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

by Christopher Aslan Alexander

  While the upper echelons of the Soviet army were largely Russian, many of the soldiers were Muslim Tajiks, Turkmens and Uzbeks. Despite their common ethnicity and religion with the people of northern Afghanistan, most cultivated a passionate hatred for Afghans, having experienced the terror of guerrilla warfare. I met a veteran once in a shared taxi from Urgench to Khiva and hoped he might regale me with stories from the war. Instead his eyes welled with unspoken pain. ‘I will not talk of these things. I cannot,’ he said.

  * * *

  Driving through the streets of Termez, we noticed how much hotter it was than Tashkent.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Matthias. ‘You said that wearing shorts would be culturally insensitive, but everyone’s wearing them.’

  We passed three burly European men in shorts and then another a bit further along, hand clamped to his Russian girlfriend’s bottom. They were Germans and the city was full of them.

  ‘All soldiers, here for Afghanistan,’ the taxi driver explained, pointing out the hotel where they stayed. Each morning, a squadron of planes took off for northern Afghanistan, leaving off-duty soldiers to hang around, bored, in the tea houses and brothels. Their business had caused some prostitutes from Tashkent to relocate.

  We left the wide streets of Termez behind us for the Bridge of Friendship, twenty minutes’ drive from the city centre. At the first checkpoint we could see the Amu River a mile or so ahead of us. It was much larger here than in Khorezm, where its waters had already been leeched by the Turkmen canal and wasteful irrigation. This was the mighty Oxus immortalised in the poetry of Matthew Arnold. The lush irrigated fields on the Uzbek side contrasted with the barren desert just over the river – our first view of Afghanistan. Although it was only ten o’clock, the sun was already beating down and Matthias was turning pink.

  ‘You did remember to bring a hat with you?’ I asked. ‘I know I reminded you.’

  Matthias contradicted all German stereotypes; he was disorganised, laid-back and always happy to stop for a chat with whoever he happened to meet. Having forgotten to bring a hat, he improvised with a paper one made from a newspaper, before approaching the first checkpoint, smiling. The guard looked dubiously at Matthias and his paper hat. Clearly we had not made a professional first impression.

  ‘Your visas are in order, but you are not on the list. You cannot come further,’ was the guard’s clipped response.

  ‘But we must be on the list,’ I replied. ‘We spoke to Anvar from the UN earlier this week and informed him of our trip. He said that he would put us on the list.’

  ‘You are not on the list.’

  ‘So, what does that mean? Who do we need to speak to about this? Where is Anvar? Can you call him?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘OK, how do we get to Anvar’s office? Where does he work?’ I asked.

  The guard gestured vaguely back in the direction of Termez and then turned his attention to a large convoy of SUVs speeding across the Bridge of Friendship in the distance and rapidly approaching the checkpoint. The windows were all reflective glass and the vehicles had no number plates. The guard waved them on as we leapt out of their way. They hadn’t been stopped once on their way into the country; rumours abounded of the Uzbek government’s involvement with the warlord General Dostum’s sideline in heroin-trafficking. It seemed typical of Uzbekistan that a large convoy of mafia-like vehicles could be waved through unchecked while two NGO workers – one of them sporting a paper hat – were treated as a potentially menacing threat.

  An hour or so later we found the UN office and Anvar. He was dealing with a Danish cyclist who had assumed that he could cross the Bridge of Friendship, having obtained an Afghan visa. The crestfallen cyclist was gradually accepting that he would have to change his route, as only journalists and NGO workers on the UN list were allowed across the bridge at that point. Anvar had forgotten to add our names to his list and called through to the checkpoint informing them.

  We returned, delayed but triumphant, and presented our passports. This time the problem was with a different list.

  ‘Operation Mercy, Operation Mercy,’ murmured the guard as he scanned down the list. ‘No, it is not here.’

  ‘But we must be. We’re part of the NGO consortium.’

  The guard was losing patience. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘Mercy Corps.’

  ‘But we’re not with Mercy Corps, we’re with Operation Mercy.’

  ‘Do you want to go to Afghanistan?’ he asked irritably and wrote us down as Mercy Corps.

  We continued to the next checkpoint, passing two Western women coming in the other direction who were removing their headscarves with an air of newly acquired freedom. Here we were accosted by a large, Soviet-looking matriarch in a lab coat: ‘Do you have AIDS? No? Do you have a temperature? No? Do you feel sick? No? Then you may proceed.’

  We finally arrived at the bridge itself, hot and hungry. There was a slight breeze from the river, taking the edge off the heat, and under the bridge was a large expanse of emerald-green reeds filled with bee-eaters and other birds. There were no vehicles crossing, and in the tranquillity it was hard to believe the role this bridge had played in the horrors of the Soviet/Afghan war. We ate some sandwiches, walked across the bridge and surreptitiously took photos in the middle.

  On the Afghan side there was no one around, but after some meandering through empty customs rooms we found a customs officer enjoying a lunchtime nap. We coughed politely, announcing ourselves. He woke, sized me up, and without a word took my water bottle and started to drink from it. We handed him our passports, which he stamped, and we were ushered out. After three hours of bureaucracy on the Uzbek side, the Afghan side took us less than ten minutes. My water bottle, kept by the guard, seemed a small price to pay.

  Leaving the customs office, we found ourselves in the sleepy little town of Hairatan. Matthias watched our luggage while I went in search of taxis. Passing men of varying ages wore long beards, turbans and shelwar kamiz, baggy cotton pants covered with a knee-length top; and a woman – I presumed – walked by, shrouded in a dirty blue burka. A mere river and checkpoints separated two very different worlds.

  Above me was a large, hand-painted poster of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famous Tajik warlord who had organised resistance to the Soviet occupation. Revered by the people of northern Afghanistan, his assassination by Al Qaeda operatives posing as journalists had made him into a modern-day martyr. Underneath, written in English: ‘Masud was the unique man that we cannot find him anymore.’

  A little further on was a group of taxi drivers and we soon set off, passing a long caravan of camels – our Turkmen driver bemused at our excitement. The town gave way to huge swirling dunes that engulfed the road in places, forcing us off. An elderly man in a ragged shelwar kamiz, painfully thin, dug half-heartedly at one of the larger dunes with a tiny spade.

  The taxi driver offered to take us to a nearby hot spring, perhaps noting our generally dishevelled appearance, and veered sharply off the road and down a dust track. A bubbling pool of chemical-green, sulphurous water was siphoned in rusting pipes to mud-brick cubicles. The water was a little too hot, but we stripped off and washed ourselves and our clothes, the arid air sure to dry them quickly. We continued refreshed and smelling powerfully of bad eggs, the driver explaining that this had once been a popular spot with a larger pool nearby that was now booby-trapped and in ruins.

  A checkpoint bristling with weapons gave way to a vast tent city. Refugees ran to the road pleading for alms, but our driver sped up. I asked him to stop but he said we would be mobbed if we did. Matthias opened the window and threw out the remains of our food bag. It was fought over in the cloud of dust we left behind. A year later, the same site was completely empty and I wondered if I’d imagined the endless rows of UNHCR tents that had stood there before.

  We stopped for a pee next to a
large sand dune which Matthias began to climb until the driver made a sweeping gesture over the area and mimed mines exploding. Half an hour later we reached the outskirts of Mazar. Each passing vehicle was part of a daring competition to fit as many passengers in, on, or around it as possible. We passed a car, the same make as ours, with a group of men huddled on the roof rack, the boot open, filled with more men and two sheep, and the inside a mass of burkas pressed up against the windows. I looked guiltily at our back seat, empty apart from Matthias and a small bag.

  A van drove by blaring music, something banned during Taliban rule. Its roof was crammed with men in their shelwar kamiz, singing, clapping and shimmying their shoulders. Two of them played along to the music with round, hand-held drums and the women below smiled and sang, gazing out of the window, their burkas thrown back. They were on their way to or from a wedding. I smiled and they waved at me, singing more raucously. They didn’t seem to notice or resent our near-empty back-seat.

  The pot-holed roads of Uzbekistan felt silken compared to the craters we juddered around and occasionally through in Mazar. Horses and traps, covered in pompoms and bells, managed to negotiate the craters with ease. SUVs muscled past them, property of drug barons and foreign NGOs. Open sewers swarming with flies ran down each road, flanked by concrete walls, pock-marked with battle scars. The air was thick with dust, muting the colours, until a shaft of evening sun through the pines transformed everything to shimmering bronze.

  Most of the foreign staff at the NGO compound we were staying in were away, although Helga – a German who’d lived in Samarkand previously – was waiting to welcome us. We were greeted at the gate by a chowkidor – ubiquitous in Afghanistan and Pakistan and acting as a watchman, caretaker and general dogsbody. I knew three of the foreign staff who had previously worked in Uzbekistan. Helga came to the door, adjusting her veil, and welcomed us inside.

  ‘I shouldn’t really entertain you by myself as you’re men, but Rob and the others are away, so our chowkidors will just have to understand!’ she said.

  Helga was thrilled to have another German staying and happily welcomed me as a non-American, feeling the cultural strain within their operations as the only European. The foreign staff spent a lot of time together and all had to live in compounds, which Helga was finding a challenge.

  ‘Of course, I knew about the restriction of freedom for women here, even Western women, so I was expecting that. But you know, what I really miss is being part of the community. Why do I have to have a driver, and these chowkidors, and live and work in this compound which is like a prison for me now? Before, in Samarkand, I lived with an Uzbek family and I felt as if I was really living in Uzbekistan and not in this foreigner bubble. You know what I really miss too? It’s just sitting outside under the persimmon tree in our garden in Samarkand, maybe reading a book or watching television with my host-family. Here, we are in Afghanistan, but at the same time we are not in Afghanistan at all. We live in our own gated little world!’

  There were few foreigners who managed to escape their compounds and integrate with the community, though families with children found compounds particularly claustrophobic and often became more relaxed about security risks. One family who’d lived in Kabul during the civil war allowed their teenage children to play in the walled garden if shooting and shelling could be heard, but they had to come inside when bullets actually whizzed overhead. I expect they had other house rules as well, such as whose turn it was to help with the washing-up.

  That night we enjoyed a delicious Afghan meal cooked by one of the chowkidors and eaten sitting on the floor around a plastic picnic cloth. The lights were on, but as dim as candle-light as the wattage all over the city was low. We were to sleep in the compound basement, which was the coolest part of the building. No one had ever really used their basements for anything other than storage until heavy gunfire made them the safest part of the house to sleep. Soon people realised how much cooler they were, and often moved their bedrooms down. We fell asleep to the sound of distant gunfire.

  * * *

  The next day at breakfast, Helga introduced us to one of their Uzbek chowkidors. A small, sprightly man with a well-groomed toothbrush moustache, he proved invaluable as we set off on our dye quest. I was concerned that our whole trip might turn into a wild-goose chase. I had never seen decent madder root – only powdered madder and the large chunks we were using in Khiva. I also had no idea about zok – what it looked like, whether it was available or, indeed, what it actually was.

  The chowkidor seemed confident, though, and we drove to the bazaar in the centre of Mazar. Passing nondescript, bullet-holed buildings, we were suddenly confronted by a dazzling display of tiles, domes and cupolas. This was the tomb of Ali (or one of several sites making this claim). We walked over to it, enjoying the fabulous green, blue and yellow tiles, the turquoise domes and cupolas and the azure blue doorways. An array of small spires pointed from the corners of each building. The complex stood in a lake of gleaming marble, impervious to the general squalor surrounding it. Large bundles of rags scattered around the marble turned out, on closer inspection, to be women in burkas sitting on the ground begging. Near them, a gaggle of filthy men and children, many missing a limb or an eye, also begged for alms.

  The white pigeons that lived in a nearby bunker provided a stark contrast: fat and sleek and fed by pilgrims who came to the tomb. The pigeons were said to be souls of the martyrs, perhaps explaining their profusion, and even black pigeons that came to roost near the tomb were reputed to turn white. Around the pool of marble were dusty gardens where a few families picnicked, the women ferrying handfuls of food up inside their burkas for consumption. The gardens were encircled by a busy road from which the different sections of the bazaar radiated. We wove our way past the cloth market, around the fruit-sellers (joyfully noting that they sold mangos, unavailable in Uzbekistan) towards the money-changers. We exchanged dollars for Afghanis, counting up the greasy, crumbling notes. The chowkidor checked each note to make sure it was the right type of Afghani, as different factions had printed their own currencies.

  We passed the copperware section and entered a small alleyway full of kite-sellers to reach the dye bazaar. Here a row of open-fronted shops brimmed with sacks of things exotic-looking but unidentifiable and lined with jars whose mysterious contents would satisfy the most demanding subject on the Hogwarts curriculum.

  One large jar caught my eye and I pointed it out to the chowkidor. ‘That jar there, what do you call the contents in Dari?’ It was oak gall, which was a good start. We’d need more than the fourteen kilos which was all I’d managed to find in Uzbekistan, and the price here was less than half what I had previously paid. As a concentrated source of tannin, oak galls dramatically affected the shades of colour available from madder, transforming dusky pinks to vibrant reds. There were two different types available, both spherical with knobbly surfaces. All had tell-tale holes in them, drilled by the emerging wasp larvae which had caused the oak trees to produce these growths in the first place. We bought their entire stock and did the same at neighbouring stalls.

  ‘Do you have this thing, er, it’s a dye and it’s called something like zok?’ I asked our chowkidor to translate into Dari. The turbaned merchant reached into a nearby sack and pulled out a small piece of what looked like crumbly white chalk. ‘This is zok,’ he said, as I looked at it unconvinced.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Zok is meant to give a black colour, but this is white.’

  He looked at me and grinned before spitting onto a piece of scrap leather, smearing some zok into the spittle. As he rubbed it into the leather, a black stain emerged. I found myself grinning back. This must be it. We now had an important dye to add to our palette.

  We bought enough zok and oak gall to last us for at least a year. The merchants were surprised that we would want to use natural dyes, beckoning us to lurid heaps of chemical powders. On a l
ater trip to buy dyes in Mazar, we were delayed because no one sold zok any more. It just wasn’t used, and they had to send someone on a two-day journey to a mountain where zok – possibly a sulphuric chalk or iron ore – could be dug up.

  Flushed with our success, I started to relax, taking more notice of the open sacks around me. One was filled with yellow roots. ‘Is this also a dye?’ I asked.

  The merchant shook his head and pointed at his mouth. Another sack, full of dried rose petals, released a wonderful scent. I bought some for Zulhamar. Next to this was a sack filled with what at first glance looked like small, dried grey pomegranates. They would make an attractive potpourri with the rose petals and I was about to buy some when I noticed the lines of razor-slash markings and realised that this was a sack of opium poppy-heads. They had been milked for opiates already and were now openly on sale for anyone who fancied growing their own.

  ‘Are these really opium poppy heads?’ I asked, just to make sure. The merchant, amused at my expression of shock, grinned back and nodded.

  ‘But how can you just sell them in the open like this?’ I asked incredulously. ‘How much is a kilo?’ The price was less than a dollar, and the merchant playfully cracked one open, offering me some seeds, before pouring them into his mouth and crunching contentedly.

  We continued our search for madder root, finding only one shop with a small sack of the spindly dried roots. I still hadn’t seen a live madder plant, although later we found some growing wild in Khiva – a scraggy weed with tiny hooks on its stem and leaves that made it cling to passing traffic. I knew that madder roots yielded colour only if they were at least two or three years old, and broke a few of these ones open, pleased to see a strong salmon-pink inner root. However, the asking price for this small sack seemed exorbitant. I thought about the merchants I had encountered in Samarkand, offering naive tourists boxes of cheap safflower stamens that looked vaguely like saffron, with cries of ‘Pure saffron from Silk Road!’ With no sample of what good madder looked like in root form, I could easily be cheated.