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

by Christopher Aslan Alexander

  ‘Oh,’ I replied, trying to imagine what a silkworm would do with its time when no longer doubling its bodyweight as fast as possible. ‘Aren’t they hungry any more?’

  ‘No, they will never eat again. Now they must prepare themselves for spinning their cocoons. We’re happy, we can have a rest. Come next week and it will be very interesting. You can watch them spinning.’

  * * *

  This worked well with my own schedule, as our official opening loomed. I was keen to use the occasion as a signal to any greedy officials eyeing the workshop that we had powerful friends in Tashkent and the blessing of the Mayor in Khiva.

  Fatoulah the Bukharan was adamant that we should buy a sheep and slaughter it in the courtyard. The blood-letting would protect our workshop from the evil eye, and the meat could then be eaten at the official opening. I was equally adamant that there would be no sheep coming anywhere near the workshop. Fatoulah, exasperated by my ignorance of the evil eye and its dangers, was willing to compromise with a cockerel, which I also refused to include in the budget. It was only when I gave him the opportunity to buy a cockerel with his own wages, if blood-letting was so important, that he desisted.

  Barry, the Mayor and an entourage of local journalists, officials and hangers-on arrived on the day of the opening and the ribbon was cut. We gave everyone a tour, with just a few centimetres of woven carpet to show off, and finished with speeches.

  Keen to make our opening something that the apprentices would also enjoy, I’d invited my friend Rustam, the pastor in Urgench and also one of the best surnai players in the oasis. He lifted his oboe-like instrument and began a long, wailing note distinctive of the lazgi dance. Every wedding, circumcision or cradle party ends with this dance, and as the music began the effects were immediate. The weavers, silent and demure up to this point, began to smile flirtatiously at each other, swaying their shoulders and shimmying suggestively. They were all wearing their shiniest and most glittery dresses for the occasion and even the dyers looked smart.

  Rustam had once explained to me that the lazgi dance was the song of creation. God had commanded the angel Gabriel to play the surnai, and out of the music God had created Adam and Eve. This story was reflected in the dance, as man and woman were brought to life through the music. Catriona and Seitske – a Dutch nurse – had abandoned their health education programme to join us for the day, and dragged the weavers into the centre of the courtyard to dance. Each girl lifted one hand, letting the wrist hang limp, and swayed her body like a weeping willow as the surnai continued its long, haunting melody. They froze as the music stopped and then abruptly shifted to staccato rhythms, the hand-held drum joining in.

  The music increased in speed and volume and soon Rustam was sweating. His instrument was the hardest to master and, like the oboe, required circular breathing. Toychi the dyer, an excellent dancer, joined the fray and I suddenly found myself dragged by him into the middle. Unlike the women’s swaying motion, the men danced in a series of jerks with lots of snapping of the fingers and exaggerated facial expressions. The music increased in pace and inhibitions were cast aside as Andrea was dragged in by one of the weavers. Even Madrim – not without protest – joined us. The music stopped, followed by polite applause from the Mayor’s entourage who had considered it undignified to join in. Sweaty and dishevelled, we made our way to a neighbouring hotel where a banquet of plov had been prepared.

  The Mayor presented Barry with a gold-embroidered robe of honour – insisting on personally tying the belt on. I wondered how many of these robes Barry had accumulated over the years at similar functions. I was presented with a humbler, stripey robe and a black dupe, a skull-cap embroidered with four white chilli-pepper motifs to ward off the evil eye. My robe fastened, I was given a crushing Mayor-hug. Now that I looked like a proper Uzbek, the Mayor said, it was time to find me a proper Uzbek wife, and he began pointing out different weavers and their womanly attributes. I also received a fantastically vulgar brown vase with brown roses all over it and snake handles. This was not the first and, sadly, not the last of these vases given to me: we reserved a shelf in the Operation Mercy office for our collection as no one wanted to keep them in their homes, which probably only encouraged the giving of more.

  After lunch, the Mayor departed and Barry returned to his hotel for a rest. The weavers and Operation Mercy girls, however, were in high spirits and returned to the workshop where dancing resumed to a mixture of Uzbek, Turkish, Arabic and Russian pop and even, at one point, the Macarena.

  * * *

  The following week, I set off with Koranbeg and Madrim for one final visit to the worms. We drove past row upon row of bald mulberry stumps and saw a couple of lorries full of spindly, dry bushes that grew in the desert.

  ‘What are they for? Firewood?’ I asked Koranbeg.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he replied, smiling conspiratorially .

  Nuraddin met us with bad news. ‘You missed the worms weaving; they started a bit earlier than we expected and finished yesterday. But don’t worry, we’ll look at the cocoons and then visit another of the villagers whose worms hatched a bit later. They should be spinning today.’

  Inside, the first thing I noticed was the quiet absence of munching. Where previously there had been a seething blanket of leaves and worms, there was now a winter landscape of fine silver branches laden with snowy white gossamer silk threads. Now I understood the purpose of the desert bushes, which made excellent spinning sites. Embedded among the threads were hundreds of white cocoons. Nuraddin picked one up and rattled it in my ear.

  ‘Can you hear the pupa inside? Now it’s getting ready to become a moth. Here, take it. A souvenir.’

  It was an incredible sight, the stillness belying the transformation taking place inside each cocoon. I watched as an old woman sat ripping the cocoons from the strands that anchored them in place, removing any snagged twigs before popping them into a cotton sack that she held between her knees.

  ‘Granny, I think you deserve a well-earned rest after the last months of labour,’ I said. ‘Are you looking forward to getting your house back?’

  ‘Let’s just hope we actually get paid this time,’ she replied grimly.

  After taking some photos, we moved on to another house up the road where thousands of worms were at work. There was still the snowy effect of silver bushes covered in silky gossamer threads, but this room was a hive of activity.

  ‘Look at this worm here,’ said Nuraddin. ‘You can see it is looking for a good place to begin weaving, a place where there are lots of twigs around and no other worms too close. This one here has started. First it makes these general sweeping motions with its spinneret to create a carpet of threads around it. Then it starts to weave its cocoon; see that one there, the cocoon has already taken shape, but you can still see it inside going around and around.’

  We watched, transfixed by the industry around us, concentrating on the efforts of one worm, then getting distracted by the progress of its neighbours. The silk was liquid in secretion and then hardened in the air, coated with sericin, a gum that enabled the cocoon to stick together.

  ‘An interesting thing about the cocoons is that the shape varies depending on the weather,’ Nuraddin explained. ‘If it’s been a cold spring then the cocoons are longer and thinner, and if it’s been a hot spring then they’re shorter and fatter.’

  ‘Which shape gives better silk?’ I asked.

  Nuraddin shrugged. It didn’t make much difference.

  I watched the shadow of a working worm, visible inside its translucent cocoon. Nuraddin described how the cocoons, once collected, were steamed to kill the pupae. After that they could be stored in dry conditions indefinitely, until needed. If the moths were allowed to emerge they would destroy the cocoon in the process, secreting a brown acid that dissolved the fibres. A small proportion were allowed to hatch and lay eggs for the following
year. Silkmoths, after 4,500 years of pampering, had lost their ability to fly, so now it was only the sericulture process that kept the species going. An equally large number of worms were probably eaten in the wild before ever reaching pupa stage. This partnership of sericulture allowed one species free food and the other to look more beautiful.

  Just before we left, Nuraddin presented me with a bouquet: a couple of bushes bound together, covered in gossamer silk and studded with cocoons.

  ‘So you can show the foreign guests our hard work,’ he explained.

  Back at the workshop, I perched the bouquet in my office cell and a few weeks later watched as the first cocoon grew brown at one end. A plump, flightless moth emerged, and then another. They mated, laid clusters of bright yellow eggs that darkened, and then died. All those weeks of frenetic feeding and spinning for such a short lifespan seemed a bit of an anti-climax.

  Wanting to chart the whole process of sericulture, I was keen to see the next step in silk production. Madrim straight away ruled out a visit to the main Urgench silk factory, notorious for being both inept and corrupt. Instead we arranged to see a smaller silk factory run by deaf people, also in Urgench. Having negotiated our way past a suspicious gate-keeper we headed for a large factory building. Inside were rows of vats full of steaming water and bobbing cocoons that were unwinding onto spindles. The humid air had a sharp, sour smell, distinctive of all silk-reeling factories.

  The assistant director arrived, introducing himself above the din of machinery, and took us over to a nearby vat where a woman signed a greeting to us. We watched as she dropped a handful of cocoons into the hot water and massaged them, deftly locating the ends and hooking them onto spindles. They then bobbed around in the water unravelling until the remains of the steamed larvae could be seen. The larvae were fed to chickens, although I’d heard that in China they were popular with young women for aiding breast development.

  ‘How many silk fibres get woven together to make up one thread?’ I asked.

  ‘Eight to ten,’ the assistant director explained. ‘ And you can see that the fibres are quite strong. Over here is where the silk threads are wound together.’

  I recognised the familiar skeins of silk that we used in the workshop. Madrim asked about prices, as this could be a useful source of pile-thread silk. Unfortunately they hadn’t got the machinery to wind these tiny threads together to make the thicker threads we needed for the warp and weft of our carpets. For these, we would have to look elsewhere.

  * * *

  Skeins of silk when they first arrived at our workshop looked slightly yellow and had the consistency of horse-hair. This always surprised visiting groups of tourists, as the silk was totally lacking in the lustre and sheen they expected. This was because it was still coated in sericin – the natural gum released to hold the cocoons together. In order to strip this sericin away we needed ishkor. A scrubby bush in the desert with small catkins was our main ingredient for this, and Madrim, the dyers and I collected a large pile of this, covered it in earth and then burnt it. The resulting ash, ishkor, looked like pumice. Once powdered and heated with water it gave a strong alkaline solution that stripped away the sericin as we dunked the skeins up and down in it. Each skein was then dropped into a steaming cauldron of grated soap solution and left there overnight.

  Next day the skeins were hung to dry, sparkling white with all the lustre and luminescence expected of silk. They were now ready for weaving if we wanted white, or for dyeing if we wanted indigo blue or walnut husk silver, as these dyes required no mordants. For the other natural dyes, though, the silk needed to be mordanted in a bath of alum solution.

  The term ‘mordant’ comes from the Latin mordere, ‘to bite’, and most natural dyes need the mordanting process in order for their colour to penetrate the fibre and hold there. We used only one type of mordant, called achik tosh or ‘spicy stone’, tasting bitter on the tongue. Reputed to cure most ailments, alum, as it’s known in English, was never hard to come by in the bazaar. The translucent crystals were crushed and then added to hot water, in which the skeins of silk were left overnight.

  Madrim and Fatoulah talked me through our colour palette. Hoshnaut the dyer was pounding dried pomegranate skins which yielded a deep gold that looked great on silk. Barry had obtained natural indigo from India which we were already using. The blue bricks of this dye were made from crushed and fermented leaves of the indigo plant. I hoped that we would one day grow our own indigo, undeterred by the complicated process required to turn the leaves into a useable dye or the significant role that stale urine played in this. Toychi was already mastering the art of dyeing with indigo. He removed skeins from a murky cauldron, squeezing them out and shaking them in the air. As the indigo oxidised it transformed the skeins from peacock green to a vivid blue. Seeing as there was no natural source of vivid greens, we would first dye silk pomegranate yellow and then indigo, giving us mottled and variegated shades of turquoise and green.

  Dried walnut husks yielded a delicate shade of silver, leaving the dyers with stained hands. A blend of onion skins, quince, apple, vine and mulberry leaves gave us a cheerful buttercup yellow, the bits of dried leaves and onion skins beaten out of each skein against the courtyard wall.

  We were satisfied with our yellows, blues, greens and greys, but the other colours were proving more problematic. The shades of colour varied wildly from bath to bath, and we weren’t sure why. I wasn’t too worried about this, knowing that we would master the art in time and that the varying shades produced a pleasing mottled effect known as abrash, typical of natural dyes.

  More worrying was our inability to achieve some shades at all. I peered into a bath of what appeared to be diluted ox blood where skeins of silk gleamed a coral pink, like skinned salmon. This was a bath of madder root and was giving us delicate shades of coral and salmon but not the vivid reds that we needed.

  ‘I thought that when you added oak gall to the crushed madder root it would change the dye bath from pink to red,’ I said as Fatoulah removed the dripping skeins and wrung them out. ‘You’re sure you used the right quantities, aren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe it’s this madder root that you brought from Tashkent,’ mused Fatoulah. ‘I haven’t used madder in these big chunks before. The stuff we bought from the Afghan merchant was a fine powder, like red clay.’

  ‘Maybe we should try to grind it up,’ I suggested.

  We spent the rest of the day visiting flour mills, but no one was willing to try grinding our chunky roots. We were also struggling to find a colour dark enough to use as a contrast. I thought that walnut husks would give us a chocolatey brown colour instead of the light silver. There were dyes like Brazil wood which yield a strong black, but we were in a desert oasis thousands of miles from the nearest rainforest. If it was any consolation, I knew that black was a challenge for wool-dyers too. Despite the profusion of black sheep, their natural black colouring isn’t light-resistant and quickly fades, leaving black sheep looking grey by the end of a sunny summer. In the 19th century Turks used an iron sulphate compound to make black, but this corroded the wool, leaving surviving carpets from that period with bare snaking lines where once there was black.

  Increasing the quantity of walnut husks in each dye-bath made little difference. Jim had mentioned a mysterious substance called zok, found in Afghanistan, which when mixed with oak gall and pomegranate skins produced a strong black colour. I also knew that Fatoulah’s superior powdered madder root had come from Afghanistan. If we were going to complete our colour palette, it looked as if I’d need to make a trip there.

  Andrea had taken over as Operation Mercy director and wasn’t happy with the idea of me travelling alone to Afghanistan, particularly as the Taliban had only just been defeated. Nor was it possible for Madrim to come, as Uzbeks were still not allowed across the border for fear that they might become radicalised in the process. I was also meant to b
e orientating Matthias, a new volunteer from Germany who had just arrived and was completing his language course in Tashkent. We decided that Matthias would travel with me, receiving basic orientation on the way. He was thrilled at the prospect, keen for adventure.

  * * *

  A week later at the Afghan embassy I received my passport with a new visa stamped in upside down. I asked if this would be a problem, and the official grinned, apologised, and stuck in another one. I watched him writing backwards in swirling Dari, like Arabic, and asked him to write down the name of our workshop and Khiva, as we wanted to repeat this on graph paper, producing a signature that could be woven into each of our carpets. Happy to help, he wished me a safe journey.

  ‘It is safe to travel there now, isn’t it?’ I asked, getting up to leave.

  ‘Safe? Of course it is safe!’ he assured me. ‘Afghanistan has always been safe!’

  6

  Madder from Mazar

  Synthetic dyes contain just one colour. But in madder there is red, of course, but also blue and yellow are in there as well. It makes it softer and at the same time more interesting.

  —Natural dye specialist Harald Boehmer

  Everything was organised. We’d asked the UN to put our names on the list of personnel allowed across the border and flew to Termez, the southernmost city in Uzbekistan, just a few miles from the Afghan frontier.

  Termez had a typically Soviet feel to it, with large, spacious roads, ordered flower beds, parks, ugly high-rise blocks of flats and an unattractive, modernist clock tower – mandatory for all aspirational Soviet cities. Despite the innate shabbiness of Soviet-era cities, Termez was prosperous and the infrastructure laid down during the Soviet/Afghan war was still largely intact. During the war, convoys of tanks and lorries trundled across the ironically-named ‘Bridge of Friendship’ into northern Afghanistan. The war had dragged on, and more and more Soviet top brass were relocated to Termez from Moscow, ensuring that the city rose above the average standard of Uzbek provincial towns and provided amenities for the swelling number of Russian skilled workers and army personnel.