The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  I plunged through the doors into a warren of yards and tiled chambers. Desultory restoration was going on. Through cracks in locked gates I glimpsed derelict courtyards, piled with debris. Nothing betrayed the life of their vanished inhabitants. Even when I walked through the battlements of the citadel, I found myself adrift in a clay field, where the mud-built palaces had eroded to a stark jigsaw of platforms and walls. Here, in the last century, the tyrant khans had reigned in grisly operetta. Even in summer they wore sheepskin caps and boots stuffed with linen rags. Their luxuries were carpets and a few sofas and carved chests. They executed their subjects on whim. The Russian envoy Muraviev, arriving in 1819, described how among the crowds gawping at his entry were throngs of Russian slaves, who whispered to him piteously for help he could not give. The previous intruder Bekovich, he learnt, had been flayed alive and his skin stretched over a drum.

  I pushed through a door into the open throne-room. On one side its ceramic dais engulfed the court in a tidal wave of dazzling blue. On the other a brick mound had once supported a felt-lined tent – the herders’ yurt — into whose snug fetor the half-savage khans had retired in winter.

  It was at this court, in 1863, that the Hungarian traveller Arminius Vambéry, disguised as a dervish, must have received his audience with the khan Sayyid Mahomet. As the curtain rolled back from the dais, the ruler was revealed reclining on a silk-velvet cushion, clutching a short gold sceptre. The sight of his degenerate face with its imbecile chin and white lips, and the tremble of his effeminate voice, were to haunt Vambéry for years afterwards. The slightest mistake would have cost his life.

  Later, passing through a public square, he stumbled with horror on a party of horsemen dragging whole families of prisoners-of-war behind them. Out of the sacks that they opened tumbled human heads, which an accountant kicked into piles before rewarding each horseman with a four-head, twenty-head or forty-head silk robe. Soon afterwards Vambéry watched the routine execution of some 300 captives. Most were strung up or decapitated. But the eight grey-haired leaders lay down to be manacled, then the executioner knelt on their chests and gouged out their eyes, wiping his bloodstained knife on their beards. They tried to rise to their feet, but knocked blindly against one another, or beat the ground in their agony. Even Vambéry, whose nerves were of steel, shuddered at these memories into his old age.

  I roamed the citadel in mingled awe and gloom. Against its western ramparts, on a pinnacle of natural rock, a last flicker of battlements and stairways upheld a makeshift kiosk. It hung there like a perverted throne, where the dissolute khans sipped sherbet and plotted in the sky, and the whole city fell open beneath them.

  Yet in its final years, even before the Russian protectorate, Khiva was suffused by a quiet renaissance. The last khan’s progressive vizier (whom he murdered) built roads and schools, and in 1910 erected almost the highest minaret in Central Asia, a stately, tapering pillar belted with sixteen decorative friezes. A previous khan had planned a still more prodigious minaret, but it was never completed. It squats by the main street as fat as a gasometer. Bands of tilework, created for an aerial colossus, circle it in a stilled slipstream of gentian and turquoise, teasing the imagination with its cancelled future.

  Islam had returned only thinly to the city. In the tomb-sanctuary of its local shrine, a mullah had taken up residence with his ginger cat. But the nearby caravanserai had been turned into a registry office. Inside, the bellow and slavering of camels had long faded, and their drinking-well was given over to superstitious wishing. History had turned picturesque. On one wall a tin stork dangled a familiar bundle, and a notice listed suitable names for babies. Then the newlyweds would emerge to be photographed under the minaret. They settled into pretty tableaux, framed by the sanitised past. The grooms posed in crumpled suits, the brides in white muslin from which their jet-black hair tumbled in earthy defiance.

  But when I entered the Friday Mosque – once the khanate’s religious heart – the 200 wooden pillars which upheld its prayer-hall shifted and dimmed in a twilit forest, where nobody prayed.

  ‘Turkey is our brother!’ The two men raised their hands in an invisible toast. ‘Our future is with Turkey!’

  We sat cross-legged on a carpeted dais like a trio of Buddhas on an altar, and talked of mutual friends in Bukhara. Shukrat was a slight, pallid man with a thunderous voice. The gates of his house – typical of the older oasis – had opened straight on to this cavernous reception-hall, as if it were a garage. The only other furniture was a black-and-white television, on which the Uzbek president was receiving the Turkish prime minister.

  Shukrat and his friend watched this with dark elation. They were in love with an idea of Turkey. They saw it as their country’s lodestar. Turkey beckoned from the rich West, inviting them into paradise. But its language and culture were theirs – a Moslem spirit within a secular state – and it lent them pride. On the flickering screen the motorcade glided to a halt and the two stout, bald men entered the Palace of Deputies.

  ‘The Turks have sent us aid,’ said Shukrat.

  I asked: ‘What sort?’

  ‘Just a little food,’ replied Racoul. ‘But it’s aid to the heart.’ He was dark and burly, Shukrat’s opposite, and his closest friend. A surge of satin hair and beard blackened his low brows and jaw. He looked like the King of Spades. But he spoke in a fluty whisper. He and Shukrat seemed to have exchanged voices.

  ‘Look at that! That’s disgusting!’ Their eyes were clamped to the television again. The two statesmen had mounted a rostrum and the delegates beneath were clapping with the soulless unity of old Communists. ‘Machines!’ thundered Shukrat. ‘Just like the old days! Like Brezhnev times! They haven’t a separate brain between them!’

  ‘I’m ashamed of them,’ whispered Racoul. ‘What must the prime minister be thinking? They don’t have that in Turkey.’

  He and Shukrat knew, of course, that Uzbekistan was governed by old Communists under a new name. They both belonged to the small opposition party Erk – Racoul’s pockets bulged with its news-sheets – but its activities were circumscribed, and the more formidable dissident parties had been banned altogether.

  ‘Democracy is only a child here,’ said Shukrat.

  Like urban intelligentsia all over Central Asia, they longed for ‘the Turkish model’. Turkey was educating Uzbek businessmen and students, and pushing for a Turkic bloc in the United Nations. There was heady talk of common currencies and flags, and of following Ataturk’s adoption of the Latin alphabet. Shukrat and Racoul brushed aside my misgiving at Turkey’s poor resources. Their fingers rootled into bowls of sunflower seeds as they announced that the foremost presidents of Central Asia had all declared for the Turkish model. Their talk ascended into dreams. Turkey would become the heart of the world, they said. It had suddenly found a fresh purpose, I knew. It was seeing itself not as a humiliated petitioner on the hem of Europe, but as the paradigm for a Central Asian commonwealth.

  ‘But we have too many poor.’ Shukrat was suddenly sombre. ‘I think they’ll rise up again. Things are getting so much worse here. There’s hunger now.’ It was the return of Communism which he dreaded. ‘I’m not afraid of Islam. Islam has heart.’ His face turned bitter. ‘But Communists will do anything.’

  ‘Turkey could save us,’ Racoul fluted. His gaze returned to the television, but the Chamber of Deputies had been replaced by a dance troupe. He asked: ‘Do you think the Turks are European?’

  I retreated into pedantry. ‘Istanbul is in Europe.’

  ‘Istanbul!’ Shukrat cried. ‘It’s the city I long to see! I know the European capitals must be beautiful, but Istanbul! You’ve been there? You have?’ Their twin stares alighted on me with an almost accusatory envy. ‘What is it like?’

  I described the stupendous skyline of domes and minarets above the Golden Horn, and the night-built dwellings of a city bursting with immigrant poor. They listened in rapt stillness. The great metropolis – in all its steely glamour, its poverty
and stormy energies – was drenched in an atavistic glory for them. Nothing I said could diminish it. A provincial engineer and a schoolmaster, isolated in the wastes of Khorezm, they warmed themselves in its hope, as at a rediscovered faith.

  But Racoul was still knotted with worry. He asked suddenly: ‘What do Europeans think when they hear the word “Turk”?’

  I mumbled uncomfortably, playing for time.

  ‘Yes? Yes?’ The two faces were beseeching me now. They were white, hungry for acknowledgement.

  ‘Travellers to Turkey find it beautiful.’

  ‘But ordinary Europeans,’ went on Racoul relentlessly, “what’s their first reaction to the idea of “Turk”?’

  ‘They think, well . . . .’ I became desperate. ‘They probably think of warriors and sultans . . . .’

  ‘Ah yes, yes!’ They became happy with this fairytale reduction of themselves. It lent them imperial lustre. ‘Warriors . . . .’

  Shukrat disappeared into another room and returned with an outline map of the world such as schoolchildren fill in for geography lessons. Across it, in a swathe of buttercup yellow fanning east and north from the Mediterranean almost to the Bering Straits, he had coloured in the farthest reaches of the Turkic world. It was the old dream of Turania, of a Greater Turkey resurrected.

  ‘We’re one people at heart,’ he said. ‘I’m not claiming we should necessarily be one nation, but we could be a kind of federation.’ He glowed with prophecy. ‘Look . . . . Look....’

  He laid the map tenderly across my knees, while Racoul loomed alongside, endorsing his words with coos and grunts. Under my hands the whole heart of Asia lay sealed in buttercup yellow. Shukrat’s forefinger swooped and darted across it. In the ancient Turkic homelands of steppe and plateau, where mammoth rivers meandered north towards the Siberian plains, the calyx of this buttercup unfolded from the infant nations where I now wandered: the Uzbeks and Kazakhs, the Kirghiz and Turcomans. They were its core. Eastward the visionary empire vaulted the Pamirs to annex China’s north-west province of Xinjiang, home of the Turkic Uighurs, then gobbled up Mongolia before drifting north to speckle eastern Siberia – birthland of the Yakuts – with impatient yellow dots. Westward it flooded beyond Asia Minor to engulf Bulgaria, Macedonia and Cyprus, then leapfrogged north to claim distant kin in Hungary, Finland and Estonia.

  I enquired about the capital of this mirage?

  ‘I don’t mind!’ bellowed Shukrat magnanimously. ‘Tashkent or Istanbul or Almaty! They can decide that! Only the frontiers must be down like before. A hundred years ago nobody here felt they were Tajik or Uzbek or Kirghiz. They just thought they were members of families, and Moslems. The borders didn’t matter then. You just crossed on your camel and exchanged greetings!’ He lifted one hand in a breezy salute, while the other steered an imaginary quadruped over a frontier. ‘All that demarcation was the work of Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev! Other people’s decisions! It’s nonsense. My wife, for instance, is a Tajik, and no different from me!’ He glanced guiltily at her photograph on the television, and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. ‘She hates me smoking.’ She gazed back at him from her gilt frame: a handsome face with full lips and wide-spread eyes. He laughed. ‘She bullies me. When she’s away, like now, I still see her scowling at me.’

  His stare returned to the map. ‘So I’m not a chauvinist! My wife is Tajik – they’re an Iranian people – and we’re married. This Greater Turkey has nothing to do with chauvinism! Nothing! It is a brotherhood!’

  But he ransacked his shelves for books on Central Asia, and ascribed all its civilisation to Turks, winkling out buried references and propounding vertiginous theories. Persian, Arab and Chinese culture withered at his advance. Sogdians were forgotten. Bactria fell. Whole empires were rolled shamelessly back. History resolved into a requiem for a wondrous, lost Turania. He shook his map like a threat. The buttery tide of his empire, I noticed, cynically snuffed out Armenia and his wife’s Tajiks; and the survival of Uzbek and Turcoman minorities sanctioned huge land-grabs in northern Iran and Afghanistan. A yellow question-mark hung even over the Tartar-sprinkled Volga and Urals, and the reindeer-loving Samoyeds.

  Shukrat demanded: ‘Are there Turks in Britain?’

  I answered nervously: ‘A few, from Cyprus.’

  He looked disappointed. Behind his eyes a yellow wave had perhaps reared for a moment, then ebbed away.

  Racoul had been silent a long time, restored to a swarthy majesty. But now he cooed: ‘Does the West want Uzbekistan to adopt the Turkish model?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, relieved to be truthful. ‘It’s thought more moderate than the Iranian.’

  ‘Moderation!’ Shukrat boomed. ‘Yes! We are moderates! Moscow television is always harping on the Armenian massacres, as if Turkic people were all barbarians. I don’t understand! Why all this fuss?’

  Because in 1915, I said, more than a million Armenians had died, and Turkey had never admitted guilt.

  Shukrat grimaced. ‘I’m not saying I think it was a good thing. But there have been Armenian terrorists too, you know. These Armenians . . . . And the Slavs are behind them!’ His fingers jittered over the map as if itching to grasp a scimitar. ‘But we are moderates!’

  On 3 July 1881, a colony of German Mennonites, who had settled on the lower Volga to escape conscription in Prussia, heaped their belongings on to wagons and lumbered eastwards on the orders of God. Descendants of Anabaptist dissenters in the sixteenth century, they were pacifist farmers of fanatic simplicity, and refused allegiance to any government. In the end it was the khan of Khiva who offered them sanctuary. Some sixty-four families floated to him down the Amu Dariya in eight hired barges; the rest dismantled their wagons, loaded them on to camels, and marched alongside. So they came at last to the end of the world, where they settled in two colonies and worked the land. The khan valued them as carpenters and polishers. They mended his phonograph, and delighted him by sticking coloured transfers all over the furniture they made for him. And here travellers found them as late as 1933, living lives of classless austerity among the puzzled natives.

  They haunted me. I kept wondering what had happened to them. Against all reason, I hoped that some remnant, forgotten in their remote hamlets, had survived Stalin’s persecutions. I enquired among taxi-drivers in the bleak spaces round Novi Urgench station, but only one driver remembered their village at Ak Metchet. He had heard of a bizarre German people living there many years ago, he said, but they had all gone. He looked at me with suspicion. Why should I want to see it?

  But we drove across a country of misted peace. The whole land lay muffled under the hush of the Amu Dariya, which carried down more silt than the Nile and smeared it for hundreds of miles over the oasis in a counterpane of stiff, pale clay. To either side the soil was tilled for cotton, and a sprinkle of young com showed. Nothing interposed between us and the horizon, where willows and poplars were scratched in thin lines on an opal sky.

  The driver was wincing from toothache. His mouth opened on a blackened stump. I pointed to the Dracula gap among my own teeth, and this perversely pleased him. As our road clattered past mud villages, I scribbled notes idly, then saw in the mirror that he was watching me, his eyes narrowed in distrust. ‘What are you writing?’

  ‘Just notes about the land.’

  ‘That won’t do. There are too many police. Put your notebook away and just sit and look ahead or they’ll take us.’

  I did as he said, with despair. A feel of provincial harshness touched every village here. Foreigners never came. We were approaching the most bitter fringe of habitation, where suddenly the desert shone yellow and close, waiting, and the Mennonites had reclaimed Ak Metchet from seasonal marshland.

  The driver said: ‘It’s nearly finished now.’

  A few cottages scattered either side of a dead-end. Their doors were lightly carved in the Uzbek way, and their brick-work decorated with Communist stars. The only man we saw knew nothing of the place’s history, but directed us
to a derelict-looking house where the village elder lived. Still I half expected the porches to fill with the black and white bodices and plaited hair of women at their spinning-wheels, the Gretchens and Dorotheas of sixty years before, and their broods of freckled children.

  Instead the old Uzbek tottered to his door and asked us in. A big sheepskin hat thrust forward his ears like radar scanners, and his face was tangled in whiskers. He settled us on the dais which occupied half the room. His voice came thin and high. The Germans had gone, he said, all gone. He spoke of them with distracted affection. Two grandchildren hovered about us, offered tea and broke hard bread among the pots and quilts where we sat. They were desperately poor.

  ‘I remember them,’ the old man said, but his voice wavered, as if any meaning was fragile now. ‘I worked with them when I was a youth. They lived along the far side of the road, where the Young Pioneers’ camp is now.’

  ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Like you!’ he piped. ‘Their faces! Just like yours!’ He contemplated me with a sudden sweetness, and murmured: ‘Aach, aach’ to himself, and finally: ‘You’re from England.’ England and Germany were becoming fused in his mind. ‘They were good people, decent people. They worked hard, because they were Germans. They used to sell their dairy products on the road to Khiva.’ He stared at me again. ‘Aach, aah. England. Did your parents live here then? Did you perhaps live here? No

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were a good people . . . .’ His gaze drifted away and for a moment his canted ears, tufted with white hairs, gave an illusion of listening for something. ‘ . . . Wonderful carpenters. They were not dressed like us, but the women all in black and white, and their hair . . . .’ His hands trembled towards the nape of his neck to conjure plaited buns.

  ‘Where did they go?’

  He closed his eyes. ‘They were repressed in Stalin’s time. They went away suddenly. In 1935, I think. They were taken away to Tajikistan, to Dushanbe. They vanished.’ He opened his fist to the air. ‘They left nothing behind. All in the Stalin years. Repressed.’