The Lost Heart of Asia (38 page)

During a lull the youth turned to me and said: ‘My father just talks. He only ever talks. My mother's wonderful. I owe everything to her . . . .' Oman, I knew, had deserted her long ago, and perhaps some buried guilt prompted his raging. ‘I don't need his help,' his son went on. ‘I don't need anybody helping me.
Nobody.'
And this too must have been Oman's trouble, that his authority was not embraced.

An hour later, as a new squall broke out, the men's voices jacked themselves up to a battering climax. A few Russian phrases laced the Uzbek clamour, so that from time to time a shred of meaning floated across to me. At first rival gangs of supporters had restrained Oman and one of his brothers-in-law from hitting one another. But now they all rose in fury and soon a battle was raging under the verandahs. At its root lay the dispute over Oman's sons, but other vendettas were rankling to the surface, and fighting had broken out among their supporters too, huge with grappling and fisticuffs, into which several wives threw themselves in a useless plea for peace, while the neighbourhood dogs set up a long, delirious baying.

The eldest son, whose birthday had slipped away at midnight, continued to look bored at the head of the empty table. I sat there too, an inviolable guest, surprised at my own peace. Once I thought of intruding; but I imagined their shame afterwards, and kept my seat. Meanwhile the fantasy of the extended family toppled in dust about me: its happiness, its pliant union. The figures dimly battling round the porch were raw with their own truth: parents who stop loving their children, ageing people who have no place.

Yet these families, I thought, more surely than Western ones, outlive their individual members, and cushion every loss. For better or worse, they superseded every loyalty outside, and often rendered public life shallow and nearly meaningless. And now Sochibar and others were breaking up the fights one by one, pushing and complaining at the men, while gradually the flung punches cooled to bravado and the pugilists disappeared through the gates still shouting their imprecations, and some grudging reconciliations and handshakes began.

As the last guest departed, the remaining women cleared away the china then folded the table-cloths over the debris of glass and cherry-stones and drained bottles. Meanwhile Oman was smoking, staring over the verandah into darkness. ‘I'm sorry, Colin. I don't know why they behave like that. They were defending my sons against me . . . .' He was black with misery. For a long time he went on lighting cigarette after cigarette. How these sons had wounded him, why fecklessness so infuriated him, I never really knew: whether his own hardship had turned him intolerant, or whether he feared to see in them some continuance of his self.

We were deprived of any long farewell. It was scarcely dawn, and our heads were reeling. On the station platform we clasped each other numbly.

More than any facial expression, more than the dejected warmth with which he said goodbye, or the pudgy arms embracing mine, I remember Oman's back as it dwindled towards the exit. Steeped in a dogged gallantry, it seemed to voice in its small span all his resistance to the unjust world. I felt at once relieved and bereft as it receded without turning into the crowds, and my train began slowly to heave itself northwards into the steppes of Kazakhstan.

I was entering the fringes of a formidable solitude. For almost a thousand miles Kazakhstan stretched northward in rolling grasslands and dust-coloured desert. For hours, on all sides, the land was the same: a treeless wilderness under a dead sky. It lay like a caesura in Asia's heart, as if this were the earth's natural state of rest. Here I was out of the tilled oases and into the nomadic hinterland, from where centuries of warrior-herdsmen had descended on the valleys of the south. Pink and yellow wild flowers still seamed the soil, but thistles were dying over the shallow slopes, and the passengers around me looked out on the sameness with a numb, unfocused gaze. Only occasionally the grassland became pimpled with volcanic-looking hills, where Hunnish, barrel-chested horses grazed, and nobody was in sight.

For more than a million square miles this opaque nation sprawled between China and the Caspian. It was the size of Western Europe. Its people had coalesced as late as the fifteenth century from Turkic tribes which had swept in from the northeast nearly 1000 years before, and from Mongol invaders, and the Russians found them sprinkled over their vast plains in three confederate hordes. As the czarist settlers inched towards the trading centres of the Uzbek valleys, and of Persia and China beyond, the Kazakhs fell first into alliance with Russia, then into servitude, until by the mid-nineteenth century they had all been overrun. But they had still been a nomad people, who circled with their herds over huge migratory paths, and Islam sat light on them. Even now, when most of them were grounded in State farms or cities, Moslem doctrine was buffered by ancestral custom, and a little unfamiliar. And the Russians' presence soon created deep changes. They settled as grain farmers, disrupting the pasturelands, and swelled to a majority in the region.

In time Kazakhstan became the waste-bin of Moscow's empire. A rash of labour-camps covered it, and Stalin transported whole unwanted peoples here during the Second World War. Then the Soviets chose it as their prime atomic and nuclear testing site. Entire regions were envenomed by radioactive dust, while the titanic factories of an antiquated heavy industry still suffocate others in a toxic fog.

This was the most Russified of Central Asian states. Its government, like most others, was composed of old Communists under a new name, barely irked by a mosquito-cloud of opposition parties. Yet now it had sponsored a drive towards privatisation which was biting deep in commerce and agriculture. Quietly, with independence, the climate was changing. The high native birth-rate had already lifted the Kazakh population just above the Russian, and the economic ties with Moscow were straining. The mineral and energy resources of Kazakhstan – the biggest deposits of iron, copper, lead and zinc in the old USSR – were alerting international business, and Western companies cautiously investing in its gas and oil fields.

Islam was only a gentle influence here, and the Russians and Kazakhs were interleaved by moderating layers of ethnic subgroups, some 20 per cent of the populace: a million Volga Germans, with exiled Crimean Tartars, Ukrainians, Poles and Meskhetian Turks. There were leftover Chechens and Ingush from the Caucasus, Uighurs who had fled China, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Karakalpaks, Greeks and a cloud of others. I shared my carriage with three Korean women, whose families had been deported from Russia's far east in the thirties. They were bound for Moscow, they announced, then whispered that they were continuing to Warsaw but were afraid of the mafia, since travellers to Poland were known to carry dollars or merchandise. ‘There's nothing but gangsterism now,' they said.

Beside me sat a genial Kazakh schoolmistress supervising an outing of fourteen-year-old Dungan girls – lissom, Mongoloid creatures, whose Chinese Moslem ancestors had migrated across the border a century before. They squeezed into the carriage to view me. They wore pink digital watches and cheap rings, and their nails were varnished. They all wanted to travel, then to become seamstresses. Under their fluent, high-pitched Russian, some scraps of Mandarin survived.

‘They had to learn Russian before,' said the teacher, ‘but now it's all changed and everyone wants to speak Kazakh. In business, in government.' She was a big, raw-boned woman with the inflamed cheeks of a cruel land. She looked as if she could bear anything. ‘My husband speaks beautiful Russian, and is valued in his institute, but he talks Kazakh only poorly. I know it's strange, but there are Kazakhs like that. And now the world's turned over. On feast-days and at weddings all the old customs are coming back – the horse-contests, bridal games and costumes, and the drinking of mare's milk.'

Yet it sounded artificial as she said it, as if her people had become sightseers. ‘What do younger people think?'

‘Oh, the young are all right!' she said. ‘It's the old who find it hard. My parents, for instance, don't like what's happened. My father remembers the war. Those were terrible times, and they bound us to the Russians. He fought at Stalingrad, and lost an arm.' Her jolly face cracked open on flashing teeth. ‘And in the famine of the thirties, during the repression, my parents almost died of hunger.'

‘Were they victimised?'

‘No, no, they were just ordinary people on a state farm. Everybody suffered . . . anybody who owned a few horses or camels might be liquidated. My mother remembers that time well, how people were eating anything – dogs, cats, their own shoes. One day she gave a little boy a handful of grain and he ate it too quickly and died in front of her. I think she remembers this often

Yet the old people went on feeling nostalgia for the past. Their bitterness, where it existed, fell far short of their sufferings. In 1920-23, towards the end of the Civil War, almost a million Kazakhs died of famine, and later the forced collectivisation was crueller here than anywhere in the Soviet Union. Between 1930-33 a ferocious and chaotic campaign to settle the nomads and reduce the richer farmers led to Kazakhs burning their grain and slaughtering their cattle rather than let them fall into alien hands. Almost half the livestock of the steppes vanished. Some people fled towards China, but only a quarter survived the trek; others were killed by the Bolsheviks. Out of a Kazakh population of only four million, over one million died of famine or dis-ease. By the end of the decade the Great Terror had decimated officials, teachers and a whole generation of early Kazakh Communists. Yet even now, with independence, people scarcely spoke of it. The tragedy had descended on them impersonally, perhaps, on native and Russian alike, and was scarcely scrutable.

The woman went on: ‘My father still thinks things were better then. He says people were kinder to one another, that they had more heart. But now it's each for himself. Everyone's just bent on business. But I don't think we're really a business people, not like the Uzbeks.' She let out a crackling laugh. ‘We're just used to rearing sheep!'

As I looked into her cheery Mongol face, it was simple to imagine her back in the grasslands where her people had roamed a generation ago. Yet she lived in a flat-block in Chimkent. ‘Those places are wrong for us. I'd like a garden, or a dacha, but we haven't the money.' Then she perked up, as if all pessimism offended her. ‘But we have our freedom now! We can speak the truth at last. That's the first, the most important thing: to speak the truth.' The common sense of this, which had eluded generations of her rulers, fell from her with the sturdiness of old platitude. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a cold chicken leg. ‘We will make progress now.'

Outside the window the grass had thinned over a plain dusted with saxaul. Only occasionally the land lifted to a far slope where sheep-flocks stuck like larvae, or a herdsmen's village fringed the railway with winter cattlesheds built in whatever lay to hand: fragments from dismembered trucks, old tyres, rusted bedposts. The solitary faces watching us pass seemed to replicate the featureless plain: a heartless waste flowing northward to Siberia.

I got out at the first town we reached. Turkestan was a poor, sleepy place, spreadeagled among dusty trees under a blistering sun. Tramping its streets and empty shops, I felt suddenly jaded and lonely. I wondered what Oman was doing. Some of the people around me were Uzbeks still – Turkestan was an early site of pilgrimage – but the stocky childlike Kazakhs were all about. They looked guileless and enduring. Their faces, economical with low brows and close-set ears, seemed shaped for battling head-winds. Epicanthic folds squeezed their eyes to humorous cracks, which sparkled out from a plane of thick-fleshed bones.

I found a hotel which charged me fifty pence for two nights, and shared my room with a Kazakh metal-worker from the north, who had arrived in a lorry to buy steel joists. Maruya was perhaps forty, but showed the boyish agelessness of his people. He blundered about the room as if he wasn't used to one. Out of his frayed haversack he pulled little bags of cheeseballs and bread, eight cans of pig fat, a toothbrush and a bundle of garlic for his wife. It was too cold to grow garlic where he came from, he said – a village near Dzhezkazgan, in his country's bitter heart. A foot of snow had fallen even in May.

We tramped into the town to a bare restaurant, which served up only
lagman.
Maruya stared about with a curious, blank con-fusion. ‘I don't know this town,' he said. ‘I can't understand what the Uzbeks say.' I warmed to him, in faint surprise. It is the traveller's illusion that everyone is assimilated except himself. But Maruya, trudging about with his gauche smile and his bag of garlic, was as much a stranger here as I was. My own alienness plunged him into mystified silences. His knees jittered under the table. ‘Where I come from,' he said, ‘there's a factory which the British built years ago, for cloth-weaving.' He gazed at me with a renewed wonder. ‘Then the British left in the Revolution.'

‘And afterwards?'

‘Afterwards the famine came. The old people still speak of it, but there are hardly any old people left. Almost my whole village died of hunger then.'

‘How do you forgive that?'

‘It was very big. Three million of us died, you know.' He gave a dulled, compensatory smile. He did not try to explain anything. This blackest estimate of three million was becoming truth all over the nation. ‘But that's all over now. We're not haters. Our people get on all right with the Russians, I've plenty of Russian friends.' His voice lowered in old habit. ‘But they've ruined our young people. They drink and drink. We never did that before. And many are out of work.'

‘Do you intermarry?'

‘Our men take Russian wives. But not the other way about. I've never heard of that. Our people won't do it.'

I asked again: ‘How do you forgive it?'

But he only said: ‘Everything's hard with us, and cold.'

Next day all the old Soviet Union arranged its business around the witching hour when a televised Mexican soap opera called
Rich Men Also Weep
sabotaged any other life. It happened once a week and was wending through 150 episodes. At four o'clock, all over Central Asia, workers and machinery glided to a hypnotised standstill. Turcoman farmers and Uzbek shopkeepers were alike caught up in the incandescent question: would Pedro marry Rosalia? Villages fell silent. City transport dwindled, and televisions in hotel lobbies attracted such crowds that I would imagine there'd been an accident. The characters in this melodrama inhabited a world of unreachable glamour, yet were household familiars and the objects of heated speculation. The very title
Rich Men Also Weep
suggested a subtle amendment to decades of other sympathies.

It was at this quiet hour that I approached the sanctuary which broke in incongruous glory beyond the shabby suburbs of Turkestan. The shrine of Sheikh Ahmad Yassawi, founder of a once-powerful Sufi order, had been inaugurated by Tamerlane in 1397, but never quite completed. Circled by battlements which had flopped into ruin, it broke through the wasteland in a tawny mountain of walls and gateways. It was the Kazakhs' holiest shrine. Pilgrimage here ranked second only to Mecca. In the Kruschev years it had been closed down and ringed with barbed wire, but now stood lavishly restored.

I approached a forbidding entrance. Its arch was flanked by rounded, Babylonish towers over a hundred feet high. Close behind, its cupola surged up in a glow of turquoise, and beyond it the ribbed dome over the tomb-chamber – more private and exquisite — rested on a stalk of lapis blue.

I might have been entering a fortress. It lay, after all, on the fringe of the steppe. Sufism here seemed to remember itself less as a mystical path than as a militant brotherhood which had carried the sword against the Mongols and czarist Russia. I stepped ant-like under the porch. Originally this whole façade must have been awaiting the glazed bricks that decorated the other walls. Then Tamerlane died. A later restoration faltered. Looking up, I saw the half-petrified beams of old scaffolding bristling high under the archway, and the towers still pocked with holes where the workmen had laid down their tools half a millennium before.

I crossed from dazzling sunlight into dimness. I bought a ticket to the central prayer-hall. I was amazed. I had entered a museum. Beneath the dome, whitewashed to a deconsecrated spectre, the walls were lined by display cabinets showing old photographs and a few charts. In other rooms hung prayer-rugs and armour, and here and there the engraved tombstones of Kazakh khans and sultans were duly labelled, and displaced from their dead. In one recess a dusty pyramid of Marco Polo rams' skulls – each weighing up to thirty-five pounds – lay heaped in a tumult of upcurled horns.

I sat here until past the hour when
Rich Men Also Weep
would end, and watched people straggling past the cabinets: urban Kazakhs in jeans and summer frocks, a woman in a denim dress labelled ‘US Army'. But among them were others – farmers and some black-faced gypsies – who ignored the exhibits but touched their brows to the walls between, praying, and caressed the obliterating whitewash. I had the sensation of standing at a watershed, where sanctity was slipping into history; or perhaps history, instead, was resurrecting, and the cabinets would soon be gone and the muezzin calling. I could not be sure.