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

by Christopher Aslan Alexander

  Life took on an element of indoor camping, Zulhamar and Malika spending their days cooking plov for the builders. The building site proved a perilous place for my ginger cat, who fell into a large vat of whitewash and almost drowned. Despite the ensuing scratches, I managed to soap him down in a tub. He remained a dusty white, and resentful, for several days afterwards – seldom venturing outside.

  Meanwhile, renovation work was nearing completion at the madrassah and we gave more thought to training. As no one in Khiva knew how to make suzanis, we decided to call twenty women from the carpet workshop waiting list and give them all a week of embroidery training. The ten most adept would become our new apprentices.

  This approach worked well, and soon our first ten apprentices moved in to the madrassah. They worked in awkward silence the first day, graduating to quiet whispers and eventually becoming just as raucous as the carpet-weavers. At first they simply worked on samples while Rosa drew Timurid, door and majolica tile designs onto hand-woven cloth we’d purchased in Shiberhan. But despite her best attempts, the designs were always wonky and stretched. The problem was solved by tracing the designs onto interfacing and stitching this papery material onto the cotton cloth and then embroidering over it – cutting away the remaining interfacing at the end.

  Rather than signing each piece in Persian script as we did with the carpets, I wanted a simple motif that we could secrete in each piece as a hidden emblem. It would make our work identifiable and would provide customers with the challenge of spotting it each time. We needed a motif that didn’t already occur in our designs, and something relatively easy to embroider. We settled on a pomegranate.

  Aina liked the idea and was soon sketching plump round pomegranates with stalk and leaf attached. The fruit also featured heavily in our diets, as the dye workshop had run out of pomegranate skins and needed considerably more. The previous autumn we’d waited until pomegranates were at their cheapest, before dipping into the ice-cream fund and hitting the bazaar.

  ‘But why do you need so many pomegranates?’ asked one of the stall ladies. ‘You’ve bought sacks and sacks!’

  ‘Don’t you have Pomegranate Day in Uzbekistan?’ I asked, feigning incredulity. There was solemn shaking of heads. ‘I thought everyone celebrated International Pomegranate Day.’ Madrim smirked as the women discussed animatedly what one might do on such an occasion.

  * * *

  The pomegranate emblem proved popular with our first dribble of tourists, as did the suzanis themselves. In Bukhara and Samarkand there were few places where embroiderers could be observed in action, and a group of women from New Zealand on a textile tour of Central Asia were our first major customers. Following me into each cell, they gasped with delight, marvelling at the bemused apprentices who sat on corpuches embroidering. Each half-finished cushion cover was taken outside for closer inspection, and bartering began among the group so that everyone would end up with something they liked.

  Encouraged by our first sales, Aina designed handbags and Rosa drew up more templates from Timurid designs as well as carved doors and majolica wall tiles. Aksana, our guide, learnt the art of suzani embroidery so she could invite tourist groups over to our more secluded suzani centre. Aina also produced a magnificent patchwork suzani which we hung up at the carpet workshop, hoping to attract more visitors.

  While Aina worked with the apprentices, I sat down with Madrim to discuss the matter of cloth looms. Our stock of cloth purchased in Bukhara was running out and we needed to weave our own. The only place where cotton cloth was still hand-woven in Khorezm was in the blind-factories, and we decided to visit the one in Khiva.

  These blind-factories were part of the institutionalised approach taken by the Soviet authorities towards disability. Blind children went to blind boarding schools – invariably marrying one of the other blind students – followed by work at a blind-factory and a state-provided flat in the blind ghetto. There had even been plans during the Soviet era to build a city accommodating all disabled people from throughout the Soviet Union, safely closeted away from the toiling masses.

  Blind-factories had worked well under the Soviet system. If quality wasn’t always top-notch, that didn’t matter, as national institutions such as railways or hospitals were required to order their mattresses from blind-factories, ensuring that no one was unemployed. Independence brought with it the harsh realities of a market economy. Customers weren’t interested in hand-woven cotton when better, cheaper fabric was available from other factories. Now, most of the blind-factories were standing idle.

  The Khiva factory turned out to be no different – a startled watchman greeting our arrival. The blind director was summoned. He assured us that his factory boasted 50 hand-looms, neglecting to mention that they had stood in dusty obsolescence for almost a decade. Our offers to purchase two were met with astronomical sums and we left, hoping for more success at the Urgench blind-factory.

  This factory had fared better, with looms standing idle for just six months. There were no looms for sale, but having purchased 50 metres of cotton, I felt entitled to some help and asked the director for introductions to some of his unemployed workers. A young, one-eyed man emerged from what looked like a shed and the director called him over.

  ‘This is Farkhad,’ he explained. ‘Talk to him.’

  Farkhad smiled shyly and invited us into what was, in fact, his home. We sat in the larger of two cupboard-like rooms where Farkhad lived with his wife and two boys. He was obviously very poor but like most Uzbeks was dressed smartly. We explained our need of looms and training, offering Farkhad the job. He accepted, keen to have something to do.

  We returned to Khiva and did battle with the blind-factory director, who eventually offered us two looms at an acceptable price. Heaving open the rusting factory door, we picked our way through bird-droppings and a fallen nest – everything shrouded in thick layers of dust. Farkhad wasn’t impressed with the rickety-looking wooden looms, but after some general tinkering he pronounced two of them fit for use. I persuaded the director to throw a small bobbin-spinning contraption into the bargain.

  Farkhad began work, producing high-quality, even weaving with a rich linen feel. He was hard-working and industrious, and didn’t complain about the hour-long commute by trolley bus from Urgench. He had a beautiful smile and a gentle sense of humour and I liked him, frustrated that he kept himself so distant from everyone else. I invited him to lunch at one of the nearby tea-houses, hoping to get to know him better. Over a large mound of plov he told me more about his life.

  As a child he had been teased for having just one eye but lived a relatively normal life until the age of six, when teachers from the Khiva blind-school came to his village, eager to make their quota for a new class intake. He was put on their list and became a boarder at the school, preferring to read braille by sight, and sticking up for classmates who were completely blind – particularly when bullied on the street by other children. After graduation, he studied history at Urgench University – his brief foray into the wider world – before marrying a Karakalpak student from the blind-school and starting work at the blind-factory. He applied for a state-sponsored flat but after independence this luxury was no longer available.

  ‘All my friends are blind as well,’ he explained. ‘Apart from university, this is the first time I’ve really been with others. I feel shy at the workshop. I know the girls must be pitying me and saying things.’

  I took off my glasses and we discovered that Farkhad had better vision than I did. I told him that people with one eye in most countries weren’t considered disabled, as it hardly affected them. Surely if he could see clearly, he shouldn’t refer to himself as blind?

  ‘No, you don’t understand, Aslan,’ he replied adamantly. ‘I’m a Class 2 invalid.’

  This had been the official diagnosis of the department of Defectologia. This Soviet system specialised in disempower
ing disabled people, keen to stash them away in institutions. Teachers in these special schools were usually the worst perpetrators. During the integration camps we’d run in the Tashkent mountains, a teacher from the deaf-school had refused to translate into sign language.

  ‘But why must I do this?’ he’d asked. ‘Don’t you understand? This boy here, he’s deaf, he has no intellect. None of them do. When they first come to us they don’t even know the word for non. Can you imagine that? They can’t even say non.’

  ‘Well, do you understand when I say the word bread?’ I countered. ‘Of course you don’t – it’s an English word. Does that make you lacking in intellect? These children don’t know the Uzbek word non because it’s spoken and not signed, not because they’re stupid!’

  The teacher – an older man – sighed at my foreign impudence and ignorance. I experienced similar responses from the Khiva blind-school where we’d run fun camps. Sitting with a bright young boy who wanted to learn macramé, I was interrupted by one of his teachers.

  ‘What are you trying to do with those ropes, Aslan? You’re not expecting Murat to learn those knots, are you? Can’t you see he’s blind? He could never learn that, could you, Murat?’

  Murat bowed his head and said nothing. I told the teacher to come back in an hour to see how we’d progressed. Murat’s skilled fingers felt the knots and with a quick smile he was soon reproducing them. Later that day he proudly presented his sceptical teacher with a plant pot-holder.

  Many of the children at the blind-school, like Farkhad, were not blind or particularly visually impaired. However, the school needed to fill its quotas and parents from poor families were keen to gain state benefits. This happy collusion meant that some children grew up learning braille and how to walk with a white stick, when a simple trip to an optician was all they needed.

  That said, a visit to an optician could lead to all sorts of unpleasantness. The hocus-pocus of Soviet medicine, slavishly adhered to by doctor and patient alike, perpetuated practices as barbaric as they were bizarre. Umid, a boy from the orphanage where we ran weekly events, was severely shortsighted and needed new glasses. We arranged to take him to the best opticians in Khorezm – a wing of the main eye hospital.

  A woman in a lab coat introduced herself to us as the head doctor. Ignoring Umid, she ushered us into her office. A chart of decreasing letters stood at one end, but this was superfluous. The doctor simply gave Umid’s eyes a cursory overview and then declared her treatment. We had expected stronger glasses but she had something else in mind.

  ‘He has weak eyes and must stay in this hospital for one week of darkness so that his eyes can rest. During this time we will give him vitamin injections to strengthen his eyes. Then he will be ready for the second week when we will administer two injections daily into his eyes.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I interrupted, ‘do you mean actually into his eyeballs?’

  She nodded curtly. ‘Of course, because he is an orphan, his stay here will be free of charge.’

  Horrified, we returned to the orphanage, requesting permission to take Umid to an excellent Korean optician in Tashkent. Our request was denied and Umid was packed off to the hospital, where he spent a week in darkness and boredom and a further week in excruciating pain.

  The same thing had happened to Malika, my Uzbek little sister. She was slightly cross-eyed, and to correct this she spent two weeks at the eye hospital undergoing endless injections into her eyeballs. Returning, unable to see for the first few weeks, she remained cross-eyed. Then there had been the time when Zulhamar got tinnitus. Plagued with an incessant ringing in her ears, she saw the doctor and underwent twenty or so injections straight into her inner ear.

  I had never met an Uzbek who shrank away from a needle. Injections – the panacea for everything – were always favoured over mere pills. Drips were also popular and could be purchased from the bazaar and set up at home. The most popular was called the ‘heavenly drip’ – a mixture of vitamins and glucose.

  Bed-rest and drips were popular for both domestic use and hospital stays. Weavers and embroiderers often requested two or three days off from work as they were booked into hospital for a rest.

  During the Soviet era, rest and leisure were, in themselves, suspect bourgeois activities and quite counter-revolutionary. Sport was justified and promoted, as it taught discipline and represented the nation at international events. Holiday facilities, however, smacked of indolence and so were rebranded as sanatoriums. Each was owned by a state company and privileged workers came for massage therapy, swimming therapy, mountain-air therapy, hot-spring therapy and anything else suffused with a sense of health-giving.

  For those without access to sanatoriums, there was the humble Soviet hospital. Admission was relatively easy and those suffering from stress or exhaustion could enjoy two weeks of bed-rest and telly with a drip stuck in their arm. This proved particularly popular among Central Asian women who rarely experienced the luxury of rest within the home. Ill health became an empowerment of sorts – the one thing that women could control, and a means of escaping the drudgery of daily life.

  This tradition continued after independence. Zulhamar regularly disappeared for two weeks of hospital rest and Koranbeg’s mother, at 65, had made it her ambition to spend as much time in hospital as possible. This was, it must be said, encouraged by Koranbeg, keen for some peace, leaving Zulhamar and her sisters-in-law to ensure that a regular stream of home-cooked food was taken over.

  I got into trouble with Zulhamar for criticising Soviet medicinal practices. After all, was I wearing a white coat? What did I know? I countered that in Uzbekistan I could buy a medical degree, turning up only for my graduation – as many an oligarch’s offspring did.

  Some traditional medicinal cures worked quite well, even if they were a little unorthodox. My cousin came out as a volunteer for one of the integration camps. She stoically endured the communal pit latrines, perfecting a squatting jig necessary to prevent maggots from crawling onto her sandals. Towards the end of her time, Cathy came down with a severe cold and took to her bed feeling bunged-up and miserable. A young Uzbek teacher promised to help her. A few minutes later I heard a loud shriek from her bedroom. Rushing in, I saw Cathy lying down with the young man leaning over her. He had fitted an upturned teapot lid onto one of her nostrils as a funnel and was spooning onion juice down it. The burning sensation and lack of common language, as a strange man leant over her, had caused her fright, but the onion juice worked and Cathy was soon recommending the procedure to others.

  * * *

  Neville from the British Council came for a visit, with strict instructions from his wife not to buy another carpet. He was a joy to work with and very affirming of the project. As the British Council director, Neville attended endless official functions and ceremonies but was rarely given the opportunity to mingle with ordinary Uzbeks. Consequently, he enjoyed sitting cross-legged on the floor asking questions of the embroiderers and gaining more insight into everyday Uzbek life.

  We were now on our second intake of suzani apprentices and were producing more than just samplers. We focused on utilitarian items such as cushion covers and handbags, as these sold well, but were also branching out into more ambitious wall-suzanis and table-runners. I had commissioned a series of embroidered explanations which I planned to hang around the workshop, creating a self-guiding tour. Most of my time was spent in the suzani centre – called to the carpet workshop only when decisions were made or problems needed solving.

  I pointed this out to Uncle Richard during another of his trips to Khiva – the carpet workshop was finally becoming self-sustainable.

  ‘Yes, but what about the corruption?’ he asked. ‘How do you know that the Mayor won’t just turn up and demand free carpets whenever he wants them?’

  This was a valid point and a concern I’d often discussed with Madrim. We knew that the main
reason we hadn’t been more aggressively pursued by greedy officials so far was because the UNESCO name gave us an element of protection, but also that it would only be a matter of time before our relative success proved too tempting for someone.

  That evening, Madrim invited Uncle Richard, Koranbeg and me for an evening meal. Koranbeg was in the middle of a lengthy toast in honour of Richard when a car sent by the Mayor interrupted us. The driver had orders that Madrim should accompany him with the keys for the workshop, as the Mayor wished to view our carpets. The driver hadn’t expected my presence and was obviously uncomfortable when I insisted on accompanying Madrim. We drove through the northern gateway into the walled city where Botir, head museum director, was waiting for us. I realised that something underhand was going on, so went on the offensive.

  ‘What is the meaning of all this?’ I demanded loudly. ‘Our workshop has been open all day and the Mayor could have come any time. Instead we get summoned to come out in the middle of the night. I’ve left my uncle – a foreign guest from England – alone at Madrim’s house. He doesn’t speak any Uzbek. I feel ashamed that he must stay there by himself!’

  Botir looked uncomfortable and cast an irritated look at his lackeys. He explained that President Karimov’s daughter Gulnora was visiting to open her new hotel in Khiva and that the Mayor wished to present her with a small gift – a couple of carpets. Would we kindly open the workshop for just half an hour so the Mayor could make his selection?