The Lost Heart of Asia (22 page)

Then the first pilgrims appear. Peasant women mostly, gleaming in gold-splintered scarves and iridescent leggings, and trailing picnic bags, they toil up to the entombed saint who casts over this place a halo of miracle. But on the way they squat inside the chambers where the half-pagan Mongol aristocracy lies, and smooth their palms over the stones, and murmur Allah, Allah. Methuselahs with sticks and flaking beards, and dowagers whose shawls pile their heads like the wimples of medieval burghers, they ease themselves upwards in an aura of pious holiday.

Half way along, the ascent bends through an overhanging gateway, and there opens up a zone of disciplined brilliance. The acres of lightly patterned brick which covered contemporary mosques contract to an aisle of private piety and grief. To either side its walls and high entranceways are clothed in waterfalls of pure faience. Sometimes the façades converge across the way with barely twelve feet between them, echoing one another with the lustrous intimacy of miniatures. Two sisters of Tamerlane are buried here, and a young wife, Tuman, all of whom pre-deceased him. Inside, the chambers are nearly bare. Here and there a smashed tile sticks to a grave or a shadow of fresco lingers, but the cenotaphs are simple cubes and rectangles, mostly uninscribed. It is the entranceways which give voice to the distinction, and perhaps the belovedness, of the dead. They are tiled vertically by eight or ten different friezes in turquoise and gentian blue, powdered with stars, wheels, flowers: a whole lexicon of motifs. They hang there in ravishing detail. Sometimes white inscriptions twine them. Occasionally a touch of oxblood or pale green intrudes. Many panels are raised in deep relief, as if wrapped in a veil of loose knitting, so the sun glitters over them unpenetrating. They are an aesthete's paradise.

But pilgrims steer for the avenue's end and the tomb of the legendary Kussam ibn-Abbas, cousin of the Prophet, who carried Islam to Samarkand, it is said, and was martyred here in the seventh century. ‘Those who were killed on the way of Allah are not to be considered dead; indeed, they are alive,' runs the
aya
on his grave, and it is perhaps from this that the necropolis takes its name of Shakhi-Zinda, ‘the Shrine of the Living King'. As late as the 1920s, before Stalin stifled religion, its underground cells were full of devotees fasting and contemplating in enforced silence for forty days at a time. The martyr, they said, lingered here unseen ‘in the living flesh', waiting to expel the Russians. Beyond the shrine, all along the sunlit heights of the vanished ramparts, thousands of graves still spread within the sacred force-field of his tomb.

A pair of deep-carved walnut doors lurches open on its antechamber. Dust-filled beams of light hang in the dark. Glimpsed through its grille, the porcelain grave is delicate and small. It unfurls in four jewelled tiers upon the bare floor.

‘It was the fire-worshippers who killed him. Persians, you know. They cut off his head.' The burly, soft-faced man who dispensed prayers here touched his neck with a karate chop. ‘But then what happened? The saint didn't die, no. He picked up his head and jumped with it into a well!' He tucked an aerial head under his arm, like a Tudor ghost. ‘And there he waits to return, in the Garden of Paradise.'

Crouched along the walls beside us, ranks of village women let out bleating hymns, their scarves dropped over their faces, their legs doubled under them, their shoes off. Sometimes they turned their furrowed hands upwards while old men led them in half-sung prayer. A bevy of town girls came in and squatted opposite self-consciously. They were necklaced in seed-pearls over their high-ruffed dresses, and their hair drawn tight under nacreous clasps in the style of the day. They fell silent almost at once, listening to the unfamiliar words. They seemed to be sucking nourishment back out of their past, learning from these ancient peasants who they were, or who they might yet be.

From time to time the burly man went out to pray with other pilgrims in his cell – a converted tomb – where I would hear him chanting in a plangent, musical voice before he returned to sit in the sun. The whole sanctuary was resurrecting now, he said. Its mosque, closed down since Kruschev's day, was open again, and the pilgrims returning.

And what of the saint, I asked? Had there been miracles?

He could not answer for others, he said. ‘But I myself . . . I used to have high blood pressure. It got up into my eyes somehow, and into my kidneys. I thought I might not have long to live, and the doctors couldn't do a thing. So I came here to clean the dust round the saint's tomb.' He gazed at the walnut doors with rested eyes. ‘And now I'm well again.'

Then a younger man sat down beside us. I saw, beneath the cap of a medreseh student, a white, possessed face. He wanted to know what we had been saying. The burly man went silent. Under the student's hot, arid stare our conversation spluttered up again, then died.

A medreseh had opened recently in Samarkand, he said coldly, and he was there. I remembered it, of course, and the rape and the mullah's suicide, but said nothing. ‘The top graduates', he went on, ‘will complete their studies for a few months in Saudi Arabia or Iran or Pakistan.'

I tried hopefully: ‘Doesn't your Islam differ a little from theirs?'

He hooked his forefinger into a knot of indissoluble union. ‘We are all one. The Koran is one. Our faith is one.'

I sat there a long time, touched with alarm, before he went away, irritated by my questions. The burly man remained seated in silence beside me, relaxed in the sunlight. Now the Russians had gone, I asked, what enemy was left for the Living King to expel? Couldn't he rest?

‘I don't know. You'd have to ask others things like that. But the saint expels the sorrow in people. That's why they come here.' An old woman was kissing the door-jambs in front of us. ‘And eventually he will return.'

‘You believe that?'

‘Yes, I believe it. He'll return at the end of the light.' A millennial fatalism overtook him. ‘Perhaps if we live long enough, we'll see it.'

I went back down the funerary way, wondering about the nature of its dead. (Who, for instance, had been the niece of Tamerlane laid under a dome decorated pathetically with faience tears?) As I passed the grave of the astronomer Kazyade, teacher and friend of Ulug Beg, my thoughts turned to heresy and science, and a confused train of history flooded in.

All through the fifteenth century Central Asia was filled by the quarrels and luxuries of the Timurid princes, successors of Tamerlane, with their poetry and miniatures (and weakness for wine and catamites). Hedonism and science ran free. Tamerlane's son Shah Rukh reigned – a mighty prince – from Herat in Afghanistan, where years before I had seen his wife's college toppling in ruin, while their own son Ulug Beg governed as viceroy and then sultan in Samarkand. A century later a great-great-great-grandson of the emperor, Babur, ruled here in brief happiness before fleeing the Uzbek invaders south, and left behind him an autobiography of entrancing humanity. It was he, years later, who founded the Moghul empire in India, and carried into its rice-deltas the vigour and epicurism of Central Asia, whose bulbous domes were to fruit in the Taj Mahal. Here the schizophrenic spirit of Tamerlane survived (or so I fancied) among the imperial chess-players and refined Moghul gardens, and lingered too in sudden, often intimate acts of cruelty – that terrible divorce of aestheticism from compassion which was to trouble all his descendants.

In Samarkand meanwhile, the empire of the dead conqueror was disintegrating. Its economy was too shallow to support it. The city workshops still produced their rich cloths and metal, and the finest paper in the world – a skill taught here by the Chinese seven centuries before – but the Silk Road was dying. Tamerlane's wider conquests, which settled no government in their wake, were now revealed only as the megalomaniac raids of a brilliant predator.

Ulug Beg, his grandson, ruled with a different glory. In the 100-foot observatory which he built on a hill outside Samarkand, frescoed with embodiments of the celestial spheres, a caucus of astronomers and mathematicians fussed over azimuths and planispheres, traced the precession of the equinoxes and determined the ecliptic. Here he discovered two hundred unknown stars, and recalculated the stellar year to within a few seconds of that computed by modern electronics. But the pietists, of course, hated him, and in 1449 he was killed by reactionaries led by his own son. His observatory was damned ‘the cemetery of the forty evil spirits', and levelled with the ground.

In 1908 a Russian schoolmaster, Vladimir Vyatkin, after calculating where the observatory must have stood, dug down and hit the arc of what appeared to be a primitive escalator. Now sheltered under a modern vault, its twin marble parapets swoop side by side through the excavated earth. Meticulously jointed and calibrated, they are the section of a titanic 180-foot quadrant along whose rails ran the astrolabe by which Ulug Beg bearded God and identified the heavens.

The Victory Day celebrations were muted that year. For the first time, there was no parade. Down the memorial avenue red flags still mingled with the national colours, and groups of Russian and Tajik veterans were hobbling separately, their chests ablaze with medals, towards the temple which sheltered the eternal flame. But a mournfulness of anti-climax hung about them. The ragged line of police had nothing to supervise. On either side, Second World War tanks and anti-aircraft guns stood on their plinths like relics of prehistory, and martial music sobbed from the loudspeakers. Inside the red-stoned cube of the temple, lilies, peonies, carnations and irises were banked around the sacred fire. ‘Nobody must forget', raged the slogans. But young Tajiks and Uzbeks with their families were strolling about on holiday, and glanced curiously at the shuffling mourners, who looked suddenly redundant as if – in this empire of long memories – the war were at last receding.

‘I was at Potsdam and Berlin,' confided one man. His lapels dripped with medals. ‘Look.' He bowed his head to me. Under its powder of hair the skull was dented by a cavity empurpled with veins. I would not have thought anybody could survive such a wound. ‘I got that a week before the war's end!'

‘I'm amazed you're still alive!'

‘Alive? I've marched every year in the parade.'

‘I missed it.'

‘Well, there wasn't one. There's only this now.' He jerked his chin at the silent veterans trudging about the flowers. He looked belligerent. ‘It's because of that Gorbachev and everything he did . . . .' He scanned me with filmy eyes. ‘Were you in the war?'

‘No.' I wondered how old I was looking. ‘But my father fought in North Africa and Italy.'

‘North Africa . . . Italy . . . .' The words fell experimentally from him. After their appalling sacrifice, Russians often forget that anyone but they confronted Germany. But suddenly he squeezed my arm in a brotherhood which overleapt the continents, and kissed my cheeks, so that I was moved by a vicarious pride, and I wished my father there.

‘Next year, I tell you,' he said, as if to comfort me, ‘there'll be a parade again.' He opened his arms like a boasting angler. ‘A
huge
parade!'

I wandered away into the memorial gardens. Tajik and Uzbek veterans were walking there too, and an old woman in full dec-orations was posing for her photograph. In their remembered war they converged – native and Russian together – at a point where time had superseded race. I went down glades lined with the busts of Heroes of the Soviet Union.

‘Look at them,' one of the Uzbeks said. ‘The heroes are still there, but the Soviet Union's gone!' A delta of smile-lines flowed from his mouth and eyes, but he was not happy. He had the face of a wizened monkey. ‘I tell you as an old man, as a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, that it's a bad thing. Absolutely a bad thing.'

‘You don't want independence?'

‘No! Everything's got worse. And it'll go on getting worse and worse.'

I stared at him, still touched by a vague wonder at the gap where nationalism might have been. A pair of policemen shambled by, their hats tilted back on their heads.

‘Only young people are glad,' he said disgustedly, ‘because they don't have to do any work. Look at those police! They just play-act and take bribes.' He bent his arm in a mock salute. ‘Nobody works any more.'

This, I knew, was more than the perennial complaint of the old against the young, the lament for uninherited beliefs. A gulf of unshared experience gaped between the generations. The world was slipping away from him. ‘And you wait,' he said, as we circled back to the eternal flame. ‘In a minute hooligans will come and steal the flowers.'

I loitered until noon while the crowds thinned. The soulful music throbbed and tramped in the loudspeakers overhead, as if the dead were on the march again, accusing. Then I remembered that I had promised to share Tania's Victory Day lunch, and walked to her home down streets which were almost deserted.

In the courtyard two sallow youths squatted by the gate, awaiting their turn with the prostitute, while a neighbour harangued them from his window. They looked sheepish, but did not budge. When I knocked, a middle-aged man opened Tania's door, and from the photograph by her bed I recognised Petya, her husband. He was slim and dapper, with black hair and gold teeth. He looked almost designed. Despite his Russian name, any Slavic blood in him was subsumed by a Tajik darkness. He appeared younger than Tania, more delicate.

Inside their love-nest, the drinking had already begun. Clustered round a table strewn with cheeses, pickled vegetables, brandy and wine, and facing a mammoth television, we watched a favourite Russian war-film
The Warriors
relayed from Moscow. ‘Today we remember our great dead,' said Tania — already the brandy had curdled her speech to a squelchy aria – ‘all our millions killed in the Great Patriotic War.' We lifted our glasses. Her gaze swivelled towards mine. ‘This was our time of greatest suffering, and today we remember all that . . . . Petya had an uncle killed, and I too.' She added formally: ‘It went from 1941 to 1945.'