The Lost Heart of Asia (4 page)

Only the historian did not drink. ‘He is a very serious man,' the clown gabbled. ‘He wants to talk history with you. But he says drink fucks his brains.'

The historian's face cracked into a smile, which survived there senselessly a long time later, as if he had forgotten it. All his moods traversed these slow gradients, and remained stranded in his expression after all feeling must have gone.

By now the damp from the earth floor was seeping up through our socks and trousers. But we settled drunkenly into the last crusts and dregs. With dimmed amazement I remembered that the men squatting in this butcher's store were the sophisticates of Ashkhabad. But their formal shirts and ties now looked like pantomime, and our party seemed to unleash in them some deep, earthen craving, older than Islam.

An hour later we were meandering over a potholed road towards Geok-Tepe. For miles Ashkhabad seemed to extend itself over the scrubland in scattered villages of pale-bricked cottages and dishevelled gardens. The country had a vacant, incomplete look, as if it were earmarked for a suburb, and was waiting. Pylons and telegraph poles criss-crossed the plains in a dirty spider-web. Heaps of piping and rubble littered the roadsides. Every building appeared to be unfinished or falling down, with no moment between consummation and decay.

We passed cement and asbestos works, and wine distilleries. Then cotton fields and vineyards appeared, and collective farms named ‘Sun' or ‘Glory', adorned by faded slogans celebrating strength and labour. Once we crossed the Karakum Canal flowing westwards seven hundred miles from the Amu Dariya, the classical Oxus, to fertilise all these oases beneath the Kopet Dagh. It ran in a brown tumult between concrete banks and encroaching reeds.

Soon afterwards, driving through pastureland, we came upon an enormous graveyard. Many dead from the Geok-Tepe massacre had been interred here, and a year afterwards the Turcoman leader Kurban Murat was buried amongst them. He was not only a warrior but a Naqshbandi Sufi, a holy man, and his tomb became a lodestar for pilgrims, and a token of resistance. Far into the Soviet era it was secretly venerated. ‘It had just decayed to a mound,' the historian said, ‘but people remembered it.'

We scrambled through a gap in the concrete wall. The saint's tomb had been clumsily rebuilt: a brick cube under a clay dome. We had all sobered a little, and now went swaying in silence through the grass towards it. All around us heaved an ocean of nameless mounds misted with white poppies. The historian said: ‘Two of my great-grandparents were killed in that battle. They're buried here too.' He knew the place, but did not go there. He eased open the door to the tomb of Kurban Murat. Only the director remained outside, suddenly ashamed or indifferent, running his hands over his face in the Moslem self-blessing.

We peered into a wan light shed by the perforated dome. We were alone. The grave-mound swelled huge and constricted in its walls. It was covered in green silk. At its head, pilgrims had left variegated stones, and several hundred roubles lay there untouched. Three times we circled the grave anti-clockwise in the Moslem way, squeezing along the walls. Nobody spoke. Then suddenly, violently, at the grave's head, my companions prostrated themselves and struck their foreheads against its mound. I gazed at them in mute surprise. All at once the place reverberated with the ancient, tribal prestige of the dead, and of all the unutterable past. Their foreheads were covered with dust when they rose.

Next moment we were outside, among the graves again. A few swallows were twittering in the grass. ‘Many people come here on the anniversary of the battle' — the historian snaked out his arm to conjure queues – ‘especially the descendants of the dead.' But the dead were mostly anonymous. Here and there a Turcoman samovar, discoloured and rusting, betrayed the presence of a grave, or an inscribed headstone showed. But most were marked only by the raw earth breaking through a weft of shrubs and poppies.

‘Do the Naqshbandi come?' I had read that they still pervaded Central Asia.

But he said: ‘No. They're not important. Our religion is older than theirs, older than Islam. We have our own faith. That's why we can't accept fundamentalism, or Iran, or any of that.' His face confronted mine like a blank moon. He wanted me to understand. ‘The people who come to our shrines, they're not exactly Moslems, you see, although they are called that. Their belief is earlier . . .different.'

Lingering beside this clannish mausoleum – the lair of a sainted warrior – I believed him. It reeked of ancestor-worship. The formal practice of the mosque, all the structures and theologies of urban Islam, seemed far away. This was a secret place of tribal memories, and anger. ‘The Russians killed fifteen thousand of us on that day, many of them women and children, and lost three thousand of their own.' The historian stared across the rough, earthen sea. ‘They were barbarians.'

Yet he had invented the number of enemy dead. Against the piteous Turcoman casualties, the Russians (perhaps minimising) put their own at fewer than 300. But the historian's history was glamorous and simple. He was rebuilding his country's past as dangerously free of truth as the Russians had once created theirs. Wandering the graves, he claimed a 7000-year ancestry for the Turcomans in this land, as if they were the pure descendants of Neolithic men. He had reconstructed them not as idolatrous slavers who had veneered themselves with a more sophisticated faith, but as an ancient, homogeneous people steeped in early wisdom.

Now the director was stumbling along the path beside us. ‘It's not our tragedy!' His shirt gaped open above a straggling tie. ‘It's
their
tragedy, the Russians' tragedy! It's the Russians who had to leave this country, not us. Like the British from India or the French from Algeria!' His clownish eyes strayed over me. ‘Like all colonialism – it's the tragedy of the colonisers!'

I mumbled uncertainly. Colonialism seemed to resolve into no such easy patterns. He was drinking himself to death like any Russian.

‘It's
their
disaster,
their
mistake!' His arm trembled towards the graves: ‘These others were not mistaken . . . .'

An hour later, as we motored towards Geok-Tepe, the odd, reckless fervour overtook him again, and he insisted on stopping. Nobody dared refuse him and soon we were all lolling in the grass with two more bottles of vodka and a bag of halfliquefied cheese. Beside us glinted a stagnant pool, where a concrete sluice was channelling away water from the Karakum Canal. It gurgled miserably. By now my head had floated clear of my body, and my feet were unfamiliar to me. I recognised them dimly at the far end of my legs. The self-made clown had turned us all into children. We laughed in a gale of idiot mirth whenever he opened his mouth. A few dusty shrubs concealed our scandal from the road. ‘This is a beautiful Turcoman place,' he cried, and everybody laughed.

I was aware only of the historian secretly condescending, touching my arm from time to time, and his eyes said: I'm sorry. And sometimes Bairam pushed bread and cheese at me and whispered: ‘Eat, eat, don't just drink. Save yourself ...'

I longed to tip away my glass unseen, but the director watched me with fevered eyes every time he refilled it, and demanded toast after toast. Then – half in jest at first, half in absolution – he would slither his hands over his face in the Moslem blessing, until they were squirming down his cheeks in cynical desperation. But he muttered: ‘I'm grey. Only good men go grey . . . . Look at these others . . . .' He got up and staggered in the grass. ‘This is a beautiful place . . . . Will you give my love to Princess Anne? . . . Our is a high culture ...'

We never reached Geok-Tepe, but somehow circled back to Ashkhabad in a nimbus of alcohol. At the hotel, where my floor-lady usually sat at her post in bored watchfulness, the desk was vacant and I fumbled in its drawer for my room-key. Then I stopped. A piece of paper had caught my eye. With a shock I found myself reading a report on my own movements. Scrupulously it noted the times I had left and entered my room, and the identity of those who had visited me. I felt slightly sick. An old tension took hold of me, familiar from twelve years before, when the KGB had dogged me through the western Ukraine. The paper reminded me of what I already knew, but which in the pleasure of the day I had forgotten: that this was not a free country.

But to whom, I wondered, did the local KGB report? Were they being cleansed of their Russian element and turning purely Turcoman, or had the links with Moscow been preserved? Above all, what was their point? But most likely, I thought, they would change only with the slowness of those Jurassic sauropods which possessed two brains, one in the head, one in the base of the tail: an organism of unwieldy, vegetable instinct. For a while they would simply continue doing what they had been programmed to do, however senseless, because that is what they had always done.

The next moment my floor-lady appeared, agitated. An obese Russian
babushka
with hennaed curls and pencilled eyebrows, she too seemed to belong to a fading species. She greeted me with a wriggling wave of her fingers, then groped for my key in her pocket, shooting me smiles. ‘How stupid of me . . . .'

Next day I revived my plans to reach Geok-Tepe. A driver named Safar offered to take me seventy miles for barely two dollars (the devaluation of the rouble had turned the dollar to gold) and we set off past the same factories, cotton-fields and jaded pasturelands. The country grew poorer as we went. The cottages spawned shacks of corrugated tin: animal pens, dwellings, lavatories. Weather-blackened men idled in the doorways with dark, Bedouinish women in black dresses and flaring headscarves. Over the grasslands roamed flocks of karakul sheep and lambs – the source of astrakhan wool – and small, one-humped camels. But the fields were fringed with salinated marsh which shone like dirty snow.

By now the Kopet Dagh mountains were teeming across the southern horizon, and dropping their foothills in our path. A storm raged beyond them, discolouring the sky. Suddenly a military airfield appeared. Outside their camouflaged bunkers, the jet fighters were all pointed at Iran thirty miles away over the mountains. I was unsure if foreigners were permitted on this road, but the old rules had broken down, and the airfield was circled only by broken barbed-wire and derelict watch-towers where nobody watched. The next moment we were past.

I wondered what people thought of this arsenal in their midst – the forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States — but Safar only shrugged. He had done his military service in a chemical warfare unit near Bukhara, he admitted, and he didn't mind the Russians. ‘We can get on with them. They're all right. The Russians won't go away.'

But they were already going away, I knew.

I wondered about Safar. A dust of white hair flew back from his brows, and his long face was deeply lined. Yet all the lines had gone the right way, and his nose craned over a loose, laughing mouth.

But his life unfolded in tragedy, as I was now expecting here. In the earthquake, when he was only a boy, he had lost his three-year-old sister buried under the debris, and his father had disappeared long before during the Stalin years.

‘I never knew him. He was a trader in salt over the border in Iran.' He gestured at the mountains. ‘He married my mother over there – Turcomans spread all over the border – but he was arrested as a
kulak
in 1936 and taken away to Siberia. My mother is ninety now, but still remembers. He returned to her for a month, then was rearrested, and years later she got a letter from a fellow-exile, saying he had died out there, near Novosibirsk. That was how we knew.'

For a while, beneath the mountain walls, a paler line of ramparts had been rising, and now loured on its hill to our south. It was a Parthian palace-city, over two thousand years old. And that was the sorcery of this land. For miles it lay empty of anything but modern villages or state farms, and then – as if the intervening centuries had concertinaed – the dry air or shifting sand would have preserved an ancient era in dreamlike isolation, like this city of Nisa.

Barely eighty years after Alexander the Great marched through this region to India, the half-nomadic Parthians rebelled against his successors and were establishing their own empire. Nisa must have marked the northern limit of their domination, and it looked formidable still. Nothing stirred there. But near its gates a shy greeting sounded and we glimpsed in the spectral light a red-headed boy with pale eyes. He vanished into the ruins. He might have belonged anywhere: to Persia or Macedon or even (my imagination vaulted) to those broken Roman legionaries whom the Parthians marched eastward after the battle of Carrhae.

Ahead of us the city seemed as ghostly as he. Built of baked earth, it shared its colour with the dust around it. Wind, rain and the pulverising sun had eliminated all its detail and left behind a tawny labyrinth of walls and towers. I tramped its corridors in fading anticipation. So substantial were its halls that I expected any moment to encounter something intimate or particular. But the sixty-foot ramparts and the bastions knuckling out of them were smoothed to precipices, and the passageways ran beneath like natural gulleys. Even the circular throne-room, once statued with the half-deified princes who ruled here, showed only a shell. The earth was absorbing the whole city back into itself. It was falling out of focus.

Mentally I tried to furnish it with artefacts I had seen in the Ashkhabad museum. They had betrayed a city infected by a mongrel Hellenism. I remembered statuettes in translucent marble, and stupendous ivory drinking-horns. Only from these horns could I dimly sense the city. Their bases flowered into carved dragons with ebullient tusks and firebird wings, but the decorative tiers swarming up their stems were ringed by half-Greek figures, who made war or sacrifice in postures of faded grace, or clashed their cymbals at some forgotten rite.