The Lost Heart of Asia (41 page)

‘When I saw you,' she went on, ‘I thought you were one of our Soviet people, you seemed so open.' Then she said artlessly: ‘I'm looking for a man now. I'd like a companion. Not for a family, but for the heart.' She plucked at her breast. She must once have been rather beautiful, I thought. Her mouth and cheeks had slackened round fine bones, and an old pride stayed in her manner. ‘Would it be possible for us to meet, do you think, if you're here longer? Or for me to come to England?' Her voice had dropped to a sentimental contralto. ‘Sometimes when I see people, I think, I could be happy with him, he's open and decent. I thought that when I saw you.'

In the face of this vaulting trust I felt complex, not open or decent at all. Her warmth and directness, even the cloud of her hennaed hair, reminded me of Russian women. She knew nothing at all of England, or of me. She simply swam in the tide of her instincts; and when I told her of a woman in England, she accepted this with a smile as if a chance accident had blocked an open road.

A few years ago the circus, like the ballet, was a showcase for Soviet culture. No city of the empire was complete without its circular theatre spinning with a galaxy of acrobats, trapeze artists, fire-eaters, conjurors, ventriloquists, bear-tamers, clowns and contortionists.

That summer a Moscow troupe was visiting Almaty, and the spectators were undiminished. More than a thousand banked up to the theatre's gallery, where a twelve-piece band sent up a boisterous overture. Children and adults gazed with the same wonder into a spangled, hyperactive world whose vivid physiques and matinée-idol grins exuded an aura of otherworldliness. They gasped at the sleek-haired conjuror whose fingers sprouted spoons, respectfully applauded the performing yak, set up rhythmic clapping at the dancers meshed in twenty-foot pythons, and maintained a pindrop silence while a man with a cowhide whip at twenty feet flicked a rose from a girl's lips.

High in the apex of the dome, where a cyclorama of stars circled through darkness, a team of trapeze artists in phosphorescent leotards dispersed and reunited. The music stilled to an unearthly trembling. Weight lost its meaning. They swam above us in a night ballet whose noiseless ease turned it to an exchange of ghosts, and grasped and released one another so effortlessly that had they failed, I imagined, the discarnate bodies would scarcely fall to earth.

Yet already a feel of archaism intruded. Musical references to
Swan Lake
abounded, and the clowns' jokes about
perestroika
seemed coined in another era. Towards the end a shambling brown bear was led into the ring's centre to play the accordion. It looked drugged and old. It reeled on its podium. The accordion was strapped to its paws like handcuffs, so that a few melancholy notes rose involuntarily as it swayed. It was at once ridiculous and heart-rending. The audience cheered. They were simply seeing a collusive beast, I suppose, pretending to be human. The animal, I think, saw almost nothing. Its eyes were inscrutable beads. Maybe only I, fancifully, was seeing in its tottering bulk the Russian Bear on its last legs.

In a park near the city's centre, under an avenue of ash trees, I met a girl named Dilia who dreamed of becoming a conductor. Every other evening she sat with an orchestra following the score in rapt, near-hopeless ambition, and returned at day to her job of accompanying singers on the piano. In her still-young face the classic Kazakh features looked simplified and intense. Her eyes slanted fine and dark under sleek brows, and beneath them the delicate mouth and cheekbones might have been limned on to her face by a miniaturist seeking perfection. But a pair of thick spectacles seemed to repel intrusion, and the score of Brahms'
A German Requiem
lay open across her knees on the bench.

‘The conductors here tell me it's hopeless my wanting to conduct. They say “Give up! It's no good!” But I don't listen.' Her laugh was tinkling steel. ‘They think I should concentrate on my piano playing. That's a woman's role. It's good work, but some of our singers have God-given voices which they scarcely cultivate, and then I'm angry. I'm hard on them, and they resent it. They don't think it's my place!' She sliced a hand across her throat, as if she were committing suicide, then her voice darkened into mockery which was not yet cynical, but might become so.
‘No, no, you are just a woman, Dilia, you should do as you're told
But I've never done that. The Russians say “If you're afraid of wolves, don't go into the forest”, but I've gone in and I'm not coming out now.'

She looked so young, I found myself saying: ‘What do your parents feel?'

‘My parents are dead. I live alone. My father was a railway engineer and she a teacher, but ill all her life. She was glad I loved music, but they wanted me married. They wanted grandchildren.' She took off her spectacles and lifted her face in profile, consciously stilling herself. Without her glasses, she appeared harder. ‘Nobody understands my not marrying. But I never liked the men my parents produced. I've always liked older men.' She looked momentarily shy, as if this were a vice. ‘When young men courted me, I pushed them away. It was sensitivity I wanted, and intelligence.'

‘And children?'

‘Children aren't important to me. It's only important that the man should love me.' She turned from my gaze again, but her hands wrenched at one another above
A German Requiem,
and her voice assumed its mocking lilt.
Oh no, you must have children and live among saucepans, Dilia. Don't you want that? What's wrong with you?'
She laughed again, buoyantly. I could not foresee when this laughter would grow bitter.

‘You may still marry,' I said. She was, in her hard way, beautiful.

But she dashed this aside with her hand. ‘With us, women often marry at seventeen. Twenty-three is old – and I'm thirty-one!'

‘But still . . . .'

‘Marriage here can be terrible. When women get what they want, all they do is whine for more money. Men drink and beat their wives, and the women are silent and cover their bruises.' She closed the score on her lap.
‘But you want a career more than a family, Dilia? Oh no, that's terrible.'

She would have been unusual in any country, I thought, but here in the man's world of Kazakhstan she was extraordinary and moving. We sat for a while, silenced by her impasse, until an old man tottered towards us, his chest ribboned with warmedals. His was a near-ancestral face of Russian suffering, its lines deep-etched in hopelessness, its eyes bleared. As he stooped down to us, he breathed out beer fumes. ‘I need to eat, young people . . . I need to eat.' He waved at a tea-house through the trees. His slack mouth rambled between obsequiousness and a ghost of dignity. ‘Is it possible for you to give?' Dilia raised her clinical profile to him, said something distantly, and we both gave. ‘Thank you, thank you.' He scrutinised the money in his palm, then bowed to us frailly and stumbled away.

She said: ‘I feel sorry for these old Communists who fought in the war, and believed. They've got nothing left now. Everything they valued has collapsed, everything they lived for. That must be hard.'

I liked her then. I had expected the old man to awaken her intolerance: his mind and body ransacked by himself and the world, his past so far from her imagined future. He would not have guessed her sympathy.

She went on as if no one had interrupted: ‘Everybody apart from me seems to accept things. Perhaps I should not have been a woman.' She smoothed her hands over her face, as if eradicating lines, which were not there. It was an ageless face, without discernible expression; and her figure androgynously slim. ‘But there was a man . . . .'

He had been a visitor to the concert hall, a Lithuanian Jew who had encouraged and perhaps loved her. He had invited her to Vilnius, but her parents had been horrified.

‘Because he was Jewish?'

‘No, no! Because he was not Kazakh. Men can do what they like, but a Kazakh girl must take a Kazakh husband!' Her hands wrenched in her lap again. ‘But I deceived them, and went, and we were happy. We walked in the park, and talked. He was forty-five.' She looked suddenly naïve, forlorn. ‘Now he's in America, and thinks I should go out there too. But what would I do? I could bear to work as a waitress for a year or two, but after that, if I didn't become a musician, I'd starve inside.' She touched her heart in the Russian way. ‘I don't know what I'll do. Here I have my music. But over there I think I might have nothing.'

‘Perhaps this friend would help you.' But I did not know what was happening inside either of them.

‘Perhaps. When he telephones from there, he sounds happy. It's my voice that sounds sad to me . . . . I feel sad after he's gone.' She replaced an imaginary receiver. ‘Lonely.'

So she remained between her lesser world and the cruel challenge of America, and did not know what to do. Only the small, determined mouth and tightened profile said that she was not to be pitied.

Next morning I flew to Karaganda, the second city of Kazakhstan. This was no more than a feint into the heart of a steppeland spreading thinly peopled towards Siberia, for you could travel it for weeks and encounter no one. Far down, under the wings of our groaning Tupolev, drifted an unchanging, dun-coloured earth, where cloud-shadows moved in grey lakes and there was no glint of life. It was hard to look on it without misgiving. In these secretive deserts and the grasslands lapping them to the north, the Russians had for decades concealed an archipelago of labour camps, nuclear testing sites, ballistic missiles and archaic heavy industry. It was the dumping-ground of unwanted nations. Around the handful of those exiles it hammered into stature – Dostoevsky soldiered here in disgrace, Solzhenitsyn festered – millions more succumbed into death or obscurity. Trotsky spent two years banished in Almaty, before the murderer's ice-pick found him in Mexico.

From time to time the land had floated visions. In the late 1950s Russians and Ukrainians flooded into the northern steppes to plant a hundred million acres of wheat and barley on Kruschev's ‘Virgin Lands' (lands not virgin at all, but Kazakh pastures) and for a few years the scheme flowered spectacularly, before soil erosion called it to heel. From the Leninsk space centre near the Aral Sea the first Sputnik shot into orbit, the first dog ascended, then the first astronauts.

But the testing sites near Semipalatinsk have left half a million people ill with radioactive sickness, some of them – in Stalin's time – exposed intentionally as guinea-pigs. Over a region now riddled with unfissioned plutonium, some 500 bombs, exploded over forty years, have undermined a bewildered populace with cancers, leukaemia, heart disease, birth defects and blindness, so that the first act of an independent Kazakhstan in 1990 was to ban all tests on its territory. All across this blighted country, lead smelters and copper foundries, cement and phosphates works still plunge the skies and waters in poisonous effluent, and some two million Kazakhs and Russians are rumoured chronically sick from the pollution.

But as we floated above it, the steppe looked untouchably vast. Here and there a green valley scored it, the excrement of a mine appeared, or a lonely quadrangle of wheat; and as we descended towards Karaganda a speckling of dark cattle and pale sheep, invisible before, emerged against the void. Beyond the airstrip the road travelled across an empty plain. The sky thundered. After a long time villages of dachas and allotments started up, many half built and all deserted. Then came steel-works bannered in smoke; and suddenly the suburbs of Karaganda shot up in twenty-storey flat-blocks like a futuristic Hell. They clustered in concrete islands, separated by wasteland, so that the whole city was ringed by these desolate micro-regions too far from one another.

We jolted down splintered streets. It was a young town, founded in 1926, and it seemed ownerless. In western Russia it was the butt of black jokes: a synonym for nowhere. Its only purpose was the coalfields on which it sprawled. Of its 700,000 inhabitants, most of them Russians, one quarter laboured under the ground. Above ground, it looked half abandoned. To these choking warrens the Second World War had added an arsenal of iron works. All through the Stalin years the place was filled with ex-convicts still half in exile. From its railway station, still grim with floodlights, the packed Stolypin carriages had shunted their prisoners to a nest of surrounding labour-camps, and lorryloads of others vanished to nearby Samarka and Kengir, whose inmates in 1954 at last revolted – men and women together – until tanks overran them leaving 700 dead.

My hotel stood in the centre. Its concrete was cracking, and it owned a gaunt restaurant selling black market drink. When my room's telephone rang a woman began to enquire after her son, whom she had lost. She had dialled the wrong number. Her voice echoed from another time.

I went out into the streets. They were enormous and near-empty, their buildings the colour of dust, undecorated. Hammer-and-sickle banners still dangled across the roads, and a few people lingered at bus-stops or beer-wagons, as if in refuge from something. On the façade of the Miner's Palace, a screen of gross columns, sprouting figures of workers and soldiers, concealed some cringing Arabic arches; while opposite, in an ensemble of brutish, soot-coloured brotherhood, a Russian and a Kazakh miner upheld a chunk of coal. In its terrible isolation, I thought, the city might have been going mad. Its coal was poor, and produced a corrosive ash. Its river was strangled by radioactive waste, its air tainted with carbon. In winter, they said, snow turned black before it touched the ground.

When the labour-camps were broken up in 1956, Karaganda was flooded by ex-convicts, some of them educated liberals, who could not go home. They settled here beside their ex-jailers, and for a generation the city took on a gentler tinge. But it remained a wilderness of exiles, forced or voluntary. Now, at the end of Peace Prospect, the wooden concert hall, long closed, was falling to bits. Even the KGB headquarters – a Doric palace stuccoed grey and white – looked unoccupied (but was not). Outside a cake shop I passed 200 people queuing: doughy women in plain scarves and skirts who might have belonged in the forties, but for a dash of lipstick.