The Lost Heart of Asia (9 page)

Zelim was an artist who lived with his mother and wife in the alleys south of the Lyab-i-Khauz. A friend had given me his address with a warning that he was silent, and I came upon his house only by chance. Above its doorway a tin plaque read; ‘Here lives a veteran of the Great Patriotic War'. But I had no idea who this veteran was, and my knock was answered by a forty-year-old woman with hennaed hair and green eyes. She was Zelim's wife, Gelia, who ushered me down a passageway and into a courtyard which seemed almost empty. Its rooms resonated like cisterns. She was unsure where her husband was, Gelia said. So we sat waiting in a high living-room spread with carpets and lined with classic Russian novels. Faintly embarrassed, she pushed dishes of nuts and sweets towards me. She had a liquid, tender face which might have been European, and she spoke a soft English. But she said her parents were Tartar who had come from the famine-stricken north to Tashkent in 1949, because it was rumoured a ‘city of bread'. Her laughter tinkled in the bleakness. She had only been an infant then. Long afterwards she had married Zelim here and given him two sons: gaunt, loose-limbed youths now, who stalked about the compound in silence.

But another, weightier presence brooded in the passages. Massive and watchful, Zelim's mother settled opposite us, cracking sunflower seeds. Her eyes were sorrowful crescents. She sat with her knees splayed in woolly stockings, and listened. The pale oval of her face — smudged with a chance nose and hung with flaccid cheeks – lent her the moon-like gravity of a Chinese.

She was, in fact, one quarter Chinese. In the last century her grandmother had been abducted from Kashgar at the age of six, and sold in the slave-market of Bukhara. Then her grandfather, a rich merchant, had fallen in love with his purchase, and married her. The old woman's eyes watered with remembering. ‘She was very small and delicate, with little shoes and tiny hands.' She fumbled a photograph album from a shelf and opened it on a woman wreathed in Bukhara silks. ‘There!' I saw a thin-lipped, brooding face, oddly attractive. She had died in her forties. ‘They were rich people,' the old woman said. ‘My father too. We had a dacha and a garden then, where the statue of Lenin stands now.'

Her father had owned two wives and many children, and her memories were all of happiness, living together in the same house. ‘We had servants, many, and when guests came Papa would kill a sheep for them.' Then she spat out bitterly: ‘And now we're rationed to a hundred grams of meat a month! And it costs a hundred and ten roubles!' She was starting to shake. She gazed at her father's photograph, high on the wall in the room's centre. ‘Papa built this house. It is a memorial to him.'

Swarthy and turbaned, he stared down with a sombre authority. He seemed to inhabit a world long before the age of cameras, but she called him ‘Papa' as if he were in the next-door room.

He had fought as a Bolshevik revolutionary, said Gelia – in English, which the old woman could not understand – but he had been too rich to escape the Stalinist purges, and had died in a Siberian camp in 1937. His daughter had fallen in love with a Chechen Moslem from the Caucasus, and they had married; but within a year he too had been banished to Siberia and she had divorced him. She watched us now, uncomprehending, and breathed in long, heaving sighs. A mixture of Tajik and Chinese, she had yet grown one of those awesome Slavic bodies which look born to suffer. ‘She left her husband because she remembered her father,' Gelia said, ‘and she could not bear to go through all that again.' She had been married just one year, and had born a child, Zelim.

He entered the room like a ghost. He was tall and faintly stooped, although only forty-three. His chest appeared to have collapsed inward, and under his whitening hair the gentle, creaseless face looked out of reach. His speech was blurred and murmuring, and sometimes faded away. I had the deepening impression that the whole house belonged to its dead. Their memory haunted it: that wronged father and husband. By contrast, the living had shrivelled inside its walls.

Yet the old woman remained stoically, violently Communist. Her father and husband might lie in anonymous graves in Stalin's labour camps, but her political faith was pitted deep in her mountainous and immobile body, and would not be shaken. ‘She believed it wasn't Stalin's fault,' Gelia said. ‘She thought it must be somebody else's. She thought he didn't know.'

Yet even now, when Stalin's role was clear, this schizophrenia continued, so brutalisingly complete had been the woman's indoctrination. She heard the name Stalin in the rustle of Gelia's English, and at once her fists thumped together. ‘Stalin was strong! He imposed discipline!' She heaved herself upright in her chair. Her dress strained tight as a drum round her belly and thighs. ‘Prices were controlled then. Everything was controlled! It's only after Gorbachev that we had these wars and this inflation The Russians need discipline. We can only work under discipline!'

Gelia was simmering with laughter. ‘She's a Communist,' she said, as if it were a disease. ‘She's famous for it.'

The old lady drew down a hand from her throat to her lap, as if performing open-heart surgery. ‘I'm a Communist right through my blood,' she said proudly. ‘That was my education.'

I was mutely astonished. I became uneasily conscious of her murdered father watching the room from his enshrined photograph; while her husband had left himself behind in Zelim – ‘He's the image of his father!' Yet she sat stubborn as a rock in the chaos of her values. She revelled in memories of her privileged childhood – the servants, the property – but still gave lectures locally which glorified Communism. Each time she saw Zelim, she looked into the face of the husband she had abandoned.

As for Zelim, his eyes were overcast by bushy brows, and his face seemed not to see. But while Gelia and his mother talked, he told me in his faraway voice: ‘My father was not political at all. Just a writer who wrote about the countryside. But it was enough to be a writer in those days, to condemn a person.' He looked at me with a kindly, impenetrable gaze. He was older now than his father had ever been. His hair receded from his forehead in two shining inlets. ‘I've never read his work. He wrote in Chechen, and I can't read it. He died out there in Siberia . . . .'

Gelia was saying mischievously to his mother: ‘You get it, you get it!'

Abruptly the old woman left the room and returned carrying a military jacket clanking with medals. It was her own. She had fought through the Second World War, and it was in her honour that the tin plaque surmounted their door. She held the jacket up. Perhaps she thought it spoke more trenchantly than words. Her fat fingers coddled the medals. ‘This is the highest of all,' she said. ‘Look. Gold and platinum. The Order of Lenin!' The discredited head clinked against her thumb. ‘I was a radio-operator at the front, reporting the advance of tanks. I helped beat them all – Germans, Americans, British!'

To many Russians, the war was fought only by themselves against the world. Gelia said: ‘The Americans and British were on our side.'

“ . . . And I reported the flight of aeroplanes,' the old lady went on, ‘and artillery . . . .'

For a moment the Soviet empire glittered awesomely again in that medal-hung jacket. ‘She was a heroine,' said Gelia quietly.

‘And all that struggle,' the old woman continued. ‘For what? Why? People today, my heart bleeds for them . . . . Do you know what a television costs?'

Gelia said: ‘It's true. Everything's changed here in six months. Our factories produce nothing. People just trade in odds and ends, or buy and sell from somewhere else.'

‘It's God's curse on them for all their abortions!' said the old woman enigmatically.

Gelia said: ‘But the prejudice is starting to frighten us. When I go to the market now, the vendors sell me the worst cuts of meat, or just stare through me. They think I'm Russian. That dis-like never used to be there, not openly

‘Four hundred roubles!' the old woman said. ‘That's all this television cost a year ago. Now it's eight thousand. And that fridge . . . and the carpet . . . .' She knew all the prices, and everything had gone' up ten- or twenty-fold. ‘A train to Samarkand used to cost . . . .'

Gelia said: ‘The Uzbeks used to learn Russian. Now they're pulling their children out of the Russian schools and sending them to Uzbek ones. It's they who have the power now!'

‘Tomatoes . . . thirty roubles . . . now they're . . . .' The old lady's voice had soured to an angry whine. ‘Cabbages used to . . . .'

But Bukhara was a complex city, Gelia said. Many of its people were not Tajik or Uzbek at all, but Russians, Tartars, Jews and a horde of others. The Russian school where she taught English was like a small cosmopolis. ‘Even the Tajiks and Uzbeks are muddled up. In some families one brother's registered as an Uzbek and another as Tajik. It's hopeless. But perhaps it'll save us. Maybe people are too interbred to become nationalists.'

But the old woman's litany went on jangling beneath Gelia's talk like an idiot wisdom. ‘Soap . . . . Oranges . . . .' There was no telling what people might do if poverty became extreme.

‘There's no future for us here,' Gelia said: ‘We sent our sons to Russian school, so they speak no Uzbek or Tajik. And they look like Russians. Who will give them jobs now? Who will want to marry them?'

After a while the old woman brought in a platter heaped with mutton pilau, the universal dish of Central Asia, and we dined on this, and drank cabbage soup and sipped her cherry wine. Zelim had turned against his mother long ago, I'd heard, and for years they had not conversed. But now the old woman glowed as she spoke to him, her face quivering, and he would answer in his soft, distracted way, while she went on wobbling and flushing, and sometimes talked on his behalf, so deep were his silences. ‘He loves his mother's pilau, especially his mother's He's spoken more today than he has for a long time He never eats enough, he's too thin . . . .'

‘It's no good being thin,' Gelia said. ‘The important people are all fat!' She was mysteriously buoyant in the world disintegrating round her. The household was sustained chiefly by her teaching. Zelim rarely sold a picture now. Only a reticent sadness underlay her jokes sometimes, like a dark instrument in a light orchestra.

Before we parted she said: ‘I don't know if Islamic fundamentalism will come here. They've opened small religious schools in every district of the city. They're all learning Arabic.'

I said: ‘I thought Stalin wiped out the Arabic-speaking generation.'

‘Not quite. People went on learning and reading in the home, while pretending not to know it . . . and now it's coming out into the open.'

We crossed the courtyard in the dark, under a quarter moon, past its ranges of empty rooms, and said goodbye in the lamp-lit street. Gelia looked at me with a sudden, pained brightness. ‘This may be the last time you see our faces,' she said, and raised a screening hand beneath her eyes. ‘When you return, we'll be wearing the veil!' She was touched by laughter again; but above her hand the eyes were not happy.

On the city's western fringes, the last of its battlements falter and die over derelict parklands. Their eroded towers rootle back into the earth, and their crenellations look as if they would fall at a touch. But just inside them, hidden among trees, stands the tenth-century Tomb of the Samanids. Disconnected in time and style from anything around it, it stands in isolation, without ancestry or heir, as if it had been set down all of a piece from somewhere else.

Its form is modest: a tall cube supporting a dome. Each facade is pierced by arched doorways, and each corner inset with a pillar, while a small, decorative gallery circles them above. But over all its surfaces – friezes, columns, lunettes – swarms a latticework of ornamental brick. No hint of colour touches it except the sandy monochrome of these slivers of baked clay. They are laid with a fertile cunning and variety. Their chiaroscuro of raised and depressed surfaces lends to the whole tomb the absorbent richness of a honeycomb, as if it had ripened in the sun. Brickwork has become an obsession, a brilliant game, so that the mausoleum blooms against its trees with a dry, jewelled intensity.

The tomb is all that survives of the precocious Samanid dynasty, the last Persians to rule in Central Asia, whose empire pushed south of the Caspian and deep into Afghanistan. The tomb escaped the Mongol sack because it lay buried under windblown sands, its builders half forgotten, and it perhaps finds its architectural origins in the palaces and fire-temples of pre-Islamic times. But its sophistication – the lavish, almost playful deployment of its brick – betrays an age more daring, more intellectual, than any which succeeded it.

For over a hundred years, until the end of the tenth century, a creative frenzy gripped the capital. Alongside the moral austerity of Islam, there bloomed an aesthetic Persian spirit which looked back to the magnificence and philosophic liberalism of the Sassanian age, extinguished by the Arabs more than two centuries before. As the Silk Road spilt into and out of Bukhara – furs, amber and honey travelling east; silks, jewellery and jade going west – the Samanids sent horses and glass to China, and received spices and ceramics in exchange.

An era of peace brought men of letters and science crowding to the court, and the Persian language flowered again in a galaxy of native poets. It was an ebullient age. Iranian music, painting and wine flourished heretically alongside Koranic learning, and the great library of Bukhara, stacked with 45,000 manuscripts, became the haunt of doctors, mathematicians, astronomers and geographers.

The short era produced men of striking genius: the polymathic al-Biruni, who computed the earth's radius; the lyric poet Rudaki; and the great Ibn Sina, Avicenna, who wrote 242 scientific books of stupefying variety, and whose ‘Canons of Medicine' became a vital textbook in the hospitals even of Christian Europe for five hundred years.