The Lost Heart of Asia (21 page)

I crossed the courtyard and found myself in a bare passageway. At its end, on either side of a low door, hung a broken Kufic frieze, huge, as if displaced from somewhere else. ‘This is the resting place of the Illustrious and Mercirul Monarch, the Magnificent Sultan, the most Mighty Warrior, Emir Timur Kurgan, Conqueror of all the Earth' ran the original inscription; but it had gone.

I peered through the doors and into the chamber. The latticed windows let in diffused sunbeams. High above me, across the whole summit of the dome, fanned a net of gilded stucco, which twined upon itself in mathematic delicacy. It dropped its golden creepers over the enormous spandrels, bays and pendentives, and shed a soft blaze of light on to everything below. Beneath it the walls were coated in alabaster – hexagonal tiles, still translu-cent – and circled by a jasper frieze carved with the deeds and genealogy of the emperor. Beneath this again, within the low balustrade at my feet, the cenotaphs of his family lay side by side in rectangular blocks of marble and alabaster. And at the centre, stark among their pallor, the grave of Tamerlane shone in a monolith of near-black jade. It was disconcertingly beautiful: the largest block of jade in the world. Its edges were lightly inscribed. A vertical split showed where Persian soldiers (it is thought) had hacked at it two and a half centuries before.

I stayed here a long time, at once moved and unsettled. A man entered and prayed for a while, then went away. The cries of children sounded faintly outside. Under the decorated brilliance of the cupola, the simplicity of these gravestones was dignified and rather terrible: a recognition of the littleness even of this man, and the passage of time. Beside him lay his gentle son Shah Rukh; at his head, his minister; under a bay, his sheikh. His grandson Ulug Beg was at his feet. Others were gathered round.

At last the young caretaker, pleased by my interest, ushered me out of the chamber and led me round the back of the mausoleum. He unlocked a tiny carved door. ‘Here is the real grave,' he said.

I descended a steep, ramped passage beneath the building. In the blackness I sensed the sweep of vaults low overhead. Somewhere behind me, the man turned a switch, and a bare bulb made a pool of dimness in the crypt. Each cenotaph in the chamber above was mirrored in this darkness by a flat gravestone. They lay secret in their dust and silence. The air was dry and old. I knelt by the emperor's graveslab and touched it. Beneath, wrapped in linen embalmed in camphor and musk, his shrunken body had been laid in an ebony coffin. I could not imagine it. The living man was too vivid in my mind. For a year after his interment, it was said, people heard him howling from the earth.

In the dull light I saw that every inch of the marble slab seethed with carved Arabic, as if even the words were waging a battle across his stone. They traced his ancestry back through Genghiz Khan (a claim he never made in life) to the legendary virgin Alangoa, ravished by a moonbeam, and at last to Adam.

The stone was split clean across in two places; but when Soviet archaeologists opened it in 1941 they found undisturbed the skeleton of a powerful man, lame on his right side. Fragments of muscle and skin still clung to him, and scraps of a russet moustache and beard. An untraceable story warned that if Tamerlane's grave was violated, disaster would follow, and a few hours later news arrived that Hitler had invaded Russia.

But the investigations went on, and from the emperor's skull the Soviet scientist Gerasimov painstakingly reconstructed a bronze portrait-head, before sealing Tamerlane back in the tomb. Under the sculptor's hands there emerged a face of hardened power, compassionless, bitter and subtle. Perhaps some Slavic prejudice heightened the epicanthic cruelty of the eyes; perhaps not. A hint of the emperor's youthful truculence tinges the full lips, but that is all. Cord-like ligaments scoop the cheeks into harrowed triangles. Ancient muscles knot the cheeks, and a heraldic flexion of the brows seems to signal the sack of a city.

‘He was a hero,' said a voice behind me. I jumped. The care-taker had entered noiselessly and was looking down at the tumult of calligraphy on the slab. ‘What a history!'

‘Perhaps he should have done less,'

I said. ‘Less? No. Timur turned us into one country.' He seemed lighthearted, but a reticent evangelism tinged him. ‘Yes, he was cruel, I know. People come to this grave from Iran and Afghanistan and they hate him. They say, “He destroyed our land, he enslaved us!” And of course it's true. He smashed Isfahan and Baghdad.' He smiled charmingly. ‘He was ruthless.'

I said: ‘Ulug Beg might be a better hero for your nation.' My eyes drifted affectionately over his graveslab. It was richly inscribed too.

The caretaker laughed. The sound made a soft insult in the silence. ‘He was only a teacher.' He squatted beside me above the stones. ‘But Timur was world-class! If I was an Iranian, I'd hate him too!' He was laughing at himself a little; after all, it was long ago. ‘But Timur was not a savage. He knew about Alexander of Macedon, and the slave leader Spartacus and . . . .'

‘Spartacus?' This was a Soviet cult leftover. ‘Did he?'

‘ . . . and he'd read the great Persian poet Firdausi, who claimed that the Iranians were natural rulers and the Turks were natural slaves.' He cocked his head at the gravestone, as if trying to read that tremendous obituary. ‘Our two worlds have always been at war. And when Timur overran Persia and came to Firdausi's tomb he shouted: “Stand up! Look at me! A Turk in the heart of your empire! You said we were slaves, but look now!'”

His words rang in the dark. We both fancied, I think, that the dead were listening. He glowed with vicarious triumph. Tamerlane for him was the unifier and recreator of his notional fatherland, of the Pan-Turkic dream. He said: ‘The Persians were here once, you see. You've been to Afrasiab? You've seen those Sogdian paintings, Persian things? They were our conquerors.'

‘Those paintings are extraordinary . . .'

‘So Timur avenged us. He created a Turkish empire!' His voice had whetted into a funeral oration. He had the northerner's scorn for the soft, dark people of the south. ‘He's our hero.'

I said: ‘But he was a Mongol.'

‘No, Timur was not a Mongol, he was a Turk.'

I stayed silent. Everyone was claiming Tamerlane now. Uzbeks and even Tajiks whom I met would debonairly enrol him in their nations. In fact Tamerlane had been a pure Mongol of the Barlas clan, infected by Turkic customs. But this pedantry could not staunch the caretaker's sense of ownership or belonging.

‘I may be an Uzbek,' he said, ‘but above all I am a Turk. Most people have forgotten their tribes now, but I know my father was a Kungrat, my mother a Mangit – these are Turkic tribes.'

‘They're Uzbek tribes too.'

‘But you can't
feel
Uzbek.' He was losing the infant Uzbek nation in a Turkic sea. ‘Look at our ancestors! We have Navoi, we have Mirkhwand, we have . . . .' His list spilt into the unknown for me. In fact his people were ethnically too complex to shelter under any name. Even his Turkic umbrella was full of Persian holes. The hero of Uzbek literature, the fifteenth-century Timurid poet Navoi, had written of Uzbeks only to disparage them. Yet his name and image were as ubiquitous in Uzbekistan as Makhtumkuli's in Turkmenistan. Young in their state, Uzbeks and Tajiks were suddenly annexing poets or scientists out of the past, steeping their nation in the magic of great men. The Tajiks were even appropriating Saadi and Omar Khayyám, any Persian at all. To challenge such claims was to wander an ethnic labyrinth until the concept of a country became meaningless.

The caretaker got to his feet, still reeling off names, and we started to return up the passageway. ‘ . . . And we have Timur!'

He switched off the sad bulb and locked the narrow door behind us. In the sanity of daylight he relented a little. ‘Well,' he said, ‘occasionally somebody
does
feel quite strongly “I'm an Uzbek”' – he feebly thumped his chest – ‘but you don't hear it much.'

We walked round the mausoleum in the sun. Some ease and lightness had returned to us. Uzbek independence had freed him into pride, he said, instead of condemning him to some Slavic sub-species. ‘Of course I'm pleased by it. Everyone I know is pleased. You've found some not? Well, those are the uneducated.' He spoke the word without regret. ‘Some people don't know what to feel. They can't see beyond their faces. They just know that things are bad now. But I'm thinking of my children, and the world they'll grow into. I want it to be their own.'

We stopped at the mouth of a shaft descending through grilles beneath the sanctuary. When I set my eye to it, I descried grey rectangles suspended far down in the blackness, and realised that I was gazing into the crypt. It was a vent for whispered prayers. I straightened and moved away, shaking off the notion that some dreadful authority lingered in those shreds of gristle and calcium under the stone.

The man went on eagerly: ‘How can anyone regret the Soviet Union falling to bits? They bled us. In the old days they gave us five kopeks for a kilo of cotton. Just
five kopeks.
One factory in Russia used to make two shirts out of a kilo and sell them for
forty roubles
each. Moscow said we were partners, but what kind of partnership is that?' He clasped my hand in illustration. ‘Partnership should mean friendship, shouldn't it?' We had circled the building now, and the handclasp turned into farewell. As I walked back across the courtyard, his shouted optimisms followed me to the gate. ‘Enjoy our country! Everything will get better!'

Above him the great dome made a lonely tumour above the ogre-king.

I wandered one Sunday morning among suburbs blooming with chestnut trees, where birds sang in the unaccustomed stillness. All around clustered those brick cottages which seem to cover the old Soviet empire in petrified log huts. It might have been a suburb of Novgorod or Oryol. But nobody was about. In front of me a brick cathedral thrust up its gaudy spire where the bells had hung silent for seventy years. In the aftermath of
perestroika
a few women in bedsocks and slippers were begging near the entrance, and now the belfry sent up a hesitant, rusty clanking.

Inside, where a congregation of a thousand might have worshipped, some eighty faithful stood in broken ranks. Old women cowled in headscarves, with a few children and lanky young men, they belonged in the Belorussian fields, not here in the heart of Asia. But they kissed and embraced each other as they ambled among the icons, and slowly a feel of family security brewed up. This, after all, was their transposed homeland: the mystical body of Christ, where the massed contingents of saints, Church fathers and attendant angels – the whole hierarchy of Orthodox holiness – mounted the walls and pillars in arcs of candle-flame. Across the iconostasis they unfurled their white wings and fingered blessings. St Basil the Great, St Nicholas, St Theodore, St George on his white charger – their Slavic eyes and brandished swords and books encircled the faithful with the comfort of an immemorial truth.

But my heart sank. The people looked beleaguered. Their singing quavered and whined in the void. A few acolytes in pale violet drifted back and forth like disconsolate angels, and in the balcony a little choir set up a shrill, heartbreaking chant, whose verses lifted and died away like an old, repeated grief. Beneath them, where a verse should have come, the people seemed to let out a deep, collective sigh. They had survived the blows of Communism only to face nationalism and Islam, and they seemed now as remote to this land as the time when their saints were flesh, and God was in the world.

Then the doors of the iconostasis burst open on a huge, gold-robed priest, who raised his arms in prayer. Where Western prelates beseech God with an alto sanctimoniousness, Russia turns out these booming giants who seem to understudy Him. The whole church at once filled up with a Chaliapin thunder, and the liturgy went forward in a deafening, homely pomp. As the incense spurted from the thurible, each sweep of the priest's arm could have felled a tree. The coals grated and the sweet smoke rose. A domestic balm descended on the worshippers. All was familiar, theirs, right. From time to time one of the old women would trundle away to kiss a saint or calm a baby or top up an oil lamp. But she would return to cross herself again and again, while the groves of candles blossomed beneath favourite icons.

Meanwhile the processions of the gold-embossed Gospel and the elevated Sacrament, swollen on the voice of the priest, brought on a fresh flurry of self-blessings, and at last the silver Eucharist spoon, dipped into the chalice beneath a scarlet napkin, administered the body and blood of Christ like a wholesome medicine. Even I felt a sense of remission. For this hour, at least, all seemed well among the dwindling faithful, as they and the priest and the dim-lit saints watched and nurtured one another into the unknown future.

It was Tania, married to a Moslem, who had told me about the cathedral, where she sometimes prayed alone. I had kept her address in my pocket for days, but now I pulled it out and it pointed me down streets where pastel façades cloaked a motley of dwellings behind. I peered through her gates into a bedraggled courtyard. Four shabby cottages with lean-tos and padded doors confused me. Some half-washed stockings lay trampled by a tap. Somewhere the voice of a woman seared up in fury. Then a haggard youth emerged from a door and swivelled his back on me, smoking furiously at the sky. I glimpsed a woman in the window behind: a slackening face with high-painted cheeks. Her hair bunched above her head in an impertinent tuft.

The next moment Tania came to a window opposite, and saw me. Her mouth opened in a soundless oval, and a second later her stout body was wrestling through the door-frame, and her ring-encrusted fingers patting my cheek. ‘You found us!' She pulled me inside. ‘Ignore that woman!' She slammed the door. ‘Half the men who come here are her clients.' She stood before me in the cramped hall, trembling a little. Her high heels had been discarded for woolly bedsocks, and she looked squatter and coarser. ‘Prostitutes! I suppose there've always been such women. People without education or skills. So they do that.'

She lived in a nest of chaotic warmth and colour. Her walls gushed scarlet draperies and shelves of disintegrating books. Cheap silver and Russian crystal crowded every surface, with Lithuanian dolls, Moldavian honey-pots and wooden dishes from the Urals. Orange hangings partitioned off the stove, yellow silks shone sluttishly over the bed. She tugged a curtain across the window – ‘Block out that woman!' — and plunged me into the chair where she had been watching television across a tray littered with half-eaten biscuits. Then she mounded herself opposite me, glowing and disconcerted. The prostitute had shamed her. Her cat arched against my shins. ‘The system before the Revolution was better,' she breathed, ‘when those women lived in brothels and carried yellow cards and everybody knew who they were.' She was still quivering. ‘But there's no law against them. They can carry on a business as they like. So they live among decent people and cause disruption.'

‘That happens everywhere,' I said, to soothe her.

‘Does it, does it?' She dropped her hand to her cat, which stalked away. She did not want to be driven from this house, she said.

It stood in a region still called the Garden of the Winds, after a palace laid out by Tamerlane. She'd found fragments of old porcelain and glass in her vegetable patch, and liked to think they might have touched the monster's lips.

‘In any case, where would I go? I'm rootless, like my cat.' She laughed. ‘That's what I like about her. You say “Come here” and she leaves you, like a man.'

In all this she barely mentioned her husband, the elusive Moslem whose suits hung dowdily in a half-open cupboard. It occurred to me that they were not married. But she addressed the cat as if it understood, ending half her sentences with the saccharine diminutives of Russian sentiment. ‘Where would we go, my Katenka? Who would take us in, my little Katya, my Katooshka? . . . I've told you before not to walk on the table. Don't you ever listen? . . . Yes, we have to stay here . . . .'

‘You won't return to Russia?' I noticed the icons above her bed. The cat had taken to chewing at the refrigerator door behind the curtain.

‘Return? I was never there.' She fell into a frowning distress. ‘My parents were sent from Moscow to Tajikistan to teach. They didn't ask to go. They had no option. But they gave their lives to it.' She sounded angry. ‘They were dedicated, and their pupils loved them. And I too, I've taught here for thirty-three years. And suddenly this She stopped, perhaps challenging me to ask if her whole life, with her parents' lives, had been poured into an abyss. I began: ‘So you feel . . . .'

‘Do you really want to know what I feel?' she demanded. ‘Do you really?' The anger flushed her cheeks into pink roundels. ‘Well, I feel humiliated.
Humiliated.'
The ginger curls shook round her cheeks. ‘And betrayed.'

I asked gently: ‘By the failure of Communism?'

‘No, by the failure of the Soviet Union. We could have demolished the Party but kept the Union. Why not? We gave people here so much. Why shouldn't we go on? But now they're saying Moscow bled them, and Moscow says Central Asia gave nothing back – and neither is true. But everybody's showing his wounds now, shouting “Look at my damaged eye!” or “See this cut on my neck”, or “Look at my leg, I can't stand!”' She mimed these wounds in a stormy sadness. ‘It's true we took their raw materials. But people like my parents gave everything to this land – it was a desert before – and now they're saying it was all mistaken.' Her body was shaking like a girl's. ‘Yes, I feel debased.'

Hers was the old, unfathomable belief in Russia's holiness, in her civilising mission. It had been the bedrock of her dignity. Hers, too, was the inborn colonial expectation that people be grateful for what they had never requested. My own nation had made the same mistake. I said cruelly: ‘Moslems have a saying that your own country's weeds are better than foreign wheat.'

But Tania had stopped listening. She was inhabiting a timeless Russian theatre of self-pity and helplessness. Now that she did not want it, the cat had returned to her, and she plucked harshly, absently, at its coat in her distress. ‘And so we're left with this . . . this nothing, overnight. Nobody should suffer that. If you want to move house, you first build another, don't you? But instead we find ourselves without anywhere, the roof fallen in and the rain pouring through!' Her laughter did not reach her mouth. She disgorged her feelings and swallowed them back simultaneously, savoured them almost, like a painful possession, in the mournful Slavic way. She seemed to be voicing what the old lady, Zelim Khan's mother, would have voiced, had she been able.

‘We Russians don't know what to believe in now,' she said. ‘So we're turning in to our families – that's where our belief goes now, close to home.'

‘Perhaps that's better,' I said.

Yet I pictured the huge religious energy of her people raging like disconnected horsepower across the continent, hunting for an object, some reconciling love.

But as if to illustrate her newly domestic affections, Tania stooped under the bed and tugged out a basket mewling with kittens. She seemed suddenly exhausted. ‘Look. My Katya has children. When they were born my husband said “Drown them”, and I replied, “You drown them” and put them into his arms, and he couldn't. He is a good man.' She lifted two out, and coddled them with – ooshas and – oolyas. They almost vanished in her plump fists. ‘How often do I have to tell you to wash them, Katooshka, my Katenka? Look at their bottoms . . .'

She dropped them back into the basket. She could not keep them long, she said; but it was growing harder for her to get rid of anything now, even cats. She had already lost too much. Especially she had loved her father: a gentle scholar from Moscow. After one of the earthquakes his house had been demolished, she said, and he had never recovered, simply wasted away so the doctors thought he had cancer, and he'd died from a misjudged blood transfusion. ‘It was more than five years ago, and I still weep.'

It was he who had taught her to love books, and among the ragbag of veterans on her shelves (Fielding, Aldous Huxley, Dale Carnegie) I noticed Russian translations of once-banned works, even
Animal Farm
published in Moscow. ‘But I'm sick of all that,' she said.

Sick of all what, I asked?

Then her bitterness resurfaced and shook the words from her in spasms of vehement regret. She wanted to believe in her country again. ‘Up to a few years ago I always received
Literaturnaya Gazeta
from Moscow,' she said. ‘But when all those things started to be published about what Stalin had done, the numbers killed – I felt sick, physically sick. Soon I couldn't stand it any longer, and I stopped reading those articles. Some of my friends too, I think one or two were literally killed by it. They just gave up.'

‘Hadn't you suspected?'

‘No, it wasn't that. In my family we always knew. My father loathed Stalin.' Her voice filled with a desolate truculence. ‘But to read all that, on and on . . . there was so much of it, the sheer quantity. Stalin, Brezhnev, even Chernobyl.' Her features retracted into nausea. ‘I took to reading detective stories, science fiction, anything . . . .' After a while she calmed and said in vague wonder: ‘I suppose I could imagine, before, that it wasn't so. I knew it was true, but perhaps . . . I did not really face it. And when day after day, month after month, our papers were printing such things, after all we had already suffered, the millions who died in the war . . . .'

She stopped in a confusion of shame and recoil. She was trying to understand how with exposure her country's sins seemed suddenly enormous, which before had lain known but anaesthetised in half-concealment; how the fantasy of national innocence could vanish overnight. Somehow, for years, she had seen her nation bifocally. She was a woman of long, tenacious passions, and this dishonour went to her heart. So she clung to an outrage at the world's ingratitude, and to her own and her parents' sacrifice. Sometimes I felt that the dying of her father and of her country had become knit together in one loss. He had been a Christian believer, she said, and had bequeathed to her the icons which hung above her bed. Their eyes gazed blindly over the cluttered room. Someone at that time had given her a Bible too. ‘I wished I had thought before about that verse,' she said. ‘
“Let no man be your teacher, only God” . . . .'

She asked me to return to her for lunch on Victory Day. ‘Then you will meet my husband,' she said, ‘and we will honour our country's dead.'

On the north-east outskirts of the city a sunken trajectory of domes and gates traces a funerary way up Maracanda's ruined ramparts. In this secret glade, through the late fourteenth century, the women and warriors of Tamerlane were laid in sepulchres whose precious tiles, carried on camel-back from Persia, were fitted round the tomb façades in a cool splendour.

In early morning, before any tour-groups arrive, you may walk up this avenue undisturbed, while the dawn leaks a thin light over its walls. At its foot a mullah waits in a newly working mosque; but beyond, the screams of swallows ricochet among the domes, and the way ascends over hexagonal flagstones between the mausoleums. Their cupolas do not swell and bloom, but complete their graves modestly, like a wardrobe of antique hats. A few plane trees lean over the path. Here and there a building has vanished, leaving an anonymous hump.