A Carpet Ride to Khiva: Seven Years on the Silk Road

by Christopher Aslan Alexander

  Our teachers – two women – spoke little English, which was good for forced language practice but didn’t help us with the many questions we had about Uzbek culture and traditions.

  We learnt how to get around the city. Tashkent boasted a tastefully designed metro, each station themed after an appropriate Soviet hero or after cotton, which seemed to be the main value of Uzbekistan as far as the Soviet authorities were concerned. We learnt to understand Cyrillic, despite new edicts attempting to move the country towards a Latin script. Laboriously pondering the first couple of letters on hoardings, we’d suddenly recognise words like gamburger or got-dog. Borrowed English words beginning with ‘h’ were translated into Russian with a ‘g’ instead, giving rise to places such as Gonduras or Gong Kong and a pantheon of new personalities including Gitler, Gercules, Gamlet, Frodo the Gobbit, Attila the Gun and Garry Potter.

  I was placed with an Uzbek family who lived on the outskirts of the city. Their house was backed by a courtyard full of chilli plants, aubergines and tomatoes; the pit toilet at the bottom of the garden guarded by a bad-tempered sheep. There were three sons in the family and the middle one attended the University of World Languages, speaking some English. While the small, rotund father of the house wore a traditional black skull-cap embroidered with chillies to ward off the evil eye, his sons wore jeans and tracksuits and were all keen to emigrate to America. I learnt to enjoy greasy bowls of noodle broth called laghman, and to cup my hands in prayer at the end of each meal. My host parents were kind and hospitable but also very concerned for my safety, wringing their hands each evening if I appeared fifteen minutes later than my promised return time.

  After two weeks in Tashkent, smothered by my host family, struggling to make any sense of the language and missing home, I slipped into self-pity. It would take over an hour to get home from language class in crammed buses, which seemed the perfect place for melancholy. Standing wedged between two stout Uzbek women, pungent armpits in my face, I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake in leaving England. A chicken, one of three forlorn birds trussed in a shopping bag near my feet, pecked my ankle sharply. Khiva took on the allure of a promised land: the concrete claustrophobia of Tashkent replaced with a skyline of glittering minarets; a place with no overcrowded buses; a place where chickens could roam free.

  * * *

  I had imagined arriving in Khiva, after a long, arduous journey, to see its exotic skyline beckoning like a mirage across the desert. In reality, my first glimpses of the city, at three o’clock one blustery November night, were the few metres illuminated by headlights after an eighteen-hour drive. There was no sense of exuberance, merely the opportunity to collapse on the piled cotton-filled mattresses that Lukas and Jeanette, my hosts, had prepared for me.

  Lukas and Jeanette, a Scandinavian couple, had lived in Khiva for two years and in Tashkent before that. They both spoke good Uzbek and had adapted well to life in Khiva. Jeanette wore a headscarf as all married women should, and baggy pants under long, brightly-patterned dresses. Her distinctive gold hooped earrings studded with nuggets of turquoise were typical of those worn by local women but had been a birthday present from Lukas rather than the usual marriage gift. She tried to sweep outside her house every morning and keep up with the cultural expectations of her neighbours. On some days she managed excellently, but on others the challenges of home-schooling her eldest daughter and raising three children in such a different environment from her own would overwhelm her.

  They lived in a modern part of Khiva in a concrete two-storey house that doubled as our office. Their faith and commitment to the blind children they worked with had kept them in Khiva despite the challenges and isolation. They both taught children how to use white canes, increasing their independence and freedom. They were also attempting to change the attitudes of teachers at the blind-school who had been trained in the Soviet science of Defectologia – an approach to disability that was caring but isolating, ensuring that those with disabilities existed in a cosseted parallel world of institutions, away from their able-bodied family and friends. Lukas was struggling with the corrupt school director, who was building a palatial new house for himself with money meant for the blind children under his care.

  Both Catriona and I were keen to visit the blind-school, but first we wanted a general tour of the town – and especially the Ichan Kala or walled city, dubbed by UNESCO ‘the most homogeneous example of Islamic architecture in the world’.

  Our tour took us down one of two main roads that ran the length of the modern town, past the blind-school, the park and a rusting ferris wheel which I assumed, wrongly, was disused. At first sight, Khiva had a shabby, provincial and slightly disappointing feel to it. It was only as we turned the corner at the bottom of the road that the Ichan Kala loomed in front of us. The bulging mud-brick walls wound around a crowded centre of madrassahs, mosques, minarets and mausoleums like a large bronze snake basking in the autumn sun. Nearing the walls, we could see their crenellations and the impressive watchtower, giving the appearance of an elaborate sandcastle.

  Four enormous, turreted gates led into the inner city from the four points of the compass. We approached the Grandfather Gate and Jeanette introduced us to a plump woman who sold entry tickets. We would pay admission this time but, seeing as we were living in Khiva, wouldn’t pay again. This was, after all, one of the main thoroughfares for getting to the bazaar.

  Wherever we went, we were greeted with a chorus of ‘Toureeest! Toureeest!’ As time went by, I learnt to expect this accompaniment, along with ‘Good morning’ at any time of day or night, and the occasional ‘Fuckyoo’ from gaggles of daring boys. We were also greeted with cries of ‘Aiwa’, which I assumed to be a local variant of ‘hello’. Its origins were actually in the first capitalist television adverts shown in Uzbekistan after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Aiwa electronics featured an ad with two passers-by, both carrying Aiwa products, waving a cheery ‘Aiwa’ to each other with the tagline, ‘The whole world speaks Aiwa.’ The greeting was practised on the first tourists who visited Khiva, and they – assuming as I had that it was a local greeting – responded with enthusiastic Aiwas, establishing its authenticity. These first tourists had also arrived armed with pens, which were now considered an expected gift from all foreigners accosted on the street. Often children would shout ‘A pen, a pen!’ at me, sounding much like I probably had during my language course in Tashkent.

  We walked past a series of small stalls selling souvenirs – a huge mud-brick wall to our right and an impressive madrassah to our left. Next to this was a large, squat tower layered with beautifully glazed bricks in shifting shades of green, turquoise and brown. This complex, built by Mohammed Amin Khan after a particularly lucrative pillaging of Bukhara, was on such an opulent scale that parts of the city walls were removed for its accommodation. Rivalry between the Khiva Khanate and the neighbouring Emirate of Bukhara was a reccurring theme in both Khiva’s history and its modern-day attitudes. Mohammed Amin Khan planned a minaret taller than any other, dwarfing the one in Bukhara, but never completed it. Some claimed that this was because the Khan realised that those calling the faithful to prayer would gain a tempting bird’s-eye view of his harem. Others believed that the Khan had plans to assassinate the architect on completion of the minaret – ensuring that the Bukharan Emir could not commission him to build an even larger one. The luckless architect, fearing for his life, jumped from the minaret, turned into a bird and flew away.

  ‘Well, seeing as we’ve paid for our tickets, we might as well be tourists for the day,’ decided Catriona, heading towards a stall selling papier-mâché puppets. I was drawn to one selling carved wooden Koran-stands and boxes in different shapes and sizes. Having greeted the stall owner in Uzbek, I discovered that he spoke excellent English and that his name was Zafar. He praised my Uzbek, amazed at my simple phrases. I was used to flattery in response to my limited efforts, particularly in Tashkent w
here few foreigners strayed from Russian.

  ‘You’ve only been here six weeks and already you speak more Uzbek than all these Russians who were born here!’ a Tashkent taxi driver had declared once, glaring at a passing mini-skirted Russian. ‘What are you giving me money for?’ he demanded as I got out of the car. ‘You are learning our language, you are our guest. Please do not offend me with money.’

  Far more impressive was Zafar’s English, which was self-taught and fairly fluent. He was about my age, with a ready smile and a quick wit. We got chatting as Catriona and Jeanette haggled at the neighbouring stall, and as we left he invited me to visit his home. Zafar would become a good friend and would play a significant role in my carpet journey.

  Jeanette took us next to the Kunya Ark, or old fortress. We entered through another huge, carved wooden gate, past a magnificent iwan. These roofed, three-walled structures acted as primitive air-conditioners, capturing cooler northern breezes and circulating them. Most were simple but this one was part of the Khan’s palace, held up by immense fluted pillars decorated with intricate carving. The three walls were completely tiled, with stalks, leaves, blossoming lotuses and peonies winding around each other, covering each wall in mesmerising complexity. This was a place I would return to later, to discover potential carpet designs.

  We wanted to view the whole of the walled city from the watchtower. Entering through a darkened doorway and fumbling our way up a steep staircase built into the mud-brick walls, we emerged blinking in the sunlight to a spectacular view. Ahead of us the large green dome of the Pakhlavan Mahmud mausoleum glinted, and behind it was the shapely, tapered minaret of the Islom Hoja madrassah. This was the second-largest minaret in Central Asia and, with its bands of dazzling tiles, it made a fine desert beacon for weary travellers to fix their eyes upon. Sunlight flashed off the distinctive blue, white and turquoise tiles adorning the portals of each madrassah. Beyond a central group of larger buildings were flat-roofed mud-brick houses clustered like a Christmas-card Bethlehem, and in the distance I could just make out the first dunes of the desert. The only thing missing was a flying carpet or two.

  * * *

  I stayed with Lukas and Jeanette in their tiny spare room upstairs, next to the larger room we used as our office. Over the next few weeks our guidebook team established a routine. Lukas still had his other responsibilities at the blind-school but would meet us in the morning for planning and researching the guidebook. I valiantly waded through a few Soviet guidebooks that had been translated – nominally – into English. In the afternoon Catriona and I would visit each site of interest to learn as much as we could about it from local guides and museum attendants.

  Lukas encouraged us to view all opportunities to speak Uzbek as ‘work’ and good language practice and to seek them out as much as possible. Most of the museums were housed in madrassahs and presided over by women bundled in layers of acrylic cardigans with angora headscarves, knitting colourful socks and slippers to sell to tourists. These museum ‘wifies’, as Catriona referred to them, became our first friends. They assumed that we were married to each other, but – after our vehement protests – concluded that we were merely conducting an affair. We quickly learnt that there was much more segregation between men and women in Khiva than in Tashkent.

  Khiva’s madrassahs varied in size. Most were now museums but some had been converted into hotels, woodwork shops, even a bar. Originally they were residential colleges for learning the Koran, each following the same basic design: an elaborate front portal leading into a courtyard, with a tree for shade and a well for water. Radiating from the courtyard were cells in which students studied and slept. Some had a mosque and minaret attached and some didn’t.

  Sitting inside the madrassah cells, making conversation with the museum wifies, we realised just how different the dialect in Khiva was. They smiled at our stilted, textbook Uzbek, explaining how they would say the same thing completely differently in Khorezmcha, their own dialect.

  We weren’t the only ones struggling with pronunciation. The wifies warmed to Catriona’s name, adapting it to the Russian ‘Ekaterina’, but ‘Chris’ proved more tricky – particularly with the English ‘r’. After attempts at ‘Cliss’, ‘Cwiss’, and even the occasional ‘Christ’, I presented my middle name, Aslan, as an alternative.

  ‘But that’s not your real name,’ declared one of the ladies. ‘Aslan is an Uzbek name.’

  I was born in Turkey, I explained, and my parents had given me a Turkish middle name, much to the delight of their Turkish friends.

  ‘And this is also in your passport?’

  I nodded and from that point on everyone in Khiva referred to me as Aslan.

  * * *

  I felt claustrophobic living and working in the same place. The house felt too small for Lukas and Jeanette and their three small children without their having to give up a bedroom for me, so I started looking for a place of my own to live. I was glad to have tasted life with an Uzbek family in Tashkent, but had no wish to repeat the experience. There were no newspapers to advertise accommodation for rent, so I placed posters around town. I watched expectantly as an old Uzbek man in a long, quilted robe tore off a phone number from the poster, certain that a deluge of housing options would soon come my way. Unfortunately, my poster-placing spree coincided with Lukas and Jeanette’s phone line breaking for ten days.

  I made my first trip back to Tashkent, helping Lukas collect equipment donated to the blind-school. During the month I’d stayed in Khiva, Tashkent seemed to have magically transformed itself. Now it was a paradise overflowing with English-speaking foreigners, hot water on tap, nice restaurants and shops brimming with variety. I wondered why I’d never appreciated these things before.

  There was also Tezikovka – the weekend flea-market. Anything from toilets and potted plants to dismembered fridges, second-hand books and pets were laid out on the streets for sale, and if you were lucky you could sometimes buy back your own, previously stolen, property. The bazaar began after independence as the large Jewish population of Tashkent started selling off their possessions before departing for the promised lands of Tel Aviv or Queens, New York. I bought myself a large red flag of Lenin covered in Communist slogans and then – in a moment of weakness – found myself the owner of a lime-green parrot who I named Captain Frederick Burnaby.

  Returning across a desert whipped by bitterly cold winds with nothing but the occasional squawk from Burnaby to relieve the boredom, my enthusiasm for Khiva waned. We arrived to a grey and overcast city approaching winter. I placed Burnaby and cage in the corner of my little bedroom, where he perched glowering. All attempts to teach him how to mimic the traditional greeting ‘Assalam-u-Aleykum’ were met with hostile silence and the occasional lunge.

  This time, my arrival in Khiva had none of the mystery or excitement of before. I tried to remain positive. I knew about culture shock and that the honeymoon phase in a new culture would lead to the despondent phase as the novelty wore off and the differences niggled. Knowing didn’t really make much difference to how I felt, though. I looked for the positive and for events to look forward to. We had all been invited to a circumcision party in Urgench (a town about twenty miles from Khiva, and the capital of our province of Khorezm), which would be my first cultural celebration and might even lead to making some local friends.

  While in Tashkent, I’d been mortified to discover that weddings, circumcisions and christenings were held at five o’clock in the morning. Dragged out of bed by my Tashkent host-brother, we’d attended the beshik toy of a neighbour celebrating a new birth. Mother and child were absent from the proceedings, as both were still vulnerable to the evil eye – a curse caused by jealousy or the unwitting complimenting of a child. We sat at plastic tables covered in food and I nodded off during a lengthy monologue from the mullah, shaken awake and confronted by a large bowl of greasy plov. This national dish of rice, carrot-sha
vings and raisins was topped with lumps of mutton and fat. Central Asian sheep have large, overhanging bottoms where fat is stored for winter. This prized fat, known as dumba (with a powerful taste I never acquired), divides each piece of meat on a stick of shashlik, and is generously pushed from guest to guest when eating from a shared mound of plov.

  It was a relief to learn that celebrations here in Khorezm took place, more sensibly, in the evenings. Our hosts in Urgench were Rustam and Mukkadas. This couple – good friends of Lukas and Jeanette – were the pastor and his wife of the only Uzbek Christian church in the region. Despite official harassment and regular visits from the secret police (formerly the KGB), they had been told by the authorities to register their church but were then denied registration by the same authorities on the grounds that there was no such thing as an Uzbek Christian; that they were both Uzbek and Christians was apparently inconsequential. Considered a threat by the local government, they were also ostracised by their family and community on account of their faith, and accused of turning Russian. Both of them were determined to maintain their cultural traditions, and keen that their community recognise that they were still Uzbek and proud to be so. Circumcising their sons was a natural part of this, so a trip to hospital and the deed was done.

  We arrived outside Mukkadas and Rustam’s simple mud-brick house at sunset, greeted by the two young boys who hobbled awkwardly, wearing specially-made loose pyjamas. Boys were always circumcised aged three, five or seven, and often brothers or cousins were done together to save on costs. Each guest would congratulate them and stuff bank-notes into their clothing. The weather was freezing, but the abundance of plastic trestle-tables and chairs made it clear that the celebrations would take place outside. I was looking forward to meeting Rustam and Mukkadas, but they were both busy organising food and Lukas went to help them. Catriona and Jeanette were led to a women’s table, while I was seated beside a group of young men from the neighbourhood. They nodded in my direction but were more concerned with pouring shots from a bottle in a paper bag, disgusted that their hosts had not provided vodka – their main motivation for being there.