I stepped hesitantly through its breached enclosure. Beneath the dome was interred an obscure dervish named Sultan Ibrahim, and the wind-blasted graves of three other saints huddled in its fold. Even Kakajan had known nothing of them. It was enough that they were old, and holy, and had performed miracles. Long-extinguished candles and lamps clustered around them. Charred tea-jugs stood in votive rows, and pots stuffed with rags. I walked there in chilled wonder. It seemed a violent, shamanistic place, where Islam had never been. My footsteps crackled in its silence. One grave was inscribed ‘The Living Princess’. She lay under a naked mound. The stark light and dry air turned it immortal: the dreaming epitaph and contradictory dust. I felt I was standing at the origins of faith. The wind set me shivering uncontrollably. I stared over the cliff-edge at the desert stretching eastward. Beneath me, in a precipitous curtain, the escarpment zigzagged out of sight through its own shadows and the lowering sun. Its shorn immensity suggested some divide across the map of the world. Beyond here, it seemed to say, everything changes. Far below, the matchstick figure of Kakajan was waving at me to hurry down.
Half an hour later we were weaving under the cliffs in the dying light. They rose like a man-made wall beside us. Far into the distance their veins streamed smooth until the whole escarpment resembled some layered and preposterous cake. Its strata descended through flamingo and coral pink to marmorial white and green, and a procession of caves was scooped along its softer veins. But its summit hung slaty with rocks, like a flaking roof, which had sometimes crashed into the abyss where we drove, split into shale and dust.
At first I could not guess what had created this. Then I glanced at my map and with a shock I realised where we were. We were driving along the abandoned bed of the Oxus river. Three times within historical memory its enormous flood has wavered between the Caspian and Aral seas. No wonder the cliffside strata flowed like water! Above us the Usturt plateau was set in clay for hundreds of miles, while invisible to our south a mosaic of lakes and marshes, some below sea level, traced the dead river almost to the Caspian. As recently as the sixteenth century the Oxus was flowing along the titanic ravine where we now drove, ebbing into distant marshes and leaving the Aral to wither away. Already we had travelled for miles along its floor, while the phantom boats of ancient Khorezm sailed thirty feet over our heads.
Kakajan pointed ahead. ‘There it is. Dev Kesken.’
Some way from the scarp, on the edge of the lost river, a line of walls had come into view. Even the driver exclaimed and touched his face in blessing. ‘You see, there is a God! If we hadn’t had tea with the mullah, we’d never have found this place!’
But a minute later he shrank from the cold with a world-weary grimace, and remained in the car nibbling cubes of toast, while Kakajan and I walked towards the ruin. At first we could see nothing beyond its long outer rampart, which crossed our vision in a ribbon of etiolated yellow under the fading sun. Kakajan had gone quiet. He knew nothing of the place but its name, and his head was full of demons. Our attenuated shadows wrinkled beside us. If this was the place he said it was, it had been linked with a clifftop castle to the north, and had once been a city named Vezir, where the first Uzbek ruler of Khorezm, the sultan Ilbars, was proclaimed khan in 1512. The last Englishman to have seen it was perhaps Jenkinson, who arrived in 1558 to find the river already bending its course back towards the Aral Sea, and threatening the land with wilderness.
Now it was hard to imagine it ever peopled. Dusk was turning the land to amber. The wall looked paltry at our approach. The wind cried faintly in its fissures. I walked through its gate without expectation, and the outer vallum fell behind us. Then, in one of those moments which snare the unguarded traveller, there unfurled before us the ramparts of a phantasmal inner city, whose towers bulged from their battlements, eight to each side, between chalk-white walls. It stood stupendous in its solitude, far from anywhere now habitable. A stricken beauty touched it. Its clay bricks had been smoothed into one substance by the compacting rain and wind, so that all decoration had been rubbed away from them, leaving abstract bones.
We entered between towers over a choked ditch, and found ourselves in wasteland. The rectangle of walls stretched some 400 yards square, but enclosed only tamarisk and camel dung. Yet around them the parapets and walkways rose almost untouched and the loopholes still glared into desert.
Only the melancholy hooting of the driver’s horn wrenched me away. He was frightened of the long road back, and refused point-blank to continue to the clifftop castle. It was night long before we reached Kunia Urgench. In the oasis outskirts, Kakajan said, his brother ran a state farm where we could sleep; so the driver started back alone while we trudged there under an icy blaze of stars.
There was no one else about. On the hoardings which flanked the farm gateway, dimly visible in the dark, stately youths and landgirls looked upward to a Marxist sunrise, their arms heaped with fruit and cornsheaves. But beyond, the track petered out among a cluster of mud cottages. It was heart-rendingly poor. All around us in the starlight the salinated earth glimmered like snowfields. Broken wooden steps led into the yard of the director’s home, a little bigger than the rest. Some ghostly cattle lifted their heads as we passed, and a tiny donkey stirred.
I had imagined the directors of such places to be heartless engineers of statistics, beleaguered by quotas and corruption. But instead, a bespectacled peasant with a long, gentle face emerged to greet us in his pyjamas. His hair fell lank over a narrow forehead, and gold teeth gleamed in his smile. He did not believe, at first, that I was British. ‘I think my brother is joking,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’re an Estonian.’ But thereafter, from time to time, he would gaze at me with a distant, amazed affection at my visit, and murmured ‘English, English . . .’ and shook his long head, and said: ‘I’m sorry for the poverty here. We have nothing. Everything’s very hard. I’m so sorry.’
We had surprised him supping on hardened bread and green tea. A naked bulb dangled from the reed thatch, leaking shadow round walls of mud and straw, which he could not afford to whitewash. Against one wall was a clay stove that only gave out smoke, he said, it was useless even in this cold; and fifteen years before, his wife had brought with her two painted marriage chests, which stood in one corner.
As we settled on the felt carpets, his eldest son came in with a basin, towel and ewer, and knelt while I washed my hands; and little by little the whole family assembled round in biblical formality. Two daughters fluttered in, then vanished, and a row of small sons squatted before me and gaped.
‘They’ve never seen a foreigner before,’ the director said.
At once I had an attack of ambassadorial nerves. The boys scrutinised my every movement with bright or stunned eyes. I clamped my lips over my gap-tooth, and offered them sweets. Their fingers wrenched together or plucked at their toes. I became as jittery as they. I was suddenly embodying not only Britain, but the whole Western world. Whatever I did – if I scowled or dribbled or picked my teeth – that was what the West did.
Their mother darted in barefoot and arranged quilts and cushions. She was dark-eyed and handsome, but life had spun her fine. From her flowery dress poked out wafer-thin ankles and long, sinewy hands. Her husband teased her as she worked: ‘She’s old, she’s slow, she can’t do a thing any more’, and she bustled and laughed at him, banking cushions round us.
Kakajan, meanwhile, sat beside me dismantling and repairing their tiny cooker, which looked rusted away. He had fallen into a quiet, solitary place as elder brother, respected and indefinably sad. Only now did he take off his trilby from flattened hair, which caressed his mahogany face in a shock of premature whiteness. After a long time the woman carried in a stew of apples, marrows and a little mutton, scalding in its oil. This had taken two hours to prepare, its ingredients gathered in panic from other houses. The children filtered away, one by one, and we three men ate alone – but it was bitter to eat what they could not afford.
Hospitality he
re could blind the traveller. Lulled by its traditional language, I used often to forget the squalor – sometimes the brutality – of my hosts’ lives, and think: these are a good and happy people. But in this desolate farm the signs were of a benign unity. They examined my passport incredulously, running their blackened fingernails along its crest. ‘Dieu et mon Droit Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requires ‘ The director gaped dumbly at its visas. ‘And I thought my brother was joking.’
Then mortification overtook him. ‘I am ashamed to be offering you so little. Our life here . . . . The land is hopeless. Even if we fulfil our quota, the government scarcely makes a return to us. We have no machinery. We gather everything by hand. And the cotton doesn’t grow properly – barely this high!’ He levelled his hand at knee-height.
I said: ‘Can’t you grow vegetables or fruit?’
‘The soil is too bad. It can’t bear it. You’ve seen it. It’s just salt.’
‘Salt,’ repeated Kakajan. ‘Everywhere.’
Yes, I said, I’d seen it. I had grown aware of it insidiously, as if it were the bitterness to which everything reduced: salt along the canal banks, salt in every hollow, salt crusting the fields, in the air, the water, the lungs. Legend ran that it was the dried tears of the despairing inhabitants.
I could understand now why the director looked hopeless, broken. All his defeat seemed compressed in his self-mocking mouth. ‘And you in England have everything. I’m sorry I’m ashamed, Mr Colin.’
I had heard that the fields could be rejuvenated by scraping off the saline topsoil and piling it up for the rain to leach. But the director shook his head. ‘Even the rain is salty here. I’ve seen it lie in pools after a fresh downpour, and when it evapo-rates, there’s salt. It’s because of the Aral Sea drying up. The clouds collect its vapours and deposit them here,’ He looked almost contrite, as if what was happening were his own doing. ‘So the clouds rain salt.’
‘The Aral will disappear one day,’ Kakajan said. ‘There used to be rest-houses and beaches there, but now you have to go farther every year if you want to find water at all. And the fish have almost gone, it’s so polluted, or they’re very small. When I was young, we used to catch monsters . . .’
It haunted their minds like a despair: the delicate Aral, withering to our north. All evils were attributed to it: from the whinging tears of their sick children to the changed weather-patterns. ‘The air has become cold,’ said Kakajan. ‘It never used to be like this.’
Already a hundred years ago the sea was so shallow that nomads waded with their cattle to an island eight miles from the shore, and a strong wind might blow the waters back from its bed for as far as the eye could reach. But now the two great rivers feeding it were being bled away down networks of canals, seeping and wasting. More than half its water was gone, and the main port lay stranded sixty miles from its edge.
‘There’s no future here,’ Kakajan said. ‘People in this region get everything, Mr Colin. Skin rashes, stomach problems, problems with hearing and sight. My brother, too. His eyes are failing now.’
The director dropped a sad smile. ‘I can see during the day, but not at night, I don’t know why.’ He took off his thick-rimmed spectacles and his eyes shrivelled. ‘And now even in the day it’s getting hard. Everything’s blurred at the sides. I can only see straight in front of me.’
He turned to me to test them, and I imagined myself suddenly at the antipodes of his fogged tunnel, and smiled at him. ‘The doctors can’t do much,’ he said, ‘and the mullahs only pray. Nobody can prevent the salt. All our water is contaminated with it.’ He laughed cynically and picked up his bowl of tea. ‘Now let’s drink!’
Then, as if hunting for someone to toast, I enquired after Kakajan’s family. I should have known better. No man voluntarily wanders his country homeless here. Instantly his face became hard – like the intensification of a hurt which had been there all the time – and fixed the floor without speaking. ‘It was in a road accident,’ the director said. ‘The car overturned. My brother lost his wife and only son.’
Kakajan remained motionless. I found nothing to say, only placed my hand on his knee while his brother pulled a dutah from its cover, and began to play. So this, I thought, was why Kakajan led his mendicant life, passing from brother to sister, or sitting with the mullah like a mercantile gypsy in his shiny hat and boots, always a guest, surrounded by other men’s children, making himself useful. The dutah whined and twanged. The director was agile-fingered, but would not sing. The notes arose as if from far away, miniature and lonely, like distillations of fuller and more passionate sounds being played somewhere else. The director smiled at my listening with a loose-lipped smile and heavy eyes, and shook his head a little, while Kakajan sat upright, his palms lifted on his knees as though praying, and the night wore on.
We slept in a row on the floor. For a while, in darkness, the brothers conversed in the soft, disconnected voices of people who lie close but cannot see one another.
Once I said to Kakajan: ‘At least you have a family of brothers and sisters . . . .’ The words floated bodiless in the night.
He murmured stoically: ‘Yes. Many.’
At last their voices blurred into sleep, and I lay listening to silence. Out of the thatch a few insects dropped metallically on to my hair, and I brushed them away until I slept.
In the grey morning Kakajan was contemplating something, sitting bolt upright with his trilby set whimsically on his head. This soiled hat, and the black eyes shifting beneath it, dissolved his melancholy to an entrepreneurial watchfulness. We ate the hard bread together, with some tasteless jam. His brother had already gone. After a long silence of considering, he said: ‘Mr Colin, would it be possible for me to accompany you to Nukus?’
‘Of course.’ Nukus was the capital of the Karakalpakia region where I was going. (It turned out grim and characterless.)
Silence. Then: ‘Mr Colin, would it be possible for me to accompany you back to Novi Urgench too?’
‘Yes it would be possible, but perhaps boring for you.’
‘I will not be bored,’ he smiled sadly. ‘I have today free, and tomorrow free . . . .’
Guiltily I thought of this life, and agreed. Perhaps to him any companion was better than none, and I had the novelty of foreignness, and seemed kindly. But after another pause, in which his fingers curled no longer prayerful on his knees, his sun-blackened face looked up and said: ‘I have a brother in Novi Urgench who collects dollars. He needs them for a car he wants to buy. Mr Colin, if I was to accompany you to Novi Urgench, could you perhaps afford
‘I need all my dollars,’ I said, with the traveller’s ruthlessness. The idea of this nagging presence suddenly palled. I could not tell what he was thinking. The mournful widower was fading in my mind, and somebody more resourceful and sly was emerging.
He said neutrally: ‘Then I will accompany you to the bus station.’
I parted from the family with a sense of desertion. The older daughters appeared suddenly at my going, then disappeared in embarrassment, leaving their mother to wave farewell from an undertow of small sons whose future nobody knew.
At the bus compound, where I prepared to take the long road through Nukus to Bukhara, Kakajan said: ‘The bus drivers always cheat you. Give me three hundred roubles and I’ll bargain. He won’t cheat me.’
Five minutes later he gave me back a ticket and a pitiful handful of notes, and it was obvious what he had done. I forgave him without speaking, a little sadly. He had almost nothing. But now his burnished head wobbled and shone on its neck like a sunflower in delight, and his eyes poured out something like love to me. I had covertly given him perhaps a week’s wages. ‘Oh Mr Colin! It’s been so . . . oh . . . .’ Then he could not resist asking this inexplicable foreigner: ‘When you get back to England, could you send dollars to me?’
I said: ‘Only through Ashkhabad. Then they’d be stolen.’
His face fell, but recovered as I clambered into
the bus. ‘Goodbye, Mr Colin. Really, you . . . .’ He wanted to thank me, but could not. ‘I’m so very glad we met!’ And the next moment he was gone.
But a few minutes later, as my bus lumbered into the street on its way north-east, we overtook him. Jaunty in his dented hat, he was prancing along the roadside, counting my money.
Chapter 6
Samarkand
By early May I was moving east from Bukhara through a land gentling into fertility, among villages of whitewashed clay, towards Samarkand. At last the deserts and plateaux which glare for a thousand miles east of the Caspian were falling away, and I was following a river basin towards the foothills of the Pamir. Behind me the Bukhara oasis paled into fields where the water sidled green along thinned canals. In scattered villages the only signs read ‘Shop’ or ‘Baths’ or ‘Food’ in the heartless Russian way. They looked like frontier-posts. Black cattle plodded across wastelands slung with pylons and telegraph poles. Once or twice the arch of a ruined mosque appeared, or a minaret stood in emptiness.
My bus crashed through the conurbation of Navoi. Hot-water pipes swarmed across its scrub, and its rundown factories throbbed and retched unabashed, as if still trumpeting Socialism. The effluent that had poisoned children, orchards and livestock all over the republic, and filled its water with sulphates and aluminium waste, blackened the sky from an antiquated sprawl of chemical plants and power stations. The air reeked.
The next moment we were out in the bleakness of cotton-fields, but now tractors were trawling them in plumes of dust, and there unwound along the road a feel of leisured and untidy life. Orchards thickened. Under wind-breaking belts of trees the banks had turned green, and cows were grazing in the ditches. The horizon ahead of us hoisted faint, sky-coloured hills.
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