The Lost Heart of Asia (3 page)

But how much had he invested in his authority, I wondered? Had he believed in Marxism-Leninism or in literature or, arcanely, in both? It was hard to ask. He looked so old now, and somehow depleted, yet comfortable. He had taken off his jacket and put on a lumpy cardigan. His damaged hand rested on his knees. But his wife lived in Moscow – she did not care for Ashkhabad, he said – and he came and went between them, not exactly separated. His life seemed now to have resolved into these divided loyalties. They were perhaps his truth.

I wondered how easily this family cohabited: the failing war-hero and his film-director son Bairam – who was working on a study of Red Army atrocities – and a garrulous, ten-year-old grandson. A depthless chasm of experience seemed to gape between them all.

Bairam came in later, pale and ebullient, without the look of closed unsureness which I often saw about me in the streets. He grew excited by my interest in Turcoman things, and presented his collection piece by piece, unrolling hundred-year-old kelims at my feet in a patter of discriminatory pride. These were not the soulless products, dull with aniline dyes, which 200 underpaid girls (he told me) turned out in the local Soviet-built factory. They were works of love and patience, whose skills had been inherited from mother to daughter. He brought in jewellery too: necklaces which had flooded the breast with lapis lazuli and silver bells; enamelled and filigreed frontlets that clipped on to the woman's ears before cascading about ber in a tumult of chains. They trickled like water through my fingers.

Meanwhile the old man switched on the television which stood among the nomad regalia, and drank brandy mixed with Pepsi Cola. ‘I used to drink too much,' he said to no one in particular. ‘But I hardly drink now.' On his chosen channel the Ashkhabad Orchestra, dressed in white tie and tails, was playing Moussorgsky.

Bairam was full of projects. He was working on a film which would have been unthinkable two years before, he said. It was a documentary on his people's flight from the Red Army during the forced collectivisation in the 1930s, when a million Turcomans and others had fled into Iran and Afghanistan.

He spoke like his father, in sudden bursts of feeling, while still holding up jewellery for me to admire. ‘We're even showing a sequence on the Red Army machine-gunners mowing down the refugees in the mountain passes. Yes, this happened.' He held up an amethyst frontlet, as if it might have belonged to the dead. ‘The film is being bought by Moscow television! They asked us to cut out what the Red Army did, but we said no. So they're transmitting it whole!' He let out an airy laugh. It was an astonishing reversal of power.

His father went on listening to Moussorgsky, but after a while ambled out into his courtyard. It must have been simpler to survive the war and all the Stalin years, I thought, than to meet this shock of independence. But Bairam waved the notion away. ‘No, not for my father. He was already independent. He never believed in the Party. He left it twenty-four years ago.'

I asked in astonishment: ‘Why?' Leaving the Party was tantamount to suicide.

‘There was a sort of scandal . . . when he was Minister of Culture. They said he travelled too much – in Turkey and India. The KGB got after him.'

I thought: so in Moscow's eyes his ideas had become contaminated. ‘What did he do after that?'

‘There was nothing he could do. After you'd left the Party, that was the end of you. There was no chance of a job. So he sat at home and wrote poetry . . . .' He smiled weakly. ‘That's how I remember him, all my childhood.'

So whatever had happened, I had not understood; and the old man's look of hurt and reconciliation sprang from something older than his country's independence. A little later I asked him about Oraz – who had written his subversive novel from the heart of government – and Korvus only said: ‘I know who you mean by this man.'

The note of censure was unmistakable. A residual loyalty to the system, perhaps, had been disturbed by that betrayal. He himself had simply resigned, and become a poet.

On Sundays, when the central market opened, the farmers spilt into the city. Behind their hillocks of tangerines, pomegranates, beetroot, peppers and dried apricots, they waited from early morning with dogged unconcern: a people whose faces expressed all the fierce gamut of Turcoman change. There were Mongoloid faces whose cheeks had stayed creaseless into old age, and long Caucasoid ones with startling pale eyes, and Bedouin visages where the beetling noses erupted beneath tapered brows. A few of the older women, in the remembered modesty of youth, still touched their concealing scarves to faces no longer beautiful, and squatted all day before a cupful of onions or carrots from their private plots.

The shoppers trudged disconsolately among them. Sudden inflation had sent the fragmented Soviet Union into shock. Everybody was complaining. Everybody had a dirge of comparative prices on his lips. On e kilo of meat costs a hundred roubles now . . . last year it was just ten! Everything was better under Brezhnev . . . .' And the Russians who moved among them looked as poor as the rest.

It was here that I met the artist Momack. He was drifting about, like me: a slight, middle-aged man in baggy jeans and trainers. In this rough ambience he looked faintly theatrical. He had the sensitised melancholy of a king in a Persian miniature. A satiny beard swarmed blackly up to his cheekbones and liquid eyes. He felt close to these farmers, he said. They seemed nearer to his people's roots. But I could not imagine them feeling close to him.

He drove me to his studio in a twenty-year-old Zhiguli saloon. Years ago, he said, he had daydreamed of selling all his paintings and buying a Mercedes Benz. ‘I love those cars.' He tapped his splintered windscreen. ‘But instead I've got this.' The Zhiguli might have been assembled from scrap metal. It moved in spasms, and swung about like an artist's mobile.

We clattered down Gogol and Pushkin streets – ‘I hope they keep those names,' he said. ‘They were real people, writers not politicians . . . .' He hated politics. Even Islam was not a belief to him, but a habit. It had always rested lightly on the pastoral Turcomans. He had counted three new mosques being built in the city, he said, but they signalled a mild cultural resurgence rather than a doctrinaire revolution. ‘We Turcomans never so deeply believed. We never had many mosques. It was enough just for five or six people gathered in a house to pray . . . .I remember that as a child.'

His studio stood in a suburb still scattered with the dwellings of 1948 earthquake victims. The building had lain derelict for years, until he and some friends had restored it. Now it had become a nest of gaunt ateliers where nobody seemed to be working. A debris of sculpture lumbered its courtyard – two decapitated leftovers of Socialist Realism carved in silver-painted polystyrene, and a discarded portrait-bust.

We went down an echoing corridor, where outsize stoves loomed like pillars. In the studio was a primitive press for Momack's etchings. He sat down awkwardly. His life's work lay stacked around us, unsold. The canvases banked up in shelves or were heaped against the walls. As a student he had become infatuated by Picasso and Chagall, and over the years his paintings had grown dangerously unrepresentational. They had sold only to friends. After
perestroika,
he said, he had enjoyed some acclaim in Moscow and even Eastern Europe. But life was hard now, he was so isolated. He supported two daughters by his first wife, and by his second a little son, who had yesterday been circumcised and cried all night.

Hesitantly he showed me some pictures. His early oils were romanticised scenes of Turcoman village life, and faltering essays in Picasso. But his etchings and watercolours were besetting and strange. Obsessively he had painted weddings and mirages. Above all, mirages. It was as if his people's past shimmered just out of reach, maddening and ungraspable to him. His figures were like ghosts. They walked or rode in abstract deserts and mountain-valleys, and they reeked of melancholy. They were people in moonlight, in flight. Their shadows on the sand or rock were as important as they were, and were often doing something different.

‘These are only attempts,' he said. ‘You can never achieve what you want, can you?'

The grief in him, the hunt for some rootedness in the past of his violated people, perhaps arose from an orphan's distress. His father and two small sisters had been killed in the 1948 earthquake, leaving his mother pregnant with him; and when he was only thirteen, she too had died.

‘Perhaps that's why I'm already going white . . . .' He touched a plume of ashen hair spurting back from his temples. He was still only forty-three. No wonder all his pictures seemed to weep for a lost motherland. He had chosen to inhabit the fringes of his city, among the victims, and his friends came from the minority peoples who float between the Russian and Turkic populace in all the capitals of Central Asia: Armenians, Tartars, Jews, Koreans, Poles.

Had he conceived of his painting, I wondered, as a way back to his past?

‘No, no, nothing like that now.' His expression dissolved into a kind of tragic softness. ‘It's only line and colour. That's all. Line and colour. No, I haven't rediscovered my culture, just extended my technique.'

Some of his pictures descended into a peculiar literalness. In one the words of an illuminated Turkish manuscript hung like a curtain behind a bearded artist. But the composition dwindled away in four parts, the words faded and the figure was pared to a shadow. ‘This tells that without knowledge of his past a man is nothing,' Momack said pedantically. ‘He can't understand himself. He disappears.'

Now he was fingering a watercolour labelled
Marriage: a Study of Old and New.
A village bridal dress – the vivid crimson of fertility — lay in a museum vitrine, brilliant but inaccessible; while beside it, in virginal white, posed a Western mannequin bride. Under her veil, she was naked.

I longed to find some geographical heart to this diffused nation, but there was none. It owned no Vatican, no Acropolis. Its people had perhaps drifted westwards into the Karakum desert in the tenth century, but even this is unsure. Late in the nineteenth century the advancing Russians found them scattered beneath the Kopet Dagh foothills in fortress villages and nomad camps. Of all the Central Asian peoples the Turcomans had the firmest sense of their own nation, and the strongest will to fight. Yet even amongst them this statehood was a cloudy concept. They thought of themselves first by tribe – Tekke or Yomut or Salor – and their frontiers were in constant flux.

Only the little town of Geok-Tepe, I thought – some twenty miles north of the Iranian foothills – might have covertly been remembered as a national shrine. In 1879 the Turcomans had thrown back a czarist army from its walls in a rare reverse for the imperial arms in Central Asia, but two years later the Russians returned under their sanguinary general, Skobelev – Old Bloody Eyes', as the Turcomans came to call him – and laid siege to Geok-Tepe again.

Inside its three miles of mud-built ramparts the most savage and powerful of the tribes, the Tekke, had assembled ten thousand mounted warriors for a last stand. Artillery failed to dismantle this redoubt, so the Russians sent in sappers to mine the soft earth beneath its walls. After twenty days of siege, a two-ton explosion and a rain of artillery blew a breach almost fifty yards wide, killing hundreds of defenders; then the Russian infantry charged forward with their bands playing, and streamed through the breach. Hand-to-hand fighting broke the dazed Turcomans. They fled out of the fortress with their women and children, and were massacred indiscriminately in their thousands. For years afterwards the plains were scattered with human bones, and the tribespeople only had to hear a Russian military band playing for their women to start wailing hysterically and their men to fall on their faces in terror.

Yet Geok-Tepe became a legend of heroic failure, and when I mentioned it to Korvus's son Bairam, he grew excited and insisted on driving me there. It was only fifty kilometres away, he said. He knew a local historian who would join us. We would go to the burial-place of the Turcoman war-leader Kurban Murat. ‘We'll have a party!'

By the time we left next morning, the party had mushroomed uncontrollably. We clattered out of the city in a Volga saloon stuffed with his friends from the state television company. There was a mocking film-director, already drunk, a mouse-like scriptwriter, and a cloudless colossus of a historian with a pock-marked face. Scenting festivity, they had abandoned their desks
en masse
and were stirring up a carnival euphoria.

Even before we left the outskirts, they had waylaid a friend in his butcher's shop. Through a swinging jungle of fly-blown cow and sheep, we thrust our way into a mud-floored storeroom and squatted down in this sordid secrecy for a random picnic. Roundels of bread and saucers of cucumber appeared, and soon the tiny room resounded to the splash and gurgle of vodka. An infectious jubilation brewed up. We toasted one another's countries, families, businesses, futures and pasts. Turcoman and Russian oratory blundered together in helpless pastiche. Occasionally the butcher came in to snatch up a knife or a bloodstained apron. But we were soon past caring. Shoulders and necks were clasped in inebriate brotherhood, and bawdy jokes recycled as the film-director implacably refilled every-body's glass.

Even in my vodka-soaked trance, I recognised the director's strangeness. He was the group's self-appointed jester, but he had the face of a ravaged clown. With his every movement a shock of greying hair floundered above two goitrous eyes. Much of his humour was lost to me, but the rest was subtly self-degrading. The others laughed sycophantically. The role of joker had become his distinction, his passport. He appeared close to breakdown. ‘English culture! Turcoman culture!' He lifted a shaking glass. ‘These are high cultures! Not like the Russians . . . .' Our glasses clashed. ‘I love England . . . . Most of all I love Princess Anne! That is a beautiful woman!' His eyes came bulging close against mine. He was slopping vodka into my glass. ‘Vodka's the cure for everything!'