The Lost Heart of Asia (44 page)

He wanted to go back to the mountains.

Outside the railway station at dawn, I found Pasha, the Korean Baptist waiting for the first Moscow train of the day, dozing in his taxi. An hour later we were driving eastward down a silent valley to where the Tienshan cradle Lake Issyk-kul and carry the last thrust of Kirghizia into the Chinese deserts. To our south, out of sleepy hills, the Alatau massifs cut up a blue sky. To our north the Chu river idled through meadows. The air was thin and cool. The valley's fertility, ringed by its astral mountains, bathed it in an illusion of happiness.

But the Russian and Ukrainian cottages along the way marked the bloody incursions of nineteenth-century Cossacks, and in 1916 a Kirghiz uprising was savagely repressed. The herdsmen's flight over glacial passes eastward into Xinjiang was repeated in the 1930s, as over quarter of a million tribespeople fled collectivisation, driving their horses, yaks, camels and sheep deep into the Pamir.

Now the valley seemed at peace. Other dwellings interspersed those of the invaders, and soon their villages dwindled away altogether and we moved down avenues of willows and wheat-fields. In this solitude, close by the river, all that remained of the city of Balasagun was sinking into fields of horse-high grass. It had been founded in the tenth century by a wave of Karakhanid invaders, and had petered away with their empire.

Pasha had no heart for it. He took out his Bible, wrapped in an old
Izvestiya,
and settled in the taxi's shade. I was left to wander the town alone. It lay inscrutably in ruin. A rectangle of crushed ramparts traced itself in the grass, and a farmer was grazing his donkey among the thistles over a buried palace. Nearby rose the minaret of a vanished mosque. Earthquake had broken it in two, but the eighty-foot stub, banded austerely in decorative brick, burgeoned from a huge octagonal plinth in a lonely manifestation of the city's power.

I roamed the site in ignorance. A millennium before, it had blossomed into scholarship and piety. The Silk Road, splintering through the valley, had deposited here a flotsam of trade and knowledge, and the bodies long crumbled in its mausoleums had left behind Chinese coins and bracelets of Indian cowrie shells. Iron swords, bronze lamps and amulets had been found too, and crosses carved in stone by Nestorian Christians: and a little museum had collected them all.

Straying round the levelled walls, I came upon a crowd of stone effigies, gathered here from distant nomad graves. Flat boulders, lightly incised, they were survivors from the vast western kaganate of Turkic tribes which had overswept the southern steppes and hill valleys between the sixth and tenth centuries. Now some eighty of these
balbali
stood in the long grass. Thin columnar noses bisected their faces, and dribbled slight moustaches. They were at once crude and unsettling. They looked like profane dolls. Beneath their pear-shaped chins they cradled goblets, and sometimes swords. Their close-set eyes held a sleepy simplicity. They seemed to be portraits: or slabs of stone which had grown expressions. Some believe them to be the images of slain enemies who become servants of the dead in the underworld.

A woman was scything the grass around them in careful strokes. She spoke of them affectionately, caressing the word
balbali
as if they were her babies. She understood the pagans' creating them, she said. Her own people, at Bairam, would banquet round their family graves and would imagine that the dead were feasting with them. That, she supposed, was the purpose of the
balbali.
She looked round them in tender authority. ‘They are alive in a way, and they share with us.' She fondled a stone head. They stared away, all facing the dawn.

On the anniversary of a funeral, she said, her family would set aside food for the departed. But women never wept at the graves. They had to weep at home, or their tears would disturb the dead. She said this hotly, as if she wished it otherwise. Around us the variety of stone expressions, carved by intent or the wind, turned the
balbali
to a living audience. If mourners wept, she added, the waters would rise round the ghosts, and they would drown. ‘All the same, we pray there,' she said, caught up in some private grief, ‘and we imagine he is with us.'

Eastward the Chu river closed in and the grass peeled off the valley-sides from rocks of crumbled gold. As we neared Issykkul, we twisted through a defile and passed a spring hung with the rags of pilgrims. Then, suddenly, the cliffs cracked open and we looked down at mountains parted along a 120-mile corridor of sky-coloured water, dusted with tiny clouds.

A lacerating dryness had descended. The whole land looked burnt. A commotion of flayed foothills gnawed at the snowline, and around us the willows and poplars had gone prematurely russet, as if scorched by a sirocco. Westerly winds habitually blew the lake's evaporation eastward, where it fell on hills out of sight. But here the shore stretched unsoftened, like an abstract painting.

Beyond the town of Balikchi we started along the northern coast in mesmerised silence. Across the water, and far ahead of us, the foothills were thinned away by haze, but strung above them, thronging the sky from end to end, the snow-peaks of the Tienshan hung in unearthly amputation. No wind touched the water. Close in to shore it shone aquamarine, but farther out it darkened to a deep, intense indigo, in which the reflected summits left a chain of icy lights.

Our road was deserted. It ran down a shelving passageway between mountains and sea. Sometimes the stain of a watermark 200 feet above lake-level, or a deep, pebble-strewn strand, signalled that for centuries the water had been evaporating. This was a mystery. Many streams flow into it, yet none ever flows out. Brackish, pure, oddly warm, it marinates in its own solitude. For 3000 square miles – five times the size of Lake Geneva – it smoothed before us in a glittering wilderness: the deepest mountain lake on earth.

Pasha drove at a stately 40 mph. He had been here as a boy, he said, on an expedition with the Young Pioneers, when his Communist zeal was still intact. ‘And that was long ago!'

I did not know he had ever felt such zeal, I said.

‘Yes, I did. Yes.' He smiled. The lake's calm soothed him. ‘Even when I was in the Komsomol, I believed a little. It was like a religion, you see. But when I started my first job – then I gave up. When I saw how the local Party bosses cheated us of our wages, and how they secured perks, then I gave up believing.'

‘You were seventeen?'

‘Even younger.' He was talking with vague surprise, as of a distant relative. ‘But my generation was the last to believe like that. My two sons never wanted to attend those political meetings. They just played truant. Everybody did, not only we Koreans. The Russians, too. They thought it all boring and laughed at it. And that was the end.' He had turned a little sombre. ‘When I think how my parents trusted Stalin, even though he repressed them! They thought he could not have known about their persecution – as if he was elevated above it! People died in the war with his name on their lips, you know . . . .'

His separation from his native Korea, I thought, had fitted him a little for Communism. It had offered a new sureness. He still hankered after Soviet rule, when everything, he said, had been at peace. ‘I'm not sure exactly where my people came from. We were in Sakalin for two hundred years maybe, I don't know. It's wrong not to know your history. Educated people know their history. But here
nobody knows.'

‘Haven't you traditions left?'

He frowned. ‘We have a special way of preparing noodles! And some of the older people sing songs which we younger ones don't know. But even our language has changed. When I talk with our pastor from South Korea we can hardly understand each other.'

We stopped near the lakeside to eat a picnic of dried bacon, kept cool in his Chinese thermos. The sunlight dazzled the thin air. I ambled across the shore, where boulders had been cast up by the withdrawing waters, to a miniature bay of mouse-coloured sand. The ground was starred by mauve and white convolvulus, and sea-lavender sent up a dry, crushed fragrance. The silence was absolute. Grey and salmon pebbles scattered the sands with a pastel delicacy. There was no sign that anyone had ever trodden here. The lake lisped in warm wavelets against my hands. Opposite, fifty miles across the water, the snow-peaks hung in nothing.

As I rested, a dinghy glided out of nowhere and cast anchor in the bay. Two fishermen, bearded piratically and almost toothless, clambered ashore with home-made rods to dig for bait. A century ago the lake had so brimmed with fish that the Cossacks of the Russian explorer Semyonov had harvested 400 pounds of carp by slashing at the surface with their sabres. But now, said the fishermen, a vicious pike-perch introduced from the Volga had upset the natural balance by gobbling herrings. Yet the bottom of their boat brimmed with blue-tinted scales, and soon they rowed laughing away, calling after me: ‘England! . . . Football! . . . Hooligans!' Their voices died over the silence. ‘Better off . . . here . . . fishing . . . .'

Into the afternoon Pasha and I dawdled east. Half way along the shore, where the rains begin to colour the hills, a straggle of holiday camps and sanatoria appeared. Then came a presidential rest-house, built to simulate the cruiser
Aurora,
whose guns sparked the October Revolution. But beyond, the solitude intensified. A few villages, pretty with toy cottages, clustered among cherry and apricot orchards, and in the Kirghiz graveyards the castellated mausoleums looked grander than the houses of the living, crowned by Islamic crescents or the Communist star, or both.

But as the lake narrowed, and evening glassed it over, the Tienshan rose in jagged fangs to the south-east, angrier and even higher, streaming with clouds. They were reaching towards their savage climax, still invisible beyond, where the
syrt
plateaux hang in unchanging ice and stone, and glaciers laden with boulders and limned in bluish weeds slide imperceptibly down the chasm shoulders. In this tremendous labyrinth the Syr Daria rises, while other rivers spill over the watershed into Xinjiang; Khan Tengri, ‘Lord of the Spirits', erupts in a trihedral pyramid of pink marble, and the 24,400-foot Mount Victory glimmers over China.

Yet where we went, skirting the lake's end, the river had left sodden meadows. The marijuana crop which had flourished here in the Brezhnev years had been put to the torch; but the Chu valley was still full of it, Pasha said – half the farmers smoked it – and from all over Central Asia, I'd heard, the white opium poppy was finding its way as heroin to Europe via the Baltic and Ukraine. Yet for the moment only acacia was in flower along the shore, and as we approached the whitewashed town of Karakol, the orchards became lush tangles of apple trees, where cockerels and ganders paraded.

In Karakol, for the first time, we felt the closeness of China. On a bluff high above the lake, where the explorer Przhevalsky was buried in 1888, a bronze eagle spread its talons over the unfurled map of his journeys: the Gobi, the Kun Lun, Tibet.... A cuckoo was cleaning its wings in the birch trees above.

The town was full of Uighurs, whose ancestors had migrated from Xinjiang a century before, and we came upon a mosque built in 1910 by Dungans who had fled the Taiping rebellion. It was surrounded by a Russian stockade, and its shutters and window-frames might have belonged to a Ukrainian cabin. But the dragon cornices and smiling roof were those of a Chinese temple; it was built in unfamiliar, grey-blue brick, and its minaret was a wooden pagoda.

Pasha stared round it blankly. ‘They come from China, but they face Mecca! How did they grow to believe in this?'

I said: ‘I don't know. How did you believe in Christianity?'

He turned a tranquil, humourless face to mine. ‘I grew curious,' he said. ‘I wanted to see this South Korean pastor who was sent to us. We all did. Because he came from the Capitalist world.' We had stopped where the stockade sprouted a Chinese gate with upswept eaves. ‘But later we went on going to church because we felt a bit sorry for him. If we didn't go, he'd be alone. And he'd come all that way . . . .Then I found I was starting to believe. I don't know why. But at that service everything's happy. You've heard how we sing. I feel my heart lighten.' He lifted up his palms. ‘Out in the streets everything's getting grimmer. There's no peace any more, and nobody knows what may happen. But in there . . . . I think we need God, don't you? If a man commits a crime, and there's no God, how can he be made to fear?'

These questions fell unanswered under the Chinese porticoes, with their synthetically painted beams. God gave meaning in a chaotic world, he said, He was a vital commodity. Sometimes I could not decide if Pasha were naïve or cynical.

I said: ‘You can't create God because you need Him.'

But Pasha had read through the New Testament twice. While I had been admiring the pagan
balbali
in the grass at Balasagun, he had been finishing the Revelation of St John the Divine. ‘I used to worry all the time about the future,' he said, ‘especially about my children. But now I've stopped. After all, if God gives something, that's good. If he doesn't give, that's His will also. So what have I left to worry about?'

It was easy to understand: the cloistered refuge of the little chapel, with its clean people singing of forgiveness, and the love of a Father less fallible in history than Lenin hectoring from his poster. ‘I think many are there because they are unhappy,' Pasha said. ‘Their husbands have died or left them. And nobody knows the future now that the Kirghiz and Russians are grating worse on one another.' He ground his knuckles together. ‘But when we sing, we forget that.'

‘You have Kirghiz converts too?'

‘Yes, almost seventy, and it's harder for them. They're frightened the Moslems may kill them.' We peered into the prayer-hall spread with Chinese rugs under Chinese lanterns. Its strangeness seemed to deconsecrate it. ‘Islam isn't really strong in Kirghizia, but nobody can read Arabic, so people don't know what the Koran says and if some mullah yells “Kill all the Christians” – they just may.'