The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  I asked her, in the boring way of adults, what she wanted to do after she finished school.

  But she walked away. ‘I’ll be a young woman, then a mother, then an old woman . . . .’ Her walk slowed to a dark saunter, and she looked back suddenly over her shoulder ....’ Then a corpse.’

  The alleys twisted into clearings, where I came upon a holy man’s grave, restored forty years after its destruction under Stalin. A fig tree marked the mound, which was strewn with candle-stubs, and a horse-tail banner had been raised above it again. At such moments the Communist era shrank to a thin wave in a timeless sea. So too, in the tea-houses of the Lyab-iKhauz, where the lanes opened on a pool ringed with medresehs – religious schools – an immemorial conclave of old men lolled on wooden divans as if nothing had ever changed. Their heads were knotted in pale blue turbans or piled with sheepskin hats. Beards dribbled from their chins like fine wire. They sat at ease cross-legged, or dangled a hedonistic limb over the divan’s edge, while the proprietors shuffled amiably between them, pouring out green tea from cracked pots. A gentle euphoria was in the air. Nothing sounded but the clink of china and a genial murmur of conspiracy. A breeze blew ripples over the water. Around them the religious schools looped in high gateways and blind arcades, in whose spandrels flew faience phoenixes. Here and there a façade cast a band of Koranic script into the sky, and under nearby plane trees a statue of Khodja Nasreddin, the wise fool of Sufi legend, rode his mad-faced mule.

  ‘What would he make of us now? Everything’s gone mad!’ I had sat down mistakenly beside a man who was angry-drunk. ‘Look at our Uzbekistan! We’ve got cotton, gold, skins, oil, uranium, marble, but we all live like rats!’ His raucous voice split paradise apart. The seraphic faces of the old men turned sleepily towards us. Our families should be ten times richer than the French! Our potential is greater than Saudi Arabia’s! We could buy America!’

  The man was fired by some frenetic inner violence, yet his face was soft and idle, and his mouth self-mocking.

  I began: ‘Then things will get better . . . .’

  But his voice dropped into conspiracy. ‘No, we were sold off years ago, under Brezhnev, under Rashidov. Moscow said “Give!” and we gave. And it’s still going on. The Uzbek and Russian leaders kiss on TV, like tarts. Our president’s spunkless, he’s frightened somebody’ll shoot him. He’s their man.’ A treacherous knowledge curled his lips. ‘Oh yes. I know things. Big Brother is still Big Brother!’

  In the coming months I would hear this litany often: a distrust of all political leadership, and a lament for riches which the Russians had spirited away.

  I said: ‘You’re free to trade outside Russia now. You can do your own deals.’

  He waved a chubby finger. ‘I tell you the Russians won’t let us go. A hundred years ago those pederasts in the Kremlin looked about and saw that Britain and America were taking colonies . . . so why not Russia? They’ll go on bleeding us . . . .’ He seemed to be acting two people: one rabid and hyperbolic; the other detached, wryly amused, and perhaps despairing. He had pared history into a play for shadow-puppets.

  ‘Now all we need is to be left alone with our land,’ he said. ‘Just to live quietly with the earth. The earth was given to everyone. It can feed and clothe us all.’

  This mystique of the land, too, would grow familiar. In the absence of human heroes, it had become the repository of patriotism, of the purity in the people’s soul. The Russians had exploited and polluted the earth, but it belonged to those who loved it, and would requite them in the end.

  The smile of self-parody had left the man’s face. He began: ‘Before Alexander of Macedon died, he said: Only make sculptures of my hands to stand above my grave! Just my hands and the earth! These are my tools!’

  ‘Did he say that?’

  ‘He said we achieve through labour . . . .’

  It was a grotesque fusion of legend and Communist work ethic. The man started to ramble. He nibbled crusts left over on the table. Oral epics of Alexander have pervaded this country since antiquity. In remote valleys, far into this century, clan chieftains claimed descent from him.

  ‘You remember!’ The man stood up. ‘I’m not a fool. My grand-father was a prophet in his village. He had the gift of second sight. I have it too . . . .’ He teetered above me. ‘And I tell you everything will get worse. Everyone is a tyrant, a thief or a slave!’ He drifted morosely away among the divans. ‘There’s nothing in between . . . .’

  I got up and started towards the city’s heart. The lanes had loosened into squares and boulevards impenetrable to cars, where starved canals ran deep in their stone gullies. Suddenly I entered a dust-filled wasteland fringed by a pale host of mosques and medresehs. The din and pall of restoration shook the air. The earth dazzled. The buildings glared in a blank, shadowless uniformity. Dressed in cement-coloured brick, they had not the rich plentitude of the tiled mosques of Iran, but were patterned only sparsely with a glaze of indigo or green. For the rest, they were the colour of the earth beneath them: a dead platinum. It was as if the dust had hardened into walls and turrets and latticed windows. Everything – even the clay-coloured sky – shone with the same bleached stare.

  But above, in radiant atonement, hovered a tumult of turquoise domes. Beyond the high gateways and iwans – the great vaulted porches – they swam up from their drums like unearthly fruit, and flooded the sky with the heaven-sent blue of Persia. From a distance they seemed to shine in unified aquamarine, but in fact the tiles which coated them were subtly different from one another, so that they spread a vibrant, changing patina over every cupola: eggshell, kingfisher, deep sapphire.

  These mosques and medresehs were mostly raised by the successors of Tamerlane or by the sixteenth-century Sheibanids, the first and most glorious Uzbek dynasty that succeeded them. Little that is older survives. In 1220 Genghiz Khan had laid waste a city already more than a thousand years old, and only the stupendous Kalan minaret, muscling 148 feet into the sky, was intentionally spared. Once the minaret served as a beacon for caravans over the night desert and in the degraded years of the last emirs condemned criminals were pushed from its summit. It is a mammoth, unlovely thing. Its colours have all but gone – the surging Arabic script in tilework fallen away – but its raised brick-patterns survive near-perfect, and mount to a rich gallery upheld on scalloped corbels.

  I lingered beneath, touched by vertigo at the criminal’s body hurtling towards me, and the ground where I stood rushing up to meet him. But only the call to prayer was sounding, plangent and weak from the summit, and two women were sweeping the dust beneath.

  I moved away. The blanched aridity all around oppressed me inexplicably, as though the city were dying instead of being restored. Even the dust seemed to have been leached by some ghostly peroxide. But in fact Bukhara was being resurrected indiscriminately: walls rebuilt shoddily en masse, tilework reproduced wholesale. Work had started in the Soviet period, but events had overtaken it, and the mosques which had been reconstituted cold in the service of art or tourism were stirring again with a half-life of their own.

  Even as I looked, white-turbaned students filed out of the Miri-Arab medreseh and into the Ulug Beg medreseh beyond. I had seen them before, hurrying through the markets where they bought nothing, and they stung me with curiosity. I followed them in idle frustration. A look of enclosed earnestness marked them off. I had the illusion that through them I might unravel the country’s identity, as if it owned some unified and comprehensible heart. But I did not know if they were the future or the past.

  I followed them to the Ulug Beg medreseh, built by the grandson of Tamerlane, and peered in. A few men and boys were walking under the arcades. The double tiers of cells looked empty. But as I hesitated, a diffused hum of Koranic chant rose from the depths of the building, as if it were a vast hive to which the bees were returning.

  Then a surly guardian ordered me back. He was filled with suppressed anger. I remembered the same anger in the holy places of Ir
an and Iraq. ‘This isn’t open any more. This is for Moslems.’ He could not bear to look at me.

  I sensed anger in myself too, welling up to meet his. I did not understand it. I found myself challenging him to accept me, asking ingenuous questions. ‘How many pupils do you have here?’

  He said pugnaciously: ‘Four hundred, with the Mir-i-Arab.’ The numbers had doubled in two years.

  ‘And how long do they study?’

  ‘Five years.’ But his eyes would not meet mine, as if mine might contaminate his, or perhaps soften them. He fixed his stare over my head.

  I noticed the inscription carved in Kufic above the gate. It belonged to the time of the liberal sultan Ulug Beg, who had promoted the study of astronomy and the sciences. ‘What does it say?’

  The man parroted angrily: ‘”It is the sacred duty of every Moslem man and woman to pursue knowledge.”’

  I said bloodlessly: ‘That’s nice.’ He glared. ‘I’ve heard there’s fine tilework inside.’

  ‘You can read it in books.’ He turned his back on me. ‘This place is for Moslems.’

  Silently, I promised to return.

  The heresy incipient in Ulug Beg (who was murdered by puritan reactionaries in 1449) ran riot in the seventeenth-century medreseh opposite, the towering and dilapidated Abdul Aziz Khan. Here, in the dying sunlight, I found a portal tiled with chrysanthemums and cherry blossom; but amongst them, flouting the Islamic ban on portraying animate things, serpents writhed from the ground, masquerading as vase-handles, and blue-headed parakeets flew in pairs towards the sun. Inside, a robust caretaker indicated the outline of a man painted in the mihrab – the niche facing Mecca – a terrible heresy, which delighted her. ‘Look! Can’t you see him? There’s his beard . . . his eyes . . . .’ But I could make out nothing.

  An undertow of apostasy has pervaded Central Asia always. The Uzbeks carried traces of shamanism into the Sunni orthodoxy of their settled lives, and a countervailing underworld of Persian demons had been throbbing for centuries beneath the surface of the great caravan-cities. Twenty feet beneath the floor of the Attari mosque I saw the stones of a Zoroastrian fire-temple; and fire, I was told, is still carried like an ancestral memory at the head of some Moslem wedding processions here. With a twinge of suspicion now, I remembered meeting years ago in Jerusalem the last of a sect of Bukhariot Sufis, who contemplated God by staring into flames.

  Water too: the holiness of springs proved ineradicable. The pagan veneration of a deep well under the city walls was long ago sanctified by an enfolding mosque. It became the Spring of Job (a prophet adopted by the Moslems) who was said to have struck water from the ground to succour the parched inhabitants. The Russians turned the shrine into a museum, and I found it lined with vitrines illustrating the triumphs of Soviet irrigation. But nobody was looking at them. Instead, a party of peasant women was heaving up ice-cold water from the well among the showcases, splashing it over their wrists and heads with little mewling cries, and carrying it away in phials.

  It was the failure of water, as well as conservative ferocity, which hurried on the isolation of Bukhara. The Zerafshan river, flowing five hundred miles out of the Pamirs, expends its last breath on the oasis, and is withering away. To north and west the sands have buried a multitude of towns and villages which the exhausted irrigation could not save.

  Even in the nineteenth century, the accounts of travellers were filled with ambiguity. To Moslems Bukhara was ‘the Noble, the Sublime’. It was wrapped round by eight miles of walls and fortified gates, and its mosques and medresehs were beyond counting. The Bukhariots, it was said, were the most polished and civilised inhabitants of Central Asia, and their manners and dress became a yardstick of oriental fashion. The men minced on high heels – a pompous, trotting gait was much admired – and turbans clouded their heads in as many as forty folds of dazzling muslin. Some dignitaries drove in carriages; others, sporting thigh-length boots with dandily pointed toes, rode thorough-breds harnessed in turquoise and gold. Beneath their horsehair veils the women walked in the most caressing silks in Asia; they joined their eyebrows in a double arc of black antimony, and anointed their fingernails with balsam. Even in decline, the bazaars were rumoured magnificent, and teemed with Hindus, Persians, Jews and Tartars.

  Yet this splendour barely concealed an inner wretchedness. Men who walked abroad like kings returned at night to hovels. The city gates and walls were a gimcrack theatre-set, and the famed medresehs in decay. The emir’s spies terrorised the whole populace, and cannabis was so endemic that it reduced half the government to apathy. From time to time a plague of cholera swept through a populace already riddled with dysentery and typhoid. Those who bathed or drank at the public pools contracted the repulsive guinea-worm, which could be eased out of their flesh only by a skilled barber lancing their skin and coiling the worm – sometimes four feet of it – on to a stick.

  As for women, only beggars took to the streets barefaced (in the hope of being chosen for a harem) and even amongst the veiled it was bon ton to affect decrepitude. No man was seen with a woman. Their incarceration turned men to pederasty, and at night homosexual gangs haunted the streets. Ordinary people seemed inured to cruelty and subterfuge. Scarcely a Westerner dared enter before the 1870s.

  Yet religious obscurantism was tainted with hypocrisy. Steeped as they were in their city’s blazoned holiness, the people observed the code of religious law but abused its intent. Lax Moslems were beaten into the mosques by officials armed with a leather strap, and the moment the Russians abolished this practice attendance plummeted. Within a few years of Russian domination, the ferocious hostility to unbelievers had stilled to a mysterious tolerance, almost to lethargy. Travellers wrote that there was no more peaceful populace in the East, and occasionally, as I wondered about the future, I would find myself thinking of this strange flexibility with a faint unease.

  Yet nineteenth-century Bukhara seemed remote now. Searching for the bazaars which were the pride of Central Asia, I found them almost gone. Only the market crossroads – lanterned cupolas rising from a nest of semi-domes – marked the lost arcades where the trade of China, India, Afghanistan and Russia had mingled across twenty-four covered acres. Now, in place of the early exotica – the camels’ hair and silks, the porcelain and Tartar gold, the suits of chain mail, matchlocks and Khorasan swords (and stray American revolvers) – I saw little but a meretricious clutter of sequin-splashed frocks and slippers. A hesitant free enterprise was surfacing, but the inflation raging through the old Soviet empire had turned everyone poor. Sad traders peered from their kiosks like glove-puppets, or threaded the bazaars with a predatory vigilance. But they had almost nothing to sell. Once the name ‘Bukhara’ had been synonymous with lustrous dyed silks and the crimson rugs of the Turcomans who traded here; and carpets of Persian design were woven on domestic looms all over the city. But under Stalin, home industries became criminal. Mass production laid a dead hand on all the old crafts. I trudged through the market quarter until dark, but found no trace of handmade silk or rug.

  Dusk emptied the lanes. A few street-lamps stood in stagnant pools of light, and a call to prayer wavered on the sunset. Behind padlocked doors, the tulip-shaped columns of a ruined mosque were tottering into the dust. Once or twice, where a view opened, I saw how many domes were crowned not by the Islamic crescent but by a single spike. Around these the migrant storks – a bird of happy omen – used to heap up compacted nests, like urns, until they stood sentinel on half the domes of the city. So long as the storks returned, people said, Bukhara would flourish; but twenty years ago they started to thin away, and were now gone. Some said that the rivers and marshes of the oasis were drying up, forcing the frog-guzzling storks to hunt elsewhere. Others blamed suburban factory-smoke. Yet others I asked, after staring up ruefully at the tenantless spikes, admitted they did not know, but feared only that the storks, by the inscrutable will of God, had flown away with their future.

  Zelim was an artist who lived wit
h his mother and wife in the alleys south of the Lyab-i-Khauz. A friend had given me his address with a warning that he was silent, and I came upon his house only by chance. Above its doorway a tin plaque read; ‘Here lives a veteran of the Great Patriotic War’. But I had no idea who this veteran was, and my knock was answered by a forty-year-old woman with hennaed hair and green eyes. She was Zelim’s wife, Gelia, who ushered me down a passageway and into a courtyard which seemed almost empty. Its rooms resonated like cisterns. She was unsure where her husband was, Gelia said. So we sat waiting in a high living-room spread with carpets and lined with classic Russian novels. Faintly embarrassed, she pushed dishes of nuts and sweets towards me. She had a liquid, tender face which might have been European, and she spoke a soft English. But she said her parents were Tartar who had come from the famine-stricken north to Tashkent in 1949, because it was rumoured a ‘city of bread’. Her laughter tinkled in the bleakness. She had only been an infant then. Long afterwards she had married Zelim here and given him two sons: gaunt, loose-limbed youths now, who stalked about the compound in silence.

  But another, weightier presence brooded in the passages. Massive and watchful, Zelim’s mother settled opposite us, cracking sunflower seeds. Her eyes were sorrowful crescents. She sat with her knees splayed in woolly stockings, and listened. The pale oval of her face — smudged with a chance nose and hung with flaccid cheeks – lent her the moon-like gravity of a Chinese.

  She was, in fact, one quarter Chinese. In the last century her grandmother had been abducted from Kashgar at the age of six, and sold in the slave-market of Bukhara. Then her grandfather, a rich merchant, had fallen in love with his purchase, and married her. The old woman’s eyes watered with remembering. ‘She was very small and delicate, with little shoes and tiny hands.’ She fumbled a photograph album from a shelf and opened it on a woman wreathed in Bukhara silks. ‘There!’ I saw a thin-lipped, brooding face, oddly attractive. She had died in her forties. ‘They were rich people,’ the old woman said. ‘My father too. We had a dacha and a garden then, where the statue of Lenin stands now.’