The Lost Heart of Asia (31 page)

‘We have far to go,' the teacher said simply. ‘We haven't moved as the Russians have. We don't have democracy here at all. Just a sham. They talk about it all the time, of course, but do nothing.'

‘At least you're ruled by your own people,' I said: so one layer of repression had been peeled away.

They nodded approval. ‘Yes . . . yes . . .'

Oman was rocking the cradle. ‘This is our democracy!' he cried. ‘It's just an infant!'

The baby started bellowing again; but his father released him and stood him on his feet, while everyone watched and applauded. He looked like a young Hercules. He was stroked, kneaded, saluted, lectured and kissed. Then Oman seized him and lifted him up and down above his head like a trophy. ‘This is the future Uzbekistan!' he cried. Tears shone in his eyes. He was dangerously drunk. ‘Here is our country! Look how fine he'll be!'

He was playing to the crowd, I knew, ingratiating himself. Yet at the same time he was subtly condescending to these provincial teachers and tradesmen, and soon he began preaching against people in Tashkent who thought themselves superior to other Uzbeks. It was absurd, he claimed. Why should they think so? He entirely disagreed with it. But his denial came with a drink-loosened suavity which belonged to the theatre of another civilisation. As he flaunted the baby on his shoulder, the others looked back at him with mixed deference and unease. He engaged and slightly awed them. But they did not trust him.

And now Hakim stretched up and eased away the child from Oman's alien and uncertain hands. Somewhere, it seemed, he had gone too far.

Our voices leaked into an unhappy silence. Hakim strapped the child back into his cradle, then touched my arm in embarrassment and in his quaint English changed the conversation: ‘I am unable to make known if my English language is good or not. I wonder if you in your office can give me a blank with on it a stamp?'

‘A blank?'

‘Yes, a blank. If I have a blank, I can show to authorities.'

Oman was shifting beside me, drunk, wretched.

‘We don't have such forms,' I said. ‘I'm just a private writer . . . .'

‘But if out of your position you would write that I'm good with English, and say you famous English writer, even without the blank, would maybe help.'

So I promised to send him a reference from England (and wrote this shamelessly on my return) and he relaxed again, and went back to rocking his howling son.

The next moment everybody rose in respect. Tiny and frail in the doorway, wrapped in a dusty coat caught round with three sashes, the family patriarch hovered, still light on his feet. He was ninety-four. Under the coil of his turban a pair of light, leprechaun eyes glistened shallow in their sockets, and an ashy beard jutted spryly in front. As he alighted beside me, a semi-circle of earnest, deferential faces turned as one man to listen. My presence became the occasion of his history, which his progeny must have heard a hundred times, but nobody uttered or stirred.

He had been a Silk Road merchant in the old days, he said, carrying gold from the Fergana valley into China's far northwest, and returning with silk on eight camels across the Pamirs. He had weathered the tracks which the Chinese graded ‘big headache' or ‘small headache' passes, but on his last journey, as relations worsened between the Soviets and Xinjiang in the early 1930s, the border bridge was dropped into the Ili river and he'd been stranded on the far side.

‘But the Chinese governor was a man of honour,' he said: his silvery voice belonged to a faraway age and place. ‘He exchanged our gold for wool and ferried us back across the river. But that was the end of my travelling. I couldn't go back. So I became a butcher in Almaty, and married there.'

As the men strained for every note of the treble voice, I thought how hopeless had been the task of Communism here – its suppression of the past and hurrying-in of the new. For the past was seated amongst us, innately respected, in its triple sash and worn coat full of years. The true country of these people had been their genealogy, which they used to memorise through generations back into myth (tracing themselves to Adam), and dignity still lay in age. The health and longevity of the old man was a subject of clannish marvel and pride among his descendants, and as his history dwindled away in the abattoirs and domesticity of Almaty, and his offspring warmed back into conversation, he buttonholed me with health tips.

‘I've never been ill . . . .' He was sitting bolt upright, his legs supple under him. ‘I used to drink a bottle of vodka with every meal . . . and my meals have always been the same: one kilo of mutton, one kilo of rice, and half a kilo of sheep's fat. That's how I've lived on. Remember. I recommend it. I've had a little trouble with my left knee this last year, I don't know why.... But that's all there's ever been wrong with me.'

His digestion was perfect, he said, but he had no teeth. One grandson shredded cucumber for him, while another cracked and crumbled some hazel-nuts. I hunted in his face for any clue to his endurance, but found myself staring into a visage of uncanny agelessness: clear and almost featureless, except for its goblin eyes. The bridge of his nose sank untraceably into his cheeks, leaving only an isolated flare of shell-pink nostrils. He had outlived most of his seven children, but his youngest daughter, whom he had fathered at sixty-four, still visited him.

‘But everything was better,' he began, ‘in the time of . . . of . . . that man Nikolai . . . .'

‘Nikolai II?'

‘Czar Nikolai, yes Those were good years. Nobody bothered you. There were just camels and horses, plenty of horses, yes, and quiet And then the Soviet Union came and everything got collectivised and rearranged.' He shook his head. His neck trembled with wrinkles, like a lizard's. ‘And it was a lot of trouble . . . for nothing . . . .'

Towards midnight he got up – ‘I'm going to visit my nephews! I'll be back!' – and by the time we had clambered respectfully to our feet, he had tripped away.

An hour later the last guest departed, Hakim unfurled quilts over the floor, and Oman rolled himself up, his voice turned maudlin and tearful: ‘I'm sorry, Colin. It was not me that was talking, it was the vodka.' Then he snored sonorously, horribly, for hours, shifting an octave whenever he turned over, while Hakim made a lighter, nasal moaning beyond. Finally the patriarch returned at an early hour of morning and lay like a statue on a catafalque, wheezing, with his fingers laced over his stomach, and his beard pointed at the ceiling. Their wind trio rose and filled the room.

At a time before anyone in the town could remember, an itinerant holy man had struck water from its ground and been buried where the cold streamlets descended a hillside. Now acacias and chenars plunged its terraces into a subaqueous light, and tea-houses spread their divans among ornamental pools, where men drank discreetly – for this is a holy place – and women played with their children round the tomb.

A posse of Hakim's younger relatives took me there in the morning. A few nights before, the town's Lenin statue had been pulled down (‘they always go in the night,' somebody said); but the holy man's tomb was under restoration. All around us, as we squatted before our mountainous breakfast, the tea-house habitués were deep in confabulation, and had hung up their cages of pet quails in the branches overhead. Sometimes, Hakim said, they pitched the birds against one another in a bloodless battle of nerves, and laid bets. But now the aviaries, each one cowled in a black hood, dangled in silence among the leaves, while the quails sulked underneath.

Relaxed in the young sunlight, and freed from the polite reserve of their elders, the young men pummelled me with questions. The West shimmered in an El Dorado beyond their reach, but their black eyes settled on me as its exemplar. Back in England, did I own a house, a car? What did it cost to marry? But the price of a Honda or a flat reeled into meaninglessness. Inflation had already turned their own prices into bedlam, but the disparity between the dollar and the dwindling rouble laid waste all comparisons. A plane ticket to the West would alone have cost them over a year's salary.

But there was one thing that baffled them entirely. Why wasn't I married? Later they confessed that they had all been aching to ask me this, and now it sprang from the lips of an open-faced youth who had listened to everything in silence. Here, after all, every man married automatically. Even Hakim looked at me with bewildered charm. ‘You miss all the sweetness of life!' he cried, and the others gazed at me in mute accord, while the shadows splashed over our half-forgotten meal, and the blacked-out quail cages shifted in the branches, and they waited for a reply.

‘Where is this sweetness?' I asked. The question held a Socratic quaintness. ‘With the woman or the children?'

Hakim answered at once: ‘With the children, of course, with the boys!'

But in the West, I told them, it was more often the woman who inspired the longing to marry. I could not convey to them a world in which the preciousness of one person might change a life's course, or the chances of love refute the ordered programme of matchmaking and childbirth.

The callow man echoed: ‘Just the woman?' He was frowning.

‘Yes.'

They started munching their food again in perplexity. Whatever secret yearnings might rankle in them (and I'd met several who had seduced other men's wives), there was too much of market-place practicality and clan responsibility in their hard lives to allow of understanding any other. A woman was only a woman, after all. But a child was a descendant, bone of your bone, who would carry on your blood and memory, and secure your continuance in the chain of things. I, as far as they could see, was a cul-de-sac, an unaccountable exception to natural law.

They ranged about for other explanations of me. Women and commerce, they presumed, were the motives for travel. What were Arab women like, they wondered, and the French? Was it true that Japanese women were made differently
down there?
Had I ever had a Chinese?

In me, I realised, they were being left with an ungraspable paradox; yet to them I inhabited such riches and freedom that perhaps the secret of my solitude lay somewhere there.

The sweetness of life. I saw myself in their eyes, and was touched by a fugitive melancholy. They gave me cherries in parting, and a small knife. Their questions posed an innocent challenge, and to some I had no answer.

For a few days Oman and I dawdled east through a country where cotton-fields were interrupted by alfalfa, wheat and rice paddy. In Namangan we saw no trace of the veil now, and drove on towards the old capital of Andijan where Babur had been born 500 years before. Even its people were beautiful, he wrote, and its meadows, sweet with violets and tulips, would tease him far into his exile. But now, as Jura had intimated, Andijan was rougher and less pastoral, an oil and cotton town whose streets were sober with yellow stucco. So at last we slipped over the Kirghiz border into the town of Osh, and prepared to move south to the Pamirs.

In these towns the hotels were baffled by the arrival of a foreigner. Some accepted us, but quadrupled the price. Others telephoned the police asking what to do, but the police did not know either. The rules had all gone. Then Oman, growing irritated, would stump into the police-station and cry out at every official hesitation: ‘Hasn't the Iron Curtain come down yet?' or ‘I thought Stalin was dead!' and the officers would look foolish and acquiesce, or angrily refuse. Eventually we would succumb in some cramped room reeking of urine, where I would try to write notes under a weak bulb and Oman would smoke and read Arthur Hailey. (He had abandoned Kafka, who scooped about in himself too much, he said.) Then I would return from a night ramble to find him overcome by boredom or sleep, his shapeless body thrown down among his sheets as if by somebody else.

By now we were barely seventy miles from the Chinese frontier, separated only by a neck of mountains where the Tienshan and Pamir converged. It was from the Chinese that the Fergana valley people had learnt precious metallurgy, paper-making and the sinking of wells, while the cultivation of vines and clover had travelled the other way, along with a breed of horses different from the stocky battlers of the steppes. Over two thousand years ago these Fergana horses came to the ears of the Chinese emperor Wu Ti, who coveted them for his new-fangled cavalry. They were said to sweat blood and to be of celestial descent. In 104 BC a Chinese invasion left its dead strewn along the deserts and mountains of a 3000-mile route-march; but the tribute of horses was secured – beautiful, high-strung creatures, akin to the modern Arab.

But in Osh we sensed nothing of China. The frontiers had been sealed for sixty years, and were only reopening far to the north-east. The first blades of intervening mountains rose from the outskirts. Legend ascribed the town's foundation to Solomon, and by the twelfth century it had become a holy place. Its inhabitants were pious and a little mischievous. When travellers rested in its meadows, the local urchins would open the river sluices and drench them. Now earthquake, decay and Soviet rebuilders had conspired to emasculate it.

I walked here weakly in the morning after a poisoned supper of noodle soup, and left Oman moaning on his bed. He was, in any case, afraid of the town, where riots between Kirghiz and Uzbeks had left 300 dead eighteen months earlier. The Uzbek rumour-mill had placed the killed at over 1000, and he'd seen amateur video-film of the massacres which still drained his face. The agents of these horrors, I knew, must be walking in the streets about me, and the dominance of the Kirghiz – a pastoral race of recent nomads – edged the town with a ruffianly freedom. They were burlier than the Uzbeks, blunter, more secular. Their white felt hats, jaunty with tassels and upturned brims, touched them with an incongruous comedy. Beneath this headgear you might expect to glimpse the blond complexion of a Russian fairytale prince. But instead, an arid plane of Mongol cheeks appeared, and an innocent, unfocused gaze. ‘They're just shepherds,' Oman had said, and waved them nervously away.