‘But best of all is the woman who remains at home,’ said the Namangan youth ominously. ‘It’s written that a woman only has to leave the house twice: once for marriage and once for burial.’
I said: ‘What do women think of this?’
They went momentarily silent. The Azeri smiled. But the Tashkent man said: ‘The women here are far from Islam. They don’t understand, they don’t know anything.’
‘The veil would have to be forced on them,’ said another youth, ‘so it is not possible!’
The Azeri sensed my misgiving. He said: ‘When our people see a foreign woman with bare legs or arms, they get inflamed and can’t study for hours. But I know that among you it’s common, and that you don’t notice it or feel anything.’
The others made noises of understanding. They looked a little unhappy. They spoke of the West with mixed repudiation and awe. The West meant licence, profligacy. There was a haunting Westerner in every one of them.
‘The people here in Bukhara know nothing of religion,’ the Namangan student went on. ‘They’ve been Sovietised. It’s a godless place. In the villages they know a little, but here, nothing.’
‘Not in our villages,’ said a dark Turcoman. ‘There’s no religion there.’
I looked at them in surprise. Unconsciously I had imagined them the heart of Bukhara, as if they were its unifying essence; but all the time they considered themselves strangers here, just as I was. In this conservative backwater – Bukhara ‘the Pillar of Islam’ – they felt they walked in spiritual exile, through a sea of unbelief. It was strange.
Soon they said goodbye with the stately Moslem placing of the right hand on the heart, and filtered back into their medreseh. If nobody stirred them, I thought, their natural Islam would be a restrained and dignified one, despite their tyranny to women. Most dangerous was their ignorance – they knew almost nothing of any world outside theirs – and the spectre of economic collapse, which could drive people to extremes. I watched them disappear with mixed respect and misgiving. Compared to the commercial fecklessness of youths in the streets, their questing intensity was archaic, attractive and dangerously innocent.
I ambled away, directionless. The close lanes and squares gave the feel of a city only half unlocked to the light. I found myself brooding over the students, consoled by their slow, Turkic conservatism. The fires of fundamentalism still felt far off.
But as I walked, I lapsed into private apprehension. What would become of the promenading girls whose skirts ascended godlessly to just below the knee, I wondered, and whose legs showed patterned stockings and high heels? I dropped an imaginary veil over every woman I saw, and pictured the world through a gauze of black horsehair. As for the young men wheedling to change money, I turned the passion for dollars into the passion for God, until I had replaced their opportunist faces with others more moral, and more threatening.
In this disquieting daze, I tramped full-circle and arrived opposite the Mir-i-Arab medreseh. On one side spread the huge Kalan mosque, where Genghiz Khan had hurled down the Koran and initiated the slaughter of the city. On the other, the drums of the medreseh shone in complex knottings of Kufic script, and bloomed into sky-coloured domes.
A few students were chatting under the gateway, and I recognised the evangelising Kirghiz youth of an hour before. He approached me shyly. Shorn of his companions, he looked gentler, more awkward, and seemed to wear a faint, perpetual look of surprise. For a minute we talked pleasantries, then he said: ‘Don’t speak to anyone. Just follow me.’
With the traveller’s delight in the forbidden, I followed him unchallenged through the medreseh gate and into the courtyard. It was brimming with life. Its arches were hung with notices in Arabic and Uzbek, invoking sobriety, friendship, integrity. Under the tiled porticoes the students conversed in murmuring conclaves, or sat alone with their Korans propped on chairs, repeating the same sura over and over. Above the double tier of their cells, two turquoise domes shed down an astral beauty. The past shone all about them, and seemed to convey a truth. It was the prince of medresehs. For years after the Second World War it had been the only one permitted open in Central Asia, with a mere seventy-five students. Now it housed over 400, and the nasal chant of remembrance filled its walls.
I padded after the Kirghiz, but nobody seemed to notice us. He pushed open a low door into one of the cells. It was tiny: a hermit’s den. An unbroken succession of students had studied here for more than 500 years. The air was rife with dogma. Nothing substantial had changed, except that two iron beds had ousted the quilts on the floor, and an iron stove flooded the room with heat. The Kirghiz grinned at me. ‘Nobody will see you here.’ We sat at the rough table while he dropped a filament into a pot to brew tea, and broke fresh bread. Around us the walls were pierced by banks of niches scattered with belongings: an Arabic calendar, a jar of eau de Cologne, a clock, a box of Indonesian tea, jumbles of bottles, books and pens.
He poured tea into a chipped cup. He came from near Bishkek, he said, the capital of Kirghizstan, the obscure mountain nation on the borders of China. It was the last object of my journey. Yet he was not a Kirghiz by race, but a Dungan Chinese, one of a remote Moslem people who had fled west from China in the 1870s. Crossing the Tienshan mountains in mid-winter, they had left the snowfields covered with their dead. ‘My grandparents still speak of what they heard from their grandparents, how people died in the avalanches and on the glaciers. And the Russians shot down thousands . . . .’
He turned his mild face to mine without anger. It was too long ago to resent. And myths had been entwined with history. All disasters were traced back to the Russians, and I told him hesitantly that they had not massacred the Dungans (according to Western historians) and that the native Kirghiz had welcomed the survivors as they stumbled in tatters out of the mountains.
‘That’s what is good about this place,’ said the youth, who was not listening. ‘We have no nationalities here, no hatred. Nobody says “You’re a Kirghiz” or “You’re an Uzbek”. They just say “You’re a Moslem”, and we feel at one.’ He mounded the crusts of bread between us in token of community. ‘It was the Soviet Union that created nationalism here. Before Stalin, the borders weren’t there. It’s only since then that people have said they belonged to countries.’
It was true, and I was to hear it again often: the nostalgia for a time before frontiers, for some imagined brotherhood. In these centuries of flux, when the borders of the Central Asian emirates were only transient opinions, people conceived of themselves first by extended family or tribe. The whole region existed in a time-warp, where the tragedy of modern nationalism scarcely intruded. Now people looked back on that era as an age of stateless peace, made not for politicians but for merchants on golden roads. Yet it was this shallow-rooted patriotism that had laid these lands passively under the Soviet heel.
‘Our identity is in Islam. Islam goes deeper,’ said the youth. ‘It’s true that in Kirghizstan, where I come from, there’s not much religious feeling. But people did pray in secret even in the Stalin years, closed the doors behind them and prayed in the dark, in families.’
I asked: ‘Did you?’
‘No, my family never did. I came to believe in another way.’
He fell silent, wondering whether to divulge his conversion. I could not guess it. I waited. Maybe some illicit mullah, I thought, had gathered the boy into his circle. Or perhaps an adolescent idealism had led him this way alone.
Then he said: ‘It was like this. Near the village where I live was a graveyard, and one year two men were buried there. They were Moslems, but they were drinkers, which is against our faith. Now you know that our dead are buried with the face exposed . . . .’ He went silent again and glanced up at the latticed window, which filtered a wan light. Then he said in a cold burst of memory: ‘When one man was laid in the grave, his eyes suddenly shot open. Yes, they were wide with fear! White and staring. Terrified.’ His own eyes were fixed on mine, and had dilated too, fill
ed with the marvel and terror of the thing. His words were a breathy rush. ‘And when they lowered the other man into his grave – what do you think?’ His fingers were clutching the edge of the table. ‘It was filled with snakes!’ He gaped at me. ‘Our dead are buried two metres down at least, but even so there were these snakes, dozens of them, waiting for him in the grave. It was dreadful. Everybody spoke of it.’ All the calm had left him. ‘I know this because my uncle was the gravedigger there. From that time I began to pray and read our scriptures, and I came to understand.’
I stared back into his callow mask of face – the sad arc of its eyes, echoed by the gossamer eyebrows above – and I had the fancy that the blinding moment of his revelation had imprinted itself permanently there, leaving behind a trace of petrified surprise.
‘You’re European, so I think you’re Christian.’ He was suddenly urgent, pleading. ‘Now Mahomet’s uncle, who acted as his guardian, was a Christian too [this was untrue] but he came to believe in Islam. He chose Islam over Christianity.’ He caressed the word again: ‘Islam’.
‘I know someone who was brought up with no religion,’ I said. ‘He studied several. And he chose Buddhism.’
This produced a pained silence. Then he said: ‘But you must believe. When you return home, read our books, read more.’ He was looking at me with a hurt, puzzled gaze, where the horror still lingered. ‘You see, at the Last Day, at the end of the light, there’ll be a parting of the peoples, and only the Moslems will be saved.’ He illustrated this separation regretfully, but firmly, with morsels of bread across the table. ‘Only the Moslems! As for the rest, the Hindus, the Communists, the Jews, the Christians . . . .’ He swept the unbelieving crumbs on to the floor. ‘Finished!’
His eyes were imploring me.
The next moment it was time for prayer, and we trooped back, a little crestfallen, to the gateway. He took my hand sadly in parting. His look of perplexity remained, as he said: ‘I think you’re a good man.’ Some glimmer of another justice, I think, had touched him for a moment. Far inside, perhaps, he wondered why I, who had shared his bread and tea, deserved a fate so different from his own.
‘You should study and believe.’ His hand lifted to his heart. ‘Then you must come back to us.’
Chapter 4
Lost Identities
One building, and one era, overbear Bukhara like a disfiguring memory. For over a thousand years successive incarnations of a vast palace-fortress, the Ark, have loomed against the north-west walls. Shored up in secrecy, its final, monstrous embodiment is withdrawn out of human reach on a dishevelled glacis, which the binding timber-ends speckle like blackheads, and the ramparts which crown it are forty-foot scarps. Of the ruined buildings inside, only a few cupolas and an arcade can be glimpsed from below; but behind, it disintegrates into a rectangle of rotted bastions which blunder round its plateau in half-pulverised brick. It seems to have slipped down entire from a more savage era. Yet it kept much of its old use until 1920, when the last emir fled, and it is this incongruence in time — it is a museum now, but was a bloodied court within living memory – which perpetuates around it a peculiar disquiet.
As I approached its ramped gateway, this displacement intensified. Two tall towers squeezed the way to a needle’s-eye. In the loggia above, ceremonial musicians had once set up a macabre thump of drums and bray of horns. A mechanical clock had hung here, contrived by an Italian prisoner who temporarily bought his life with it in 1851; but it had gone now. A covered passage climbed past the cramped chambers of sentries and janitors, then wound up to a series of sterile platforms into emptiness.
I wandered in dulled surprise. Within seventy years the whole elaborate palace-keep, peopled by 3000 courtiers and soldiers, concubines and catamites, had disintegrated to a jigsaw of blank courts. A few rooms housed depressing little museums where schoolchildren were gawping at photographs (leftovers of Soviet propaganda) recording the emirate’s cruelty. But the rest were crumbling and uninhabitable.
I was walking over the debris of all Bukhara’s later history. After the Mongol sack, the city had revived under the house of Tamerlane, and when the Uzbeks came south and seized it in 1506, they continued its splendour for another hundred years. But by the end of the eighteenth century Central Asia had resolved into three warring states – Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand – lapped by intransigent tribes of Kazakhs and Turcomans. By now the whole region was in decline, and the nineteenth century in Bukhara was spanned by two vicious and degenerate emirs, products of an isolation which had educated them in little but indulgence.
The atrocious Nasrullah signalled his accession by slaughtering his three brothers, and on his deathbed in 1860 ordered one of his wives stabbed to death before his eyes. His son Mozaffir began his quarter-century of despotism by butchering the heir-designate. At first the poorer classes trusted Mozaffir, dubbing him the ‘killer of elephants and protector of mice’, for to his ministers and courtiers he was quixotically cruel. But towards the end of his reign one of the few Westerners to reach Bukhara alive described him as a sallow lecher with shifty eyes and trembling hands, whose subjects credited him with the Evil Eye.
I approached his audience-chamber through a ruined gate where a stone lion roared harmlessly, and entered an empty field of paving. The plinths of a lost arcade made orphaned rows of stone. At the end, on a long dais, the canopy of the vanished throne rose on wonky pillars, and touched the dereliction with a trashy pomp. There was nothing else. Even the wealth on which this pantomime rested – the emir’s secret gold-mine – was unknown for years after the emirate’s fall. Before their retirement, miners routinely had their eyes and tongues gouged out, and travellers were executed on the smallest suspicion that they knew where it was. Only in the 1960s did the Russians locate it and hurry it back into production.
It was the emir Nasrullah who sent a cold tremor through Victorian Britain by executing two army officers on diplomatic mission. Colonel Stoddart was an intemperate campaigner who arrived at Bukhara in the hope of steeling the emir against the advance of czarist Russia. But to this court of touchy etiquette and childish vanities he brought no suitable gifts, and his letter of introduction was signed not by Queen Victoria but merely by the Governor-General of India. Nasrullah played with him like a cat. He either cosseted him under house arrest or entombed him in the Sia Chat, the deepest well of his prison. After more than three years Captain Conolly, a romantic and lovelorn officer in the Bengal Light Cavalry, reached Central Asia in an attempt to unite the khanates against Russia, and to retrieve Stoddart. It was he who first coined the phrase ‘The Great Game’ to describe the shadow-play of British and czarist agents across Central Asia as the Russian frontiers pushed closer to India. He too was thrown into the well.
The prison stands on a dusty spur behind the citadel. I found its cells crowded with dummies chained by their necks to the mud walls. Beyond them a rectangular hole opened in the paving. In the domed pit scooped out below, from which escape was impossible, Stoddart and Conolly had wasted away among excrement and human bones.
I peered down on two decomposing dummies and a glitter of coins thrown in by visitors for luck. A daemonic inspiration had once stocked the well with a mass of vermin, reptiles and giant sheep-ticks which burrowed into the men’s flesh. Within a few weeks their bodies were being gnawed away. I descended by a rope ladder, and alighted in dust twenty feet below. The walls were lined with impenetrable brick and every whisper reverberated. Beside me the rag and plaster effigies had rotted to sick apes, their arms extended in supplication, their legs dropped off. I could not tell who, if anyone, they were meant to be. But I looked up at the terrible, hopeless hole in the apex of the dome, and thought about my last compatriots to have lain here. The walls closed overhead in horror. On 24 June 1842 Stoddart and Conolly were marched out into the public square under the citadel, and made to dig their own graves. Then they embraced, professed their Christianity, and were beheaded by an executioner’s knife.
Tw
o years later an eccentric and unwitting player of the Great Game appeared in the diminutive shape of the Reverend Joseph Wolff, the Anglicised son of a Bavarian rabbi. Dressed in black gown, shovel hat and scarlet doctoral hood, and ostentatiously cradling a Bible, he rode into Bukhara to discover the whereabouts of the vanished men. He described the city as if it were a heathen Oxford, but by now its trumpeted 360 mosques and 140 medresehs were mostly in ruins, if they had ever existed. Instead of beheading Wolff, the emir became convulsed by laughter. For weeks the clergyman remained a virtual prisoner in the home of the Chief of Artillery (whom the emir years later hacked in two with an axe). From a nearby garden he could hear a Hindu orchestra from Lahore playing ‘God Save the Queen’ in his honour; and he was continually called upon to answer the emir’s queries – about the lack of camels in England, or why Queen Victoria could not execute any Briton she wished. Finally, in bemusement, Nasrullah let him go.
But the brutality and self-indulgence of the emirs alienated them fatally from their people. Imperilled by Russia, they could lead no holy war, and breed no patriotism. Their armies in the field were an absurd rabble. Dressed in random uniforms and harlequin colours, they shouldered a phantasmagoria of matchlock rifles, sticks, pikes and maces. On the march they perched astride donkeys and horses, sometimes two or three to a mount, while a few pieces of camel-drawn artillery brought up the rear.
The czarist armies brushed them aside. In 1868 Russia bit off half the emirate, occupying Samarkand, and reduced Bukhara to a client state. In all their Central Asian wars, between 1847-73, the Russians claimed to have lost only 400 dead, while the Moslem casualties mounted to tens of thousands.
The ensuing years brought the ambiguous peace of subservience. The czarist Russians, like the Bolsheviks after them, were contemptuous of the world which they had conquered. They stilled the Turcoman raids and abolished slavery, at least in name, but they entertained few visions of betterment for their subjects. As for the Moslems, who could stoically endure their own despots, the tyranny of the Great White Czar insulted them by its alien unbelief. ‘Better your own land’s weeds,’ they murmured, ‘than other men’s wheat.’
The Lost Heart of Asia Page 9
