The Lost Heart of Asia (7 page)

These broodings were halted by the arrival of soup. Murad elevated the cauldron above his head as if at a pagan Eucharist, while the calf's head bobbed obscenely to the surface. The big man skimmed off the fat and threw it on the sand. Then we drank, and it was delicious. Fumbling in my rucksack, I found a packet of English cheese biscuits and passed them round complacently. They nibbled them without comment. Later I noticed Murad dropping his into the sand.

Little by little the party's spirit mellowed. The men's quick, guttural language was mysterious to me, but they translated their jokes into a babbling Russian, and finally Murad conjured up three bottles of vodka. ‘This is the whole point!' He slopped it into shallow glasses, and we flung them back in one gulp, Russian fashion, at every toast. Only the old Mongol refused to drink at first. It suborned his stomach, he said. ‘He's an
ishan,
a holy one!' roared the big man, mocking.

‘They drink most of all!' retorted the Mongol, and they were rolling in the flowers with laughter.

Some charred pots of green tea created a moment's hiatus. Then the vodka-drinking went on. Sometimes, secretly, I spilled mine into the sand, but Murad replenished my glass at every toast, and fatally I lost count of them. Meanwhile they absolved themselves with blessings, and peppered their talk with ‘If God wills!' or ‘Thanks be to God!', while pouring out the forbidden spirit. Then they expatiated on remedies for hangover, and confided the medicinal properties of saxaul root or green tea (sovereign against headaches if you inhaled the aroma between cupped hands).

‘Try it! Try it!' But it was too late. The vodka had already detached me, and I was seeing them all from far away. Sitting cross-legged on their carpet among the flowers, they seemed to have regressed into a Persian miniature. Yet squatting amongst them was this outlandish foreigner, with a black stain advancing over his shirt ...'

The big man turned to me with inebriate slowness and asked:
‘Where
are you from then?' All countries, I think, lay in mist to him beyond the oasis of his own. ‘London? That's in America!'

‘No, no!' yelled Murad. ‘Great Britain!'

The giant looked bewildered, but said: ‘Aah.'

‘Margaret Thatcher!' mused the Mongol. ‘She is very beautiful. I did not think that such an old woman could be so beautiful. So slender!' He shook his own hands in congratulation. ‘Who is president of Great Britain now then? Does she have a son?'

By now the shadows of the shrubs were wavering long over the dunes, and the sand grew more deeply golden, the sun descending. The men picked their teeth and let out soft whistles of contentment. For a while the Mongoloid had been plucking the poppies round him, and munching them. But now he took out his
dutah
– the frail-looking Turcoman lute shaped like a long teardrop – and started to play. From this coarse instrument he conjured tiny, plangent sounds on two wire strings, to which he sometimes sang, or half-spoke – but the words, he said, were untranslatable – about love, longing, and the passing of everything. His voice was a husky shadow. His shaven head, furred over by a grey and white chiaroscuro, bent close over the strings, as if striving to hear. He had never been taught to play, he said, but had learnt by listening to the old bards in his youth. Yet his gnarled fingers fluttered along the wires, and long after his right hand had plucked one, his left darted up and down the lute's stem, while the notes faded.

Far away on the horizon, billowing black into the sky, an enormous column of smoke was ascending, where some oil installation had gone up in flames.

The sun dropped into the dunes. The last of the shashlik, ignored, had charred to a line of basalt pebbles, and a postprandial weariness descended. The last song left the old man's lips, and he eased the
dutah
back into its velvet sheath. Our picnic had shrunk to husks and rinds. Flies were glued to every abandoned scrap. We groped to our feet and began to clear up. The old man was slapping his head against the flies. He cleaned the skewers by stabbing them into the sand, as the Romans had cleaned their armour. Nobody seemed to notice the long trail of dung-beetles on a gastronomic pilgrimage to the bush behind me.

The vodka had vanished too, and all the way back to Mari my head was separating from my body. I glimpsed it swaying in the lorry's mirror. Whenever I opened my mouth my missing tooth struck me with a seedy shock. It had not so much dropped out as disintegrated, and had left a stunted fang dangling above the gap like a yellow stalactite. But by the time we reached Murad's house in a village on Mari's outskirts, I had ceased to care. My legs dropped from the lorry independently, and embarked on a wavering half-life of their own.

I remember his home only as a series of vodka-sickened lantern-slides which light up in my memory even now with a tinge of shame. Two women in native dresses are standing near the doorway. They are Murad's wife and eldest sister. His wife comforts her small son over something as he sobs against her breast. I greet them feebly. The half-light from the door, or an overhanging vine, seems to turn them biblical. I imagine I am back in Syria. The starlight shows a private vegetable patch, and two cows standing under a byre. A puppy wags a disfigured rump. To save it from being mauled by other dogs, its ears and tail have been sliced off with a razor.

My legs carried me weightlessly into the bare interior. In its reception room a dresser shone with cheap ornaments, and a television stood mute. Murad was drunk too, strutting and shouting. The women looked at us with the indulgence accorded to hopeless children.

The drink-haze lifted a little on a mild-faced schoolmaster who was invited in to speak English with me. He did so in a doggerel monologue of Dickensian sentences, once or twice beginning ‘It is painful to reflect . . . .' or ‘As is my wont . . . .' Meanwhile I propped myself on a cushion like an indolent sultan, and tried not to sink into catalepsy. A young musician, too, was summoned from the village to amuse me. In the middle of his improvised concert, I watched through dulled eyes as he slapped two batteries into his
dutah
– ‘It makes a bigger noise like this!' – before launching into new arpeggios.

The music tinkled far away. A great tide of blackness was lap-ping up behind my eyes. I remember hoping, as they thudded shut, that this would be construed as ecstasy at the
dutah
music rather than a bursting headache. Whatever happens, I thought, I mustn't sleep.

Then I slept.

For 800 miles the Karakum desert ripples towards Afghanistan in pale yellow waves. Bordered to the south by the Kopet Dagh and the Hindu Kush, and to the north by the long hypotenuse of the Oxus river, this shifting, fine-grained wilderness throws up no landmark, no distinctive feature at all, but is fringed by choked wells and salinated fields. A Roman historian remarked in astonishment that its people could travel only by the stars, like sailors.

From my train window it guttered through a triple haze. Misted by my hangover and by the smeared glass, the whole wasteland was dimly in motion. Almost unnoticeably, a light wind was lifting the feathery grains off the dunes, until every surface fell faintly out of focus. For mile after stricken mile the sallow crescents rolled to the skyline — not in sculptured contours, but in shuffling ridges and rotted-looking mounds.

Across these wastes, in 329 BC, Alexander the Great had marched his 60,000-strong army to the Oxus under a scourging sun, and here, when a soldier brought him water in his helmet, he refused to drink while his army was dying of thirst, and poured the water into the sands.

Later expeditions were drastically depleted, or vanished altogether. General Skobelev, moving against Merv in 1881, started out with a pack train of 12,000 camels, and ended with only 600 living; and the formidable General Kaufmann salvaged barely one twelfth of 20,000 camels and horses from his desert march on Khiva in 1873.

The failing of water glares over the whole region. Tributaries of the great rivers peter out in sand-cluttered gullies, and whole lakes shrivel to beds of salt. Irrigation has both extended and thinned its resources. Even the inland seas – the Aral, the Caspian, the mountain-ringed Issyk-kul – are gradually emptying.

The family seated beside me looked out of the window with loathing. As the void deepened, they let out a rasping ‘Eah!' or ‘Fffft!', and cuffed away the view with their hands. ‘It's hopeless,' the woman said. ‘You can't do anything with it.'

They were stout and old, with thick bodies and coarse necks: a Russian couple with their small granddaughter. They wore an identical look of clouded defence. In their shared face a tundra of cheeks and jowls overpowered all else, isolating their vision and squeezing their mouth to a fleshy bud. The small girl's plaits were gathered up under frothy muslin ribbons and a Mickey Mouse hairclip, but already she reproduced her grandparents' stolid stare.

The old man had worked in the oil-wells at Nebit Dagh near the Caspian for forty-five years, and a Soviet work-medal drooped from his lapel. Every spring, before the heat came – ‘A wind brings the sand out of Afghanistan like a sauna,' he said – they escaped northward to a dacha near Samara in the Russian heartland. There they lived on fruit and vegetables which the woman had grown and bottled the year before, and would return south only when the snows came.

In the cubicles around us the Turcomans lay asleep on the railway's flowery pillows. Their padded coats dangled decorously from every hook, but the faces coddled below were those of Hunnish destroyers. Their beards forked angrily over the clean sheets. Their young women, descendants of those Amazons who had followed their men into battle, lay fully dressed in a glitter of gold-threaded headscarves and earpendants.

A hundred years ago the building of this Trans-Caspian railway had set the seal on their nation's defeat. Its earthworks and cuttings were hacked out by 20,000 native and Persian labourers, while two battalions of soldiers spiked down the rails behind them. Along this thin line the trains dithered at less than fifteen miles per hour, but by 1895 it had linked Russian dominions from the Caspian to Tashkent, and hung a Damoclean sword over Persia.

Now the train pushed through a howling wilderness towards the Uzbekistan frontier. A tempest dimmed the sky with sand and tumbled the torn-up saxaul from dune to dune. Local Turcomans say that the sand-grains in each dune cling together like tribespeople and never intermingle, but towards evening our view had liquefied into a tawny mist. Once or twice we passed impoverished villages, with camels wandering in the dust-blown streets, and the desert heaped at their walls. The sun dangled above like a tarnished coin.

‘How frightful!' chorused the family. They were dreaming of the green north, the cool winds and marshy fields round Samara.

An hour afterwards we clanked through the sprawl of industrial Chardzhou and minutes later, as the last suburbs disappeared, we were crossing the Oxus. It moved in a huge question-mark over the barren earth: less like a natural river than an act of fate. Both its source and its end were far away. In the past, before irrigation depleted it, it flooded to a diameter of five miles, and even now, confined to its banks, it measured over half a mile across. It flowed with a soft, muscular ease. Silt-mounds glistened on its surface like the backs of drowned whales, or were smoothed into temporary islands, so that it appeared to be entering its estuary four hundred miles too soon.

For a precious minute the train crossed its bridge. I stared at it with boyish excitement – few Westerners had ever seen it – and with a faint sickness of nostalgia which I could not identify. This was the immemorial divide between the Persian and Turkic worlds, and in its 1500-mile flow from the Pamirs to the lifeless Aral Sea, I fancied that it scarcely belonged to the present at all. Turkic peoples call it Amu Dariya, ‘the River-sea', so vast does it seem, and Arab geographers long considered it the earth's mightiest river. In Persian legend (and the epic of Matthew Arnold) Rustam had killed his son Sohrab on its banks. Alexander's army steered itself across in five days on inflated tent-skins stuffed with brushwood, and seventeen centuries later the Mongol emperor Tamerlane crossed it the other way to conquer the world.

I had time to glimpse two or three antiquated ferries churning between the mud-flats, and the span of a new lorry bridge. Then the desert circled us again, and we were riding into the night across the unmarked frontier of Uzbekistan towards Bukhara.

As if emboldened, an Uzbek youth perched on our bunk and started to ask questions. His skull-cap was faded green, and his shoes scuffed. The Russians watched him with furious suspicion. The old man answered him only by thin smiles, and the woman was violently silent. But the youth affected not to notice. When he offered the woman a drink from his bottle of lemon juice, she almost screamed her refusal, and glowered in disbelief when he passed it to their granddaughter. ‘No, no, no!' And the little girl, infected by the nervousness all around her, echoed: ‘No, I don't want it, no . . . .'

The youth turned to me. ‘Where are you from?'

‘He's Ukrainian!' the woman barged in. ‘He's a teacher! He's just going to a hotel in Bukhara.'

The Uzbek's eyes glided over me. He looked delicate, amused, harmless. It was impossible to tell what he wanted. He murmured: ‘Ukrainian . . . .' and moved away.

The woman said: ‘You be careful. It's dollars they want. They'll kill you for them.' She pointed her fingers to her head and pulled an imaginary trigger. ‘They're shooting foreigners for their dollars now. Pff! . . . Pff! . . . Pff!'

‘It's worse in Russia,' the man said. ‘There it's got terrible.'

‘But it's coming here too,' the woman said. ‘There won't be travellers here much longer.'

I sank into an uneasy quiet. Outside, the train's headlamps wobbled myopically over the same mutilated-looking desert. Nothing betrayed that we were entering the most ancient and populous country of Central Asia, its settled heart, or that the nomad wastes would soon give way to the watered valleys of Transoxiana, ‘the Land beyond the River'.

Across this region, for some two thousand years, the Silk Road had nourished caravan-towns – Samarkand, Bukhara, Margilan – whose populace had spoken an Iranian tongue. The Uzbeks were latecomers, migrating south at the end of the fifteenth century. They took their name from a khan of the Golden Horde, for their origins were Turkic, but already their blood was mixed with Iranians', and they added only the last layer to a palimpsest of peoples identifying themselves less by nation than by clan. On my map Uzbekistan made a multi-coloured confusion. It was shaped like a dog barking at China. A country of twenty million – more than seventy per cent of them Uzbeks – it butted against the Tienshan and the Pamir mountains in green-tinted lowlands and a sudden spaghetti of roads. But it remained an enigma: a land whose Communist rulers had persisted in power under another name, offering only lipservice to Islam, and loosening the economy without promise of democracy.

As we pulled in to Kagan, the station of Bukhara, the woman hissed in my ear: ‘Mix only with Russians! Say you're an Estonian!
Never
talk to Uzbeks!'

I got out into the warm night. My rucksack felt suddenly heavy. I had contracted her fear, a little. I kept glancing behind me; but the families tramping along the platform looked docile and self-absorbed. A lonely goods train stood under the stars.

A century ago, when the railway first neared the city, the people had never set eyes on such a thing. It was beneath the dignity of the emir of Bukhara – a vassal of the Russians since 1868 – to travel on a train, and its pernicious track had to skirt the holy city by ten miles. People dubbed it ‘the Devil's Wagon'. Yet the moment it arrived at Kagan, they crammed into the open wagons in their hundreds and would wait ecstatically for hours to witness it puffing its inexplicable smoke and to feel the exquisite terror of its movement.

Now I trudged out of a silent station and into the lamp-lit night. A perverse excitement was stirring me. Bukhara! For centuries it had glimmered remote in the Western consciousness: the most secretive and fanatical of the great caravan-cities, shored up in its desert fastness against time and change. To either side of it the Silk Road had withered away, so that by the nineteenth century the town had folded its battlements around its people in self-immolated barbarism, and receded into fable.

I started up the road towards scattered lights and a dark hotel.

The sun rose on a chalk-pale city. Its heart was a mud-floored labyrinth where cars petered out. The lanes meandered in ravines of brick and stucco, so that I found myself tunnelling for miles between blank walls where whitewashed clay and weathered door-frames propped each other up, old and new together, in a patchwork of splintering plaster. Ranks of timbers poked out of walls like the cannon from some rotting man-o'-war, or lifted whole storeys clear across the alleys. In these blind wanderings the lightly carved doors, bossed and ringed with brass, stood habitually shut. Sunlight never reached them. The streets curved ahead of me like an ambulatory full of closed chapels. Only occasionally, where some mangy Cerberus nested in an open doorway, I would glimpse beyond a deep passage a courtyard where roses bloomed or a bicycle rusted or a stairway wriggled down from a balcony.

Meanwhile, a motley of citizens sauntered by. A few still went in the long, multi-coloured coats of tradition; and blue or green skull-caps perched on every other head. But an unravellable mix of Turk and Iranian subsumed every face. Aquiline features and vivid, open eyes betrayed a people chiefly Tajik – the early Persian inhabitants – but other faces smoothed to steppeland masks in which the eyes became passing details and the eyebrows refined to feathery arcs.

Once I was overtaken by a groom on the way to his bride: a sheepish-looking youth, outlandishly sashed and turbaned. He went among cheering friends who hoisted four-foot horns into the air and made a rude, unearthly braying. Behind them skipped a street-gang of girls whose members were half-recognisable: the tomboy leader flashing her adult teeth, the rebel, the joker, the beauty, and the sissy tagging along behind.

After they had gone, one of them returned, slopping in slippers too big for her. She had the wide-set eyes and fair complexion of the Russians, and blonde curls trickled under her headscarf. She looked like a miniature charlady. She asked: ‘Have you got a dog? So have we, but it's old. I hoped you might get another one from America . . .'

I asked her, in the boring way of adults, what she wanted to do after she finished school.

But she walked away. ‘I'll be a young woman, then a mother, then an old woman . . . .' Her walk slowed to a dark saunter, and she looked back suddenly over her shoulder ....' Then a corpse.'

The alleys twisted into clearings, where I came upon a holy man's grave, restored forty years after its destruction under Stalin. A fig tree marked the mound, which was strewn with candle-stubs, and a horse-tail banner had been raised above it again. At such moments the Communist era shrank to a thin wave in a timeless sea. So too, in the tea-houses of the Lyab-iKhauz, where the lanes opened on a pool ringed with medresehs – religious schools – an immemorial conclave of old men lolled on wooden divans as if nothing had ever changed. Their heads were knotted in pale blue turbans or piled with sheepskin hats. Beards dribbled from their chins like fine wire. They sat at ease cross-legged, or dangled a hedonistic limb over the divan's edge, while the proprietors shuffled amiably between them, pouring out green tea from cracked pots. A gentle euphoria was in the air. Nothing sounded but the clink of china and a genial murmur of conspiracy. A breeze blew ripples over the water. Around them the religious schools looped in high gateways and blind arcades, in whose spandrels flew faience phoenixes. Here and there a façade cast a band of Koranic script into the sky, and under nearby plane trees a statue of Khodja Nasreddin, the wise fool of Sufi legend, rode his mad-faced mule.

‘What would he make of us now? Everything's gone mad!' I had sat down mistakenly beside a man who was angry-drunk. ‘Look at our Uzbekistan! We've got cotton, gold, skins, oil, uranium, marble, but we all live like rats!' His raucous voice split paradise apart. The seraphic faces of the old men turned sleepily towards us. Our families should be ten times richer than the French! Our potential is greater than Saudi Arabia's! We could buy America!'