The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Her father had owned two wives and many children, and her memories were all of happiness, living together in the same house. ‘We had servants, many, and when guests came Papa would kill a sheep for them.’ Then she spat out bitterly: ‘And now we’re rationed to a hundred grams of meat a month! And it costs a hundred and ten roubles!’ She was starting to shake. She gazed at her father’s photograph, high on the wall in the room’s centre. ‘Papa built this house. It is a memorial to him.’

  Swarthy and turbaned, he stared down with a sombre authority. He seemed to inhabit a world long before the age of cameras, but she called him ‘Papa’ as if he were in the next-door room.

  He had fought as a Bolshevik revolutionary, said Gelia – in English, which the old woman could not understand – but he had been too rich to escape the Stalinist purges, and had died in a Siberian camp in 1937. His daughter had fallen in love with a Chechen Moslem from the Caucasus, and they had married; but within a year he too had been banished to Siberia and she had divorced him. She watched us now, uncomprehending, and breathed in long, heaving sighs. A mixture of Tajik and Chinese, she had yet grown one of those awesome Slavic bodies which look born to suffer. ‘She left her husband because she remembered her father,’ Gelia said, ‘and she could not bear to go through all that again.’ She had been married just one year, and had born a child, Zelim.

  He entered the room like a ghost. He was tall and faintly stooped, although only forty-three. His chest appeared to have collapsed inward, and under his whitening hair the gentle, creaseless face looked out of reach. His speech was blurred and murmuring, and sometimes faded away. I had the deepening impression that the whole house belonged to its dead. Their memory haunted it: that wronged father and husband. By contrast, the living had shrivelled inside its walls.

  Yet the old woman remained stoically, violently Communist. Her father and husband might lie in anonymous graves in Stalin’s labour camps, but her political faith was pitted deep in her mountainous and immobile body, and would not be shaken. ‘She believed it wasn’t Stalin’s fault,’ Gelia said. ‘She thought it must be somebody else’s. She thought he didn’t know.’

  Yet even now, when Stalin’s role was clear, this schizophrenia continued, so brutalisingly complete had been the woman’s indoctrination. She heard the name Stalin in the rustle of Gelia’s English, and at once her fists thumped together. ‘Stalin was strong! He imposed discipline!’ She heaved herself upright in her chair. Her dress strained tight as a drum round her belly and thighs. ‘Prices were controlled then. Everything was controlled! It’s only after Gorbachev that we had these wars and this inflation The Russians need discipline. We can only work under discipline!’

  Gelia was simmering with laughter. ‘She’s a Communist,’ she said, as if it were a disease. ‘She’s famous for it.’

  The old lady drew down a hand from her throat to her lap, as if performing open-heart surgery. ‘I’m a Communist right through my blood,’ she said proudly. ‘That was my education.’

  I was mutely astonished. I became uneasily conscious of her murdered father watching the room from his enshrined photograph; while her husband had left himself behind in Zelim – ‘He’s the image of his father!’ Yet she sat stubborn as a rock in the chaos of her values. She revelled in memories of her privileged childhood – the servants, the property – but still gave lectures locally which glorified Communism. Each time she saw Zelim, she looked into the face of the husband she had abandoned.

  As for Zelim, his eyes were overcast by bushy brows, and his face seemed not to see. But while Gelia and his mother talked, he told me in his faraway voice: ‘My father was not political at all. Just a writer who wrote about the countryside. But it was enough to be a writer in those days, to condemn a person.’ He looked at me with a kindly, impenetrable gaze. He was older now than his father had ever been. His hair receded from his forehead in two shining inlets. ‘I’ve never read his work. He wrote in Chechen, and I can’t read it. He died out there in Siberia . . . .’

  Gelia was saying mischievously to his mother: ‘You get it, you get it!’

  Abruptly the old woman left the room and returned carrying a military jacket clanking with medals. It was her own. She had fought through the Second World War, and it was in her honour that the tin plaque surmounted their door. She held the jacket up. Perhaps she thought it spoke more trenchantly than words. Her fat fingers coddled the medals. ‘This is the highest of all,’ she said. ‘Look. Gold and platinum. The Order of Lenin!’ The discredited head clinked against her thumb. ‘I was a radio-operator at the front, reporting the advance of tanks. I helped beat them all – Germans, Americans, British!’

  To many Russians, the war was fought only by themselves against the world. Gelia said: ‘The Americans and British were on our side.’

  “ . . . And I reported the flight of aeroplanes,’ the old lady went on, ‘and artillery . . . .’

  For a moment the Soviet empire glittered awesomely again in that medal-hung jacket. ‘She was a heroine,’ said Gelia quietly.

  ‘And all that struggle,’ the old woman continued. ‘For what? Why? People today, my heart bleeds for them . . . . Do you know what a television costs?’

  Gelia said: ‘It’s true. Everything’s changed here in six months. Our factories produce nothing. People just trade in odds and ends, or buy and sell from somewhere else.’

  ‘It’s God’s curse on them for all their abortions!’ said the old woman enigmatically.

  Gelia said: ‘But the prejudice is starting to frighten us. When I go to the market now, the vendors sell me the worst cuts of meat, or just stare through me. They think I’m Russian. That dis-like never used to be there, not openly

  ‘Four hundred roubles!’ the old woman said. ‘That’s all this television cost a year ago. Now it’s eight thousand. And that fridge . . . and the carpet . . . .’ She knew all the prices, and everything had gone’ up ten- or twenty-fold. ‘A train to Samarkand used to cost . . . .’

  Gelia said: ‘The Uzbeks used to learn Russian. Now they’re pulling their children out of the Russian schools and sending them to Uzbek ones. It’s they who have the power now!’

  ‘Tomatoes . . . thirty roubles . . . now they’re . . . .’ The old lady’s voice had soured to an angry whine. ‘Cabbages used to . . . .’

  But Bukhara was a complex city, Gelia said. Many of its people were not Tajik or Uzbek at all, but Russians, Tartars, Jews and a horde of others. The Russian school where she taught English was like a small cosmopolis. ‘Even the Tajiks and Uzbeks are muddled up. In some families one brother’s registered as an Uzbek and another as Tajik. It’s hopeless. But perhaps it’ll save us. Maybe people are too interbred to become nationalists.’

  But the old woman’s litany went on jangling beneath Gelia’s talk like an idiot wisdom. ‘Soap . . . . Oranges . . . .’ There was no telling what people might do if poverty became extreme.

  ‘There’s no future for us here,’ Gelia said: ‘We sent our sons to Russian school, so they speak no Uzbek or Tajik. And they look like Russians. Who will give them jobs now? Who will want to marry them?’

  After a while the old woman brought in a platter heaped with mutton pilau, the universal dish of Central Asia, and we dined on this, and drank cabbage soup and sipped her cherry wine. Zelim had turned against his mother long ago, I’d heard, and for years they had not conversed. But now the old woman glowed as she spoke to him, her face quivering, and he would answer in his soft, distracted way, while she went on wobbling and flushing, and sometimes talked on his behalf, so deep were his silences. ‘He loves his mother’s pilau, especially his mother’s He’s spoken more today than he has for a long time He never eats enough, he’s too thin . . . .’

  ‘It’s no good being thin,’ Gelia said. ‘The important people are all fat!’ She was mysteriously buoyant in the world disintegrating round her. The household was sustained chiefly by her teaching. Zelim rarely sold a picture now. Only a reticent sadness underlay her jokes
sometimes, like a dark instrument in a light orchestra.

  Before we parted she said: ‘I don’t know if Islamic fundamentalism will come here. They’ve opened small religious schools in every district of the city. They’re all learning Arabic.’

  I said: ‘I thought Stalin wiped out the Arabic-speaking generation.’

  ‘Not quite. People went on learning and reading in the home, while pretending not to know it . . . and now it’s coming out into the open.’

  We crossed the courtyard in the dark, under a quarter moon, past its ranges of empty rooms, and said goodbye in the lamp-lit street. Gelia looked at me with a sudden, pained brightness. ‘This may be the last time you see our faces,’ she said, and raised a screening hand beneath her eyes. ‘When you return, we’ll be wearing the veil!’ She was touched by laughter again; but above her hand the eyes were not happy.

  On the city’s western fringes, the last of its battlements falter and die over derelict parklands. Their eroded towers rootle back into the earth, and their crenellations look as if they would fall at a touch. But just inside them, hidden among trees, stands the tenth-century Tomb of the Samanids. Disconnected in time and style from anything around it, it stands in isolation, without ancestry or heir, as if it had been set down all of a piece from somewhere else.

  Its form is modest: a tall cube supporting a dome. Each facade is pierced by arched doorways, and each corner inset with a pillar, while a small, decorative gallery circles them above. But over all its surfaces – friezes, columns, lunettes – swarms a latticework of ornamental brick. No hint of colour touches it except the sandy monochrome of these slivers of baked clay. They are laid with a fertile cunning and variety. Their chiaroscuro of raised and depressed surfaces lends to the whole tomb the absorbent richness of a honeycomb, as if it had ripened in the sun. Brickwork has become an obsession, a brilliant game, so that the mausoleum blooms against its trees with a dry, jewelled intensity.

  The tomb is all that survives of the precocious Samanid dynasty, the last Persians to rule in Central Asia, whose empire pushed south of the Caspian and deep into Afghanistan. The tomb escaped the Mongol sack because it lay buried under windblown sands, its builders half forgotten, and it perhaps finds its architectural origins in the palaces and fire-temples of pre-Islamic times. But its sophistication – the lavish, almost playful deployment of its brick – betrays an age more daring, more intellectual, than any which succeeded it.

  For over a hundred years, until the end of the tenth century, a creative frenzy gripped the capital. Alongside the moral austerity of Islam, there bloomed an aesthetic Persian spirit which looked back to the magnificence and philosophic liberalism of the Sassanian age, extinguished by the Arabs more than two centuries before. As the Silk Road spilt into and out of Bukhara – furs, amber and honey travelling east; silks, jewellery and jade going west – the Samanids sent horses and glass to China, and received spices and ceramics in exchange.

  An era of peace brought men of letters and science crowding to the court, and the Persian language flowered again in a galaxy of native poets. It was an ebullient age. Iranian music, painting and wine flourished heretically alongside Koranic learning, and the great library of Bukhara, stacked with 45,000 manuscripts, became the haunt of doctors, mathematicians, astronomers and geographers.

  The short era produced men of striking genius: the polymathic al-Biruni, who computed the earth’s radius; the lyric poet Rudaki; and the great Ibn Sina, Avicenna, who wrote 242 scientific books of stupefying variety, and whose ‘Canons of Medicine’ became a vital textbook in the hospitals even of Christian Europe for five hundred years.

  But of all this activity almost nothing in brick or stone survives. The wall which circled the oasis for 150 miles, shielding it from nomad and sandstorm, was allowed to fall to bits in this time of hallucinatory wealth, and Turkic invaders, arriving from the east in AD 999, captured a city already declining into squalor. Only the mausoleum survives among its trees; a lavish, unshining gem. Its centuries-long protection under the earth has left it pristine. Even from a distance the biscuity brickwork lends it a perforated lightness, as if it were clothed in some loose-knit garment.

  Yet nobody knows who was buried here. In later centuries, nostalgic for past glory, people imagined that it belonged to Ismail Samani, founder of the dynasty, and its grave shows two holes, where supplicants would whisper their petitions to the emir and a hidden mullah give his answer. Even into the twentieth century, such buried leaders were believed to protect the emirate, so that pious men were bewildered when their vengeful spirits did not rise from their graves against Bolshevik forces in 1920, and massacre them. Now, after years of disinfection as an official monument, the tomb was covertly open to worshippers again. Sometimes a semi-circle of stately pilgrims could be seen praying in its chamber, and occasionally one would place his lips to the perforation in the grave, and whisper.

  One morning I returned to the Ulug Beg medreseh. The surly guardian had gone, and a group of pale-robed students lingered round the entrance. Their dress lent them a fraternal anonymity, and beneath their snowy turbans the faces all seemed embalmed in the same epicene delicacy. I was assailed again by the feeling that they were the keepers of something cardinal and secret in the country’s psyche, and that they knew its future.

  But the instant I started talking with them this sameness broke up. A semicircle of disparate faces shifted round me. I arrived amongst them like a virus in a bloodstream. Some cells spun away, fearful of contamination, but a compensating swarm of antibodies nudged closer. They came from all over Central Asia and beyond. Only a tinge of reticence united them, a vague suspiciousness which ebbed away. They had rustic, cloistered expressions, without the acquisitive glitter of the youths who rode motorbikes in the nearby alleys and tried to sell things. There was a hot-faced Uzbek from Namangan, an urbane youth from Tashkent, a sharp-featured Azeri, a Kirghiz, a Turk, even an Afghan Tajik. For five years here they studied the Koran, the Traditions and Moslem law, they said, and they did not want to become mosque imams – ‘the imams know nothing!’ – but to pass on their learning in the medresehs. They were the future élite.

  ‘How many Moslems live in England? How many in America?’ they clamoured. ‘How many mosques in London?’

  I guessed a figure.

  ‘There are many Moslems in Italy,’ said the fervent youth from Namangan. ‘Italy is very Moslem.’

  ‘Italy’s a Christian country,’ I said. ‘But I’ve read it . . . .’ The youth looked at me, bewildered. ‘It was written!’

  I said: ‘You can read anything.’

  ‘But you Christians say Jesus was the son of God, and that Mary was the mother of God. How can that be so? God has no mother or son. God is one.’ He was bright with his own certainty again.

  I became uneasy. The family tree of God has always amazed the Moslems. It amazed me, a little. I found myself launching a plea for tolerance. Why should one religion hold a monopoly on truth, I asked’ Faith was a matter of private conscience . . . . The clichés left me in gusts of ungrammatical Russian. My evangelism for tolerance began to sound fanatic. In front of me the faces were mild, listening. Several of them murmured agreement; others relaxed into polite waiting. Tolerance, I think, appealed to some modesty in them.

  ‘Yes, Christians, Jews, Hindus . . . people should be free,’ said the Kirghiz. ‘But we believe that in the end everybody will become a Moslem.’

  ‘With the will of God!’ they chorused.

  ‘Islam is the last revelation,’ the Kirghiz went on. He had a flat, elliptical face, with the shallow-set eyes of a Mongol. ‘First came the Jews’ book, then the Christians’ book, and finally the Koran. The Koran is the last word of God. It was right at the time for Jews and Christians to believe as they did. They had nothing else. But now it is our way which is right.’ Yet he spoke this courteously. He was appealing to me.

  I said pedantically: ‘The Communist doctrine came later than Islam, but didn’t disprove it
. The last book isn’t necessarily the right one. Your own Traditions come later than the Koran, but they don’t supersede it.’ This coup produced a hum of assent, and the Kirghiz nodded graciously, and I felt, for some reason, ashamed. ‘The Jews believe that the first is the best,’ I added gently, ‘because it’s the original.’

  Simplified thoughts like these created a profound and uneasy hiatus in them. They were not used to them. They were used to written certainties. They lingered on the edge of such concepts, as if waiting for an imprimatur.

  Suddenly the Azeri said: ‘What about that other book? The Satanic Verses?’

  I was taken aback. News of it had filtered even into the bowels of Asia. I delayed. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘I haven’t read it.’ Prayer-beads slithered in his hands.

  I looked at the others. But none had read it, and only the Azeri seemed to have thoughts on it, which he did not disclose.

  I said: ‘It’s not fact. It is a novel. Our traditions of the novel are different.’

  ‘Is he still alive?’ asked the Azeri.

  I tried to read his expression, but could not. ‘Yes. Some Moslems wanted him killed, but that is against our justice.’

  Nobody demurred, and the moment passed. The youth from Tashkent said: ‘We don’t like the Iranian model. They are far from Islam, far.’ He joined his fingers, then parted them. The simple gesture created an abyss. ‘They don’t understand the texts.’

  ‘What texts?’

  He lifted a teacherly finger. ‘Islamic law, for instance, does not prescribe the veil absolutely. If a woman wishes to be veiled, she may. But with us, three parts can be open: the arches of the feet, the palms of the hands, and the face. Yes, the face.’ He circled his fingertips close around his cheeks and forehead. ‘The hair must be covered, but the face may be open.’