Shadow of the Silk Road (22 page)

She was just a schoolgirl, sixteen perhaps, with wide-set, anxious eyes in a pallid face. The imam prayed above her in a hard, rapid monotone while she gazed at him uncomprehending. When he took her arm, she wrenched it away. Her mother fluttered the imam an apology, while the brother’s whip tapped against his leg. The girl turned away from them, stared at me in wonderment, and when I smiled at her she tried to speak.

‘He’s from England,’ her mother said.

Then the girl came pathetically and leant against my shoulder, perhaps because I was the only one who did not bawl at her. She said suddenly in English: ‘How do you do?’

‘She is learning English,’ her mother said. ‘She is in sixth grade.’

The girl asked: ‘Where are you? Who is your name?’ then repeated ‘Colin…’ She spoke barely above a whisper.

‘And who are you?’

‘I am Nurana.’ She uttered it like her only dignity.

They pulled her up the hill toward the cave, while she stared back with frozen eyes.

From our track a multitude of faint paths, edged with stones, dribbled up the hill to anywhere strange–a sudden ledge, a curious rock-face–and there the miracles might start. Below us, pilgrims who had seen visions had marked the spot with rocks. Magically healing plants covered the slopes–you burnt the green-flowering
adrashmun,
the imam said, like an odorous incense to repel all sickness–and lavender-scented shrubs thrust up their lambs’ tails in the wind. The imam shambled before us like a magus, prayer-beads dangling from his fingers. His face glittered with hot, believing eyes. We traversed a hill of wonders, filled with the rush of prayer and angels’ wings. People had been resurrected here. They flew in a few minutes to heaven or to Bishkek. ‘Everybody came! Tamerlane was here! Alexander Macedonski was here! Even people from the Bishkek municipality!’ His voice dropped to an involuntary hush. ‘Even in the Soviet time people came secretly, at night. Many.’

All over the slopes pilgrims had left the memory of their passing with pebbles piled on boulders or inserted into clefts. There were sites for the healing of migraine and earaches, intestinal cancers
and blindness. Every pathway ascended to hope. Stammerers and stutterers found peace by circumambulating an isolated bush. A nose-shaped boulder cleared the sinuses. Those who could not read or pray were cured as they knelt below a bluff, and barren women followed a path to a lichen-green cliff where they rubbed against the stone. And God listened.

In one place a heart had been traced over the ground–a Western intrusion–and here you could overcome your unrequited love, or invoke spirits to lure the beloved to your arms. And in an enclave of living rock believers struck a match to attract an archangel. There you learnt the future: how many children you would have, how much money, when you would die.

Everywhere there were angels. There were special places where they haunted most thickly, and sang. The imam’s voice rose in wonder as he gave away their habitats. And beneath our feet lay the forty warriors of Manas, he said, buried in secret to protect them, nobody knew the exact spot, while their official mausoleum stood empty far away. Night had descended now, and the lights of Lenin glimmered under Venus, which shone brighter than anything below. We could hear the faint singing of pilgrims behind us. Once our path turned beneath a ridge where igneous rocks were scattered under a crag. Visiting mullahs went into trance here, the imam said–his eyes gleamed with the awe of it–then the stones burned with fire all around, and broke into prayer. ‘Yes. They glow and speak. I have seen this…’

In that unearthly light, under the wakened stars, the volcanic slopes grew tortuous and impenetrable. I imagined all the released prayers ascending from the hilltops in a burst of hope and sorrow. Behind me the cab-driver walked in silence. I waited for him to show irony or disbelief, but he only asked a question or two, and once chose a stone to place among the rocks, while his daughter trailed alongside, her smile disengaged, like a child bored in church.

Once the imam lined us up before a black-stoned ledge whose heat, he warned, could burn our veins. Place your palms there, he said, and the fire would race up your arms and through your body back into the stone. So we bathed our hands over the plutonic surface. They all trembled a little. ‘You feel it?’

‘A bit,’ I hoped. ‘It’s just beginning.’ But I felt nothing. And the girl murmured: ‘Nothing.’ This place frightened her, she whispered. She’d mistaken her father’s words and thought we were visiting a bazaar, not a
mazar.
She had wanted to go shopping.

By now we had circled almost to our starting place. The prayer-hall was lost in darkness, with the white collective farm, fallen to ruin ten years ago. At the hills’ farthest point, the imam listened, lifted his hand. Then he wriggled his fingers. ‘Snakes!’

But they were sacred. They emerged through doorways from their paradise in the depths of the earth. Their bite was a blessing, or else they refused to bite, he said. If outside snakes intruded, they repelled them. To my eyes there was nothing here but a path wandering over a patch of stones and scrub. I followed it gingerly, sensing my feet fall coarse and heavy over the earth, the snake paradise, the bones and veins of warriors. Somewhere in the dark of the hill a cicada sang. ‘That’s one of the snakes!’ the imam cried. ‘That’s how they sing!’ He raised his short arms to the starry sky in triumph. ‘God made all things! Even Kyrgyzstan and England! And New York and Albion and Moscow!’

But the cab-driver’s daughter was trembling, wanted to go home. In farewell I slipped the imam some money for the place. It was barely two dollars, but his face convulsed in delight before he pocketed it. ‘May you have health! May your children have children! May they give you money in your old age!’ He took my arm.

We reached a last site alone. It was a smoothed rock, pale under the risen moon. ‘This is the throne of the emperor of the snakes, Shah Maran! He appears here, yes, like a president. I have seen him.’ His hands conjured a crown on the head of a rearing serpent. The vacant stone became sinister in the moonlight. ‘Sometimes he speaks.’ Then the imam’s head bent back to the stars, and he began to pray for me. The name Colin sounded strangely in the rush of his Arabic and Kyrgyz. Arabic itself rang out young in this primeval place–Islam itself still young–while the moon shone in front of us above the hill, rising indifferently over the dust of Manas’s warriors, over Nurana’s loneliness and the shrill of the cicadas.

Late every spring the people along the Jumgal valley go up with their flocks and yurts to the high pastures of Song-kul lake, and return to their villages in the waning summer. This release into the mountains–a transhumance older than memory–incited me to follow them, although the summer warmth had already chilled into September.

A man I met in Kochkor said he could find me horses. Ruslan came from a village in the valley under the lake, and knew everybody there, he said. I wanted to trust him. We looked at each other in mutual appraisal. His face was a polished plate, clouded by a slack, sensuous mouth and hazel eyes. But he spoke with gravelly sureness.

We reached the village late at night, after the petrol transmission had failed in his borrowed car. He no longer owned a house here, he said, and nobody knew we were coming. He roused the local teacher, an old school friend, who even now, at two in the morning, greeted us with decorum, his hair sculpted round his face in fastidious curls, while his tired-eyed wife made beds.

I slept under hanging Kyrgyz carpets by a case of Soviet china. A native lute lay on a divan. In the morning I discovered that I had shared my room with a minute cat, which shot like a gecko over the carpeted walls. In the yard outside, ringed by a sky-blue Russian fence, the frame of a summer yurt was building. But things were hard now, the schoolmaster said, their sheep and cattle so few. Snow blocked them in three months of the year. He made only a thousand som a month–twenty-five dollars–while his wife sold
kumis
, the Mongol fermented mare’s milk, in a nearby market. In early summer his brothers climbed to the pastures where I was going, and grazed their dwindling herds.

It was afternoon before Ruslan found me a horse. He would catch me up by jeep on the mountainside, he said, or by the alpine lake. Uncaring, I mounted the black stallion, and turned its head to the south. Its owner, a sinewy herdsman with a forked Mongol beard, rode as my guide in silence, watching me through wary eyes. At first we went through abandoned wheatfields, bristling with
thistles and scrub. Small birds volleyed from them in sudden clouds, and they were filled with the whirr and rasp of summer insects. Then our way steepened into foothills.

Abbas the herdsman mellowed with the hours, and his look of simple cunning eased. He was proud of my horse. ‘These are
kuluk
horses, very strong. They go sixty kilometres without tiring. Yes, there is another kind, the
jorgo
, runs smooth, gallops like a fast walk. But these’–he pointed down to his stocky mount–‘these are the poor man’s horse. They belong in our country.’

Above us the mountains round Song-kul were severed by stormcloud. Once we passed a group of herders descending, their dismantled yurts stacked on horse-carts, their few cows lumbering in front, their surly dogs following. As we climbed, the mountains unwrapped beneath us. To the north-east they dispersed into snaking ridges, their snows darkening to the valleys. In the west another palisade of peaks was decapitated by a black stream of thunder; while at our feet sunlight still smeared the yellow hills along the Jumgal river.

Just as we began the last ascent, Ruslan’s jeep came pitching and roaring behind us. It was steered by two raucous villagers, its radio screeching, its doors flung open to receive me. The villagers Tochtor and Annar, rivals since boyhood, drove in a squall of badinage and insult. So we crashed on upward, blaring and shouting as we went, while I gazed back at the black stallion and the silent Abbas, left behind on the mountainside.

Suddenly ahead, in the softened light and just beneath us, the blue triangle of Song-kul appeared. Across its still-green pastures drifts of horses, sheep and cattle grazed intermingled, and smoke hung like incense over the yurts. For a moment this nomad camp froze in limpid idyll by the lake; then we were clattering down into its bivouacs among loosed dogs and chickens, while friendly shouts and smells went up.

Ruslan took me on ceremonious visits to old kinsmen. They sat in dignified semicircles, men and women together, on the stained carpets, their yurt-frames festooned around them with harness and frayed clothes. Sometimes a sewing machine or a piece of lowland furniture appeared–half-broken chests and stools–and
reassembled stoves poked their chimneys through the roofs. With the approaching cold, they were all ablaze. Out of a cavernous and discoloured cauldron a matriarch would ladle
kumis
into tin bowls–it streamed fizzy and bitter down my throat–with nan bread and freshly churned butter.

But sometimes our reception was different. Once a fierce-faced despot stood above me, hands on hips, his lips spitting: ‘Are you a guest? Are you a friend?’ I noticed he had a maimed hand. Yes, I said, had his family not welcomed me in? He wanted some obeisance which I did not give, and Ruslan never explained him. Once too we sat uneasily with a haggard mother and her daughter–this was a very poor yurt–and suddenly her finger was wagging at him and her voice cracked into harangue. After long minutes Ruslan stood up in silence and left. I imagined this serious; but no, he said, it was an old vendetta, something about some fish.

We emerged into dusk. I hoped to spend the night among the family yurts. Their felt walls, latticed with ropes, turned them into badly done-up parcels; but inside they were sealed and warm. Instead Ruslan made for the only sordid object in the seventy-mile circuit of the wild lake: a steel shipment container piled with the wreckage of beds and stoves. We crammed into its heat and closeness, already packed with herdsmen and two poachers fishing the lake. A feisty woman ran it like an inn, cradling an infant boy in her arms. Hunched like convicts round the walls, we were all changed in the gaslight. Under his sheepskin cap Ruslan’s features melted into wide jowls and a bull neck. I could read nothing there. But Tochtor was boyish and delicate, with blackcurrant eyes. He was quicker, but less foxy, than Annar, whose long, melancholy face–perhaps from Tajik blood–was crowned by a cockscomb of hair under a wobbly wool hat which he never took off. Only the woman was a voluptuous enigma. The glimmer of her stove, where she knelt among black pans, lit a sultry, handsome face, with the broad eyes and generous lips of her people.

‘I don’t know where her husband is,’ Ruslan muttered. ‘Maybe he has another wife. Quite a few of us are like that. Two wives, even three. But in secret, against the law. Or maybe she’s alone.’

Tochtor went out and drove the jeep close against one wall. Then he dangled a lightbulb from its battery into the cabin, where it bathed me as if I were on stage. Blinded, I talked and listened to shadows.

Bowls piled with food appeared, and the avid ranks of faces stooped forward under fur-trimmed Mongol caps and fishermen’s bobbles. The rich, oily stew of a Marco Polo ram–the largest sheep in the world–dripped down our chins on to mounds of pilau and stacks of long-hard bread. Lukewarm
kumis
went the rounds, and then the vodka began.

Soon the air filled with rough argument and repartee. For hours I listened to a language which scuttled and lisped and tripped over itself in glottal tics. Occasionally a man would try out some dimly remembered Russian on me. And then the toasts started. Vodka inflamed already wind-dark cheeks, and maudlin arms flopped over shoulders. Tochtor and Annar punched one another harmlessly. Everyone drank in the Russian way, the cups drained at each toast, and Ruslan inexorably replenished mine. Reclining stage-lit against the tin wall, I could barely see anyone else. But I was fearing the aftermath of vodka. I lost count of the toasts and began to leak my glass surreptitiously into the felt where I sat. Opposite me the bobbing heads were only shadow-puppets. I never knew what they saw. But the felt was almost waterproof. My vodka spread there in a betraying pool, so that I tried to manoeuvre my feet and absorb it into my socks.