The Lost Heart of Asia (14 page)

O nightingale of my heart
Sing me that I was right to trust you....

The young women listened to this abstract love in unreadable stillness, while the small boys lapsed into sleep. I felt unease for them. Subjects of an empire now crumbled into nationalism, their vulnerability sent up unsettling echoes from their people's longer history. Even here, the Jews were set apart. Barely a century ago they had been obliged to wear girdles of common rope and to ride only on donkeys. There had even evolved a sect of crypto-Jews named
chalas,
‘half done', the fruit of forced or pragmatic conversion to Islam. Shunned by both Jews and Moslems, they became sickly through interbreeding and had almost dispersed, but their giveaway surnames were still despised.

Now the Tajik songs had faded from the tape-recorder, and the children were being bundled into their quilts. I got up to go, wishing I could offer something. But as I parted from the cobbler in the pitch-dark street, he only said: ‘Don't tell anyone you were here. It's against the law.'

‘Not any more.'

He smiled, a little ashamed. The fear still guttered in his eyes. ‘No,' he answered. ‘But still.'

On my last afternoon in Bukhara I drove out with Zelim to a melancholy necropolis which he had haunted as a young painter. His mother levered herself into the car too, ribboned in her war-medals, and pointed out along the road the improvements which Communism had brought. She looked pale, and sometimes trembled, but she gazed through the windscreen with a baleful pride. ‘Thirty years ago you'd have seen a hundred horses and carts here for every one car,' she said. ‘It was just a filthy track . . .'

Zelim said in his faraway voice: ‘I remember the horses as a boy. They didn't churn up the mud like cars do.' He loved horses. They crowded his canvases with heavy heads and dissolute manes. He painted them more affectionately than he did humans.

The old woman said: ‘These suburbs used to be a disgrace.'

After a few miles we arrived at a graveyard tumbled round a shattered mosque. The building had been raised in the sixteenth century around a three-sided courtyard, but its central structure had collapsed, leaving two magisterial prayer-halls separated in the dusk. Under one arcade stood a blackboard and some benches, where Koranic lessons were starting up.

‘Just ruins,' said the old woman, as she heaved out of the car. She hated the place at once.

But a mullah had emerged to greet us – a tall man with a pared, angry face – while a cripple stumbled complaining after him. The mullah remembered Zelim from years before and began to regale us with the history of the cemetery. He exuded a fierce, sweated energy. But behind him the cripple, his white head bound in a frayed turban, followed like a deflating shadow, undermining his talk with down-to-earth asides. As we tramped between mounds of dust and into half-restored enclosures crammed with engraved cenotaphs, the mullah reeled off the names and qualities of the dead in bursts of parrot learning.

‘They don't want to hear all that,' the cripple said. ‘You can leave that out.'

But the mullah barked on in a harsh monotone, as if he were addressing not us only, but the mosque, the dimmed sky and the surrounding dead. He trumpeted the genealogies of all its buried saints, who had lain here longer than the mosque itself, some of them, and hushed into sorrow at inscriptions worn away or defaced; while the cripple, playing Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, grumbled and refuted and threw in belittling innuendoes. Often the mullah spoke too fast for my understanding. As for Zelim, he had gone deaf to words, and seemed only perfunctorily present. He was watching the textures and shapes of the cemetery in the painterly twilight, and after a while he drifted away.

The old lady, hobbling after us, grasped my arm suddenly, almost affectionately, in her unsteadiness. ‘It's from the war,' she said. ‘My spine was broken.' Her fingers hooked frailly over my forearm. She glanced at the carved headstones: their Arabic script had paled to wraiths. ‘I don't know whose ancestors these are.' She grimaced and looked away. ‘Some of mine', she added vaguely, ‘had blue eyes and fair hair. I think they were descendants of Alexander of Macedon's soldiers. Those men intermarried here.' She regarded these later graves with dulled contempt, and after a time she shuffled back towards the car.

I was left alone with the mullah and the cripple. Graves seemed to have dogged my way ever since entering Central Asia. Everywhere they were being restored, reconsecrated, refrequented. Sometimes they were less graves than tribal memories. They were the newly dignified past. The Soviets had tried to amputate history, but now every historical artefact – a tomb, a mosque, an inscription – was a milestone along the half-obliterated road back. The dead had become the conduit by which the living were reintegrating themselves.

The mullah's voice rasped and flared among the tombs. Yet whenever I intruded on this rush he listened with a frowning intensity, and fell quiet. He struggled to disentangle the Kufic script on headstones, but could not. Like many others, he said, he was trying to learn Arabic, but his Uzbek teachers could only read the language haltingly, and did not speak it at all. Around us the earth tossed and heaved beneath its memorials, tilting them left and right. Sometimes it gaped on empty crypts, then closed again where the cenotaphs above had been lugged into shaky order. The mullah pointed down at a warren of breached vaults. ‘Those are the tombs of Naqshbandi sheikhs.' His voice lifted in wonder. ‘See how big they are! People were taller in those days. Look. Three metres long! All of them. And look at the modern ones.' He gestured at some forlorn mounds. ‘Two metres at most! People are small now. We are not like they used to be.'

‘Food is rationed,' said the cripple. ‘That's why. Even cookingoil.'

I asked: ‘There are still Naqshbandi Sufis here?'

‘Yes, yes,' the mullah answered. ‘There are many still living in the city. But their dress shows nothing. They are like invisible ones!' He struck his ribs and half chanted: ‘What matters is in the heart! It is only the heart that matters!'

I said: ‘Perhaps you are one.'

The cripple laughed cynically. But the mullah did not reply, only rushed on with a new genealogy of dead holy men. There had been a time, he said, long before the Prophet, when this place was a shrine of fire-worshippers, and a matriarchy. ‘That is why some women still worship fire.'

‘Women? You've seen them?'

‘You see them often. They pray at tombs. These people are fire-worshippers. When they do that, they are remembering the matriarchy, honouring it.'

He was rabid again, glittering. I could not tell if this supposed heresy outraged or excited him. I asked: ‘And you?'

‘I can pray only to God, not to tombs. Everything's changing now. We have a class here where forty children come after school to learn the Koran. Our mosque is being restored with the money of ordinary people, although the government gives nothing and it will be finished when God wills.'

He seemed at once exultant and angry. I wondered how to ask him the question which went on rankling in me. But among those cold graves, in the sudden twilight, it asked itself: ‘Do you want fundamentalism here?'

He turned to me with dagger-bright eyes. ‘No! That won't come.'

‘Why not?'

He answered: ‘In the Koran it is written that the Jews and Christians are close to us.' He rubbed his fingers together in amity. ‘We cannot stand against one another.'

Then he turned and launched into a new encomium on the dead. Always the dead! The whole past seemed to have risen in retribution. But his strident harshness appeared a habit now, just a way of talking. At last he said: ‘You must excuse me. I have to pray.'

He entered a hut and re-emerged in a coat and snowy turban. A few bats came whispering out of the trees. Already faint chanting sounded inside the walls of the half-ruined mosque, and through one door, over a brilliant lake of carpets, I glimpsed a rank of kneeling men.

Zelim's mother, the war veteran, was waiting in the dusk. She had been frightened by a rush of doves out of the graves, she said, and had returned to the car. Zelim too had been tramping miserably over the corrugated earth. The loss of the central façade, which had united the two prayer-halls, filled him with dismay. It had stood here only two years before, he said. As a boy he had come often, sometimes on foot, and returned to paint it again and again. ‘It was quiet then. Ruined. There was nobody. Just trees.'

What was it he had loved so much, I asked: the melancholy, the wilderness of graves, the silence?

But he said: ‘No. You see, the mosque has proportion. The whole building is in one style. I like that. Its harmoniousness.'

He walked away to view it from another angle, as if this might return to him some illusion of its old self. It was almost dark, and a rash of stars was descending the sky. But for a full five minutes he went on staring up at the building, trying to re-create in his head the harmony which he remembered as a boy.

The oasis was thinning away. Its fields petered out in formless swamps, then vanished beneath the dunes. The peasant woman seated beside me stepped down from our bus near the last village and walked off into emptiness. This whole region west of Bukhara had been densely populated as late as the eleventh century, and here and there spectral mounds and ridges swelled under the saxaul; but it was impossible to tell if they were the burial-place of forts and villages, or a chance collation of dust. Our bus clattered and droned in the silence. Only occasionally the sands hardened to flatlands lightly polished by grass, or shone with pools of late rain, where sandpipers stood.

Westward along an arrow-straight road we plunged 300 miles towards the Khorezmian oasis and the Aral Sea. To our north the pinkish dunes of the Kizilkum, the ‘Red Sands', were tossed in blurred crescents to the horizon, while somewhere to our left the Amu Dariya, still invisible, wound in a ponderous flood through the camel-coloured wastes, dividing the ‘Red Sands' from the ‘Black Sands' of the Karakum.

Inside my bus the lilt of Uzbek pop songs half obliterated the shouting of convivial youths; some peasant women slumped in half-sleep, and two girls were reading romantic novels in Russian. A student named Rachmon shifted on to the seat beside mine, and started to talk. Dressed in scuffed shoes and a black waistcoat, he looked like an apprentice undertaker. A thatch of hair overhung his forehead like a sunshade, and the eyes beneath it bulged in adolescent questing. He was returning home with a low-grade diploma in construction engineering. But he added with a callow charm that his passion was Islam. On his collective farm had lived a secret mullah, he said, and this man had been his guide. But he yearned for more knowledge. Islam was the only way he knew back into his people's past. It promised to enclose him in some lost sense of family. His longing was less a search for God than a quest for self. He asked pathetically: ‘Tell me about my country.' I was nonplussed. ‘You've read books. What happened here?'

I answered uneasily: ‘What do you want to know?'

‘Anything
. You say your shops are fuller than ours. Why?'

Trying to simplify something which I did not understand, I spoke about the discovery of the sea-lanes round Africa, in which power had passed to the kingdoms of the Atlantic seaboard – Portugal, Spain, England – and the Central Asian trade routes had withered away. But Rachmon did not know of this. He thought England lay a little west of Moldavia, where he had finished his armed service. Proudly he showed me his education booklet, which recorded his final exams when aged seventeen. For history – ‘Soviet' and ‘World' – he had earned ‘Grade 5: good', yet of his own people's past he knew nothing at all, and the world's history had reached him distorted by a rigid Marxism. As for geography, I was glad to see, he had received only ‘Grade 3: fair'.

His ignorance of the Islamic world deeply frustrated him. He was trying to build something ideal out of fragments. Even his friends on the bus, I sensed, treated him with faint condescension, as if he were a country dolt. He repeated the dogmas of his mullah slavishly to me. He wanted wholeness, a new belonging. He wished he could travel like me. His gaze washed over my rucksack. But he said: ‘Aren't you afraid? Aren't the police following you? A foreigner travelling like you in our country! Don't they think you're a spy?'

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘Do you think I'm followed?'

‘I don't know either.' He looked at me, bewildered. ‘I'm just an ordinary fellow like you.'

On the horizon to our north a mushroom-cloud of storm had welled up, as if billowing from some supernatural crater, and by nightfall it had covered all the sky except for a crack in the west. Then this too closed, and we were travelling in our own pool of light along the empty road.

By now the passengers' shouting had shrunk to murmurs. The two girls had fallen asleep with their novels in their laps. Rachmon said: ‘The Russians brought a lot of bad things here.'

‘You want those books banned?' I joked.

‘Yes.'

I asked: ‘Do women want that?'

But he seemed not to hear, as if it were a question in another language. His mildness, I began to see, was an illusion. He only said: ‘Our laws should be Moslem ones.'

The Western clichés of Islamic law had been simmering in my head for days. I heard myself say: ‘You'd cut off a thief's hand?'

‘Yes. I think Soviet law is too lax with such things. You find that cruel? Really?' His look of boyish surprise redoubled. ‘But if somebody steals something, then he can't steal again!' He smiled at me with a ghastly innocence. Brick by brick he was building a tower of absolutes in the wastes of his ignorance, with no creative doubting in between. Learning for him was a process of accumulation.

The two matriarchs behind us suddenly banged on the back of the seat. They had caught the word ‘mullah' and wanted to know what we were discussing. Their headscarves wound about their chins in the way Rachmon approved, but their features were whetted to refractory crags, their eyes blazed and their hair curdled round their cheeks in ashen authority. The younger of them knocked Rachmon on the shoulder and let out a jet of Uzbek. I listened uncomprehending while their fusillades pattered to and fro. A final salvo burst from the two women in unison, and Rachmon fell silent.

‘What did they say?' I asked.

He shrugged. His boy's face was undented. ‘She just talked. About men having two wives. Nothing.'

‘What?'

‘She doesn't like it.'

When I turned to them, the older woman, remembering scraps of Russian, said: ‘It's bad, bad, bad,' and her friend puckered and shouted ‘Bad!'

‘They don't know anything,' Rachmon said. ‘What if your wife got ill and was no use?'

‘That's when she'd need you more,' I said.

Again there moved over his face the paralysis of listening to another tongue, yet something pained and baffled unfocused his gaze too, as if a discomfort were stirring far behind it. But he said: ‘In your country can't you get another wife?'

‘Only after you separate.'

He was silent a moment, then said proudly: ‘I paid a high price for my wife.'

I was astonished that he was married, he looked so puerile. High bride-prices had been frowned on under the Soviets, but had never been stamped out. He had met his wife by chance two years ago, he said, and they had decided in private to marry. ‘It's different with all my friends. Their parents chose for them.' But his parents had been displeased, and the girl had not yet born him a child. Vaguely I wondered if their hostility had thrown him into the arms of a wider family in Islam, but the thought faded.

By now we had crossed the Amu Dariya by a barrage ablaze with lights, and were threading between dark fields tilled for cotton and quartered up for rice, where he disembarked at the gates of his collective farm. Tired with the road's jolting, I thought of him with misgiving. The future suddenly seemed threatened less by the anger of a people's depleted dignity, or the extremes to which poverty might drive them, than by a blinding simplicity. Soon afterwards we were moving through the lamps of the Khorezmian oasis, scattered and dim, and into the centreless town of Novi Urgench and an empty hotel.

Isolateci from all other civilisations by desert, Khorezm was an oasis-country of mythic remoteness, gorging on the sediment of the Amu Dariya, the ancient Oxus, whose wanderings had spread a treacherous delta of silt north-west into the shrunken Aral Sea. Two and a half millennia ago the oasis became a province of the great Achaemenian empire, where Iranian peoples flourished behind an intricacy of dykes and terraces, and here, it was once believed, was born the faith of Zoroaster.

Only in the seventeenth century, as the ungovernable Oxus changed its bed, was the old Seljuk capital at Kunia Urgench abandoned, and the inhabitants migrated more than a hundred miles upriver to Khiva, near the placeless metropolis where I wandered next morning. Novi Urgench might have crystallised overnight from a sprinkling of villages and fields. It looked harsh and poor. A sterilising grid of Soviet roads had been clamped over the Uzbek lanes. In the memorial to Soviet Power two boys were parading derisively and hacking at the bas-reliefs with sticks.

It was not on this barren metropolis that the government of Khorezm devolved, but on the city of Khiva nearby. By the eighteenth century its rulers, together with those of Bukhara and Kokand, had carved up the heart of Central Asia. Khiva was more compact than its rivals, but poorer, more remote and tortured by Turcoman raids. The whole oasis bristled with fortified farms. Yet in this solitude its khans came to think themselves invincible. They filled their fields and homes with Persian and Russian slaves. Three Cossack expeditions sank against them, and in 1717 a 4000-strong Russian force under Prince Bekovich was deceived by a pretence of hospitality, then massacred almost to a man. In 1839 another expedition, after floundering through freak snowstorms, returned without a blow struck, littering the desert with the frozen corpses of a thousand men and nine thousand camels. Only in 1873 did a three-pronged Russian army under General Kaufmann seize Khiva with scarcely a Russian casualty, and reduced the khanate to a puppet state, which expired in 1920.

Yet when I reached the city, it was as if the air had frozen there. It had been restored under the Soviets pitilessly, its life washed away. Inside its ramparts, I felt, nothing had ever happened, nor ever would happen. The place might have been created on the instant, without a past.

I lingered by a causeway through the battlements. In its corridor a triple succession of eighteen-foot doors swung huge and delicately carved. I emerged into empty streets. Sometimes they wound like canyons between the walls, and lightly tiled towers bulged overhead. On all sides the sculptured doors, wasted and pale, led into gutted houses. They hung light in their sockets, starred with hexagons and lozenges or jungled in sculptured foliage. All the mess of habitation had been cleaned away, and the gates and turrets, the minarets and cupolas, seemed to belong to a civilisation remoter than Byzantium. Everything was tended, sanitised. Over the tawny monotone of the medresehs the green-blue tiles shone rare and sudden. No one was praying in the museum-mosques. Only the flagstones of the lanes, rutted like those of Pompeii by the iron-studded wheels of old horse-carts, betrayed that anyone had ever lived here.

By noon the streets were trickling with tourists – Uzbek and Russian – and booths had opened in the walls, selling cassettes of Turkic pop music and posters of Rambo and Indian film stars. I avoided them down lonely alleys. Once I stooped through a door into the back of a palace, and found myself in the courtyard of the khan's harem. It was quaintly beautiful. On three sides, over every façade, glistened a cool spray of tiles where painted roofs hung over galleries, and little doors showed. On the fourth, a rank of wooden columns tapered like inverted tulips, and scooped deep, shadowed bays from the walls. Every surface was worked into flowers, tendrils, inscriptions. It was as if for centuries, all over the courtyard, a legion of insects had been burrowing nervously across wood and marble, gnawing out, with minute, fastidious appetites, all the intricacy for which the patience of men was too short.

I plunged through the doors into a warren of yards and tiled chambers. Desultory restoration was going on. Through cracks in locked gates I glimpsed derelict courtyards, piled with debris. Nothing betrayed the life of their vanished inhabitants. Even when I walked through the battlements of the citadel, I found myself adrift in a clay field, where the mud-built palaces had eroded to a stark jigsaw of platforms and walls. Here, in the last century, the tyrant khans had reigned in grisly operetta. Even in summer they wore sheepskin caps and boots stuffed with linen rags. Their luxuries were carpets and a few sofas and carved chests. They executed their subjects on whim. The Russian envoy Muraviev, arriving in 1819, described how among the crowds gawping at his entry were throngs of Russian slaves, who whispered to him piteously for help he could not give. The previous intruder Bekovich, he learnt, had been flayed alive and his skin stretched over a drum.

I pushed through a door into the open throne-room. On one side its ceramic dais engulfed the court in a tidal wave of dazzling blue. On the other a brick mound had once supported a felt-lined tent – the herders' yurt — into whose snug fetor the half-savage khans had retired in winter.

It was at this court, in 1863, that the Hungarian traveller Arminius Vambéry, disguised as a dervish, must have received his audience with the khan Sayyid Mahomet. As the curtain rolled back from the dais, the ruler was revealed reclining on a silk-velvet cushion, clutching a short gold sceptre. The sight of his degenerate face with its imbecile chin and white lips, and the tremble of his effeminate voice, were to haunt Vambéry for years afterwards. The slightest mistake would have cost his life.

Later, passing through a public square, he stumbled with horror on a party of horsemen dragging whole families of prisoners-of-war behind them. Out of the sacks that they opened tumbled human heads, which an accountant kicked into piles before rewarding each horseman with a four-head, twenty-head or forty-head silk robe. Soon afterwards Vambéry watched the routine execution of some 300 captives. Most were strung up or decapitated. But the eight grey-haired leaders lay down to be manacled, then the executioner knelt on their chests and gouged out their eyes, wiping his bloodstained knife on their beards. They tried to rise to their feet, but knocked blindly against one another, or beat the ground in their agony. Even Vambéry, whose nerves were of steel, shuddered at these memories into his old age.

I roamed the citadel in mingled awe and gloom. Against its western ramparts, on a pinnacle of natural rock, a last flicker of battlements and stairways upheld a makeshift kiosk. It hung there like a perverted throne, where the dissolute khans sipped sherbet and plotted in the sky, and the whole city fell open beneath them.