The Lost Heart of Asia (45 page)

These nightmares filled people's imaginations now. The misty promises of Communism and
perestroika
had peeled away from a horizon of black ignorance. For Pasha, the Marxist paradise-on-earth had been delayed too long, and all his people, he said, had long ago sickened into disbelief. ‘But I suppose the Bible says that too, doesn't it?' he asked suddenly. ‘That there's a future paradise.' He looked quaintly disconcerted.

I said: ‘Yes. I think the Bible says “Wait.”'

‘Wait,' he repeated wanly. Something familiar and bitter was clouding him. ‘Ah yes.'

The eastern end of Issyk-kul is haunted by tales of drowned cities. Early maps located a thirteenth-century Nestorian monastery here enshrining the corpse of St Matthew, and a century ago Russian expeditions glimpsed brick foundations under the surface, where the waves cast up shards and human bones. Dim memories circled a creek near the village of Koysary, and Pasha drove there next morning in tired fatalism. While I had found a dormitory in a bleak hotel that night, he had slept in his car to prevent it being stolen. ‘Fear of the law fades out here,' he said.

We crossed fields of young wheat. A heron clattered into the sky like a broken umbrella and descended ungainly at the lagoon's mouth. Then our track ended at a gateway between high turrets, and a secretive huddle of buildings in barbed wire. It was an armed naval base. It looked run-down and its watch-tower hung empty. But we had blundered almost to its gates, and I glimpsed a sentry's blond, nonplussed face, before Pasha swerved aside down a track along the inlet.

I joked: ‘The Soviets are still here!'

‘That's our army too,' Pasha said. ‘The Commonwealth of Independent States . . . .' He seemed to be trying out the idea. ‘There are our men in it.'

I had heard of a secret Soviet installation on the lake years before, built for the testing of torpedoes. Inhabitants of Bishkek had been mystified by naval uniforms appearing in the streets of a city fifteen hundred miles from any ocean. Now Pasha stopped the car among trees and I walked alone along the shore. There was no sign that the lake-level had ever receded. Instead its banks plunged to lapis-blue inlets glazed with water-insects, then eased into momentary rock-shelves and sank out of sight. I looked in vain for any drowned building. Only an abandoned flour-mill hovered above a cove among fir trees raucous with crows. Farther out, the lake was smeared with tracks like the wake of vanished ships.

I squeezed between the locked gates of the mill. On its jetty the wheels and hoists were rusting away, and the shadow of a barge lay ghostly and aslant beneath the water, under a sparkling rain of gnats. Nearby, a few blocks of granite shone on a spur, as if some citadel had been half absorbed into the earth.

I loitered here in faint bemusement. For a long time nothing moved or sounded except the wheeling crows. Then I heard something stir behind the gutted mill, and I remembered that I was trespassing, perhaps in a military area. If I were a soldier from the naval base, I thought, and discovered an Englishman with an air navigation chart of his region and a journal full of indecipherable notes, I would demand an explanation more convincing than some tale of an underwater city. I padded to the mill's perimeter and squirmed under the wire. A sand-coloured hare skittered into the trees. Covered in dust, I prowled round the outer wall and found myself face to face with an old woman.

Her red fist was closed round a walking-stave, and her body heaved in its threadbare coat. We stopped a foot from one another. I looked into a primordial Slavic face, its nose a retroussé stub. But in it I saw a maternal and eccentric benevolence. She was beaming. I had encountered this face, I thought, a thousand times in the vanished Soviet Union. It looked old yet benignly half-formed: the gross, fleshy protoplast of Mother Russia.

I began chattering, trying to explain my presence. It was a beautiful shore, I said, but it looked so derelict now. I thought of the half-abandoned naval base. Everything seemed in retreat, I said. My gaze floundered over her frayed jacket and dress. Life had become so hard . . . .

But she cut me off. ‘No! Everything's fine, it's wonderful!' Her jaw set. ‘When people say how terrible everything is, I ask Why? What does everybody want?' She planted her trousered legs apart. They descended to woollen socks and split boots. She seemed instantly to have forgotten the oddness of meeting a gap-toothed foreigner coated in dust. ‘Why can't people be content? I have a little garden over there' – she waved at the skyline – ‘where I grow cherries and nuts, and there's a plot of land for pensioners where we plant potatoes. I've got everything I need. My teacher's pension is just nine hundred and five roubles a month but it's all right. The sun's good, the earth's good and the winters are mild here!'

I grinned back at her. Her comfortable face dispelled all anxiety. Where had she come from then?

‘I arrived from Siberia thirty years ago. Everything was good up there too. Hard, but good. We had three cows, and that was enough. Milk, cheese, butter! Everything's fine, and it always was.' She rooted her stave between her feet. Our Gorbachev did the right thing.'

It was the first time I had heard anybody here praise him. ‘Yes, in the West we admire him. I know he made mistakes

‘Who doesn't make mistakes? Nobody is walking on this earth who hasn't made mistakes. But it's a good thing the old Union has split up. It was finished anyway. And now these small countries will have to stand on their own feet. They'll have to grow up! They'll have to
work!'
She thumped the dust with her stave. ‘Let every nation own its own earth, and every person own a little bit of it! Then they'll feel responsible.'

Only once her expression of gritty contentment buckled into displeasure. ‘But I was ashamed,' she began, ‘yes, ashamed, when Gorbachev said his pension was insufficient, and when Yeltsin asked the West for charity. Ask for credit, yes, but not for charity!' Her voice darkened with disgust. ‘And our Gorbachev! When he complained about his pension, I wrote him a letter offering him two hundred roubles out of mine! I told him I could manage on seven hundred and five, even if he couldn't get by on four thousand.'

I stared at her in astonishment. She dashed back the white hair drifting from her scarf. Her quilted coat gushed wool stuffing out of every seam. I said: ‘Did he reply?'

‘No, of course not,' she answered. ‘He was too busy lecturing in America, making money.'

Then she laughed stoically, and marched away.

Pasha and I left the lake behind us in a fading afternoon. For a while we followed the Tiup river through valleys awash with lucerne. The water ran golden between green banks below us. We were travelling along the last salient of Central Asia eastward before its mountains unravelled into China. In the villages the Russians had vanished. Red stars disappeared from the cemeteries; Islamic crescents multiplied. Burly men clasping whips and booted on their horses followed their sheep-flocks across the hills, and women stood up in the meadows to watch us pass. Hunters of gazelle with the goshawk and the falcon, these tough herdspeople were nourishers of handsome cross-bred horses and astrakhan wool. With every few miles their villages became wilder and more Mongoloid. Their black eyes were slit almost to biindness; wispy moustaches and Mandarin beards trickled from their nostrils and chins.

Abruptly the valley narrowed. Pastures lacquered in creamy flowers swept against the road as we ascended, and fir trees gathered on the hills. Beyond them on either side, the unchanging snow-peaks kept pace with us, channelling us to China.

Once, from a roadside watch-post, three policemen flagged us down and ordered us out of the car. They had harsh, ignorant faces, and fingered revolvers. ‘Are these maps secret?' They turned on Pasha. ‘Is he a spy?'

‘No,' said Pasha matter-of-factly. ‘He's a historian.'

They scrutinised my passport and noticed old Chinese visas. The road to China was closed, they said. The only pass open lay through Torugart, far to the south. We were not travelling to China, I said, and they sent us away.

Our road turned to stone. Around it the hills crowded in velvet spurs, shutting out the mountains. The river spun below. In this sudden emptiness, at once verdant and sombre, only a few glossy and masterless herds of horses wandered. For miles the hills folded about us like lightly covered bones, then their rocks burst through the grass and littered the valley-sides. We passed another police-post, abandoned. For the first time Pasha became nervous. The sun set, but in the cleft of the pass ahead its after-glow illumined a surge of glacial mountains, the last barrier before Xinjiang.

Here, at the end of the world, on the rim of a bare valley, we came upon a monstrous
kurgan,
a grave-mound of rocks sprawled in a grim tumult fifty feet high: the sepulchre of some Scythian or Turkic chief. I reached it over a grassland light with buttercups and harebells. But a cold wind sprang up down the valley, and the mountains were waning in the last light. Around the excavated crater of the grave, an arc of shrubs shivered with votive rags. But no one was there. They might as well have been tied by a pilgrimage of ghosts. I peered down into the pit of the tomb. It was two thousand years old or more, and violated long ago.

Beside it reared the hill of stones. Steel-grey, russet or pink, and silvered with lichen, they might have numbered fifty thou-sand: it was impossible to compute. They had been raised in awed memory of a single man; but a legend had accrued to them. It was said that Tamerlane, passing east with his army, ordered every soldier to gather up one rock and pile it in the pass. Years later, on his return, each man took away his stone to Samarkand, and those that remained became a cenotaph to the fallen.

As I climbed them in the silence, they rattled and clashed against one another. Each was the size that a man might carry. Under that twilit sky, circled by mountains, they became a nameless commotion of dead: a monument raised by the wasted to themselves. A few were blood-red or marmoreal white. They clattered like skulls under my feet and rolled down on one another.

Then I heard Pasha calling me to return. It was late and dark, he said, and this was not our country.

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Abiderya village 294

Achaemenian empire 113

Adylov, Akhmadzhan 215

Afghan people 278, 355

Afghanistan 266, 297

and Russia 354-5

Afrasiab, king of Turan 155

Ahmad Yassawi, Sheikh 317

Ak Metchet village 122-4

Alai mountains 266

Alatau mountains 341, 352, 355

Alexander the Great 28, 51, 59, 155

Ali, Mahomet's cousin 243,244-5, 247

Almaty (Alma-Ata), capital of Kazakhstan 320, 322-36

theatre 324-6

war monument 326-7

origins as Verny 327-8

circus in 332-3

Alp Arslan, sultan 38

Amanullah, king of Afghanistan 293

Amu Dariya, river (Oxus) 23, 53-4, 109, 113, 121, 122, 125, 128, 266, 297.

see also
Oxus

Andijan people 235

town 259

Angren town 225-8

Ankara, battle 1402 161

Anti-Semitism 100-1

Arabs, conquerors of Samarkand 155

Aral Sea 52, 109, 113, 138

Armenia 121

Ashkhabad, capital of Turkmenistan 4-7

author's meeting with mother of two girls 5-6

Askiya
(badinage) 233, 234

Astronomy, in Samarkand 180

Attila, death 159

Auezov, Mukhtar 328-9

Avars 159

Avicenna 72

 

Babur, emperor 179, 236, 259

Bachtiar, Uzbek boxer and dealer 212-1 6

Bairam (son of Korvus) 15-16, 21, 25

Balasagun city 356-7
Balbali
(stone effigies) 356-7

Balikchi town 358
Basmachi
movement 230, 244, 293

see also
Enver Pasha

Bazaars Bukhara 64

Samarkand 149

Bekovich, prince 113, 115

Beyazid, sultan 161

al-Biruni, polymath 72

Bishkek, capital of Kirghizstan 342-55

history museum 346-7

Korean Christians 347-50

Black market 144, 213-15

Brezhnev, Leonid 58, 145, 215

Bukhara 56-107

journey to 51-6

history 63, 71-2, 81-5, 96-8

Samanid tomb in 71

the Ark 81-4

gold mine 82-3

Sufi sanctuary 92-6

summer palace 96

synagogue 98-9

necropolis 103-4

Abdul Aziz Khan medreseh 62

Kalan mosque 60, 77-80

Mir-i-Arab medreseh 77

Bukhariot Sufis 62

Bukhariots 39, 63

 

Caspian Sea 4, 52, 239

Chak village 268
Chalas
se a 103

Chardzhou town 53
Chilik
(essence) 10

China and Fergana valley 260

peoples in 239

and Tamerlane 163

trade in Tashkent 202

Chirchik river 228

Christians
see
Korean Christians;

Orthodox Church

Chu river 1, 357, 358, 360

Cimmerian hordes 2

Clavijo, Ruy Gonzalez de 162

Cleitus, death 155

Commonwealth of Independent States, and Turkmenistan 27

Communism camp in Ak Metchet 124

and Islam 91, 98

and Turcomans 11, 13

see also
Russia

Conolly, Captain 83-4

Cotton 144-5

Crassus, defeat of 37

 

Daniel, prophet, tomb 156

Darvat Kurgan village 267-8

Denau town 295

Dervishes 91, 92, 232

Dev Kesken fortress-city 130, 133, 134-5

Dilia, girl in Almaty 333-6

Dungan people 78, 313, 361

Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan 274-92

mosque 283

Dutah
(lute) 48-50, 102, 139

Dzerzhinsky, Felix 301, 343

 

Earthquake 1966 199, 261, 279

Enver Pasha 293-7

Erk (political party) 118

 

Fandariya river 304, 306

Fedchenko, explorer 267-8

Fergana town 237-9

valley 236, 238

Firdausi, poet 166

Frunze, General Mikhail 97,350-1

Fundamentalism, Islamic Bukhara 70-1, 75, 106

Namangan 251-2

Turcoman 10, 41-2

 

Genghiz Khan 38, 159–60, 165

sacks Bukhara 60, 77

sacks Urgench 127

sacks Maracanda (Samarkand) 155

Geok-Tepe town 20-1, 22-3, 26, 29-32

German colony in Angren 226-8

Gerasimov, Soviet scientist 166

Gorbachev, Mikhail 67, 215, 365 “The Great Game' 83, 84

Gypsies, in Bukhara 92

 

Hakim (in Namangan) 249-57

cousin Fatima 249, 250

Haroun er Rashid 247

Hindu Kush 51, 161

Horses Argamak 33

Fergana 260

Huns 3, 159

 

libare, sultan of Khorezm 135

India, and Tamerlane 161

Inflation 298

Iranians 239, 252, 284

and Tajikistan 270

Islam
see
Moslems Ismail Samani 72

Issyk-kul lake 52, 355, 357-60, 362

meeting with old lady 364-5

Istanbul 118

 

Jassur,
apparatchik
in Tashkent 202-5

Jaxartes river 1
see also
Syr Dariya

Jehangir, mausoleum of 188

Jenkinson, Anthony 127-8, 135

Jews 87, 98-103

synagogue in Bukhara 98-9

anti-Semitism 100-1

Jura, actor 233-6, 248

 

Kadyr, writer in Bishkek 345–6

Kagan (Bukhara station) 55

Kakajan 130-41

family 136-41

Kalinin, Mikhail I. 11

Karaganda city 336-7, 338-40

Karakalpak people 140, 239

Karakhanid rulers 263-4, 356

Karakol town 360-2

Karakum canal 4, 33

Karakum desert 2, 51, 109

Kaufmann, General 51, 113, 199

Kazakh people 4, 239, 312, 313-14, 315-16, 318-19, 327, 329-32

and Bukhara 82

music 328

woman guide 318-20

dancer 324-6

concierge 331-2

Kazakhstan 3, 311-14

journey to 311

ethnic groups 312

Kazyade, astronomer 179

Kelims, Turcoman 15

KGB and successors 26, 86, 250

Khamza Niyazi, poet 239-40, 242-3, 246-7

Khiva city 82, 113, 114-17

Khodja Nasreddin, statue 57-8

Khomeini, Ayatollah 284

Khorezm, kingdom 113, 127

Khorezmian oasis 109, 112, 238

Khrushchev, Nikita 317, 337

Khudayar Khan 231

Kirghiz people 342, 343, 346-7

riots with Uzbeks 260-1

student 77-80

builder 352-3

Kirghizstan 3, 78, 79, 238, 239, 341-55

Kizilkum (Red Sands) 109, 229

Kizylsu (Red River) 266

Kokand town 82, 229-31

mausoleum 232-3

royal palace 231-2

Kopet Dagh (Dry Mountains) 3-4, 7, 23, 27, 33, 51

Koran, ancient 210-12

Korean Christians 347-50

Korvus, poet and administrator 13-17

Koysary village 363

Krist, Gustav 294, 295

Kulyab people 296

town 275

Kunaev, Kazakh administrator 324

Kunia Urgench 113, 129, 135

mullah in 129-30
Kurgan
(burial place) 33, 366-7

Kurgan Tube 294

Kussam ibn-Abbas 177

 

Lenin, V.l.

books by 277

and Enver Pasha 293

and Kokand 229

monuments to Almaty 323

Ashkhabad 11-12

Bishkek 342, 344

Bukhara 101

Namangan 257

Samarkand 146

Tashkent 201

Ludmilla (in Tashkent) 206-9

 

Mafia
see
Black market

Magyars 159

Mahomet Alim, emir 96-8

Makataeb, playwright 329

Malik (young man on a train) 320-2

‘Manet', driver 125-7, 129, 131-5

Manzikert battle 1071 38

Maracanda 155, 175

see mainly
Samarkand

Margilan 55, 248

people 235

Mari town 34-5, 45

picnic near 45-50

Maruya, metal-worker 315

Marx, Karl, bust 200

Mavarannahr 160, 263

Mennonite community near Khiva 121- 2

 

Merv city 34, 37-44

sack of 38-9

mausoleum of Sanjar 44

sacred site 39–43

Merv desert 33-50

Mervi people 36

Meskhetian Turks 238

Moghuls 160, 179

Momack, artist 17-20

Mongolia 119-20

Mongols 3, 159-61

sack of Merv 38-9

sack of Bukhara 82

and Khorezm 128

tombs in Samarkand 175-9

overrun Uzgen 263

and Khazakhstan 311

Moore, Thomas,
Lalla Rookh
190

Moslems author's discussions with 73-80, 110

and Communists 91

Khazakhstan 311-12

Khiva 116

in Kirghizia 354, 362

reverence for old tombs 156

and 19
^th
century Russia 85

Samarkand 175-9

Shia and Sunni 10, 244, 284

and Turkmenistan 18

the
Umma
279-80

Mosques and medresehs, Bukhara 59-60

Mozaffir, emir 82

Muqanna, the Veiled Prophet 37, 190-1

search for his castle 192-5

Murad, lorry-driver 44-9

Murat, Kurban 21, 23, 30

Muraviev, Russian envoy 115

Museum of atheism, former mausoleum 92

 

Najibullah, Muhammad, deposed 34

Namangan town 249

people 235, 251

holy man's tomb 257

Naqshbandi Sufis 23, 24, 92, 94, 105-6, 246

Nasrullah, emir 82, 83, 84

Navoi, Alisher, poet 167, 200

Navoi town 132, 143

Nebit Dagh, oil wells 52

Nisa town 28-9

Nostradamus 218

Novi Urgench 112, 122, 124, 140

Nukus town 140

Nurkhon (Uzbek heroine), statue 248

 

Oman (of Tashkent), friend of the author 216-309

wife Gulchera 216, 218, 222

wife Sochibar 242, 306, 308

experience 278-82

irritation with the author 297-9

arrest and release 300-2

Omar Khayyam 132

Ommayad caliphs 244

Oraz, Turcoman writer 8-12, 17

Orthodox Church Samarkand 169-70

Tajikistan, visit to 290-2

Osh town 238, 259-63

Throne of Solomon mountain 261- 2

Othman, caliph, Koran of 210-12

Oxus river (Amu Dariya) 1, 23, 51, 113, 134

see also
Amu Dariya

Pamirs (mountains) 2, 55, 237, 239, 265-309

Parthians 28

Pasha, Christian taxi-driver 349-50, 355-6, 358-67

Pechenegs 159

Penzhikent town 302-3
Perestroika
8, 9, 18, 100

Persian language 55, 304

Persians peoples in Iran 239, 252, 284

slaves 87, 113

and Tamerlane 166-7

see also
Samanids

Petya (in Samarkand) 182-7

Polo, Marco 2, 266

Przhevalsky, explorer 360-1

 

The Qazi, Dushanbe 283

Rachmon (student in bus) 109-12

Racoul (in Khorezm) 117-21

Radioactivity in Kazakhstan 312, 337

Rashidov, Sharaf 58, 145, 158, 199, 215, 300

Rich Men Also Weep
, soap opera 316, 326

Roman legionaries, enslaved 37

Rudaki, poet 72

Rukh, Shah 165, 179

Russia and Afghanistan 354-5

and Almaty 323

against the
basmachi
293-4

and Bukhara 64, 84

and Khazakhstan 311-12, 314, 316

and Khiva 113, 126

and Kokand 229

restoration of historic buildings 148

and Samarkand 151, 168

and Soviet Central Asia 3

and Sufis 261

and Tajikistan 273, 274-5

and Tashkent 199, 229-30

and Turkestan 3, 20-1, 24, 29-31

and Uzbekistan 58

and World War II 181

Russians archaeologists and Tamerlane's grave 165

in Ashkhabad 5, 6

Bukhara deaths 97

leaving Bukhara 87

and the Dungan Chinese 78

in Samarkand 172-5, 184

slaves 113, 115

and Turcomans 10-11, 16, 20-1, 24, 29-31, 35

leaving Turkmenistan 27

lorry-driver 344

 

Sadik (an Uzbek) 270-3

Safar, driver 26-32

Salt, in Kunia Urgench soil 138

Samanid dynasty 71-2

Samarkand 55, 145

journey to 143-5

mosque of Bibi Khanum 146, 151-2

medresehs in 146-7, 154, 178

Registan market square 146-8

history 155-6, 159, 179-80

capital for Tamerlane 160, 161-3

and mausoleum of Tamerlane 163-8

ancient Maracanda 155

Shir Dar medreseh 147

Orthodox cathedral 169-70

Shakhi-Zinda 175-9

trade 179-80

culture 180

Sanjar, sultan, mausoleum 44

 

The Satanic Verses
75

Saxaul (plant) 45, 109, 131, 314

Sayora (girl in Dushanbe) 286-7

Sayyid Mahomet, khan 115

Scythians 2-3, 159

Seljuk Turks, and Merv 34, 38

Semipalatinsk 337

Shachimadan (Khamzabad) 239, 246

Shakhrisabz 187-90, 299

girl at 189-90

Shamanism, Uzbek 62

Shavgat, driver, and family 157-8

Sheibanid dynasty 60

Sherali (a Tajik) 270-3

Shukrat (in Khorezm) 117-21

Siberia 120

Silk Road 55, 56

Bukhara 72

Khazakstan 320

Kirghizstan 356

near Merv 34, 37

Samarkand 179-80

Siyon 192-3

Skobelev, General 20, 51

Sogdians 155-6, 302-6
Sohrab and Rustam
54

Solomon, alleged founder of Osh 260

tomb 261, 262

South Africa 203

Stalin, Josef V. 67, 70, 78, 88, 91, 174, 226, 248

state frontiers under 238

Steppes 311–40

Stoddart, Colonel 83-4