The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

‘You be careful in Samarkand,’ said the man beside me. ‘Bukhara’s a quiet town, but they’re violent in Samarkand. They all live on the black market.’ He was old and he came, of course, from Bukhara. ‘Everything’s getting worse. Our people are changing. Young people don’t work any more, and nobody can afford anything. You watch out . . .’

  On my other side a Russian geologist was making for Tashkent with his two children. Among these dark people his blondness turned him raw and guileless. His upper lip let fall a Viking moustache. For years he had worked excavating gas in the south, he said, and his Uzbek friends had begged him to stay. But the future was too uncertain, and he was heading for the Ukraine. ‘I’ve never been out of Central Asia before.’ He was gazing at it through the window in passionless farewell. His children lay against him, fair and sleepy, with bubblegum dry on their mouths. ‘My wife’s Ukrainian, and I’ll work there as a labourer, just to stay alive. I’ll build a house, and give my boys a future.’

  Around us the hills were starting to squeeze the valley, while a sharp wind curdled the unsown fields. We were following the arc of a river which trickled down from its high glacier in the western Pamir. The flecks of gold which sparkle uselessly in its water lent it the name Zerafshan, ‘the gold-strewer’, and even the ancient Greeks knew it as Polytimetus, ‘very precious’. A hundred years ago, travellers described orchards blossoming all along its course: almond, peach, blue plum, cherry, fig and apple, and the finest apricots and nectarines in Asia.

  Now the trees were split by vast cotton-fields, and the river meandered through its shallows to our north, depleted by irrigation-canals. Sometimes last year’s cotton harvest still bulged in hills above the yards of collective farms. It had been the hope and bane of the whole country: cotton. A hundred years ago the Russians introduced an American species, and the Soviets rushed into its expansion, increasing the yield per acre by almost two-thirds. They became the largest cotton producer in the world. Moscow bought it cheap and raw from Central Asia, and turned it into clothes.

  Under Brezhnev, who rose to the presidency from his power-base here, the corruption of local officials grew outlandish. The routine inflation of statistics, and the diversion of cotton on to the black market, poured subsidies into the lap of the Uzbek supremo Rashidov. Some of his henchmen ruled like feudal lords, with their own estates, prisons and concubines. The mafia embezzled more than five thousand million pounds in fifteen years. Only after Brezhnev’s death did a spy satellite by chance photograph vacant fields where cotton should have been, and the more flagrant mafiosi were brought to trial in a welter of executions, suicides and imprisonments.

  Meanwhile, the cotton itself was failing. Deep-rooted and thirsty, it was leaching the soil and the rivers, and growing feebler. Defoliants and pesticides were spreading disease among the harvesters: cancers, anaemia and hepatitis. Infant mortality rose. Only now, gradually, were people starting to talk of imposing limits and diversifying crops.

  ‘Rashidov’s still a hero to these people,’ the Russian said. ‘He cheated Moscow. He even built football stadiums with some of the money. They love that.’

  ‘Samarkand’ conjures no earthly city. It is a heart-stealing sound. Other capitals of Islam – Cairo, Damascus, Istanbul – glow with an accessible, Mediterranean magnificence. But Samarkand inhabits only the edge of geography. It rings with a landlocked strangeness, and was the seat of an empire so remote in its steppe and desert that it only touched Europe to terrify it. For centuries after it slept under obscurity, it shimmered in people’s imagination. It was the fantasy of Goethe and Handel, Marlowe and Keats, yet its reality was out of reach. Even in the famous verse of the diplomat-poet Flecker, who travelled no farther east than Syria, its merchants took the golden road as if to a perilous mystery.

  Over an ocean of fields and half-connected townlets, my bus made landfall at last in a nondescript depot, but I glimpsed to the east the surge and glitter of another city, circled by snow-lit mountains. For the last few miles I approached it sentimentally, on foot. I went through motley suburbs and an upthrust of flat-blocks and public buildings. A mountainous statue of Lenin was in place in a jaded square, where the slogans still bleated unread from the rooftops: ‘The affairs of the world are in the hands of the people.’

  From these surburban heights there opened below me a flotsam of red and grey rooftops – tin and asbestos wreckage floating on a swell of trees – studded with turquoise domes and minarets. Beyond them a long spine of snow-peaks glimmered with an unearthly radiance, and seemed to mark some ancient protection.

  I went down through lorry-clogged streets. The way became sordid and ramshackle. A new harshness was in the air. An old man was praying among rose-beds on a traffic island, but had forgotten the direction of Mecca. Then, rounding a corner where buses clamoured under a flyover, I saw above me a sheaf of shattered domes and pinnacles. It started up in intermingling fawns and blues, as if a whole secret city had died within the modern one. Even in decay, it was huger than anything around it. The stubs of its entrance-gate and spring of broken arches hung above the lower town as if in another ether. It was the mosque of Bibi Khanum, built by Tamerlane the Great.

  I circled it in purposeful delay, past big, dim shops down avenues of plane and chestnut trees. The people looked rougher, more secular, than in Bukhara. The city was more expansive, less uniform. The wreckage of its past hovered close against its present. While Bukhara had been a warren of obscurantism, Samarkand still owned the ghostly structures of an imperial capital.

  Round its old market square, the Registan, three medresehs ranked in near-perfect symmetry. It was almost deserted. Once the centre of the world, it was now the centre of nothing. Even foreign sightseers had gone. Over the bare flagstones where I went, its enclosing majesty broke like a flood. In each of the three façades, a mammoth iwan made a gulf of shadow, and was flanked by walls tiered with shallow bays. Gate for gate, minaret for minaret, they echoed and confirmed one another. They overbore the square with an institutional solemnity, sureties of royal power and the immutability of God. To the Western eye the minarets, whose flattened tops were under-hung with honeycomb decoration, conjured stout Corinthian columns supporting nothing. Earthquake had set them leaning with a crazed, plastic ease, which had teased nineteenth-century travellers into theorising and dropping plumb-lines from them, and never quite believing it.

  The tilework of their façades does not drench the eye in a faience curtain like the mosques of contemporary Persia, but splashes the brick with cool, rather cerebral designs. The colours were familiar: grape blue, turquoise, wax yellow. The buff brick interknit and sobered them. Only here and there did a ceramic frieze blaze out complete. Beneath the entrance to the fifteenth-century Ulug Beg medreseh, the oldest of the three, some of the panels resembled lustrous carpets, and across the iwan of the seventeenth-century Shir Dar a pair of heretical lions chased white does across a field of flowers.

  The doors still swung over polished thresholds, but when I entered the courts the only noise was birdsong. In the arcades the student cells had been locked behind their doors for decades. Some peasant women were wandering bemused over the flagstones. They followed me listlessly about. For religious students the treasures of these courts must have been the beautiful ribbons of Arabic script – always pure white against peacock blue – which overswept the arches of the iwans or rippled beneath their vaults. But I could not read them. Their Kufic epigraphy seemed locked away in some exquisite battle with itself.

  Yet it is in these courtyards, too, that the illusion of the square evaporates. Here, suddenly, I was backstage. The grandiloquent façades, I now saw, were little more than that: an overbearing theatre-set. They had no depth. Their backs were only lightly decorated, or not at all. Their duty was over. These were not shapes to be viewed in the round, but bullying stage-flats which loomed over the square below in heady propaganda.

  Some deadness of restoration, too, shadows all this with emptiness. The Soviets found th
e Registan collapsing, and began to repair it with the same diligence as they bestowed on their czarist palaces in the west. Here a dome was reconstructed wholesale, there a minaret jacked upright; while over every dilapidated surface swept a meticulous veneer of new tiles and bricks. The interior of the central mosque, in particular, is mesmerising. From the centre of its ceiling, in spectacular trompe l’oeil, a shower of gilded leaves and flowers radiates down a dark blue sky, while the vault above the mihrab unfurls a fan of stalactites in coral and gold.

  Only when I entered the medreseh of Ulug Beg did I realise what had been lost. He was the most attractive of the grandsons of Tamerlane, a scientist and astronomer who urged his pupils into secular learning. Here, in a courtyard more intimate than the others, the original decoration was still in place. It kept a subtle, broken beauty. The jigsaw of its tiles was shedding pieces everywhere, fragments easing loose from their ornamental whole, petals dropping, tendrils breaking. But for the moment it was suspended in a sweet opulence of decay. Its threatened restoration was necessary, of course; but something vital would disappear for ever. These bricks and tiles betrayed by their ageing that they belonged to the first creation: to the piety and flare of their conceivers, not to the duty of a later time. They belonged with the past. Even if the restoration were identical (and some of it is suspect) its purposes would be modern, and would leave the imagination cold.

  I wondered what would happen now that Soviet rule had ended. Such mammoth reconstructions would perhaps stop, or go forward more cautiously, piecemeal. I sat for a while under the arcades, and thought ungratefully of this, while the birds were screaming in the courtyard trees, and the tiles silently, unnotice-ably, were easing from their plaster and dropping into dust.

  Inflation and instability were on everybody’s lips. Everyone feared the future. In the streets the drab men and high-coloured women coalesced into crowds which consorted only asexually, men with men in shoulder-hugging embraces, women sauntering together with linked arms. Tajik-speakers, their faces yet showed every permutation between the Turanian and Iranian worlds; blunt features and eagle features, full mouths and tight.

  In the government emporia, where bags of rusks, noodles and bottled fruit were stacked, almost nobody lingered. Everywhere, free markets were stirring. Yet even in the central bazaar there was no bustle, but a cautious, ambling passage in which an hour might pass in the purchase of a few carrots. It was oddly quiet. Farmers heaped their rented stalls with pomegranates, radishes, mounds of liquid cheese. But nobody had any money, and every quoted price elicited hissing and upturned noses. In the courtyard stood a blank-faced giant with a Chaplin moustache. Stripping his shirt from a massive beer-gut, he lay down sacrificially under a pair of planks while a bus drove over him, then got up again, still expressionless, and circulated a money-can.

  He was fuller employed than many. The pavements were dark with knots of loitering youths. They were the new unemployed, and there were over a million of them in the country. They wore T-shirts inscribed ‘New York’ or ‘Chanel’. If I were carrying my rucksack, they would eye it like psychopaths. They thought I was Estonian. ‘Didn’t you bring anything to sell?’ they demanded. They tried to work me out. ‘Why are you here?’ If I were seated somewhere, one of them would be sure to perch beside me like a shrike and nudge my knee or jolt my shoulder with every question, as if I had to be tormented into answering.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  Wearily: ‘Britain.’

  ‘How is your life there? Do you get plenty to eat?’

  ‘Yes.’ I would remember, as if down a long tunnel, a race obsessed with slimming and cholesterol.

  ‘How much do you earn?’ Prod. ‘How much is meat?’ Prod. ‘How much is a car?’ Bang on shoulder. ‘Will you get me a visa to Britain? How much . . .? How much . . .?’

  Affectionately I would recall the old men in mosque courtyards, who greeted one another with a sober hand on the heart, and with only dignified enquiry. Then I would remember remorsefully that these youths, with their lost past and precarious future, their restless eyes and talk of dollars, lived in a new void, and what did I expect of them? On and on the inquisitors would nag, while I halved or quartered my income and tried to explain a world of tax and mortgage. But nothing stopped them. My prodded knee would become psychosomatically inflamed. So would my temper. And however shrivelled my earnings or qualified my answers, this dialogue always left cupidity glittering in the hard young eyes.

  ‘They don’t believe in working. They don’t produce. They just buy and sell things.’ The stale complaint slurred on the Russian’s lips. He was peering at the announcement of a dog auction to be held in the Spartak football stadium. ‘And they’re getting more nationalistic by the minute. But how do you leave here?’ He gazed at me with the smeared eyes of the perpetually drunk, and the uninvited monologue. His fingers were ochreous with nicotine. ‘I’ve been here all my life. My father was killed in the battles round Smolensk during the war, and this is my mother . . . .’ She was staring vacantly at the market. ‘She’s never known anywhere but here. We’ve nowhere to go in Russia. Her and me, it’s too late for us . . . . I haven’t enough left.’ His orange finger-tips trailed over the notice. ‘We’ll die here.’

  The old woman shuffled up beside us, her face withdrawn inside a tattered shawl. ‘What are you saying?’ she piped. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘We’re talking about the dog auction.’ She drifted away again. ‘Look at her. She’s already ending her days. But what do we do? We have no homeland now.’

  So he was buying a dog.

  Watching his creased face, I realised how deeply my concept of the Russians had changed. Suddenly everything which they had achieved here – in education, welfare, administration, however corrupt and limited – was threatening to collapse. The old, bullying propaganda – the Marxist invocations to work and unity – all at once looked like benign common sense, a plea for the future. The familiar certainties were in retreat. Russian arts – literature, music, ballet – which had once seemed the treacherous tools of colonialism, now resembled instead the rearguard of a gracious civilisation, fading away before my eyes.

  Even the Soviet sops to local custom had changed. Not a moment ago, it seemed, the oriental street-lamps, the tulip domes above restaurants and police-posts – even the mock-Islamic latticework in the tourist hotels – had sent up a sinister smokescreen behind which a people’s heart was being stolen away. Now, instead, these kitsch concessions seemed innocently integral to local life, like a lifted curse.

  Only plastic tiles coated my restaurant, whose floor was littered with crusts and fish-bones. Beggars limped from table to table. They had torn coats and split boots. They hovered above the tables as if no one was sitting there, picking at the customers’ bread and drinking their tea, while the conversation went on obliviously below. As I left, one of them shambled over to my place and emptied my bowl of its mutton-bones.

  I went out into the ruins of the Bibi Khanum, feeling an obscure self-reproach. Even in desolation the mosque seemed to tower out of an era more fortunate than my own (but this was an illusion). Tamerlane had built it as the greatest temple in Islam. Thousands of captured artisans from Persia, Iraq and Azerbaijan had laboured to carve its marble floors, glaze its acres of tiles, erect its monster towers and the four hundred cupolas bubbling over its galleries. The emperor flailed its building for-ward. He considered too small the gateway completed in his absence, pulled it down wholesale, hanged its architects and began again. But the mountainous vaults and minarets which he envisioned crushed the foundations, and the walls started to fracture almost before completion. People became afraid to pray there. It towered above me in a megalomaniac reverie, raining the sky with blistered arches and severed domes. Cracks pitched and zigzagged down the walls. Tiles flaked off like skin. The gateway loomed so high that the spring of its vanished arch began eighty feet above me, and completed itself phantasmally in empty air. Gaping breaches had spl
it the prayer-hall top to bottom, and the squinches were shedding whole bricks.

  Everything – the thunderous minarets, the thirty-foot doors, the outsize ablutions basin – shrunk the visitor to a Lilliputian intruder, and peopled the mosque with giants. In the court’s centre a megalithic lectern of grey Mongolian marble had once cradled a gargantuan Koran, but its indestructability, and perhaps its isolation in the mosque’s wrecked heart, had touched it with pagan mana now, and it had become the haunt of barren women, who crouched beneath it as a charm for fertility.

  As I sat nearby, three young worldlings, urban and confident in high heels and tight skirts, went giggling and nudging towards it. Their shrieks rang in the ruins. Then, separately, they dropped on all fours and crawled in and out between the lectern’s nine marble legs. At first they ridiculed one another at this place where fun and superstition merged. But once unseen by their companions, creeping through the marble labyrinth, an unease descended. Covertly they touched their palms to its stone. One of them kissed it. Then they emerged, straightening their stockings, and tripped away.

  Sitting by a mosque under silver poplars, Tania had inherited the gross, maternal look of Russian peasant women in poor lands. Her ginger hair dangled corkscrews round a slovenly, vegetable face, whose nose and eyes had capsized in the fatness of her cheeks. We had fallen into conversation by chance, and only as we walked together under the trees did she start to surprise me. She pointed out the grave of a Naqshbandi statesman, which stood still honoured on its mound. It was unlike a Russian to know this history, and I glanced at her in puzzlement. ‘I’m married to a Moslem,’ she said.

  She looked so rooted in the earth of her own people that I blurted out: ‘Isn’t that difficult?’

  ‘It’s always difficult.’ She stopped and contemplated the calligraphy on the gravestone, as if it might yield a solution. ‘Moslem men are more patriarchal than us. But I don’t fight with mine. He manages the money, I manage the house. But he’s a wonderful cook!’ She gave a hoarse, burbling laugh. ‘Yes, I boss him a bit. I’ve stayed independent. That’s why I understand my cat.’