The Lost Heart of Asia (42 page)

The German was queuing too: a man with glittering blue eyes and an uprush of grey hair. It was a face with more delicacy than life had allowed its owner. ‘Nobody belongs in this town,' he said. ‘It's vile. My home was in the Ukraine before the war, but my father was shot in the repressions four months before I was born' – he marked the months off with his blistered fingers –‘ . . . March . . . April . . . After that the bits of my family moved to East Germany, then to Siberia, and now here.' He said ‘here' with a sour shudder. ‘I've worked here twenty-four years as a builder, and it's become hopeless. I haven't been paid for three months. There's no law, nothing. Even the Russians don't have a country, nobody has a country. I want my son to go to West Germany, and I too. I'd rather be buried there.' His smile dispersed over a mouthful of gaps and stains. I remembered my gap-tooth and grinned back at him. ‘I'm not afraid of work. And I'll pick up the language.' He hoisted a few German words into his Russian, but they came thick and distorted. ‘Anywhere's better than here.'

Roaming the outskirts next day, I believed him. The coal-mines ringed the city in waste-heaps where the shaft-wheels turned in their scaffolds as if this were the thirties. So steeped was the place in secrecy that visiting delegates from Europe, suggesting aid, were offered no geological maps. The safety regulations (an official confided) were routinely flouted. There was no money left. Inside grim offices, where I was refused per-mission to go underground, illuminated cabinets glowered with the penants and medals of Soviet labour awards.

Yet the surface lethargy deceived. In 1989 these fearful tunnels spat out their miners in a strike which was echoed across the Union. Its men were young, angry and organised. They demanded, and won, an independent trade union. After sixty years of servitude, the workers were on the march. But their model, they said, was the United States of America.

It was almost July. For over a hundred miles the Alatau mountains, the western ranges of the Tienshan, shadowed my bus south along the Kirghiz border, while the road ran dead-straight in their lee, seeking out a pass. Beyond a velvety massif of foothills, the snow-peaks frothed in backlit clouds, as if swept by pale fire.

Beside me sat a shy Kazakh girl who was studying electrical engineering, and was going home. Sometimes she turned a child's face to mine and questioned me about Europe. She spoke in a whisper, through goldfish lips. Whenever I asked anything about her, she whispered ‘Who? Me?' as if no one had ever enquired about her before. She got out in the middle of pastureland, clutching a watercolour of roses, and walked away towards a herdsmen's village in the hills.

After two hours the bus crested a pass and entered tablelands of grey rock sheened in grass and flowers. We had crossed unsignalled into the mountain state of Kirghizstan, the easternmost reach of Central Asia before it drops into the deserts of Xinjiang. Of all these troubled nations, this was the most remote: an Alpine sanctuary of less than four and a half million people. When independence came, power slipped from the grip of the old Communists, and the liberal president – alone in Central Asia – ruled by political concensus, and was trying to free the economy.

Around me in the bus sat the nation in miniature: some Russians, Uzbeks and a scattering of fugitive minorities. But in the ascendant, a jovial, rustic people – perhaps related to the Kazakhs – bellowed and slumbered and guzzled gross picnics. Seven hundred years before, the Kirghiz ancestors, harried by the armies of Kublai Khan, had migrated from the Yenisei river in Siberia, and centuries later percolated the Tienshan, mingling with the valley tribes. Their Islam was thin. They were nomad warriors, whose currency was the sheep and the horse. Divided by steep valleys, they had thought of themselves less by nation than by tribe, until Stalin rooted them in villages, and decided who they were. Then their language was codified with Russian loan-words to split them from the Kazakhs, and their boundaries fixed.

Towards sunset our bus climbed to a rain-swept plateau which rolled its polished rocks to the skyline. In the distance, shoulders and haunches of mountain came lurching out of clouds. Then farms and small factories appeared, and the long suburbs of the capital, Bishkek: Slavic cottages with carved eaves and fences frail in a tangle of vines and vegetables. Blonde women were basking on the verges in the last sunlight, grazing a goat or a few chickens. Everything seemed smaller than elsewhere: the flat-blocks, the streets, even the statues of Lenin diminutive in their workshop courts.

Night had fallen before I reached a hotel – an ornate Stalinist survivor, rowdy with Kirghiz farmers in from the mountains. But I was sick of the leathery mutton and
solyanka
soup in the hotel restaurants, with their sodden rice and sweet fruit juices, and I wandered out, warm with expectation, into the town's dusk.

It was filled with the scent of chestnut trees, and a sliver of moon was rising. I felt I was not in a city at all. It seemed only obscurely inhabited. Every path and avenue was wrapped in a thronging bank of trees, where the streetlights hung in lonely orbs, like outsize fairy-lights. It was as if its builders had tunnelled the place out of forest, gouging dark glades and country lanes, which sometimes opened on woodland clearings inexplicably ablaze with buildings.

From end to end of the city's heart, the boulevard once named from Dzerzhinsky, but now Peace, pushed through indecipherable foliage where a few lovers sat, not kissing or fondling, but curled together in a kind of speechless longing. Once a gaunt equestrian statue loomed above me. Its arm stretched black against the black sky, but I could not discern its face, nor read its inscription. I stopped on a railway bridge of rotting wood. A Russian couple was embracing in silence, her back arched over the parapet as they kissed. From here the city lights glimmered against a starlit glacis of mountains, and I suddenly dreaded the daylight, which might return the place to Soviet drabness.

Yet at first, dawn revealed nothing. It seemed a city built for farmers. Rustic cottages crammed its alleys, slithering with canals where gardens of cherry and apricot flowered. A rural invasion of Kirghiz was infiltrating the suburbs and crowding the shops. They looked like last-generation herdsmen, coarser and burlier than their Kazakh cousins. I watched them in fascination. They lumbered along the streets as if breasting mountains, and would drop unthinking to their haunches on the pavements. Their mastiff necks rolled into barrel chests. Their hair was cropped into a utilitarian black bush, beneath which the jowled, brachycephalic heads belonged in Mongolia. In fact a physiognomic map (if it omitted Tajikistan) would find Turkic features inexorably flattening eastward from the Caspian, until it arrived at these shambling, short-legged mountaineers with their full lips and ruddy, fierce-boned cheeks. Many looked like pantomime peasants. Their rolling-pin arms swung out from muscle-bound shoulders, and their felt hats lent them a doltish gaiety. But within a generation they could refine to a tenuous urbanity, and these other Kirghiz too were all about, running small businesses in the liberalised economy, percolating the civil service.

As I neared the city's centre, the streets still burrowed through oak and acacia, and parks blossomed with syringa and handkerchief trees; but the forest was teeming with traffic now, and at the end of streets I glimpsed factory chimneys.

Suddenly, without warning, the greenery opened on stonepaved desolation. On one side stood the marble parliament, with the marble state museum behind. There was a pale hotel complex and a blank war memorial. A bullying Lenin, huge on his pedestal, commandeered the main square. All at once the city had lost touch with its people, who clattered round it in old Zhiguli and Moskvich cars, or walked numbly in the void.

Yet in a city still full of Russians, this Soviet order, I supposed, evoked nostalgia for a time when prices were stable and people knew where they were. Now everything had changed. The future belonged to the backwoods Kirghiz.

‘They're flooding in everywhere,' said a Russian lorry-driver. ‘When my people came down from Siberia in 1945, this town was all Russian and Ukrainian, with a few others. You didn't see these black people about. You have blacks in England? What's their position?'

‘It's different.'

‘Well, we have these blacks in the city now, as many as forty per cent. They come in from the state farms because they don't want to work. I don't remember them here when I was a boy. We used to go out into the countryside and view them there, like monkeys. And now they're here, not working at all, just buying and selling and apeing about.' A pair of Kirghiz girls sauntered by, trim in black skirts. ‘They can dress all right,' he went on, ‘because they're in commerce. They even get foreign money.' His eyes drifted over me, then unfocused. ‘But they haven't got anything else. No industry, no brains.'

‘But they're getting jobs.'

‘There aren't any jobs. My sons have to work as teachers, on hopeless salaries. But where can we go? My parents are buried here, and my young sister . . . .' A spasm of misery twitched him. ‘I can't go back to Siberia, so I'll stay. But many have gone, many, many . . . anyone who could.' He planted his legs apart, and spat. ‘Now these blacks think they're the bosses.'

I crossed the bleak spaces to Lenin Square, and walked along the tended rose-beds of the presidential office. Out of the quiet came the long ringing of an unanswered telephone. I mounted the podium under Lenin's statue, and stared down on the avenue for those vanished May Day parades of orchestrated happiness. All round the square the loudspeakers tilted disused on their posts, and in the podium centre, where a microphone had once relayed leaden exhortations, the wires drooped in a tangle of dead worms.

I descended a flight of derelict steps to the rooms locked beneath. The marble passageway was discoloured and its balustrades falling. I trod gingerly, as if backstage. A broken water-pipe was dripping into the stair-well, and there was a stench of urine. The steel doors were barred, but already rusting away, and I peered through them into a sanctum of fetid emptiness.

Trespassing off First of May Street along the stairs and passageways of the Writers' Union – once a bureaucratic hub of mediocrity and obstruction – I met a writer named Kadyr. His urbanity and circumspection, even the cadaverous sensitivity of his face, seemed to set him generations away from his compatriots in the hills. Yet he had been born in a mountain village, he said, on the borders of China.

We sat in someone else's office by a deserted boardroom, on whose door the name of Chingiz Aitmatov, the expatriate Kirghiz novelist, was inscribed reverentially as if he were still inside. I asked what people did here now.

‘They don't do anything,' said Kadyr. ‘We've hundreds of writers, but no money . . . and our publishers can't get paper. It used to come to us from Russia, but now everything's atrophied. So at last we have our freedom to write – but no paper!' His lank hair and glasses lent him a juvenile charm which drifted on and off. An ingrained wariness pervaded him. Questions turned him vague. ‘There was always too much that we couldn't say. We couldn't draw on our traditions or write our own history. Now our spiritual situation is richer, far richer, but our material one is hopeless.'

‘What did you used to write about?'

‘My novels were about nature,' he said quickly, as if exculpating himself from something, ‘how the mountains sit in people's spirits, and how people relate to them and to one another. There are inhabitants of Bishkek like that, and I suppose I'm one of them.' He studied his hands. They looked too big for his body, which tapered away. ‘People call us “the mountain people”, because we've never really left the wilds.'

To write of the mountains, I supposed, was a covert way of expressing patriotism.

‘It wasn't dangerous,' he said. ‘Nature is nature, whoever is in power.' He picked a paperback from a shelf. ‘This is by me . . . .'

It was a flimsy guidebook to Kirghizia. Opening it at random, I read: ‘Just as the eagle flies up from his eyrie my people have risen to the heights of unprecedented creative achievement thanks to their Soviet homeland . . . .'

‘Did you ask to write this book?'

‘Yes, yes. I approached the publishers in Moscow – and they said Fine, fine.' His wariness had slipped away. He looked proud.

I fingered the passage miserably, then pushed it under his eyes. I heard myself say: ‘Did you have to write that”

He stared at it. ‘It was a kind of . . . well . . . formula.' He did not look at me. We both laughed abruptly. For who was I to blame him? I had not lived in his grey nightmare. He began: ‘There's nothing like that in my novels, of course. They're about how the mountains sit in people's spirits . . . .'

But his voice flaked away.

The Lenin Museum had been renamed the History Museum, but the history inside it was thin and distorted. Its lower halls were given over to a shadowy tide of Turkic peoples: Tartar warriors who had ridden these valleys in the eighth century with their battle-maces and round shields, sleepy stone menhirs that had stood above nomad graves, bronzes from lost Buddhist temples.

To these the nineteenth-century remnants of the Kirghiz lent only a more intimate variation. The rag dolls of their children were here; so were their lutes and square-shouldered fiddles which had wailed to the chanting of the
Manas
– the Kirghiz'
Iliad
which contains their whole history like a mighty palimpsest. With such instruments it was for centuries carried from yurt to yurt by the
manaschi
, travelling bards with prodigious memories, who only died out a generation ago. In the museum vitrines were goatskin bottles too, and leather funnels for the fomenting of mares' milk, while the mountain horses – tireless creatures with stone-hard hooves – had left behind fragments of harness and stirrup-irons.

Yet within the decade of the thirties this timeless cycle had dropped to earth. Even the most remote yak-herders were collectivised, and the first wheat-fields were creeping over the valleys. Bolshevism was celebrated in the museum's upper storeys by a collection which was already itself history. It was like wandering the church of a dead religion: life-size gilded maquettes of canonised historic episodes, and cabinets of facsimile letters and documents, all caressingly laid out as if they were originals. But in fact there was nothing here at all: just the memory of propaganda. The busts of its proletarian gods and saints seemed to gaze out from centuries ago. They were soon to be removed.

On the floor above, newly installed, were photographs of Stalin's purge victims and of the exhumation of a mass grave.

One morning, as I strayed round a collective warehouse near the western market, I heard distant chanting. At first I thought somebody had left a radio playing, then I emerged from passageways into a room hung with striplights. A woman in white chiffon was playing on an electric harmonium, while a projector threw on to a little screen some Baptist hymns in Russian. Among makeshift chairs some thirty people were singing in wavery unison. They looked like stocky Chinese: clear-eyed women and children in pressed frocks, three fresh-faced youths and a line of eldedy men. Nobody had dared remove the Communist standards dripping from the walls of their rented hall. The only other decoration was a vase of plastic carnations beside the harmonium.

Mortals built a house, and the rains came,
And the floods rose, and the house fell....

Above them the head of Lenin bristled out of a poster charged Our beloved leader', and a red banner was slung along the back wall, blazoned ‘The People and the Party are One'. Sometimes the crash of lorries intruded, rolling through the market beyond, and the distant shouts of bargaining.