The Lost Heart of Asia (43 page)

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Authors: Colin Thubron

BOOK: The Lost Heart of Asia
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This house is built by you, and the rains come
     And the floods rise, but the house stands,
        The house built by Jesus . . . .

A pretty woman with a ravaged face conducted the congregation by hand, smiling with a pert, manic radiance, and the people copied her gestures as her hands fluttered and twirled in illustration of the hymns. ‘Jesus loves me' – the palms alighted on the heart. ‘Jesus loves you' – and the fingers shot out in front of them. ‘Jesus....'

It dawned on me that they were Koreans. They sat motionless, as a pastor addressed them. He came, I later learnt, from South Korea, and was speaking the native language which many of them had forgotten. He stood with his feet together and his hands laced in front of him. A puerile lock of hair fell over his face, which shone with a strenuous happiness. Towards the end of the service he called out the name of a girl new to the congregation, and summoned her to ‘bear witness'. She stepped up in terror, dressed in an embroidered velvet jacket and matching hair-ribbon. ‘I am very glad,' she began, ‘I am so glad . . . . I am so happy . . . happy . . . .' then faltered into blushing silence, while everybody clapped.

Then the pastor noticed me. ‘We have a guest,' he said. He beckoned me up, and I heard my voice announcing my pleasure that I was amongst them, while the ranks of faces smiled back out of their excoriating goodness, and I grinned weakly. It was inspiring to see their little church growing out of oppression, I said — and as I uttered the words, they became true.

Yet their happiness, their conviction of divine sanctuary, was tremblingly frail in the banner-hung hall, and now the din of the bazaar – where Kirghiz and Russians mingled – almost drowned out their singing.

Jesus forever loving
Beautiful Saviour . . . .

At the end everyone embraced his neighbour on each side, murmuring the ritual ‘I love you', and I found myself in the arms of an embarrassed taxi-driver. The community had only been worshipping here seven months, he said, and I must excuse the red banners. The hall was rented from a defunct Komsomol.

But how had Baptists evolved in Central Asia, I asked'

The taxi-driver knit his brows. ‘After independence a rich Korean Christian came here from Los Angeles and asked us what we were. We said we thought we were Buddhists, but we didn't know. But the man said No, you're Christians. And so we became Christians.' The tale on his lips took on a biblical weight. His frank eyes examined me from a trusting face. Only a frail smile twisted his mouth, which seemed to acknowledge some strangeness in this. ‘Now there are seven hundred of us Baptists, and we increase all the time.'

We walked into the blinding sun. I saw that his eyes were softened in smile-lines, and his springy hair touched with grey. His people had lost their history, he said. Even his name, Pasha, sounded synthetic. His ancestors had moved from Korea to Sakalin island. ‘But in 1937 Stalin transported them in cattle trucks to Kazakhstan. I was born there, and my father died . . . .'

‘Why did your people leave Korea?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Were you Buddhists before?'

‘I don't know.' He looked faintly distressed. ‘But we became Communists in a way. I was a Young Pioneer and a member of Komsomol. But we didn't believe anything. We were nothing.'

We had turned our back on the market and were walking along a lane where a line of poverty-stricken youths and women squatted on wooden boxes. Each had laid out a few garments, cigarettes and tooth-paste on dirty newspaper in front of him, but two policemen were harassing them to go.

‘They're selling things you can't get in the shops,' Pasha said. ‘They buy them up cheap on the side. That's the only way they can live.'

They sat in resigned tiredness, while the police harangued them. Then, slowly, they upturned the boxes and packed their goods away. They couldn't afford the price of a market stall, Pasha said.

An old man craned angrily above them. He clutched a vodka bottle wrapped in a cloth. ‘I work!' he bellowed. ‘But what do these young people do? Sitting in the dirt!' Work: it was the Communist shibboleth, from the years of faith and full employment. ‘Why don't they do something manly?' He shook his stick, but no one was listening. Behind his smeared, drunk eyes sat a whole era of failure.

‘What can they do?' said Pasha. ‘We're all just sitting about now. I spend my life waiting at the railway station. But there aren't any tourists, and only two trains a day from Moscow.'

The police had gone, and the black marketeers were setting out their wares again.

Pasha said: ‘For seven years we've been told everything will get better, but I don't believe it. Nobody here believes it.'

The giant equestrian statue which had loomed above me in the night turned out by day to be a monument to Mikhail Frunze, the Bolshevik conqueror of Central Asia. In a standing insult to those whom he had vanquished, the town was renamed Frunze in 1926, and only reverted to the homely Bishkek with independence. But his statue still rode its plinth undamaged, and the thatched cottage where he had been born remained enshrined in a portentous museum. Piously preserved artefacts filled its modest rooms: ink-wells and gloves, a hanging cradle and a miniature rocking-horse, the veterinary bag of his Moldavian father still lying in the hall. Respectable poverty shaped the ideal Soviet shrine.

But I was the only visitor, and someone had plastered the door with ‘I love Kirghizstan' stickers. The Kirghiz attendant sat engrossed in a romantic novel. When I asked what people thought of Frunze now, her nose wrinkled. Old people may like him, but young people don't.' She flushed. She was very young. ‘He killed too many.'

On a Sunday evening an old lady sits in the oak-filled park near Frunze's statue. Her blue eyes are filmed over, and their brows almost gone. Her hands interlace over the haft of an ebony walking-stick. But beneath her headscarf the face shows an intermittent brightness, as if some memory woke it. Then the sunk eyes seem to see again, and she smiles a pale-lipped smile, and looks almost beautiful. ‘What is the time, young man?'

I always get the time wrong in Russian, and she laughs. She is not Russian, she says, she is Polish, born in Vilna.

‘And what did you do there?' I ask.

I am used to Polish immigrants claiming titles and estates; but she says: ‘We had a back garden, and some pigs, and we grew things.' Through the shifting oak-branches the street-lamps light up a face webbed in lines and hung with a fragile nose. ‘But the Germans came and smashed the town, and burnt our cottage.' She strikes an imaginary match against her dress, ‘And we fled.' I realise suddenly that she is not talking about the Second World War, but the First. ‘Then I worked in a hospital.'

‘As a doctor?'

‘No, I'm not educated. Just as a helper.' She shudders, even in the warm night. Her legs disappear into woollen socks and bedroom slippers. She looks institutionalised. ‘Then I went to Vladivostok and was married to a surgeon – but he died long ago – and I came to Almaty and then here.' Her stick taps the ground. ‘I'm ninety-six years old now, and my daughter is seventy-four, and some of my grandchildren are worrying about their pensions. So I'm old.' She laughs almost coquettishly at the thought, it still seems to surprise her. ‘Look, wrinkles!' She lifts her face to me. It is pale and sunk, but her eyes have come alive in it. ‘And my hands!' She spreads them before me. ‘Look at them.' Their veins coil like ropes under the mottled skin. She gazes at them as if they were someone else's. ‘But whether things are worse with other people, or the country, I don't know. I'm an old woman and I don't know anything. I never did know about politics.' Perhaps some inner safety-valve locks them out. She has not lived through the Stalin years for nothing. ‘And what do you do? You're from England, ah yes, and you have your family there,' she decides, ‘and things are peaceful.' She locks her fingers over the stick again, pleased. ‘Yes.'

Across the footbridge over the railway trickled workers from the suburbs, with a drift of the unemployed bent on petty trade, or on nothing. To the north the city crouched in its forest, throwing up an occasional roof or a factory above the trees, while to the south the Alatau mountains shadowed the high-rise suburbs with a glitter of cloud-hung snow. Sometimes the whole bridge shook under me as a train packed with mountain marble rumbled west towards Russia, and hot diesel fumes blasted up from the track.

Marble was handsome building material, said the man beside me, but the Soviets had always bought it cheap. He was a builder himself: a haggard Kirghiz on sick-leave. He glared down on the cargo rattling below. ‘My firm put up half the old buildings here,' he said. ‘We even built the ministries. But now look! These new blocks are hopeless. Their concrete's made of sand and little pebbles, and stuck up with steel bought from Russia. They don't last. The rooms are boiling in summer and freezing in winter.'

‘And the work's made you ill?'

‘It's an illness of my profession. I'm a plasterer, and I've got trouble with my arms. They ache all the time.' He looked older than his thirty-four years, all the youth worn out of him. ‘That's the block we're working on, there!' He jerked his head at a concrete shell where a crane stooped idle. ‘But the work's stopped because the steel hasn't come through. It's all like that now. I'm on half pay anyway, sixteen hundred roubles a month.'

That was less than fifteen pounds. ‘You have a family?'

‘My wife looks after the children at home. That's our Kirghiz way.' He turned his back on the suburbs. A momentary happiness entered his thoughts. ‘I've got a little plot of land where I grow carrots and tomatoes, and one day I'm going to build a house somewhere, away from all this.'

‘That's hard....'

‘The law allows it now, but often nothing happens. If you want to buy land, the local collective farm may just say No, and you'd have to bribe a chain of officials to get it. It's all mafia.' He was sounding like Oman now. ‘One day, when I'm finished, I'll go back to the mountains. But it takes four days to reach my home village, first by plane, then on the hill tracks, it's that far. People work for almost nothing there, but that's where I'll go back.'

He was smoking fiercely, then throwing the half-finished stubs on to the track below. ‘Look at this town. It never used to be like this. Even I can remember when it was grass and trees.' He gazed bitterly at the city as if it were a steelyard. Above it the mountains were shaking off their clouds across half the horizon. ‘In those days a cool wind came in with the summer night,' he said, ‘but skyscrapers shut it out now.' He looked down at the rail-track, gripping the parapet. In its flaking brown paint were lightly scratched graffiti. His wrists were like white stalks.

I could not suppress the feeling that his illness flowed from some mental hurt. He had drifted into the city as a labourer, learnt on the job and married at twenty-one. Then his life had set. For fifteen years he had built a town he increasingly hated. Concrete was so much coarser than the old brick, he said, and even brick was inferior to the native
saman,
which you never saw now. Perhaps the sickness in his arms was as much a toxin from his mind, so deep was his reaction against the suffocation of his mountains. He said again: ‘In the end I'll go back there.'

The bridge was shuddering under our feet above another goods train. Someone had stuck a Soviet flag to its prow. He gave it a mock salute. An old instinct for labels, for the comfort of identifying, made me ask: ‘You don't feel Soviet?'

‘No.' It was a dislocated sound, as if he were answering some unfamiliar language. ‘Or not very.' He was looking expressionlessly at the mountains again. The lines pinching his eyes were already scarring his cheeks too. ‘Soviet? Soviet? They tried to make us feel that about Afghanistan, but nobody did.'

‘You served there?'

‘No, but many of my friends served, and some never returned. Only Moscow knows how many disappeared, deserted perhaps Others came back in coffins, to be buried here. None of them wanted to fight. My friends say that whenever they aimed their rifles they thought “Shall I fire or not?” But of course they were afraid.'

‘There are Kirghiz in Afghanistan?'

His voice fell out of focus again. ‘I don't know, I don't think so.' Even nationality clothed him only thinly.

‘But fellow-Moslems . . . .'

‘Yes.' He contemplated this. ‘Although we Kirghiz are not strong Moslems.'

‘No.' Their Islam was like the Kazakhs', I knew: drawn lightly over nomadic shamanism.

The builder seemed, for a moment, to elude all personality: a man on a railway bridge, in a grey suit and sandals. ‘But look at Afghanistan now. How useless it all was!' He dropped his last cigarette butt on to the departing train. ‘You know, if anybody started shooting from a village, the Russians just wiped that village out: old people, women, babies. It still makes my friends sick talking about it. And they participated.'

We went on looking down on the track. Soot-coloured crows were pecking among its sleepers. The man's knuckles clenched white on the parapet. Beneath them in the paintwork somebody had scratched ‘Aleksis loves Anfisa'. I wondered vaguely who had carved it, Aleksis or Anfisa.

The man said: ‘Those Afghan people are more like us than the Russians are.'

‘Yes.' A lingering pedantry made me want further to place him. But if he looked grim, I knew, it was because he was wondering about his family, not his nation. It was I, not he, who was teased by the flux of his identity: by the light or half-repressed Islam of all these lands, their diminished loyalty to clan or tribe, their Soviet veneer, their shallow-rooted sense of nation. But he did not much care. He did not miss allegiances which his people had never felt. He had his wife and children in a brick-built flat to the north, and a patch of tomatoes. Only I was trying to redefine him. He, meanwhile, was stranded at a watershed timeless in this land: the divide between the urban and the pastoral.

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