The Lost Heart of Asia

The Lost Heart of Asia

COLIN THUBRON

Dedication

For my Mother

Contents

 

 

 

 

This journey was undertaken during the first spring and summer of Central Asia's independence from Moscow. A brief visit the year before yielded some valued friends; but in the shadow of political uncertainty the identity of several people recorded here has been disguised.

Years earlier I had travelled in the nearer Moslem world, then the European Soviet Union (for which I learnt a halting Russian) and eventually China. Central Asia supplied the final, most elusive piece of this personal jigsaw.

The sea had fallen behind us, and we were flying above a desert of dream-like immensity. Its sands melted into the sky, corroding every horizon in a colourless light. Nothing suggested that we were anywhere, or even moving at all. The last solid objects in the universe were the wing-tips of the plane. Yet when I stared at the faces dozing or brooding around me, I felt that only mine did not belong in this sun-stricken wilderness. They were wide-boned faces, burnished and still. They slept.

We had turned along the forties latitude now, midway between Gibraltar and Beijing, into the world's heart. It was a childish concept, I suppose – that the world had a heart – but it had proved oddly durable. As a boy I had soon lost the notion that one day I might slither down the North Pole or run my finger-tips along a red-hot Equator. But unconsciously I had gone on feeling that somewhere in the core of the greatest land-mass on earth, beyond more familiar nations, there pulsed another country, half forgotten, to which the rest were all peripheral.

Yet even on the map it was ill-defined, and in history only vaguely named: ‘Turkestan', ‘Central Asia', ‘The Land beyond the River'. Somewhere north of Iran and Afghanistan, west of the Chinese deserts, east of the Caspian Sea (which lay far behind us now), this enormous, secret country had turned in on itself. Its glacier-fed rivers – the Oxus and Jaxartes of the ancients, the Chu and the Zerafshan – never reached the ocean, but vanished in landlocked seas or died across the desert. The Himalaya cut off its mountains from any life-giving monsoon where the Pamirs rose in a naked glitter of plateaux, so high, wrote Marco Polo, that no bird flew there and fire burnt with a pale flame in which you could rest your hand.

Yet this region stretched from the Kazakh steppes to the Hindu Kush. It was larger than Western Europe and split by atrocious geographic extremes. While the Pamirs lay under permafrost, the Karakum desert beneath us could simmer for weeks at a time in 105°F in the shade, and its flatlands harden to a surface like levelled stone.

‘There's nothing to see down there,' said the Uzbek seated beside me. ‘It's the Turcomans' country' – and his voice darkened in despisal. ‘They're shepherds.' Then, alerted by my clumsy Russian, he asked: ‘Are you from the Baltic?'

‘No, England.'

‘England.' He contemplated the word as if waiting for something – anything – to flutter into his mind. ‘That is next door to America ....'

I stared down. The plane's fuselage was gliding above a wasteland where faint tracks wandered. Here and there, as in some anatomical chart, canals and arteries converged over the blank tissue of the sand, or spread into dark fields. Occasionally, too, the soil whitened to saline flats, where all shrubs had withered away, or never been. But against the desert's enormity these features looked as slight as craters on the moon. For mile upon mile the only colour was a terrible, famine-breathing platinum, less like pure sand than the pulverised clay of the empires which had petered out in its dust: Persia, Seleucia, Parthia, Macedon .... It was awesome and somehow expected: that the heart of the world was not a throbbing organ but a shifting question-mark.

People had filled it with their inner demons. In ancient times it was the domain of Cimmerian hordes who lived in perpetual mist, and of the dread Scythians with their horses and gold. It became a corridor awash with nomad nations. For centuries it would remain silent and the movements of its peoples unknown, then it would unleash its wild cavalry west and east – Scythians, Huns, Turks, Mongols – to unwrap the softened empires round them. It was the hinterland of God's vengeance.

Its strangled rivers also nurtured empires of its own, muffled to Western ears by the vastness surrounding them. They left themselves behind in cities and tombs broken over the encroaching wilderness or in the river valleys. Only after the fifteenth century, when the Mongol empire fractured and the Silk Road died, did this fearful heartland sink out of history, splintered into obscure khanates and tribal pastures. Four centuries later the Russian empire easily devoured it, and its noise was heard only dimly, through Moscow, as if it were a ventriloquist's dummy.

‘You will go to Samarkand and Tashkent,' the man beside me said. It sounded more a command than a question. ‘But you won't go to Tajikistan, there is fighting there. They are fighting everywhere now. Nobody knows what the future is ....'

But my journey unravelled in my mind through six thousand miles of mountain and desert. The Soviet system of tourism had broken up, and I had secured my visa by pre-booking rooms in a chain of grim hotels, which I would often ignore. The old order – all Soviet Central Asia – was cracking apart, and its five republics, artificially created by Stalin, had declared their sovereignty a few months earlier. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kirghizstan — suddenly the Soviet tide had ebbed from these shadowy Moslem nations and had left them naked in their independence. What would they become? Would they hurl themselves into the Islamic furnace, I wondered, or reconvene in a Communist mass? I could conceive their future only in the light of powers which I already knew: Islam, Moscow, Turkey, the West.

To the south, for more than an hour now, the snow-peaks of the Kopet Dagh, the ‘Dry Mountains', had guided us eastward. Adrift in a sea of haze, they drew the ancestral battle-line between the Turkic and Persian worlds. For more than two hundred miles they followed us like the first waves of an ocean poised to come crashing out of the Iranian plateaux barely thirty miles to the south.

Then we started to descend over a wide oasis. Beneath us the snake of the Karakum Canal was taking silt and water to the Caspian Sea. The collective farms looked as neat as Roman camps, bisected by pale streets where nothing moved. A voice over the Tannoy announced that in ten minutes we would be landing in Ashkhabad.

Ashkhabad: the capital of Turkmenistan evoked no feelings at all. Turkmenistan was one of the poorest and wildest of the old republics of the USSR, a desert region huger than Germany, peopled by less than four million souls. Over a century ago its inhabitants had been oasis farmers or stockbreeding nomads, whose raids had filled the markets of Bukhara and Khiva with thousands of Persian slaves. Now Turkmenistan had discovered oil, gas and minerals, and – it seemed – the habits of dictatorship. With the collapse of the Soviets, little had changed in its government except the formal abolition of Communism.

Watching the passengers as we came in to land, I realised that the broad Mongol visage belonged to Kazakhs and Uzbeks, who were travelling on east. But the Turcoman faces were fiercely individual and anarchic. Sometimes they showed brown hair with long jowls and slender noses. A few might have been German or English. Two seats from mine an oval-faced woman with blue eyes was breast-feeding a blue-eyed baby. In front of her lolled a turbaned mullah whose beard bifurcated down his chest from concave cheeks. As they all hunted for their luggage under the seats of the groaning Tupolev, I saw that they had scarcely a suitcase between them, but heaved out packages trussed with frayed string, bedrolls and splitting bags. They seemed like nomads still: predators and opportunists, whom history had caught in mid-migration.

Their capital, when I reached it, did not seem theirs at all, but a Russian city, almost featureless. I wandered its streets in bewilderment: streets funnelled through avenues of firs and plane trees, a placeless greenery. A century before, only a few hovels had clustered here, but the military station which replaced them had bequeathed wide roads laid out for army wagons and artillery. In 1948 Ashkhabad was pulverised by earthquake, killing 110,000 people. Now all was modest, low, temporary-looking. The city had a passive strangeness. It seemed half empty. Ministries, colleges and institutes deployed in pastel colours and bland classical orders. Here and there some mock-oriental tiles or plasterwork made a concession to local culture, but the hammer-and-sickle and Red star still stamped every gate and pediment. Nobody had chiselled them away, or seemed even to notice them. They remained behind with a recessional foreboding.

The streets were still full of Russians: lumbering young men in jeans, and heavy-hipped women with hennaed hair and worn faces. In the parks the gossiping war veterans were still ribboned in their medals, and robust female gardeners bent among rose-beds. I longed to talk to someone. The youths loitering under the chestnut trees, and the young mothers walking their children, teased me with the mysteriousness of a people still unknown. What did they do when they were not here? What were they thinking? Momentarily they inhabited a milieu of maddening remoteness.

Along a track between trees, two small girls were riding a children's railway. They perched at little wheels, and thought they were steering the train, while their mother sat and watched. We joked a little as her girls steered themselves importantly, but our laughter sounded fragile and empty. Perhaps the illusion of control was too adult a sorrow. She was half Russian, it turned out, and half Armenian, and until the year before had been married to a Turcoman. The small girls, with their primrose skin and black eyes, were the fruit of this union. But she wanted to go to Russia now. ‘We all do. My Russian friends talk of nothing else. Some have already gone. My grandparents arrived as farmers at the time of the czars – there was land hunger in Russia then – so I haven't known any country but this.'

‘You belong here?'

She hesitated. ‘In a way.' Perhaps she belonged nowhere now. She had one of those Slavic faces which ignite into a sentimental sadness that is paradoxically touching. ‘It'll be hard to go back. It's not even “back” really.' She trembled a little as she spoke. ‘But they're making it hard for us. If you want a job you have to apply in Turcoman. The first question they ask you is: Do you speak Turcoman?' But I've never learnt this language ....' She said this with a wondering regret, as if she suddenly saw that there was a culture here, not a dying irrelevance. All her life it had been these half-noticed Turkic peoples who had been compelled to learn Russian. Now, overnight, she was a foreigner in her own birthplace.

I asked: ‘But where will you go?'

‘I don't know. I have relatives in Moscow, but it's impossible to find work there. Two-room apartments cost a million and a half roubles It's too hard a place.' She added sadly: ‘Harder than here.' The toy railway-train had squeaked to a halt, and her girls were clambering out. She exploded, suddenly bitter: ‘But these people will regret it when we go! The Russians run every-thing here! We're the only people who make things work. When we're gone, what will their future be?'

The future was moving through the city round us, of course, but it remained opaque. The Turcomans inhabited these streets and flats like strangers. They walked in shabby jackets and dusty shoes. Their women put on flowered dresses and the same melancholy jackets; but their heads flashed with silk scarves over the fall of glossy pigtails. Occasionally an old man in a towering sheepskin hat or blue turban seemed to have hobbled out of another time, or a young bride shimmered past in ankle-length velvet.

Yet they moved in a Soviet city. Suddenly they had inherited all the structures and institutions of another civilisation. For decades Moscow had tried to assimilate them to a nationless stereotype – a
Homo Sovieticus
– and in this their own culture had been buried. Even the street names – Gagarin Prospect, Lenin Avenue – remained, for the moment, unaltered. Only Karl Marx Square had become Turkmenistan Square, and the cynically named Freedom Prospect had been renamed after Makhtumkuli, the eighteenth-century founder of vernacular Turkic literature, whose portrait now stared from the walls of offices and institutes as if he were president.

Scanned from any height, the city looked impermanent, almost pastoral: a shanty-town whose tin and asbestos roofs drowned in trees against the vaporous Kopet Dagh. Sometimes I had the fancy that it was an enormous cantonment, built to accompany some truly Turcoman town which had vanished. But this other town was unimaginable.

As I roamed the sanitised squares and boulevards, the depth of this people's change was impossible to know. They seemed cauterised. Even the Russians did not appear to own this metropolis, but carried with them a look of rural displacement. They trudged the pavements like farmers. It was as if the city itself belonged to nobody. With its grid-iron streets and screening trees and aseptic monuments, it was the perfect laboratory for the Communist experiment, where disparate peoples would be blended, and the world made simple.

It was early April, and a warm rain pattered out of the sky. It polished the avenues to brilliant green, stirred stagnant ponds in the wells of numberless flat-blocks and hatched a swarm of pink umbrellas above the women. Whenever a wind blew, it seeped through the frames of my hotel window.

But little else entered the hotel. It was a parody of the self-defeated Soviet world which had built it. It reeled across the sky in a cliff of balconies and porticoes. But inside, everything fell to bits. Stone-flagged floors spread a mausolean gloom through reception and dining-rooms, overcast by fretted ceilings. In the bedrooms nothing worked, but everything – fridge, television, telephone – was represented. My bath might have been designed for a cripple, and the plasterboard furniture, varnished malignant black, was breaking up. Electric wires wandered nomadically about the walls, and a tiny rusted fridge doubled as a bedside table, and sighed disconsolately all night. The coming months would blind me to such trivia, I knew; but for the moment I observed them in disordered fascination. Even in this near-rainless land, damp had mounded up loose plaster behind the splitting wallpaper, and etched it with a sepia tidemark.

Outside, the corridors were dark. That spring the instability of Central Asia had warned foreigners away. Only in the dining-room a little orchestra of tambour, drum and accordion played Turkic pop songs to a delegation from Ankara.