The Lost Heart of Asia (24 page)

‘It should be easier to start a business now,' I said, but sounded cheerless even to myself. I seemed to be contracting her despair.

She shook her head. ‘This isn't the West,' she answered. ‘It will never be the West.'

She had seen American drama on television, and the West now appeared to her as delectable as it had once – under Moscow's censorship – seemed sordid. She looked at me with a faint, bovine hope and asked: ‘How much do flights to Britain cost?'

I modified the price, but she sunk her head in resignation. I might have been talking of another cosmos. ‘How much do apartments cost?' she enquired. ‘How much is a refrigerator?' But now she was asking me not in aspiration but with the wan amazement of someone enquiring after another faith's paradise. Behind us the shattered palace had fallen from sight, and in front the streets of Shakhrisabz were closing in again.

A pang of childhood excitement surrounded the ‘Veiled Prophet of Khorasan'. Perhaps I had read of him in Moore's
Lalla Rookh,
but more likely in the schoolboy vulgate of adventure stories and comic books. I have forgotten now. But the impossible romance, with its nimbus of messianic mystery, had remained obscurely with me, so that when I discovered that this phantasmal figure had died in the mountains around Shakhrisabz, I felt a tremor of boyish curiosity.

Even in history Muqanna, ‘the Veiled One', is enigmatic, but from a conflation of old accounts – all of them hostile – he emerges as a sorcerer of seductive power, who raised the standard of revolt against the Arab conquerors of Central Asia in AD 776. At night he could summon up the moon from a deep well, it was said; and he covered his face with a golden mask, or a green veil, to spare men the effulgence of his countenance. Once a humble fuller at Merv, he proclaimed himself the ultimate incarnation of God, last and most sacred in the line which passed from Adam through Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mahomet. He appears to have preached a blend of Persian Mazdeism and Islam, and promoted a primitive communism, even the sharing of wives.

His Arab foes ascribed his power to trickery. Deep in the well he refracted the rays of the sun in a great bowl of mercury, they said, and he covered his face because he was hideously deformed. He was one-eyed, bald, dwarf-like; he stammered. The claims and counter-claims only added to his mystique. But his white-robed followers raged across Transoxiana, subverting all ancient Sogdiana and the Bukhara oasis. The pagan Turks flocked to him, with a miasma of religious and political dissidents. They threatened to overwhelm the whole land. He himself crossed the Amu Dariya north into the heartland of his self-made faith, and for years defied the Arab armies from a fabled castle in the mountains near Shakhrisabz. Within its outer bastions spread orchards, a river, and cultivated fields, and high on a hill, in a massive keep, he lived alone with his harem and a single slave, a focus of scandal and awe.

But at last, in 786, a vast Arab army surrounded the walls. Thirty thousand of Muqanna's men deserted him, and opened the outer gates. Immured on the heights of the citadel, and real-ising that his position was hopeless, he kindled a white-hot oven and incinerated all his possessions, even his animals. Then he commanded to follow him anyone seeking heaven, and with his family, harem and remaining followers, leapt into the furnace. When the insurgents entered the castle they found nothing at all, and at once the rumour started up that he had vanished into paradise and would one day return.

The whereabouts of this castle obsessed me. In my empty hotel the tremolo of frogs kept me awake as they mated in the pool outside, and for half the night I pored over my large-scale maps of the region in search of a clue. But the Arab historians situated the castle only vaguely, close to Shakhrisabz on the heights of Sam, or Siyam, which was probably no more than a generic name for the northern Hisar mountains of today. My pen-tip dithered uselessly among the little villages. ‘Zamas' raised a momentary hope, destroyed by its second-syllable stress. Tashkurgan – the ubiquitous Turkic word for a ‘stone tower' – sent up a feeble promise. Otherwise, nothing.

For two days I bullied drivers to launch their derelict taxis along tracks and defiles in the neighbouring ranges. The late spring rains gushed and rustled through the clefts. The foothills bristled into counterfeit donjons and barbicans, which would disintegrate at our approach with the teasing monotony of mirages. In the Uzbek hamlets of mud and thatch, under roofs scarlet with wild-sown poppies, village elders shook their gnarled and fur-capped heads in ignorance of any vanished castle. One trip petered out at a pass where the driver refused to go on because of wolves. Another ended when a lorry skidded on a loose-stoned track and crashed into us. After some explosions of self-righteousness, the two drivers settled down to debate for an hour in a measured unravelling of pride. Then we limped home.

On the third day I found a tough, bad-tempered driver, so crippled that he was bound to his taxi like a centaur to its hooves. We moved east along a newborn river towards the village of Siyon (the name augured well) between terraces sprinkled with apple blossom. In front of us storm-clouds rolled beneath the mountains, liberating their crests to float in solitude. The hills were all uncrowned; but sometimes their summits smoothed and spread like mesas, as if planed away for walls.

Suddenly, beyond Siyon, a mountain spur came thrusting into the valley. It reared up like a natural citadel. At its foot, where I imagined outer ramparts, the slopes were littered with crashed-down debris. Above, for some eighty feet, their scarps lifted sheer, fissured geometrically as if they were hewn blocks, before levelling out to a tatter of shrubs over the summit. It was impossible to tell which stones were carved, if any, and which natural. But the simulacrum was all of a mighty keep. It was hypnotic. Grey battle-clouds were storming down the valley in collaboration, and had twined ornamentally along the upper bluffs. It was a forbidding and mysterious place, uninhabitable perhaps, I did not know.

I paid off the driver. It was only noon, and I reckoned on a three-hour climb. I marched across the intervening downland in reckless elation. Sapphire and cream flowers spiked the grass underfoot, and the spires of wild tulips gone to seed. I crossed two gullies heaped with black stones, like incinerated rivers, and scrambled up the crevice of a third. A four-foot snake erupted under my feet and flashed away through the tulips in a barbaric gleam of bronze. In front of me the castle (if that is what it was) rose ever more formidable. I strained to identify squared stones, but could not. In the silence an eagle rose and circled the summit on stiffened wings.

Many versions were told of Muqanna's end. It was said that before the Arab armies closed in, 50,000 of his subjects gathered beneath the castle and begged him to unveil his face to them. He prevaricated, warning them that the blaze of his countenance could kill them, but they insisted piteously, so he commanded them to return at sunrise. Just before dawn he ordered his hundred-strong harem to line the parapets, while his followers waited below. As the sun rose, and his slave called on the people to behold the prophet's face, the odalisques canted their mirrors against the sunbeams and refracted them in a blinding conflagration of light. His followers hurled themselves on their faces in terror. Then, said the chroniclers, they took to Muqanna's cause with renewed zeal, and boasted that they had seen God.

This drama replayed itself easily on the clifftops in front of me. Labouring up a goat-track through an airy dust of thistles, I left all doubts behind me. My reddened eyes swam with the past. I reached the saddle which joined the great spur frailly to the ranges behind it, and dropped exhausted on its rocks. I was pouring sweat. Around me russet butterflies twitched and dark birds sang in the cliffs. I had no idea what I would find.

Some historians wrote that Muqanna's body was rescued from the furnace, and that its head was hacked off and sent to the caliph in Aleppo. But the starkest story was told long afterwards by a crone who claimed to be the last survivor of his harem. As the besiegers closed in, she said, the prophet feasted his women and ordered them to drain their goblets. But she sensed that the wine had been poisoned, and poured the drink unseen into her collar. As her companions died around her, she only feigned death. For a moment, she said, Muqanna surveyed the carnage, then she saw him go to his slave and strike off his head. Finally he removed his robe, and leapt into the furnace. ‘I went over to that oven,' she said, ‘and saw no trace of him. There was no one alive in the castle.'

Now, stumbling through the indigo flowers which swarmed across the summit, I could imagine a whole city here, or none. The porous rock had been split and polished into the sleekness of sculpture by millennia of exposure to the rain. I traversed it in a madness of indecision. It was impossible to be sure if the stones which balanced on top of one another had been lain by men or fragmented by wind, or if the runnels were those of water or chisel.

I struggled from natural terrace to terrace. Sometimes the storm-gouged outcrops seemed to have been slotted for posts and rafters. Dwarf oaks blurred every shape, with wild apricot trees wreathed in caterpillars. Once I came upon a plateau quartered and squared like a parquet floor. But it was a quilt of natural stone. In one place only, a vallum of boulders had been raised too regularly for chance, and I found traces of dissolved clay: a bandit's lair, perhaps.

At last I sat down bewildered on the cliff-edge. Below me the valley made a vista fit for any reincarnate god. The threatened storm had gone, and the river threaded through mist in a silver torque, from which the far calls of goatherds ascended. All around, the slopes deluged with the white scented buds and violet pods of shrubs unknown to me, and I gave up wondering if I was seated on the ravaged castle, and listened, without history, to the river.

A familiar Soviet gloom permeated Samarkand's railway station. Its gangways clanged to the trudge of labourers, and the air stank with diesel and steam spurting from vents under the platform. Everything was being rebuilt, groaning with old cranes and trucks, but nothing complete. The backs of a women's road-gang were bent over gravel-heaps in the sidings, and a pair of bare-chested Goliaths, gouging holes along the rail-track, might have muscled out of a Socialist Realist poster. Everything – the grey-faced passengers, the engines blazoned in hammer-and-sickle, the steel bridges rigged with searchlights – conspired in a Stalinist film-set. All that was needed to complete it was a lankhaired waif with a battered suitcase, and the next moment she had arrived, haggardly pretty, her skirt muddied and her head circled in a red hair-band. I never discovered what she was doing in Uzbekistan, although she rested a moment beside me. Her father was a Czech, she said, but she had been born in the Baltic, so there was nowhere left for her now. ‘The Czechs won't take us back,' she said, and wandered on down the platform, trailing her one suitcase, and faltering occasionally from some pervasive tiredness.

North to Tashkent my train moved under a mottled sky. Between the punctuation-marks of messy towns and mud hamlets, we pushed across miles of pale earth ploughed for cotton, where farmers scratched the topsoil with hoes, or a lone tractor turned. My carriage was thronged by fattening Uzbek traders with their soft, jewelled wives. In the cubicle opposite, the Russian waif curled under a blanket, reading, and talked of herself in a lacklustre, musical voice. Although she worked as a clerk in a town on the Lower Volga, she said, she had trained as an actress, and an instinctive theatricality stained her cadences and tilted her profile as she said: ‘It is so hard a profession!' or ‘I have never married.' She spoke as if any chance of marriage were over, although she was only thirty, and she did not have to act the sadness which crowded behind her tone. Now she was reading Chekhov to perform in the people's theatre in her home town, where amateur players starred. So for a few hours a week she became somebody else. Next month, she said, they were staging his short story
The Fiancée.

I dimly remembered it, and imagined her the heroine.

‘Oh no,' she laughed, but faintly. ‘I play the old woman.'

Ahead of us brown hills steepened and closed in round the track, then we were thundering through the Gates of Tamerlane, whose slatey cliffs reared to either side, split into mounded cubes and pyramids. Through this breach in the dwindling Pamir, Turkic and Mongol tribes had for centuries descended out of the steppes into the Zerafshan valley; Uzbek khans had battled back and forth and left their sanguinary inscriptions on the rocks, and Tamerlane stamped the cliffs with the record of his five-day forced passage, forbidding anyone to follow without his permit. Among rashes of modern graffiti, these early testimonies remained neat and clear and within a hand's touch as we passed, and a few moments later we were out into pasturelands under a stormy sky.

I looked with awe at Tashkent. I had flown here briefly the year before, and had thought it a backwater. But now, after so long in the deprived south, I felt surrounded by the sweep and grandeur of a true capital. It was a cosmopolis of over two mil-lion, the industrial giant of Central Asia. Its streets were broad and ordered. Its institutes and ministries withdrew soberly behind their railings. Double ranks of chestnut and chenar trees channelled its avenues between big, plain buildings, and its citizens had lost the look of intruding peasantry, and seemed almost urbane. Nearly forty per cent were Russian. Scarcely a trace of native costume showed. The manicured Uzbek secretaries looked as worldly as the ex-Soviet officials with whom they mingled.

But I searched for remnants of the czarist city almost in vain. The Russians had captured Tashkent in 1865, not on orders from St Petersburg but by the adventurism of local generals. Within a few years it became the capital of Russian Turkestan, and there grew up beside the native town a pleasant, nondescript cantonment, where water channels trickled and great trees bloomed. Its first governor-general, the vain and chilly Kaufmann, ruled like a petty emperor. His army and administration were filled with exiled bankrupts and adventurers. Far from home, local society became inward-looking and licentious, while beside it the Uzbek community continued almost unstudied, as if it would one day fade away.

The homely administrative buildings of those times, washed in buff or white, had been swept away by the triumphalist concrete boulevards and palaces of Bolshevism, or shaken down by earth tremors. After the earthquake of 1966, which gutted almost half the city, builders were rushed in from the other Soviet republics and resurrected whole suburbs which still bear their names: the ‘Kiev' or ‘Riga' or ‘Ashkhabad' districts. The inflated monuments and halls of the Rashidov years followed soon after, and the unstable earth was tunnelled with seventeen miles of grandiose subway. Its stations still gleam in pink-veined marble and ceilings gushing with triple ranks of chandeliers, where Uzbeks and Russians build socialism together in hectoring bas-reliefs: heroes of an already bygone age.

As I tramped the city, the enormousness of its spaces – the swirl of six-lane avenues fringed by trams and trolleybuses, the opening out of parks and vistas under the watch of statues – oppressed and disquieted me. The city's heart seemed numb with lessons and memorials. People faded to shadows here. Only their tiered balconies betrayed human variousness: a line of washing, a pot of violets, a cat. Under a superficial diversity of style, their flat-blocks erupted in the same prefabricated brutalism – often thousands to a block – that barges across all the old Soviet Union from Minsk to Vladivostok.

But suddenly the dogmas were being unlearnt. The rooftops which once clamoured with Communist propaganda now webbed the skyline in vacant scaffolds, or had been filled by traffic advice for pedestrians. On the crest of the Ministry of Construction the red star had fallen off its frame on to the roof below. Outside factories and offices the boards of honour were blank where the grim portraits of local exemplars had hung. The whole city was hesitating, as if waiting for something new to think.

Tired with hours of walking, I succumbed to a taxi and watched the passing streets across a smashed windscreen and a dashboard where no needles worked. The driver yelled above his motor's din: ‘The Russians will get out soon, and good riddance! We were rich here before. We had melons, nuts, everything. Then the Russians came and we just had these bloody trees.' He waved at the beautiful avenues. ‘When it's all Uzbek again we'll cut these down and grow proper ones which give you something – oranges, olives.' We went grinding from the Palace of Friendship past the monument to the earthquake victims. ‘It's OK, life. It's like this, as a driver I can earn two hundred roubles a day. But in the factories they earn only two thousand a month. That's lousy.' We crashed round the inverted soup-bowl of the state circus. ‘But the factory-workers take stuff, you know. On the side.'

We passed a statue of Alisher Navoi, the national Turkic poet, fingering his beard and open book in a park by his museum. He had been promoted by the Russians as anti-clerical (his Islamic piety censored out) and the driver reeled off a harsh fusillade of his verse. Then the familiar complaints started up. ‘You know, meat here used to be two roubles a kilo, and now it's
a hundred.
And sugar . . . .'

I walked into Karl Marx Park and made for the anonymous square once named after Lenin. A bust of Marx, aswirl in a hurricane of hair and beard, still glowered down my path with the ridged brows of a Mongol warlord. Someone had laid a red carnation beneath him. Beyond, the way was lined by shashlik and pilau vendors, doing poor business, and empty restaurants which in Moscow would have lain under siege.

I crossed the swollen canal which had divided the czarist town from the native one, and entered the void which was once the largest square in the Soviet Union. A thin drizzle descended. It was less a square than a formless plain dotted by dwarfed monuments, ministries and gardens, and bisected by streets. A bridal couple circling the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the far side was almost invisible. Only the god himself, the biggest bronze Lenin in the world, threatening from his fifty-foot plinth behind belching regiments of fountains, tried to dominate these tremendous acres. But his gestures were meaningless. The clenched eyes, everybody knew now, were gazing into nothing. The scroll he clutched contained a terrible mistake. The tarmac in front of him had been scored for the May Day march of soldiers twenty-three abreast, but the tribune at his feet was walled off and labelled ‘Closed for repairs'. ‘They'll take him away soon,' the driver had said. ‘But nobody knows what to replace him with.'

A man was lying among wet rose-bushes nearby, the rain falling on his face. I wondered if he were ill, but as I bent down to him he only murmured ‘Comrade . . . .' and closed his eyes again, drunk.

I settled on a bench under the trees, while the rain thickened around the great statue. In the blank square, all the certainties had gone. It was emptier than it had ever been. A few women tripped between puddles under bright umbrellas, and a policeman was reading a sodden newspaper. I turned up my shirt collar in a gesture of self-protection, while the rain began falling on me steadily, inexorably, out of the trees.

A month later, the statue of Lenin was gone.

It had become a city of unemployment, nerves, locked doors. In my hotel the drains blocked and the electricity faltered; dawn light flooded in through wafer-thin curtains, and the black-varnished furniture was falling to bits, its drawers spilling to the floor at a tug. In a night-club across the road, louche young Uzbeks drank with their innocently rouged girls, while a cabaret of half-veiled odalisques wriggled to gutted pop music. In this temple to their lost civilisation, complete with prostitutes and bouncers, the clients sank into a counterfeit of the West: raucous, extravagant and forbidden.

The hotel guests were mostly on business. An Israeli foreign office agent was scouting to open an embassy, but everything belonged to co-operatives, he said, and nobody would sell. Two Chinese delegations were trying to nose out trade (but falling ill on the Uzbek cuisine). An American Mormon had started a food-processing plant, he said, and the KGB, who had once harassed him, were now pestering him to sell them things.

Someone had given me the address of Jassur, an
apparatchik
who financed business initiatives. But when i reached his institute it was half-inhabited. Its receptionist slumped asleep with her hennaed hair loosed over her knees. I padded past her. Two dyed-blonde secretaries were gossiping at the boardroom table, and Jassur was sitting between them. They scattered to a sofa as I entered, while he retired importantly to his desk.

His hair dusted back from a creaseless forehead and a face which looked oiled and rather child-like. The desert of his desktop was broken by a bottle of champagne and three pieces of paper. On a table behind him, the attendants of activity – an electric typewriter, a word-processor, a fax machine – stagnated beside three telephones. A guitar stood in a corner. A map of America hung on one wall.

‘I was awarded this post last week. I am the director here.' In the amber-skinned oval of his face the eyes and slight moustache made an unreadable code of black dots and dashes. Beneath them, when I enquired about his work, a pair of fleshy lips budded like an anemone, and soliloquised in English with formal smoothness, as if he were addressing a panel.

‘I dispense money to various companies for projects. I've been in many foreign countries, and understand them. I have started a joint stock company with one of our gold corporations and with Saudi Arabia and Syria. I was two weeks in Israel and changed my position very much on the Arab question. I was two years in Moscow in the military academy there, very close to things . . . .' I listened to him, unspeaking. The anemone lips seemed to move independently of his face, like an oracle. ‘I've been in the States, and I speak almost perfect Spanish, better than my Russian or Uzbek. Uzbek' — he dismissed it with a pout — ‘is just a language for the family. I was at Harvard University for a month. And I have a speciality: the Soviet view of the Western world. I'm told that it is interesting . . . .'

I was glad, I said, to find somebody optimistic about the economy. But I stared bleakly round the office, then back at the goldfish face. Its lips were moving again.

Optimism? Well . . . I am trying to set up contact with South Africa for the purchase of gold-mining equipment. Theirs is the best in the world. But our government here doesn't help with this. They are afraid to make contact with South Africa, I think. But I believe it is a great country, a fine country to work in.' He said in the same anointed voice: ‘I hope to go there to live.'

‘For ever?'

‘Yes.' So after all his trumpeting of status and possibility, he was getting out. ‘South Africa has a great future.'

I said I thought its future more uncertain than Uzbekistan's.

‘You think so?' He looked at me as if I had propounded something extraordinary. For a moment he was silent. I gazed back into the nurtured face of an infant, at once self-adoring and disappointed. Then his voice turned petulant, as if he had found it for the first time. ‘But I don't want to go on relying on other people. Here everyone is dependent on someone else, and nobody does anything. I want just to rely on
myself.'
He pointed narcissistically to his brow.
‘Myself!'

This was precisely what a Westerner should have wanted to hear. It was odd how futile it sounded. ‘What about your work here?' I gestured foolishly round the office.

‘It's hopeless. My job is to dispense money. But I have nothing to dispense.' He looked like an angry cupid. His hands opened in a gesture of helpless deficit. ‘I want to get promotion somewhere. We're starting embassies around the world now, and I want to be in one of these. But you have to know somebody.' His voice dwindled into naivety. ‘People's sons get these positions. Perhaps my joint stock company' – he savoured the words ‘joint stock' as if they conferred some talismanic stature – ‘perhaps that will give me the opportunity to travel.' But this company was dwindling to a paper idea, or perhaps a fantasy. ‘I want to work at an American university, where I can use my Spanish . . . . they use a lot of Spanish there, in administration.'