The Lost Heart of Asia (13 page)

A few pilgrims had trickled back into the courtyard. The man was embarrassed at being found with me, but only a little. They crouched round him with their palms upraised, not in the secretive closure of Christian prayer but in the ancient Eastern gesture of receiving, as if to catch raindrops. To some Moslems a journey here ranked second in sanctity only to the Mecca pilgrimage. All was tranquil and at ease in the sunlight. The Shia shrines of Iran and Iraq, bitter in their exclusiveness and grievance, seemed far away. Sufism itself, familiar all over Central Asia, is abhorrent to the radicals of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Its survival here was like a pledge of peace.

These thoughts lulled me, perhaps dangerously, in the wormeaten arcades of the reawakening shrine, until I fell into an ecumenical sleep, tranquillised by the pad of barefoot worshippers, and the burble of rose-headed doves under the eaves.

My ramblings in the outskirts next morning led me through a multi-coloured gateway like the entrance to a funfair, and into the summer palace of the last emir. The building was completed in 1912: a bauble confected of East and West. Across its façades the pediments and pilasters were jungled in Turkic plasterwork, which wriggled fatly over every space. Arab arches sat in Chinese porticoes. Burmese domes swooped up from mongrel pavilions.

When I peered inside, I saw that every surface had been tortured into a surreal brilliance. Tiers of niches cascaded down whole walls, while others bloomed into muralled flowers which reared from their vases in spatular sprays. I dawdled down glittering aisles of mirrors and stained glass. Gilded ceilings spun overhead, and Dutch delft ovens loomed out of corners. Sometimes I felt I was sauntering through pure carnival, and sometimes through a playful, jaded refinement: the last niceties of Central Asia sinking under a ton of trivia.

The Hall of Ceremony and the Chamber of Ministers fell behind me in a concoction of delicate plasterwork and looking-glass
kitsch.
From the bedraggled parklands outside arose the crazed scream of a peacock. Here, under Russian tutelage, the last emir Mahomet Alim had governed the rump of his state in tinsel pomp. His lavishly framed photographs bestrode several tables. Even in dress he was the bastard of two worlds. Fabulously sashed and turbaned like his ancestors, he was weighed down with epaulettes and fatuous czarist honours: a stout little sensualist, whose tax-collectors had terrorised the country.

His palace betrays him. It is an intricate, proportionless toy. I wandered about it in shameless pleasure. Outlandish kiosks appeared to have dropped off its body: follies of dazing ingenuity and lavatorial tiles, where cuddly stone lions looked as if they might mew. In one of these pavilions I found the robes of the emir and his wives.

‘But I think he had only one wife,' said the girl beside me. She was looking without envy at the cabinets of dresses. O r maybe two.' She herself had discarded traditional dress for a lumpy cardigan over an ankle-length skirt. ‘Do people have more than one wife in your country? No? They don't with us either.'

I said: ‘I've heard that some men keep . . . well . . . .'

She burst into giggles. ‘Yes, they call them
sisters.
But it's not allowed.' I looked into a sunny face. She said stoutly: ‘I don't agree with it.'

‘And the veil?'

Her face turned blank with astonishment. ‘Do they still wear that anywhere?
Nowadays?'

‘Yes,' I said. We peered back into the cabinets.

‘I hate it!' She turned her back on them. ‘I don't feel a thing for that history. Nobody does. It was long ago. That last emir?' She pranced to the door. ‘He was rich' – and this seemed to put him beyond her thought.

I went down through orchards to a stone-flagged pond, where an outsize belvedere hovered on gangling stilts. It was reached by stairs in a fanciful tin minaret, and overhung the green pool. From the loggia nearby, it is said, the emir would watch his harem splashing in the waters, and would toss an apple to the beauty of his choice. Or perhaps he wouldn't. He was, it appears, an inveterate voyeur – his palace is riddled with peepholes and hidden stairs – and he seems to have preferred boys.

Yet he found a moment of power between the collapse of imperial Russia and the advance of Bolshevism. In 1918 he repulsed the Red invaders from his city in a welter of treachery and fanaticism which saw the murder of hundreds of Russian civilians. Two years later, before the advance of General Frunze, he abandoned Bukhara and his 400-strong harem to the Red Army, and eventually fled over the Amu Dariya into Afghanistan, shedding behind him a trail of choice dancing-boys.

He left no affection or regard behind him; but he was a Moslem who did not tamper with his people's customs, and there would come a time when his boorish indifference would be recollected as merciful. Compared to the Communist proselytism which followed, his rule was blessedly unprincipled. Mass ideological repression and forced collectivisation were beyond his horizon.

Somehwere along drolly named Central Street – a lane which cars could scarcely enter – I found the synagogue of an early Jewish community. It was sunk behind iron gates in the street's wall. Inside hung the old Soviet slogan ‘Peace to the world', and the halls beyond were astir with evening prayer. In one I glimpsed the dwarf chair, draped in red silks, where boys were circumcised. In another some twenty men sat cross-legged under walls hung with dedications, and rested their prayer-books on low tables covered with dirty linoleum. Genially they beckoned me in. Under their skull-caps and berets, most were indistinguishable from ordinary Bukhariots. But others looked sensitised, paler. In another place or time, I thought, they might have been scholars or poets.

Instead they gabbled their prayers with a sunny robustness. They were cobblers, tailors, street photographers. And their hall had seen better days. They sat exposed under striplights, and a skein of dangling wires and bulbs criss-crossed every wall. Instead of flames the seven-branched candlestick sprouted light-bulbs, mostly extinct, and four different clocks hung on the walls, all stopped, as if Time were out of true.

And so it was. Barely a century ago the Bukhariot Jews had dominated the city's banks and bazaars. They had owned the camel-caravans which wended into Afghanistan and over the Pamirs to China, and had controlled the precious silk market. Above all they knew the secret dyes which glowed in the Bukhara rugs. It was they who mixed an intense crimson from the crushed and roasted bodies of insects found on ash and mulberry trees, and squeezed a beautiful, enduring yellow from a species of larkspur. The hands of half the city's Jews were stained to the knuckles with dye.

Now they looked poor. They had tired faces and rough hands. They spoke no Hebrew (and for centuries never had). Foreign Jews had been horrified by the unfamiliarity of their customs. I sat amongst them while they mouthed their prayers out of little books sent from Israel (offering Cyrillic phonetics for the Hebrew words, but no translation). Four or five men eagerly picked up the chain of prayer from one another. A lean-faced youth breathed it at the ceiling in whispered bursts of memory, and a heavy patriarch intoned before the Ark. But while one recited, the rest gossiped, sipped tea and occasionally chatted down a discoloured telephone.

Seated beside me, a tiny, cadaverous cobbler sent up a cloud of furtive questions. ‘What food do you have in England? . . . How much does a middle-ranking person earn? . . . Here's some tea . . . come to my home for supper Have your sons been circumcised? . . .' He gestured at the wall above us. Behind its gold and scarlet silks, the scrolls of the Law nestled in their cupboards. ‘How long have there been Jews in England? We've been here since Tamerlane . . .'

‘Longer! Longer!' a neighbour barged in. ‘We came over two thousand years ago, after the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem!'

‘More like three thousand years,' said another.

‘Not correct,' insisted a pedant. ‘I believe we came in 1835, from Persia and Afghanistan.'

‘No, no. We came . . .'

But nobody really knew. Two hundred years ago Moroccan missionaries had convinced the community that their origins were Sephardic, and they liked to trace their diaspora through Persia and even Tunis. Some scholars believe that Tamerlane brought them from Shiraz or Baghdad, or that they arrived from Merv early in the eighteenth century.

‘It was Tamerlane,' maintained the cobbler as we debouched into the street. ‘He moved everyone about. We grew rich after that, I've heard, but now we're all poor. Look at my hands.' They were ringed with callouses. ‘Those are a working man's. Most of us are barbers or watch-menders, or deal in clothes.'

He led me into an untraceable maze of alleys. In the dark his smallness made me feel I was following a child. But his talk was a long lamentation on his people's hardships. Half of them had already emigrated, he said: those who were richer or more daring. They had gone to the Americas or Canada or Israel. ‘There are only seven hundred of us left now. Most of my relatives have gone.'

‘What do their letters say?'

‘It's hard out there in America. They thought it would be soft, but it's hard. The government gave them eight hundred dollars a month.
Eight hundred dollars
!' His voice sank into disillusion: ‘But that's what a month's rent costs. He rapped on a low door in a blank wall. ‘But they've found work now, and they'll be all right.'

The door opened on a pretty, bird-like woman. I guessed she was his wife: he did not acknowledge her. He and his brother lived in clusters of rooms at opposite ends of a long courtyard. As we crossed it, a shoal of small sons and nephews circled us. The darkness swam with their blackcurrant eyes and wan faces. Inside, the rooms were indistinguishable from those of city Moslems. The walls and floors were clothed in cheap carpets, and photographs of ancestors perched above hangings just under the sitting-room ceiling. The quilts, the black-and-white television, the china cabinet, were all in place. Only on one wall hung a high-coloured print of Moses clasping his tablets, and some prayer-shawls had been sent by an uncle from Canada.

All their windows were barred, but hostility towards them was still muted, the cobbler thought. Far to the north-west in Khiva, anti-Semitism had become so fierce that the Jews had all fled, and it was growing ominous in the Fergana valley to the east. ‘Nobody knows what will come.'
Perestroika
had licensed them to worship openly and to start their own schools, he said, but it had also released around them this dark racism, and perhaps it was for this that they assembled in the synagogue every morning and evening now, and searched their scriptures.

As the family settled to supper, drawn in a quiet rectangle round the half-lit room, they seemed already tinged with the bereavement of refugees. The boys were ragged and wary. The fine-boned wife looked preternaturally delicate. A speechless grandmother, whose husband had died fifty years before, huddled like a plinth among the children, while opposite lounged the cobbler's brother, a morose fanatic with bulbous cheeks. They dipped into the pilau with old teaspoons. The grand-mother's homemade wine gurgled into tooth-mugs. Only the woman's spoon, after searching out shreds of chicken, never reached her lips but travelled into the mouths of her small sons.

‘This is the reason we can't befriend the Uzbeks easily.' The cobbler dangled a scrap of chicken. ‘We can't eat with them. Ours is
kosher.
Theirs . . . .' He dropped the morsel formally into his mouth. ‘Our communities have never intermarried. With Russians, occasionally. But with Moslems, never.'

‘With Russian Christians?'

‘No, just Russians.' A tiny sigh seemed to stick in his throat. ‘Life was better then, under the Communists. Now things are happening too quickly for us. Did you see they've taken the statue of Lenin away? I don't think they should have done that.'

I asked in faint surprise: ‘Why not?'

He frowned. Everything was more tenuous now. Lenin had signalled a kind of continuity. ‘In your country I think they do this: whether a king was good or bad, his monument still stays. It's part of history. You don't demolish history like that.'

But his brother charged in. ‘Who wanted that statue?' He spoke in staccato shouts. ‘Who wanted anything they did? Look what I got from them!' He flung up his shirt. ‘That was in the Afghan war!' Across his hirsute stomach travelled livid, parallel scars. ‘Shrapnel!'

Everyone fell silent. These repudiated scars were his dignity. Words were meaningless against them. But the cobbler murmured to me: ‘Our local astrologist says that in forty-five years America will go down and Moscow will come up again. You think that's true? He says he knows the future, and that Communism will come back.'

‘Not in its old shape.'

‘It's rubbish!' shouted the brother. ‘That's all finished!
Fooof!'
His nose and cheeks ballooned over his face, squeezing his eyes to hyphens. ‘Gone for ever!'

Perhaps it was in reconciliation that they switched on the music they had played and recorded together. It emerged from a cracked cassette-player: sounds of unexpected tenderness. I listened for any strain of Hebrew melody, but could discern none. While the cobbler was playing an Uzbek
dutah,
his brother was singing Tajik folk-songs from Afghanistan. Whatever music their people had carried here centuries ago had been obliterated in the Central Asian vastness. In time, I had read, the Jews became court musicians to the emirs, but their repertory delved deep into an indigenous Moslem music. As the brothers' recorded noises mourned in the room's closeness, they strained to hear, as if it were all new.

My soul is a house in ashes,
You are its destroyer

The cobbler's fingers pattered on his knees, while his brother, seated in sudden melancholy, repeated the words of his recorded voice – lyrical, almost sweet – as it sounded back to him. It was as if only in the insulation of music, in this disconnected passion, could any gentleness come to him.