The Lost Heart of Asia (6 page)

Gingerly I approached the room where they had prayed. I had imagined it empty. But I eased open the door on a cave cluttered with fantastical bric-à-brac. From its walls dangled out-size wooden pots and ladles, with curling posters of Mecca and the holy places of Bukhara, and the shelves were crammed with candle-stubs and a litter of cloudy bottles. A wooden platform, smothered with soiled quilts, almost filled the floorspace, and on this, under the dim light shed by a dome, an old woman was sitting. She looked huge and sorcerous in the gloom. Her body was swathed in stained and ragged crimson, and a massive silver frontlet, littered with perforated coins and semi-precious stones, cascaded over her breast. On a ledge behind her, his mouth level with her ear, perched a shaven-headed boy. As I entered, the woman's creased hands lifted automatically in prayer, but in her face everything – all vitality, insight, emotion – had vanished long ago, and the eyes which wandered over mine were mute and undreaming.

I asked about the two graves. But the boy only glared back at me beneath fierce brows, and the woman went on rasping her inscrutable prayer. I crouched down on my haunches in involuntary deference. The boy watched me unblinking, like a black Ariel. Hesitantly I pushed some money over the quilt, imagining that the woman was praying for me. But after she had stopped she did not take it, or even notice me. Drenched in jewellery like an ancient bride, she seemed to be waiting for something, and I could not rid myself of the impression that this vaulted chamber was her chosen tomb, where her posthumous sanctity would grow unimpeded, until it too became a place of pilgrimage.

I got up and crossed into sunlight, where swallows were dipping between the arches of the ruined mosque. Broken scaffolding clung to them, and a winch had congealed beneath to a mass of rust and snapped wires. After a while a faint, rhythmic pinging sounded from a ruined-looking dwelling. I had assumed it too squalid for habitation, but when I peered inside I saw an old man touching an elfin hammer to a little anvil. In front of him lay a miniature lathe and a box of gouging and chipping tools – all as intricate and fragile-looking as he – and with these he was creating miniature jewellery and the unearthly, silvery music whenever his hammer struck.

He lived here, I discovered, with the old woman among a muddle of chipped dishes and indecipherable effects, and he carved Islamic crescent moons out of wood or ivory, which he sold to pilgrims. As I came in, he asked me to sit by him. Tentatively I enquired after the saints buried here, and wondered if he was their guardian.

His voice came thin and musical: ‘They were soldiers, martyrs. When? I don't know, but in the century of the great sultans. Their history is written in Arabic and Persian. You can't find it in Russian.' He added in faint reproof: ‘People should learn the holy languages. You can learn one in a few months if your will is strong enough, and if your heart is right.' He massaged his heart with a tiny fist. ‘Look.' He rummaged among his tools and from a carefully beribboned cloth picked out a Koran in Arabic. ‘People should read this!'

Yet his own eyes twinkled over it unseeing; he could no more read it than I could. It was a talisman only. In the Stalin years a whole generation of educated Turcomans, the Arabic speakers, had been despatched into oblivion.

I took it from him and turned the sacred pages. ‘Where did you get it?'

‘From Iran. Sometimes they come here, those people, and from Afghanistan.'

‘You favour that system, that . . .' – the word whispered like a secret – ‘fundamentalism?'

For a moment he went on chipping at the ivory in his hands. Suddenly I realised how I hung on his reply. Here, if anywhere, among the poor and pious, must be the breeding-ground for an Islamic resurgence.

But he answered simply, finally: ‘No. We don't need that here.' He jerked his chin to the south. ‘That's for people over there.'

It was strange, I thought. Superficially the soil for fundamentalism was perfect here: the deepening poverty and sense of historical wrong, the damaged pride. But in fact the old man's response was typical of his people. The idea of religion as a doctrinaire moulder of society seemed shallow-rooted among them, and their faith to thrive somewhere different, somewhere more sensory and pagan.

‘All those laws and customs . . . .' The old man resettled his grimy skull-cap. ‘They don't matter. What matters is underneath this!' – he plucked at his jacket – ‘What matters is the heart!'

He laid down his gouge and tried to activate a blackened gas-ring. The old woman came in and circled round him, while he gestured her on little errands just beyond his reach – to collect a teacup here, remove a slipper there. She had lost her strangeness now. She moved about him with a slow, desanctified tread. ‘She's deaf,' he said. But his voice was too weak to shout at her. It fluted. His thin legs stuck out unnaturally in front of him.

‘Our country's had enough of other people's interference,' he said. ‘Our whole world is committing suicide.' He sliced his hand across his throat in ghostly sacrifice. ‘All these trains, aero-planes and cars, when what we need is food! Our soil can give us three crops a year, but what do we usually get? One! All we plant is cotton, but you can't
eat
cotton. You just sell it for roubles. That's what our country's done. And you can't eat money either.' He picked up a rouble note and munched it in phantom frustration. ‘Nobody works now. People have to work. Then, God willing, everything will bear fruit . . . .'

His talk was a goulash of Islamic custom and Marxist work ethic. But his own work was almost done, he said. Two years ago he had been restoring the nearby mosque arches, when he fell and severed his spinal cord. From his hips down, he was paralysed. Yet he mentioned this with the same goblin brightness as he described everything else, illustrating his fall with the crash of his little fist on to the quilt. I remembered the scaffolding outside from which he must have toppled, and realised now why his legs were so thin, thrust in front of him. He moved them about with his hands. ‘Nothing!' He touched the base of his spine. ‘Nothing!' Then he pointed to the door. ‘I go about on that now. I made it myself.' My gaze followed his finger, and alighted on one of those heartrending trolleys which cripples ride in India and Iran – wheeled boards, which they propel over the tarmac with their hands.

He must have seen my expression. ‘It doesn't matter,' he said. ‘My life is over now. My children are all grown up. They don't need my help any more.' He retrieved the Koran from my lap. ‘I can die now.'

His manner refused all pity, but I took up one of his crescent moons before I left, and handed him a fifty-rouble note.

He looked at it without interest. ‘Do you have kopeks in England?'

‘We have coins.'

‘Next time you come, bring me some of those. I work them into ornaments. Afghan pilgrims give me coins.' I remembered the perforated coppers which flowed over the old woman's breast, stamped with Afghan lions. I realised too now why he kept asking her to do simple things around him, just out of his reach. ‘Metal and ivory are all right. Paper is useless.'

Living among graves, and surrounded by the wreckage of centuries, the huge woman and her pigmy consort touched me with irrational sadness. But there was nothing real I could give them.

Towards dusk I reached a seventh-century citadel crumbling on its mound. Its battlements resembled a rectangle of vast clay logs upended side by side, and I wondered why this petrified stockade had not been manned against the Mongols. But perhaps the human heart, in the old man's words, had not been right, and now the crenellations had worn away and the entrance-ramp was blurred into the sand.

I waded across stagnant ditches, and skirted a seasonal pond where a flock of black-winged stilts was tiptoeing through the shallows. Ahead of me, a giant mausoleum reared out of nothing above the littered plain. For forty feet into the air its cube of walls loomed blank. It had been heavily restored, and only a pair of high doors broke its austerity. But near its summit it opened on an ornamental portico, and above its drum, from which all decoration had gone, a great dome hovered.

This was the tomb of the much-loved Seljuk sultan Sanjar, grandson of Alp Arslan, whose rule vacillated for fifty years across the eastern provinces of the disintegrating empire. At first his triumphs over Turkic enemies shored up his delicate realm, but in middle age disasters made his name a byword for humiliation. In 1156, at the age of seventy, he died in a half-ruined city and was entombed in the mausoleum which he had built himself, and called ‘The Abode of Eternity'.

He was succeeded by chaos, in which his memory glittered. The form of his tomb – its walls closed against the earth but open to heaven – signalled to his people that he was perhaps alive, and might return to resurrect his empire. But inside I found an echoing emptiness. The whitewashed walls lifted to an octagon from whose pendentives floated a cavernous inner dome. It moaned with the beat of pigeon wings. Decorative strapwork, still painted blue, radiated over its surface and meshed at its apex in an eight-pointed star. But vertically beneath it, in the centre of the floor, a plain grave, protected by a sheet against pigeon droppings, subverted the glory of the ruler with the platitude of death.

‘You watch out in those ruins,' said Murad the lorry-driver. ‘They're haunted.'

‘Who by?'

‘I don't know. People have been heard crying there.' He was trying to dissuade me from returning. He was jaunty and impetuous, and wanted me to join him on a picnic in the desert. ‘And that castle you saw,' he went on, ‘there's gold buried all round, but nobody can find any. Its sultan kept a harem of forty women there and a tunnel leads from it underground to the other end of the city. It's dangerous.'

These fables of gold and tunnels attend ruins all across the Islamic world, so I agreed to the picnic instead, and the next moment we were crashing through the side-alleys of Mari recruiting his friends. He blasted his horn and bawled his invitation beneath half a dozen tenement-blocks, until a flock of grizzled heads sprouted from rotting oriels and balconies, to bellow down their assent or refusal. Then he would march inside to harry them, yelling for me to follow. We bounded up stair-wells fetid and awash with recent rain, where bottles and cigarette stubs and sometimes broken condoms floated. We were joined by a big, hirsute man with violent eyebrows and a lax, cruel mouth. Then came a wizened old Mongoloid clutching a lute in a velvet case. And soon we were careering across the desert in a gust of anticipation, while over the hummocks around us the goosefoot and artemisia thinned, and all signs of habitation vanished.

After an hour Murad's face – a quivering profile of high bones – quickened into expectation. ‘We're here!'

He veered over virgin sand and we settled in a dip between the dunes. A weft of yellow and mauve vetch shone all over the savannah, and poppies turned the ridges scarlet. He had forgotten nothing. A felt carpet, such as once covered Turcoman yurts, was unravelled over the sands. Bags of spiced mutton appeared, with two charred samovars, an outsize stewing-pot, a basket of raw vegetables, sheafs of kebab-skewers and some fire-blackened bricks. As we scavenged for dead saxaul – the wind-blown plant whose pallid stems litter the whole country – a familiar euphoria broke out. Their voices were light and bantering. Their bodies seemed balanced only precariously on their bow-legs, as if they longed to leap on horseback. Soon we had a triple blaze of fires going. The samovars were cremated in a nest of flaming branches, the shashlik oozed and spat over charcoal heaps, and the stewing-pot – into which Murad had tossed a calf's head – simmered balefully on a brick hob. The men's faces lit up in sybaritic grins. The bitterness left the big man's mouth and the Mongoloid's face dimpled into glee.

‘Isn't this better than home?' he cried, as we settled ceremoniously on the carpet. ‘Nothing compares with this!'

Soon the shashlik was being thrust triumphantly from hand to hand. Dribbling blood and fat, it was tough as rope. But the three men swallowed each morsel wholesale, or clamped it between their teeth like mastiffs and worried it to and fro, until it separated with a noise like tearing sheets. They celebrated every mouthful with a carnivorous burp, and dipped gluttonously into mountains of radishes and olives. The brief respites between skewers resounded with an anticipatory grinding of gold and ivory molars and the smack of oily lips. They looked artless and timeless. At any moment, I thought, they might break into shamanistic chant or propose a raid. The time was not long past when their ancestors had cantered eighty miles a day to harvest Persian slaves – the Mongoloid's father might just have known it – and the desert still seemed subtly to nourish them. Their earthquake-stricken country gave no confidence in building, or perhaps in any permanence at all. Better the open sky!

Assiduously they plied me with the tenderest chunks of shashlik, but my teeth recoiled even from these. I smuggled them out of my mouth and secreted them wherever I could: in the bush behind me, under the sand between my knees, in my shirt pockets. Murad kept thrusting more at me, the point of his skewer threatening my chest. But he was grinning with hospitality. They all were. The big man detached the most succulent nuggets to press on me, with the crispest onions. But soon my pockets sagged with the telltale meat, and a betraying stain of fat was spreading across my shirt-front.

As I masticated despairingly on another hunk, I bit on something hard, and assumed it was mutton-bone. Then I realised that it was one of my own bones I was chewing. I had lost a tooth. Neurotically I ran my tongue back and forth over the gap. Nobody else noticed. I longed to inspect it in a mirror, but I could picture it well enough: the double rank of ivory now breached by a slovenly void, as obvious as a fainted guardsman. Viewed from the right, I might pass muster. But seen from the left, I thought, I must show a Dracula-like unreliability. Would I be refused permits, visas, even hotel bedrooms, I wondered, on account of this lost incisor? Would conversations dry up the moment I grinned?