The Lost Heart of Asia (37 page)

The damage to the Lada turned out lighter than we had feared: only a worn-out gasket. Next morning Oman bullied five languid mechanics into replacing it, while I rambled irresponsibly along a nearby river, planning a last sortie into the Pamirs.

But that evening I returned to our hotel to find that Oman had been arrested. Apparently he had come back drunk an hour before me, and had instinctively identified a KGB officer in the lobby, and insulted and tried to assault him. My heart sank. I had no idea what they would do with him. By old Soviet standards, his behaviour was insane, and the Uzbek KGB had not changed with independence.

I tracked him down to a pavement police-post near the hotel. The door had been left momentarily ajar, and I glimpsed inside. It was like viewing an old, ugly lantern-slide. The cramped room was lit by a single bulb, which cast an orange glow on the circle of uniforms and plain clothes. Oman stood in the centre – small, stout, intransigent – while a sleek-faced man in an anonymous suit was questioning him from behind a desk. Above hung a photograph of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police. In Moscow his statue had been toppled by chanting crowds the year before. But here he presided undisturbed. I heard Oman's voice rising with its impassioned hurt, and saw his arm starting to lift in fury or helplessness. Then the door slammed shut.

I sat on a wall outside. Two or three other men were loitering in curiosity. ‘They'll probably beat him up,' one said. But Oman had not seemed afraid. Instead, drink had blinded him, and dropped him into a pit of anger and self-pity. I was afraid he might antagonise them further. In his sudden aloneness, engulfed by humiliation and memories, all the old, wronged bitterness would be welling up in him. Perhaps it would inhibit them, I thought, if they knew he was with a foreigner. It might be harder to treat him as they wished.

I pushed open the door in assumed naivety. He was seated now. The plain-clothes officer was haranguing him. The others stood above him like clichés: square-built, expressionless, out-of-date. Dzerzhinsky glowered from the wall. Oman was my driver and friend, I said to his interrogator, and I would be responsible for him . . . . A second's bewilderment passed. The officers' eyes all turned on me. Oman's head suddenly bowed. For a moment the cross-examiner looked baffled, then a big, pale-eyed officer loomed against me, pushed me back without a word, and closed the door softly in my face.

I lingered outside for what seemed a long time. I could no longer hear the voices of either Oman or the police. The loiterers grew bored and drifted away. A few cars passed down the warm street, and a half moon rose. Then the door burst open and Oman emerged alone. His shoulders were hunched in fury. He was hopelessly drunk. He turned round and bellowed at the emerging officer. ‘I'm a man, I'm not a sheep! I'm – not – a — sheep!' His fists shook in the air. It was faintly ludicrous. I pulled him away along the pavement, while the big, bland officer stood and watched. Oman turned and bawled: ‘I'm not afraid of you, sonny!'

‘Don't you call me sonny,' the man said wearily, as if this had been going on a long time.

‘Sonny! Swine!' yelled Oman. ‘Swine! Sonny!'

I flung an arm round his shoulders and propelled him away. ‘They called me a sheep!' he cried. ‘They said, “You're just a sheep, a Soviet sheep!'” He was close to tears. Soviet was a term of abuse now, it seemed. To be Soviet was to be a traitor. ‘Well, if it's true, for the first time I say “Glory to the Soviet Union!'” His fists whirled in the air again. ‘Glory! Glory!'

Eastward, where the Zerafshan river descends from the northwest ranges of the Pamir, a splintered road followed it under a mottled sky. At first it crossed empty flatlands. Then the mountains grew out of the horizon, lit by isolated sunbeams, and gathered along a valley corridor which led us unnoticeably up. Oman was overwhelmed by posthumous shame, and nothing I said could lift it. He drove in a sombre oblivion. We were climbing back into the westernmost spur of Tajikistan. As we neared the border a platoon of Uzbek soldiers stopped and searched us, but there was no other sign of a frontier.

It was up this causeway that the Tajik ancestors, the Sogdians, had fled from Arab invaders in the eighth century. For more than fifteen hundred years they had lived along the Zerafshan in a loose-linked galaxy of oasis princedoms. These, with Bactria to the south, were the cradle of the Iranian race. But Turkic and Arab incursions at last confined them to the great cities, where their Tajik descendants survive, or drove them deep into the mountains, and the valley which we followed still seemed to echo their desolate migration.

Near modern Penzhikent, one of their last towns stood in ruin above the river. Rain and wind had compacted its clay brick to yellow bones, so that houses, streets, gates, temples all traced themselves over the earth in a sleek cipher. The modest compass of its ramparts, half sucked back into the ground, exuded domestic peace. Its people had been craftsmen and Silk Road merchants, above all, and ingenious farmers. It was the Sogdians who gave wine to China, and apricots to the world.

I left Oman brooding in the car, and entered the city. A sea of wild flowers overswept the battlements – purple heliotrope, pink vetch – and through the roofless passages and breached rooms spread a lake of poppies. I blundered between enigmatic doorways and culs-de-sac, then out along avenues to where the ruler's citadel crested its mound in a cluster of chambers and towers. Even in ruin, a feel of private opulence survived. The mansions, many free-standing, had crashed in two storeys about their pillared reception-halls, but here and there an early
iwan –
the vaulted porch of a later Persia – showed in some façade a little grander than the rest.

Among the debris of roof-beams, stairs and carbonised wooden statues cluttering the courts, archaeologists had uncovered fragments of fresco: pigments faded to damson, maroon and a backdrop of smoky blue. They portray a rich, ceremonious people at banqueting and war. In their idealised faces the features show delicate and small. An unearthly luxury pervades the nobles seated cross-legged as they feast. They converse unsmiling in a flutter of thin white hands. Their embroidered tunics are caught in at the waist, and beneath their tiaras the hair is immaculately trimmed, or falls in black sidelocks. Swords and daggers droop ornamentally across their laps. They carry wands of almond blossom. It is hard to know who is a god and who is a mortal. The warriors who gallop or saunter to battle on magenta chargers are the stuff of Persian epic. But the bangled beauty who plucks at her harp might be a human or a celestial. For the city, it seems, was home to many gods and heresies, infused by Buddhism and a host of Iranian deities and resurrection cults.

The long, crestfallen faces of the Sogdians' frescoes survive in their Tajik descendants. But as the Sogdians fled east, pushing into gorges now choked with their wrecked castles, their language and their blood became mixed with others'. The Sogdian tongue seems to have lain close to the Persian of the great Achaemenian kings, and to the sacred language of Zoroastrian scripture. But it was already dying out among the Zerafshan oasis peasantry a thousand years ago, and the ancient idiom of Persia – the language of Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Xerxes – had vanished long before.

But high in the Zerafshan watershed, I had heard, where Oman and I pursued our way in silence, a few villages of the secluded Yagnob valley still spoke a remote dialect of Sogdian. Their isolation had fossilised them. Squeezed between precipitous mountains, and cut off half the year by snows, they had lived in enforced wretchedness and purity. Somewhere, I hoped, just beneath the avalanche-blocked pass of Anzob, we would find the valley entrance. But Oman only sighed at this foolishness. Such a people no longer existed, he said.

Around us bloomed orchards of pomegranates and the ancestral Sogdian apricot, until the Zerafshan dropped into a long abyss, and the villages found only precarious perches on mats of green beside it. We clanked over a bridge and up a jagged gorge, following the Fandariya tributary. The villages grew guttural Sogdian names. I imagined a half-lost elegance about their birdlike women, whose hair occasionally flamed from their dark heads in a shock of auburn. The farmers seated in the tea-houses seemed to mimic their frescoed ancestors; but their bowls brimmed with noodle soup instead of wine, and in their laps the gilded swords had perished to knobbled sticks.

Sometimes the river stilled to a flood below sheer cliffs, and our road weaved alongside between precipices which refracted each other's light and sound, and tossed down threads of water-fall for hundreds of feet. We were close beneath the pass now, and had entered a stark gallery of ravines, roughed up by winds which blasted through them inexplicably.

Soon afterwards our road crept under hanging snowfields through the shepherds' villages of Takfon and Anzob. The people seemed to grow ever more inbred. We came upon fragile academics crowned by high brows, women with bewitching green eyes and old men sporting Roman noses and Dundreary whiskers. Occasionally I would glimpse a disconcertingly European face, as if some friend from England were scrutinising me from under a skull-cap.

A little farther on, where the Yagnob valley opened, we found two men heaving goats into the back of a truck. They wore old jackets and split boots. Shyly, feeling suddenly intrusive, I asked them their origins.

Yes, they said, they were Yagnobski. They all spoke Sogdian in the home, young and old, and had inherited the language from their parents, by ear. They sat before me by the river: an old man with a face of grizzled peace, and a pale-eyed youth. They shared the same lean features and retracted brow and chin. For months a cassette-recorder had lain neglected in my rucksack, but now I pulled it out and asked the old man to talk for me.

He settled nervously before it. The only sound was the rush of the river. Then he began to speak as if in a reverie: an elusive language filled with gutturals and soft plosives, and a sad, rhythmic energy. He concentrated on it as if remembering a song, his eyes overhung by tufted black brows and his knees locked in big, liver-spotted hands. He kept his stare on the recorder's winking lights. The youth joined him in a pattering tenor, and fell into the same melancholy cadences, until all their sentences seemed to wilt away in disillusion.

I listened almost in disbelief. This, I told myself, was the last, distorted echo of the battle-cries shouted 2500 years ago by the armies of the Great Kings at Marathon and Thermopylae, all that remained from the chant of Zoroastrian priests or the pleas of Persian satraps to Alexander the Great. Yet it was spoken by impoverished goatherds in the Pamirs. Once or twice some fragment floated up to me with the eerie resonance of a common Indo-European tongue – ‘road' sounded identical in English, ‘nose' was ‘nez' – but the rest was incomprehensible.

I thought they must be declaiming poetry or saga, but no, they said in faltering Russian, they were simply talking about the hardness of their lives. They bought goats in these mountains and sold them 200 miles down into the plains. As for the past, the old man knew that his people had been driven here by invaders, and that they had carried with them records inscribed on horse-skin vellum. But he was vague about all dates.

The young man too looked blank. The Yagnob villages were dying, he said. Life there was too isolated, too cold. In the early sixties people had begun to leave for Dushanbe and for lowland towns to the north. He himself had been born on a state farm in the plains. ‘That's where our people are now. On the collectives. We hear Sogdian only in the home. I had three years in school, and nobody taught it.' He looked content with this. ‘It belongs to the past.'

Oman and I returned down the bitter valley of the Fandariya, then up over the last range of the north-west Pamir, meeting the snowline at 11,000 feet, where he dashed icy water recklessly over the boiling radiator and engine. Then we descended to grasslands and at last into the farmed and industrial plains which flow north towards Tashkent. He stopped only to buy two giant carp at a fish-market, then sped on grimly into the night. We were both exhausted as the city outskirts limped past us. But as we neared the house we became aware of a blaze of lights and merriment, and a horde of children ran out to kiss him.

He looked bewildered. ‘We've got guests.'

Then Sochibar and his daughter-in-law ran out too, and embraced him. It was his eldest son's birthday, and he had clean forgotten it.

The party was on its last, drunk legs, and half the forty guests had gone. The remainder were all relatives, together with Oman's mysterious middle son and a clutch of in-laws. Two long tables had segregated the sexes, and still groaned with uneaten salads, fruit and sweets.

A hard core of celebrants greeted us, and in no time we were sunk in shouting revelry. They were gross, simple men who bawled jokes in Uzbek, which scarcely bore translation, and plied me with mutton and vodka. Everyone was drunk. I sat between a post-office official and a chef on the railway, who jabbed me in the ribs or shoulder whenever he wanted to speak. I felt numbly detached. Meanwhile the women murmured together at their own table, not drinking, or fluttered about their husbands, hoping to leave. But the men went on bellowing and quipping and roaring in crescendoes of boorish glee.

Sochibar's father – a tiny, gnarled teacher, long retired – sprawled across the table to kiss and embrace me. ‘I know all about English history,' he babbled. ‘You have a dynasty, the Stuarts, and your queen is Elizabeth III now . . . .' His eyes peered half-seeing into mine. ‘Oliver Cromwell, he was a man of the people . . . .'

Slowly, I realised, the men's table was dividing. At first Oman had sat wanly toying with his food, and once we had caught each other's eye and smiled complicitously from the bond of our journey. But now he was drunk again, and was accusing his sons of fecklessness. The eldest boy, in whose honour the party was being given, stared doggedly back from the head of the table, waiting for his relatives to go, while Oman's words reeled about him. Sometimes his pretty wife darted up behind, whispered things and took his arm. But Oman railed on, now turning on his second son, who sat down resignedly beside me. He was a handsome twenty-year-old, with an undirected urge to work in pop music, and a look of helpless charm. Once he tried to defend himself, but three or four men of Oman's age at once assailed him, shouting and wagging their drunken fingers.