The Lost Heart of Asia (16 page)

‘I remember them,' the old man said, but his voice wavered, as if any meaning was fragile now. ‘I worked with them when I was a youth. They lived along the far side of the road, where the Young Pioneers' camp is now.'

‘What were they like?'

‘Like you!' he piped. ‘Their faces! Just like yours!' He contemplated me with a sudden sweetness, and murmured: ‘Aach, aach' to himself, and finally: ‘You're from England.' England and Germany were becoming fused in his mind. ‘They were good people, decent people. They worked hard, because they were Germans. They used to sell their dairy products on the road to Khiva.' He stared at me again. ‘Aach, aah. England. Did your parents live here then? Did
you
perhaps live here? No

‘No.'

‘You were a good people . . . .' His gaze drifted away and for a moment his canted ears, tufted with white hairs, gave an illusion of listening for something. ‘ . . . Wonderful carpenters. They were not dressed like us, but the women all in black and white, and their hair . . . .' His hands trembled towards the nape of his neck to conjure plaited buns.

‘Where did they go?'

He closed his eyes. ‘They were repressed in Stalin's time. They went away suddenly. In 1935, I think. They were taken away to Tajikistan, to Dushanbe. They vanished.' He opened his fist to the air. ‘They left nothing behind. All in the Stalin years. Repressed.'

‘There's nothing?'

‘Nothing.' His tone drifted between sadness and wonder. ‘They took them away.'

A little later he showed us the site of their village. It had been turned into a Communist Young Pioneers' camp, as if to erase their memory. Now the camp, in turn, was falling to bits. Broken swings and seesaws creaked and swung in a faint wind. In the dried swimming-pool, whose tiles were flaking away, a dog had fallen in and died. On one wall a faded mural of glowing youths portended the Communist paradise, and a silver-painted statue of a boy blew a triumphal horn under the trees. But all was abandoned. Only the tree-stumps – pale, split, immense – of two great mulberries survived from their planting a hundred years ago, and looked more durable in the double desolation than anything else.

The old man went in front of me, peering left and right. His craned neck looked so frail, I thought it would snap. Here was a school, he said, over there a meeting-house. His boots kicked up dust. He pointed over a fence to an orchard where a few apple trees blossomed. ‘That used to be their cemetery.'

Its ground was chequered with black stubble. Flakes of blossom blew in its aisles. I could see nothing else. It was hard to believe that beneath its unfilled earth lay the austere patriarchs and provident child-bearers of Protestantism, who had travelled here in search of a godly peace.

Early next morning I selected the most durable-looking car and driver that I could find, and started north-west two hundred miles towards the Aral Sea. Fortified farmhouses sprinkled the town's outskirts – memories of a time when Turcoman raiders tormented the khanate's frontiers – but beyond them the oasis smoothed into a vast, somnolent lake of silt. Under that etiolated sky all life seemed wrung out. Nothing stirred. The land was embalmed in a blank, shrouding pallor. Somewhere to our north, I knew, the Amu Dariya was moving alongside in a red-brown flood, giving birth to a long succession of untidy lakes. But the river was dying. A century ago its forested banks rustled with tiger, wild boar, panther and a host of wildfowl. Now it was bullied by dams and bled by hundreds of pumps whose dipping snouts sucked it away to the cotton-fields, until it trickled at last into the Aral Sea.

My driver was bitter. He could remember from his youth, he said, how rich in sediment the water had been. Now half its silt was trapped behind the great dam upriver, and the water here flowed clear and poor.

I recalled the lament of an Uzbek poet:

When God loved us
                              he gave us the Amu Dariya.

When he ceased to love us,
                    he sent us Russian engineers.

The driver laughed harshly. He looked sunk in a morose cynicism. His was one of those disruptive faces which I was to meet all through my journey, reminding me of some acquaintance back in Europe. He had ice-blue eyes, so unusual in an Uzbek that I suspected him of Russian blood (which he denied), and under his Gallic beret the broad brows and fleshy nose turned him urbane. He looked like Manet. But instead of discussing the
Salon des Refusées,
he cursed the landscape and the economy together, spitting out of the window.

‘We work and work, and don't get a kopek. That's how it is here. No, I don't go to the mosque. I haven't the time. I have to live.'

He echoed the land around us. It was growing poverty-stricken. We went through towns ringed by cement-works, cotton ginneries and factories toxic with dumps and furnaces, where the old Soviet slogans for Work and the Party still hung in the reeking air. Muralled Lenins lifted their wavering hands, and the hammer-and-sickle dangled across the streets in defunct lights, which nobody had dared or bothered to pull down. The people looked jaded and ill. The high-coloured dress of Bukhara had gone. The world seemed at once more contemporary and more wretched.

Soon afterwards there appeared the twin shacks of a new frontier-post, where the Turcomans had eaten into the Uzbek oasis long ago. The Uzbek police demanded two cigarettes before lifting their barrier. The red-faced Turcoman let us through without a word. ‘More restrictions!' rasped the driver. ‘More fucking borders, bureaucracy, bribes!'

The fields were turning to semi-desert. The sand was tossed into heaps, and occasional salt-flats shone like hoar-frost. Here and there a mole-run of salinated earth marked the passage of a dredged canal, where the water, it was true, ran jade-green, thinned, and a rainstorm had jewelled the plain in pools, lying interchangeably with the watery sky.

Manet's pale eyes drifted over it, accusingly. Things had declined ever since Gorbachev, he said. ‘People used to be afraid of the great Russian bear, but now they just spit.' He spat. ‘In a year or two we'll be surrounded by civil wars, you'll see.'

‘Who will be fighting?'

‘How do I know? But look at Armenia and Azerbaijan. Look at Georgia, Moldavia!' A cloud of chaos was brewing up in his brain. ‘Khorezm may be quiet, and Bukhara's not too bad, but Samarkand's dreadful, and as for Tashkent' – he swore unprintably.

But he knew little beyond his own, crushed oasis. From here the ripples of his distrust spread out concentrically, growing uglier all the time, until they lapped at the confines of his sense, and created fantasies there: a magic West, a daemonic China.

I said: ‘But you must be glad to have freedom from Moscow.'

He answered: ‘No. I'm not glad. I wish we were back.'

I stared at him with muted astonishment. Immured in my unconscious Englishness, I had assumed that nationhood gave identity, belonging. But his nation was young. He said: ‘Plenty of people feel like I do. I've never heard anyone say “Thank you!” to Moscow for leaving us like this. We were better off under them.'

Around us the country had faded into desolation. A cutting wind sprang up from the north, and the plains were closed off only by enfeebled ranks of poplars under blackening clouds. Even the fields looked squalid, nearly barren, as if another year would return them to desert.

Then suddenly, without warning, an enormous pale minaret loosened out of the sky. It was huger than anything in the land, solitary and unexplained. Next, a mausoleum appeared, then another – barbaric, conical tombs, like stone tents pitched in the wastes. As we approached, I saw that the land had turned to a sea of graveyards. They rolled in low hillocks as far as my eye could reach, their tombstones half sucked into the dust. The ladder-like biers on which the corpses were carried had been set upright beside the graves, and seemed to cover the dunes with a pathetic hope, as if propped against heaven.

While the driver stopped the car and prepared to sleep, I got out into a howling wind. It thrashed across the plain and levelled the coarse grass over the mounds. I wound my scarf about my face and tramped towards the minaret. Three mausoleums stood among the dunes of dead, far apart. They were almost all that remained of ancient Urgench, capital of a sultanate which had eased loose from the Seljuk empire after 1092. This remote kingdom of Khorezm had stayed independent and powerful for more than a hundred years, and early in the thirteenth century embraced all Central Asia. But in 1221 the armies of Genghiz Khan fired the capital with naphtha; a hundred thousand citizens were marched into slavery, and the rest massacred. Then the Amu Dariya dykes were opened and the city submerged.

The Elizabethan envoy Anthony Jenkinson, who reached Urgench in 1558, found its four-mile walls encircling ruin. By then it had revived under the Golden Horde, been razed by Tamerlane, sown over with barley, then built again. But in 1575 the Amu Dariya changed its bed and the depleted city was abandoned. Only in the last century was a canal cut and a hesitant new settlement arose, whose Turcoman inhabitants lived beyond the hillocks to the north, and whose dead were buried in the cemeteries around me.

I struggled to the 170-foot minaret. Its pinnacle of lightly decorated brick tapered into a wind which screamed unimpeded across the wastes. Its uppermost bands of script had been chipped away by storm, and its top snapped off like a factory chimney opening into the sky. Whatever mosque or mausoleum it attended had utterly gone.

Beyond, raised on a twenty-foot brick plinth, was the tomb of the martial sultan Tekesh. Its circular body, pierced with bays and crowned by a squat steeple, floated pavilion-like over the wilderness. Tiles still clung to its spire, which had broken open on an inner cupola, curved below like a skull beneath a helmet. The strange, Assyrian shape of this desolate sepulchre found its echo in the Seljuk tombs of Anatolia. Its builders were restless warrior-kings. Tekesh, the sixth sultan of Khorezm, absorbed the Seljuk power in Persia at the end of the twelfth century, before being laid in his steppeland grave, and this, with the smaller cenotaph beyond it, still gave an illusion of nomad impermanence, although it has stood here eight hundred years.

By the time I reached the last of these early tombs, I was craving its shelter. It had been built as a communal royal mausoleum, it seems, but named from Turabek, a Mongol princess. The north wind moaned through its doors. My ignorance of these dreamlike rulers, so powerful in their day, made me doubly a stranger here. I recalled no monument precisely like this one. A tall, twelve-sided sanctuary, it encased a hexagonal tomb-chamber, and was richer, even in decay, than anything in Khiva. Under its blind arches, the honeycomb decorations massed in dense clusters, tiled with a soft brilliance of campanula and grape blue, and a muted, opal green. Exposed and apparently fragile, they hung there in enigmatic strength, while above them the shattered dome cast a shard of turquoise into the sky.

I shivered in the empty chamber. It looked restored. The inner dome was overspread with a mathematic sky of plaster constellations and flowers, like a lost language.

The driver found me here and stared up almost angrily, as if there must be something else to see. A few pigeons flitted among the stucco botany and stars. After a while he urged me on the few miles to Kunia Urgench, where he wanted to eat, and the pavilion-tombs sank behind us into their cemeteries, like survivors beyond their time returning into the earth.

In front of us Kunia Urgench had been resurrected around a kernel of shrines. Its streets were full of fantastical old men. Sheepskin hats dripped strands of wool like dreadlocks over their brows and bulked out a full foot to either side of their heads. Beneath these monstrous fleeces they went in knee-length boots and quilted coats, debonairly sashed, stabbing the ground in front of them with gnarled walking-sticks. Sometimes they rose to a decrepit and fabulous majesty. Their beards forked in twin cascades, or tangled in piebald confusion; and often – if their owner wanted to cut a dash – they fanned down abruptly beneath a clean-shaven chin, as if stuck on like the ceremonial tuft of a pharoah. Only the glint of a war-medal or a wristwatch betrayed that this tribe of hoary and redundant warriors inhabited the twentieth century, and occasionally, between the waterfall of hat and the snowy gush of whiskers, a pair of spectacles gleamed in freakish isolation like headlamps through a fog.

A mosque had just been built, ugly and bright. Its mullah found us walking there, and demanded that we have tea with him. ‘A brand new place!' he cried. ‘We get a congregation of seven hundred on Fridays, sometimes more!'

In his family compound, littered with rubbish, a car and a motorcycle gleamed side by side. ‘Two machines!' he grinned. ‘We're rich!'

He was a jovial stalwart, with the beginnings of bearded majesty. On his pullover cantered a pair of idolatrous antelopes, and the walls of his house were hung with calendars flaunting Uzbek film-starlets. We sat beneath them and gossiped. He spoke Russian in the slushy patter of all his country. Two robust and unveilable daughters dropped roundels of bread on our dirty quilts, and brought green tea, and a pair of secular sons in bomber jackets sat with us and enquired about pop music.

It was the mullah's business, he said, to offer hospitality to foreigners, not bigotry. We were all men of God. Laughter cascaded from the next-door room, where his grandson was watching a television cartoon. The mullah wanted to know about America. Where exactly was the Atlantic, he wondered, and what lands did it separate? And Britain?

‘Britain is an island,' declared one of his sons proudly. ‘And is there Ireland too?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘there is Ireland.'

They contemplated this. Then I ask-d: ‘Where is Dev Kesken?'

They went into momentary conclave. Dev Kesken was the mysterious fortress-city where almost five centuries ago the first of the Uzbeks of Khorezm was proclaimed khan. They had heard of it, they said – it lay a hundred miles to the west, some-where in the desert – but they had never been there. It was abandoned.