Enver Pasha. The news spread. The villagers of Abiderya streamed out to bring his body back, and thousands of mourners appeared like magic out of the hills. He was buried in a nameless grave under a walnut tree by the river. He was just forty. Even now, it is said, on the anniversary of his death, the descendants of his comrades-in-arms come from as far away as Turkey to pay homage at his grave.

But confusion surrounded this story. Three years after his death an Austrian carpet-dealer, Gustav Krist, claimed to have spoken with the commander of the Red attacking force, who told him that Enver and his adjutant had escaped to a nearby spring, where Russian agents murdered them. Scouring my maps, I could find no trace of the old names. No Satalmis, where Enver wrote his last letter. No Abiderya, where he was interred.

For two days Oman and I threaded roads across the bare hills. In Kurgan Tube, soon to be war-ravaged, we came upon a giant mosque half-built. Its work-force of Moslem faithful, who had given their labour free, had sensed the coming storm and trickled away in fear, leaving the architect alone there, boasting of its future size, while it disintegrated round him. He had never heard of Enver Pasha.

The commander of the Red force had apparently told Krist that Enver was cornered near the town of Denau, and killed at the Aqsu spring nearby. We found the Denau fort circling its mound in a breached ring, and goats grazing in the town streets; but when we blundered up a track to the nearest Aqsu (the common Turkic word for ‘spring') its inhabitants met our questions with baffled frowns.

We took to badgering tea-houses along different roads. Every twenty miles or so we would stop off and question their habitués. Satalmis? Abiderya? Old men listened to us in puzzled confabulation, sitting comfortably in their tattered beards, and fingering scraps of bread. In the Tajik tea-houses our questions sometimes started up a gale of answers and counter-claims, which cancelled each other out. But in the Uzbek ones (for we were weaving between the two countries now) heads were scratched, moustaches tugged in sober rumination, and looks of honest vacancy appeared. Many claimed to know where Enver had fought. ‘But nobody knows where he was killed,' they said. ‘Somewhere up there in the mountains . . . .' Then tea-cups would be raised to pursed lips, brows would corrugate in surmise, and everybody's gaze drift to the east.

In a cloud of frustration, as we were driving south of Denau towards the Afghan border, we stopped at the local military commission. ‘These fellows know everything,' Oman said, and we marched brazenly in. A surprised Russian captain received us, grew interested, and telephoned an old comrade, who asserted that, yes, Enver Pasha was buried in the nearby village of Yurchi, with other
basmachi
in an unmarked grave.

We drove there in high hopes. On the edge of a deserted football-pitch dotted with cattle, we came upon the tomb of the regional Bolshevik commander: a concrete mound under an iron star. It was simply inscribed: ‘Licharov 1889-1924'. He had been killed two years after Enver.

Then we reached a hill overgrown by graves, with a tiny mosque below. Its ancient caretaker, lean and bright in a sky-blue gown and turban, ascended the cemetery before us on noiseless feet. A breeze sprang up and nudged white butterflies out of the scrub. A pair of rams' horns, old companions of prestige and death, curled on a post in shamanistic sorcery. To the west the mountains shone like Christmas decorations. The village spread below, and a thin canal.

We came to a pit on the lip of the hill. Thorn bushes were crowding into it. The old man stood on its brink. ‘I'm too young to remember that time,' he said. ‘I was only seven. But the people who guarded the graveyard before me told me what happened here. After Enver Bey's last battle the captured
bosmachi
were shot at the foot of the cliff below.' We peered over the hill's edge on to an empty track and a sprawling fig tree. ‘Then their bodies were thrown into this well. It was a hundred metres deep, so you can imagine how many of them! And they said that the body of Enver Bey was among them. That's what they said.'

Wind-blown thistles rasped against the headstones. ‘Do pilgrims ever come?' I asked.

‘People come.'

‘On the anniversary of the battle?'

He looked baffled. ‘I don't know when the battle was.'

I waded over the hill-crest through shin-high grass and cow-parsley droning with bees. Nothing fitted the official story. No river skirted the grave, and the only walnut tree shaded the mosque. The village, above all, had always been named Yurchi. Here was only the memory of an execution-ground. Enver Pasha, I now felt, had died farther east, in the Beljuan hills near Kulyab. But we could not go there. The region was sinking into war, swept by the killings which the Kulyab tribesmen would soon visit on the capital. As for the Yurchi mass grave, it only added another layer of enigma and confusion to the story.

I asked the man: ‘There was never a river below?'

‘Ah yes,' he said, resurrecting a phantom doubt, ‘there was a river here twenty years ago, instead of the canal. It forked beside the graveyard then.'

A call to prayer rose from the mosque below in a throaty wail, to which nobody answered. Then the only sound was again the scratching of the thistles against the stones.

As we neared the Afghan frontier, the mountains to our west and south sank into haze, and desert hills glared in their place. The air shimmered in a 110°F stillness which blistered the fields. Gangs of women were breaking the soil with spade-headed mattocks, or culling the cotton in blackened hands. Just north of Termez, where the Russians had built their bridgehead into Afghanistan, we swung into a sordid scrubland crossed by pylons and wasted canals. Beside us the Amu Dariya moved through a sliver of green, and Afghanistan lay flat and yellow in mist beyond. We turned north where a crimson river wound between mud-flats. The slopes reddened into angry mounds and ridges, and the yurts and pens of goatherds appeared. But after an hour we crested a watershed, the river had gone and a clear stream was flowing with us where cornfields dribbled round champagne-coloured hills.

Since leaving Dushanbe we had described a frustrated loop almost to Samarkand. The euphoria of being on the road again had evaporated days ago, and hours passed in silence. Our differences were suddenly exacerbated. Oman longed to speed home with the car radio yelling. For him only occasional bazaars punctuated the barren stretches in which his inexplicable companion contemplated scenery, talked with somebody useless, or wandered a ruin. He was pining after other companionship. Yet whenever we reached a hotel he regarded my desire for a separate room as wasteful and a little insulting, and I rarely achieved it. He did not want to be alone.

As for me, a long-festering irritation had risen to the surface, and Oman was suffering for it. The remorseless cupidity which surrounded me day after day had brought on intolerance. In the town streets the eyes raking over me saw only an assemblage of material possibilities – a watch, a pen, a chance of dollars – and I began to long for any disinterested curiosity or pleasure. And now this misanthropy spread to Oman. I bridled at his habitual cheeseparing in restaurants, and the monotonous cataloguing of inflation. He could not resist economy. Although I had given him a gift worth several times the cost of our journey, he was subtly absent whenever a bill had to be paid. The sums were always paltry, but they left me resentful.

In penitence now, belatedly, I record how costly life had become within two years: the price of a chicken had risen from four roubles to 300; a sheep from 300 to 5000; even a box of matches from one kopek to 1.30 roubles. Petrol had gone up 150 per cent in less than a year. Flour, cooking oil, butter and sugar were all rationed. Money was on everybody's lips, except mine.

Meanwhile, as Oman and I sipped
lagman
or munched
samsa
meat-balls in streamside tea-houses, our rambling talks, conducted in a clash of disorganised Russian, became sparser and more abstracted. And Oman's impatience to be home had been exacerbated by the gradual failure of the car. For over 200 miles between Termez and Shakhrisabz he nursed an overheating engine, until we were topping up the radiator with spring water every quarter hour. This deepening setback fired him into a new round of invective against crime – he thought he had been cheated by mechanics – until he burst out in favour of Islamic law.

‘Yes, I think it would be good here!' His voice had tensed to its self-hypnotised sing-song and his hands flew about the steering-wheel. ‘People don't understand anything else! You in Europe say that it's uncivilised, but civilisation is a
process.
It's gradual.' He lifted his levelled hand in a jagged procession of generations. ‘These people need to
fear.'
He was almost shouting. ‘It's the Russians who brought in this thieving and prostitution! I remember my father telling me that in his day nobody stole. Doors were left unlocked everywhere, even by jewellers! Then in the thirties thousands of Russians came down from Samara during the famine and ever since then Tashkent's been full of robbery.'

So it was all the Russians' fault. I felt the legend of his nation's purity growing before my eyes: the conviction that evil does not erupt from within, but is imposed from without. ‘Islamic law may be cruel,' he said, ‘but it wasn't that cruel. In the reign of the last emir of Bukhara, I've read, only eight or nine people were executed by being thrown from the Kalan minaret. I know it wasn't very nice, but it wasn't many.' Yet his face remained foolishly merciful. Once or twice he swerved on the road to avoid killing sparrows. ‘If only there were a thousand honest, intelligent and energetic people in Uzbekistan – just one thousand out of twenty million! – we'd be all right. But where are they? Where?'

As we ground to a halt in Shakhrisabz, where I had been happy two months before, he discovered that the engine was exuding water. ‘I think the cylinder block's gone,' he said. ‘It's a big bit of trouble.' He peered under the bonnet. ‘I'll have to find a lorry to tow us back to Tashkent.'

‘But that's over two hundred miles away.'

‘Yes.'

I watched his face for violence, but none came. Petty expenses and boredom turned him stingy or sad, but this disaster seemed to release something in him, as if he needed it. A strange calm welled up. He grew carefree, even buoyant. When I asked him how much the repair would cost, he shrugged and puffed across his palm, dissipating a mountain of roubles into the air. ‘Don't worry! It's not your problem. To hell with it. Let's eat!'

He was his old self. He paid for a lavish supper and talked about his pantheon of writers: Maupassant, Jack London, Rousseau, James Hadley Chase He spoke of happier, commercial travels, before the days of his disgrace: how as a young man he had taken ten lorries packed with melons into Siberia, and made a killing. Once he had flown 250 tons of fruit and vegetables to the Kamchatka peninsula. There hot geysers created natural saunas, and many Russian women, whose husbands were away fishing or with the battle-fleet, languished uncontrollably But all this, he said with a nostalgic sigh, happened in the golden Rashidov years of corruption.

We left the car in a yard labelled ‘Autorepair No. 35', and strolled at sunset under the gates of Tamerlane's palace, where Oman became lost in astonishment, and talked about the building's splendour without once mentioning its cost, and traced the swoop of swallows round the broken arches. Swallows had nested in the lamp-brackets of his home in Tashkent, he said, and Sochibar had planned to expel them. ‘But I threatened to expel her first!' He laughed like a boy. ‘And look how they built in those days! Six centuries ago! Our hotel will be gone in a few years, but this . . . .' He paused and glanced up. ‘But I think it needs repairs.'

I could not blame him for having repairs on his mind. ‘I prefer it unrestored.'

‘But imagine it completed! It would be magnificent! If I were a Rockefeller . . . .'