The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Yet at heart he was a nomad. He moved between summer and winter pastures with his whole court and horde. Even at Samarkand he usually pavilioned in the outskirts, or in one of the sixteen gardens he spread round the city: watered parks with ringing names. Each garden was different. In one stood a porcelain Chinese palace; another glowed with the saga of his reign in lifelike frescoes, all long vanished; yet another was so vast that when a workman lost his horse there it grazed unfound for six months.

  In such playgrounds were held the fêtes champêtres witnessed by the Castilian envoy Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo. At the wedding of six royal princes (including the eleven-year-old Ulug Beg) he described how 20,000 tents covered the meadows near Samarkand for a month. The central pavilion alone accommodated 10,000 guests. Its forty-foot mountain of silk cascaded from a dome woven with eagles, billowed down above 500 vermilion guy-ropes, then reared up again to turrets crested with silk battlements. In the banqueting tents a gluttonous feasting and drinking took hold. Enormous leather platters were dragged in, heaped with sheep’s heads, horse-croupes and tripe in balls the size of a man’s fist. After one such feast came a ceremonial presentation of gifts, and Clavijo writes with pride that his Spanish tapestries were outshone only by the Egyptian delegation’s presentation of nine ostriches and a giraffe. The city’s guilds threw themselves into sumptuous displays of ingenuity. The linen-weavers constructed an armoured horseman in pure linen, ‘even to the nails and eyelids’, while the cotton-workers erected a hundred-foot minaret in flax, crowned by a cotton stork. The butchers dressed up animals as humans; the furriers disguised humans as wild beasts.

  But among the tents, in black warning, there dangled from gallows the bodies of the mayor of Samarkand and the emirs who had bungled the gateway of the Bibi Khanum mosque, with the corpses of merchants who had overpriced their wares.

  At last, as the autumn nights darkened towards winter, Tamerlane ordered the tents rolled up and turned his ageing eyes towards the richest quarry remaining: China. With an army quarter of a million strong, he marched north towards the Jaxartes valley, planning to strike east with the first hint of spring. But the winter was the coldest in memory. The rivers froze and blizzards howled out of Siberia. Men, horses, camels, elephants struggled through deepening drifts. ‘Seared by the cold,’ wrote Tamerlane’s Arab biographer, ‘men’s noses and ears fell off. They froze to death as they rode . . . . Yet Tamerlane cared not for their dying, nor grieved for those who had fallen.’

  Soon after they reached their base-camp, the emperor fell into a shivering sickness. Wine laced with spices and hot drugs had no effect, so his doctors laid ice-packs on his chest and head, until he coughed up blood. Then they despaired. ‘We know of no cure for death,’ they said. Towards nightfall, while a thunder-storm raged outside, Tamerlane called together his family and emirs, and appointed his successor. Then to the sound of imams’ chanting in the neighbouring room, and the crashing of the tem-pest, the monster died.

  He was buried in Samarkand in the mausoleum which he had prepared for his favourite grandson, dead of wounds two years before. The college and hospice which once enclosed it have been effaced by earthquake, and it rises alone among alleys intimate with mulberry trees, whose fruit crunched underfoot at my approach. Its courtyard gate stood up in fragile solitude. Ruins made a phantom geometry inside. Amongst them a marble platform, carved with flower-tendrils, had been the coronationstone of the emirs of Bukhara.

  But beyond this, above a façade to which broken minarets and a few tiles stuck, a ribbed dome swelled like the calyx of an unearthly flower. Chance had stripped bare everything around it, so that it floated pure above a high drum, on which ‘God is Immortal’ blazed in white Kufic letters as tall as a man. Above this, a belt of recessed corbels lifted the dome through its faint but seductive swelling towards the elliptic. It was a dome peculiar to Central Asia, grooved like a cantaloup melon. Up each of its faience ribs, against an aquamarine field, went diamond lozenges in lapis blue. I had seen it in picture books as a child, redolent of desert farness.

  I crossed the courtyard and found myself in a bare passageway. At its end, on either side of a low door, hung a broken Kufic frieze, huge, as if displaced from somewhere else. ‘This is the resting place of the Illustrious and Mercirul Monarch, the Magnificent Sultan, the most Mighty Warrior, Emir Timur Kurgan, Conqueror of all the Earth’ ran the original inscription; but it had gone.

  I peered through the doors and into the chamber. The latticed windows let in diffused sunbeams. High above me, across the whole summit of the dome, fanned a net of gilded stucco, which twined upon itself in mathematic delicacy. It dropped its golden creepers over the enormous spandrels, bays and pendentives, and shed a soft blaze of light on to everything below. Beneath it the walls were coated in alabaster – hexagonal tiles, still translu-cent – and circled by a jasper frieze carved with the deeds and genealogy of the emperor. Beneath this again, within the low balustrade at my feet, the cenotaphs of his family lay side by side in rectangular blocks of marble and alabaster. And at the centre, stark among their pallor, the grave of Tamerlane shone in a monolith of near-black jade. It was disconcertingly beautiful: the largest block of jade in the world. Its edges were lightly inscribed. A vertical split showed where Persian soldiers (it is thought) had hacked at it two and a half centuries before.

  I stayed here a long time, at once moved and unsettled. A man entered and prayed for a while, then went away. The cries of children sounded faintly outside. Under the decorated brilliance of the cupola, the simplicity of these gravestones was dignified and rather terrible: a recognition of the littleness even of this man, and the passage of time. Beside him lay his gentle son Shah Rukh; at his head, his minister; under a bay, his sheikh. His grandson Ulug Beg was at his feet. Others were gathered round.

  At last the young caretaker, pleased by my interest, ushered me out of the chamber and led me round the back of the mausoleum. He unlocked a tiny carved door. ‘Here is the real grave,’ he said.

  I descended a steep, ramped passage beneath the building. In the blackness I sensed the sweep of vaults low overhead. Somewhere behind me, the man turned a switch, and a bare bulb made a pool of dimness in the crypt. Each cenotaph in the chamber above was mirrored in this darkness by a flat gravestone. They lay secret in their dust and silence. The air was dry and old. I knelt by the emperor’s graveslab and touched it. Beneath, wrapped in linen embalmed in camphor and musk, his shrunken body had been laid in an ebony coffin. I could not imagine it. The living man was too vivid in my mind. For a year after his interment, it was said, people heard him howling from the earth.

  In the dull light I saw that every inch of the marble slab seethed with carved Arabic, as if even the words were waging a battle across his stone. They traced his ancestry back through Genghiz Khan (a claim he never made in life) to the legendary virgin Alangoa, ravished by a moonbeam, and at last to Adam.

  The stone was split clean across in two places; but when Soviet archaeologists opened it in 1941 they found undisturbed the skeleton of a powerful man, lame on his right side. Fragments of muscle and skin still clung to him, and scraps of a russet moustache and beard. An untraceable story warned that if Tamerlane’s grave was violated, disaster would follow, and a few hours later news arrived that Hitler had invaded Russia.

  But the investigations went on, and from the emperor’s skull the Soviet scientist Gerasimov painstakingly reconstructed a bronze portrait-head, before sealing Tamerlane back in the tomb. Under the sculptor’s hands there emerged a face of hardened power, compassionless, bitter and subtle. Perhaps some Slavic prejudice heightened the epicanthic cruelty of the eyes; perhaps not. A hint of the emperor’s youthful truculence tinges the full lips, but that is all. Cord-like ligaments scoop the cheeks into harrowed triangles. Ancient muscles knot the cheeks, and a heraldic flexion of the brows seems to signal the sack of a city.

  ‘He was a hero,’ said a voice behind me. I jumped. The care-taker had entered noiselessl
y and was looking down at the tumult of calligraphy on the slab. ‘What a history!’

  ‘Perhaps he should have done less,’

  I said. ‘Less? No. Timur turned us into one country.’ He seemed lighthearted, but a reticent evangelism tinged him. ‘Yes, he was cruel, I know. People come to this grave from Iran and Afghanistan and they hate him. They say, “He destroyed our land, he enslaved us!” And of course it’s true. He smashed Isfahan and Baghdad.’ He smiled charmingly. ‘He was ruthless.’

  I said: ‘Ulug Beg might be a better hero for your nation.’ My eyes drifted affectionately over his graveslab. It was richly inscribed too.

  The caretaker laughed. The sound made a soft insult in the silence. ‘He was only a teacher.’ He squatted beside me above the stones. ‘But Timur was world-class! If I was an Iranian, I’d hate him too!’ He was laughing at himself a little; after all, it was long ago. ‘But Timur was not a savage. He knew about Alexander of Macedon, and the slave leader Spartacus and . . . .’

  ‘Spartacus?’ This was a Soviet cult leftover. ‘Did he?’

  ‘ . . . and he’d read the great Persian poet Firdausi, who claimed that the Iranians were natural rulers and the Turks were natural slaves.’ He cocked his head at the gravestone, as if trying to read that tremendous obituary. ‘Our two worlds have always been at war. And when Timur overran Persia and came to Firdausi’s tomb he shouted: “Stand up! Look at me! A Turk in the heart of your empire! You said we were slaves, but look now!’”

  His words rang in the dark. We both fancied, I think, that the dead were listening. He glowed with vicarious triumph. Tamerlane for him was the unifier and recreator of his notional fatherland, of the Pan-Turkic dream. He said: ‘The Persians were here once, you see. You’ve been to Afrasiab? You’ve seen those Sogdian paintings, Persian things? They were our conquerors.’

  ‘Those paintings are extraordinary . . .’

  ‘So Timur avenged us. He created a Turkish empire!’ His voice had whetted into a funeral oration. He had the northerner’s scorn for the soft, dark people of the south. ‘He’s our hero.’

  I said: ‘But he was a Mongol.’

  ‘No, Timur was not a Mongol, he was a Turk.’

  I stayed silent. Everyone was claiming Tamerlane now. Uzbeks and even Tajiks whom I met would debonairly enrol him in their nations. In fact Tamerlane had been a pure Mongol of the Barlas clan, infected by Turkic customs. But this pedantry could not staunch the caretaker’s sense of ownership or belonging.

  ‘I may be an Uzbek,’ he said, ‘but above all I am a Turk. Most people have forgotten their tribes now, but I know my father was a Kungrat, my mother a Mangit – these are Turkic tribes.’

  ‘They’re Uzbek tribes too.’

  ‘But you can’t feel Uzbek.’ He was losing the infant Uzbek nation in a Turkic sea. ‘Look at our ancestors! We have Navoi, we have Mirkhwand, we have . . . .’ His list spilt into the unknown for me. In fact his people were ethnically too complex to shelter under any name. Even his Turkic umbrella was full of Persian holes. The hero of Uzbek literature, the fifteenth-century Timurid poet Navoi, had written of Uzbeks only to disparage them. Yet his name and image were as ubiquitous in Uzbekistan as Makhtumkuli’s in Turkmenistan. Young in their state, Uzbeks and Tajiks were suddenly annexing poets or scientists out of the past, steeping their nation in the magic of great men. The Tajiks were even appropriating Saadi and Omar Khayyám, any Persian at all. To challenge such claims was to wander an ethnic labyrinth until the concept of a country became meaningless.

  The caretaker got to his feet, still reeling off names, and we started to return up the passageway. ‘ . . . And we have Timur!’

  He switched off the sad bulb and locked the narrow door behind us. In the sanity of daylight he relented a little. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘occasionally somebody does feel quite strongly “I’m an Uzbek”’ – he feebly thumped his chest – ‘but you don’t hear it much.’

  We walked round the mausoleum in the sun. Some ease and lightness had returned to us. Uzbek independence had freed him into pride, he said, instead of condemning him to some Slavic sub-species. ‘Of course I’m pleased by it. Everyone I know is pleased. You’ve found some not? Well, those are the uneducated.’ He spoke the word without regret. ‘Some people don’t know what to feel. They can’t see beyond their faces. They just know that things are bad now. But I’m thinking of my children, and the world they’ll grow into. I want it to be their own.’

  We stopped at the mouth of a shaft descending through grilles beneath the sanctuary. When I set my eye to it, I descried grey rectangles suspended far down in the blackness, and realised that I was gazing into the crypt. It was a vent for whispered prayers. I straightened and moved away, shaking off the notion that some dreadful authority lingered in those shreds of gristle and calcium under the stone.

  The man went on eagerly: ‘How can anyone regret the Soviet Union falling to bits? They bled us. In the old days they gave us five kopeks for a kilo of cotton. Just five kopeks. One factory in Russia used to make two shirts out of a kilo and sell them for forty roubles each. Moscow said we were partners, but what kind of partnership is that?’ He clasped my hand in illustration. ‘Partnership should mean friendship, shouldn’t it?’ We had circled the building now, and the handclasp turned into farewell. As I walked back across the courtyard, his shouted optimisms followed me to the gate. ‘Enjoy our country! Everything will get better!’

  Above him the great dome made a lonely tumour above the ogre-king.

  Chapter 7

  To the White Palace

  I wandered one Sunday morning among suburbs blooming with chestnut trees, where birds sang in the unaccustomed stillness. All around clustered those brick cottages which seem to cover the old Soviet empire in petrified log huts. It might have been a suburb of Novgorod or Oryol. But nobody was about. In front of me a brick cathedral thrust up its gaudy spire where the bells had hung silent for seventy years. In the aftermath of perestroika a few women in bedsocks and slippers were begging near the entrance, and now the belfry sent up a hesitant, rusty clanking.

  Inside, where a congregation of a thousand might have worshipped, some eighty faithful stood in broken ranks. Old women cowled in headscarves, with a few children and lanky young men, they belonged in the Belorussian fields, not here in the heart of Asia. But they kissed and embraced each other as they ambled among the icons, and slowly a feel of family security brewed up. This, after all, was their transposed homeland: the mystical body of Christ, where the massed contingents of saints, Church fathers and attendant angels – the whole hierarchy of Orthodox holiness – mounted the walls and pillars in arcs of candle-flame. Across the iconostasis they unfurled their white wings and fingered blessings. St Basil the Great, St Nicholas, St Theodore, St George on his white charger – their Slavic eyes and brandished swords and books encircled the faithful with the comfort of an immemorial truth.

  But my heart sank. The people looked beleaguered. Their singing quavered and whined in the void. A few acolytes in pale violet drifted back and forth like disconsolate angels, and in the balcony a little choir set up a shrill, heartbreaking chant, whose verses lifted and died away like an old, repeated grief. Beneath them, where a verse should have come, the people seemed to let out a deep, collective sigh. They had survived the blows of Communism only to face nationalism and Islam, and they seemed now as remote to this land as the time when their saints were flesh, and God was in the world.

  Then the doors of the iconostasis burst open on a huge, gold-robed priest, who raised his arms in prayer. Where Western prelates beseech God with an alto sanctimoniousness, Russia turns out these booming giants who seem to understudy Him. The whole church at once filled up with a Chaliapin thunder, and the liturgy went forward in a deafening, homely pomp. As the incense spurted from the thurible, each sweep of the priest’s arm could have felled a tree. The coals grated and the sweet smoke rose. A domestic balm descended on the worshippers. All was familiar, theirs, right. From
time to time one of the old women would trundle away to kiss a saint or calm a baby or top up an oil lamp. But she would return to cross herself again and again, while the groves of candles blossomed beneath favourite icons.

  Meanwhile the processions of the gold-embossed Gospel and the elevated Sacrament, swollen on the voice of the priest, brought on a fresh flurry of self-blessings, and at last the silver Eucharist spoon, dipped into the chalice beneath a scarlet napkin, administered the body and blood of Christ like a wholesome medicine. Even I felt a sense of remission. For this hour, at least, all seemed well among the dwindling faithful, as they and the priest and the dim-lit saints watched and nurtured one another into the unknown future.

  It was Tania, married to a Moslem, who had told me about the cathedral, where she sometimes prayed alone. I had kept her address in my pocket for days, but now I pulled it out and it pointed me down streets where pastel façades cloaked a motley of dwellings behind. I peered through her gates into a bedraggled courtyard. Four shabby cottages with lean-tos and padded doors confused me. Some half-washed stockings lay trampled by a tap. Somewhere the voice of a woman seared up in fury. Then a haggard youth emerged from a door and swivelled his back on me, smoking furiously at the sky. I glimpsed a woman in the window behind: a slackening face with high-painted cheeks. Her hair bunched above her head in an impertinent tuft.

  The next moment Tania came to a window opposite, and saw me. Her mouth opened in a soundless oval, and a second later her stout body was wrestling through the door-frame, and her ring-encrusted fingers patting my cheek. ‘You found us!’ She pulled me inside. ‘Ignore that woman!’ She slammed the door. ‘Half the men who come here are her clients.’ She stood before me in the cramped hall, trembling a little. Her high heels had been discarded for woolly bedsocks, and she looked squatter and coarser. ‘Prostitutes! I suppose there’ve always been such women. People without education or skills. So they do that.’