The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  She lived in a nest of chaotic warmth and colour. Her walls gushed scarlet draperies and shelves of disintegrating books. Cheap silver and Russian crystal crowded every surface, with Lithuanian dolls, Moldavian honey-pots and wooden dishes from the Urals. Orange hangings partitioned off the stove, yellow silks shone sluttishly over the bed. She tugged a curtain across the window – ‘Block out that woman!’ — and plunged me into the chair where she had been watching television across a tray littered with half-eaten biscuits. Then she mounded herself opposite me, glowing and disconcerted. The prostitute had shamed her. Her cat arched against my shins. ‘The system before the Revolution was better,’ she breathed, ‘when those women lived in brothels and carried yellow cards and everybody knew who they were.’ She was still quivering. ‘But there’s no law against them. They can carry on a business as they like. So they live among decent people and cause disruption.’

  ‘That happens everywhere,’ I said, to soothe her.

  ‘Does it, does it?’ She dropped her hand to her cat, which stalked away. She did not want to be driven from this house, she said.

  It stood in a region still called the Garden of the Winds, after a palace laid out by Tamerlane. She’d found fragments of old porcelain and glass in her vegetable patch, and liked to think they might have touched the monster’s lips.

  ‘In any case, where would I go? I’m rootless, like my cat.’ She laughed. ‘That’s what I like about her. You say “Come here” and she leaves you, like a man.’

  In all this she barely mentioned her husband, the elusive Moslem whose suits hung dowdily in a half-open cupboard. It occurred to me that they were not married. But she addressed the cat as if it understood, ending half her sentences with the saccharine diminutives of Russian sentiment. ‘Where would we go, my Katenka? Who would take us in, my little Katya, my Katooshka? . . . I’ve told you before not to walk on the table. Don’t you ever listen? . . . Yes, we have to stay here . . . .’

  ‘You won’t return to Russia?’ I noticed the icons above her bed. The cat had taken to chewing at the refrigerator door behind the curtain.

  ‘Return? I was never there.’ She fell into a frowning distress. ‘My parents were sent from Moscow to Tajikistan to teach. They didn’t ask to go. They had no option. But they gave their lives to it.’ She sounded angry. ‘They were dedicated, and their pupils loved them. And I too, I’ve taught here for thirty-three years. And suddenly this She stopped, perhaps challenging me to ask if her whole life, with her parents’ lives, had been poured into an abyss. I began: ‘So you feel . . . .’

  ‘Do you really want to know what I feel?’ she demanded. ‘Do you really?’ The anger flushed her cheeks into pink roundels. ‘Well, I feel humiliated. Humiliated.’ The ginger curls shook round her cheeks. ‘And betrayed.’

  I asked gently: ‘By the failure of Communism?’

  ‘No, by the failure of the Soviet Union. We could have demolished the Party but kept the Union. Why not? We gave people here so much. Why shouldn’t we go on? But now they’re saying Moscow bled them, and Moscow says Central Asia gave nothing back – and neither is true. But everybody’s showing his wounds now, shouting “Look at my damaged eye!” or “See this cut on my neck”, or “Look at my leg, I can’t stand!”’ She mimed these wounds in a stormy sadness. ‘It’s true we took their raw materials. But people like my parents gave everything to this land – it was a desert before – and now they’re saying it was all mistaken.’ Her body was shaking like a girl’s. ‘Yes, I feel debased.’

  Hers was the old, unfathomable belief in Russia’s holiness, in her civilising mission. It had been the bedrock of her dignity. Hers, too, was the inborn colonial expectation that people be grateful for what they had never requested. My own nation had made the same mistake. I said cruelly: ‘Moslems have a saying that your own country’s weeds are better than foreign wheat.’

  But Tania had stopped listening. She was inhabiting a timeless Russian theatre of self-pity and helplessness. Now that she did not want it, the cat had returned to her, and she plucked harshly, absently, at its coat in her distress. ‘And so we’re left with this . . . this nothing, overnight. Nobody should suffer that. If you want to move house, you first build another, don’t you? But instead we find ourselves without anywhere, the roof fallen in and the rain pouring through!’ Her laughter did not reach her mouth. She disgorged her feelings and swallowed them back simultaneously, savoured them almost, like a painful possession, in the mournful Slavic way. She seemed to be voicing what the old lady, Zelim Khan’s mother, would have voiced, had she been able.

  ‘We Russians don’t know what to believe in now,’ she said. ‘So we’re turning in to our families – that’s where our belief goes now, close to home.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s better,’ I said.

  Yet I pictured the huge religious energy of her people raging like disconnected horsepower across the continent, hunting for an object, some reconciling love.

  But as if to illustrate her newly domestic affections, Tania stooped under the bed and tugged out a basket mewling with kittens. She seemed suddenly exhausted. ‘Look. My Katya has children. When they were born my husband said “Drown them”, and I replied, “You drown them” and put them into his arms, and he couldn’t. He is a good man.’ She lifted two out, and coddled them with – ooshas and – oolyas. They almost vanished in her plump fists. ‘How often do I have to tell you to wash them, Katooshka, my Katenka? Look at their bottoms . . .’

  She dropped them back into the basket. She could not keep them long, she said; but it was growing harder for her to get rid of anything now, even cats. She had already lost too much. Especially she had loved her father: a gentle scholar from Moscow. After one of the earthquakes his house had been demolished, she said, and he had never recovered, simply wasted away so the doctors thought he had cancer, and he’d died from a misjudged blood transfusion. ‘It was more than five years ago, and I still weep.’

  It was he who had taught her to love books, and among the ragbag of veterans on her shelves (Fielding, Aldous Huxley, Dale Carnegie) I noticed Russian translations of once-banned works, even Animal Farm published in Moscow. ‘But I’m sick of all that,’ she said.

  Sick of all what, I asked?

  Then her bitterness resurfaced and shook the words from her in spasms of vehement regret. She wanted to believe in her country again. ‘Up to a few years ago I always received Literaturnaya Gazeta from Moscow,’ she said. ‘But when all those things started to be published about what Stalin had done, the numbers killed – I felt sick, physically sick. Soon I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I stopped reading those articles. Some of my friends too, I think one or two were literally killed by it. They just gave up.’

  ‘Hadn’t you suspected?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t that. In my family we always knew. My father loathed Stalin.’ Her voice filled with a desolate truculence. ‘But to read all that, on and on . . . there was so much of it, the sheer quantity. Stalin, Brezhnev, even Chernobyl.’ Her features retracted into nausea. ‘I took to reading detective stories, science fiction, anything . . . .’ After a while she calmed and said in vague wonder: ‘I suppose I could imagine, before, that it wasn’t so. I knew it was true, but perhaps . . . I did not really face it. And when day after day, month after month, our papers were printing such things, after all we had already suffered, the millions who died in the war . . . .’

  She stopped in a confusion of shame and recoil. She was trying to understand how with exposure her country’s sins seemed suddenly enormous, which before had lain known but anaesthetised in half-concealment; how the fantasy of national innocence could vanish overnight. Somehow, for years, she had seen her nation bifocally. She was a woman of long, tenacious passions, and this dishonour went to her heart. So she clung to an outrage at the world’s ingratitude, and to her own and her parents’ sacrifice. Sometimes I felt that the dying of her father and of her country had become knit together in one loss. He had been a Christian be
liever, she said, and had bequeathed to her the icons which hung above her bed. Their eyes gazed blindly over the cluttered room. Someone at that time had given her a Bible too. ‘I wished I had thought before about that verse,’ she said. ‘ “Let no man be your teacher, only God” . . . .’

  She asked me to return to her for lunch on Victory Day. ‘Then you will meet my husband,’ she said, ‘and we will honour our country’s dead.’

  On the north-east outskirts of the city a sunken trajectory of domes and gates traces a funerary way up Maracanda’s ruined ramparts. In this secret glade, through the late fourteenth century, the women and warriors of Tamerlane were laid in sepulchres whose precious tiles, carried on camel-back from Persia, were fitted round the tomb façades in a cool splendour.

  In early morning, before any tour-groups arrive, you may walk up this avenue undisturbed, while the dawn leaks a thin light over its walls. At its foot a mullah waits in a newly working mosque; but beyond, the screams of swallows ricochet among the domes, and the way ascends over hexagonal flagstones between the mausoleums. Their cupolas do not swell and bloom, but complete their graves modestly, like a wardrobe of antique hats. A few plane trees lean over the path. Here and there a building has vanished, leaving an anonymous hump.

  Then the first pilgrims appear. Peasant women mostly, gleaming in gold-splintered scarves and iridescent leggings, and trailing picnic bags, they toil up to the entombed saint who casts over this place a halo of miracle. But on the way they squat inside the chambers where the half-pagan Mongol aristocracy lies, and smooth their palms over the stones, and murmur Allah, Allah. Methuselahs with sticks and flaking beards, and dowagers whose shawls pile their heads like the wimples of medieval burghers, they ease themselves upwards in an aura of pious holiday.

  Half way along, the ascent bends through an overhanging gateway, and there opens up a zone of disciplined brilliance. The acres of lightly patterned brick which covered contemporary mosques contract to an aisle of private piety and grief. To either side its walls and high entranceways are clothed in waterfalls of pure faience. Sometimes the façades converge across the way with barely twelve feet between them, echoing one another with the lustrous intimacy of miniatures. Two sisters of Tamerlane are buried here, and a young wife, Tuman, all of whom pre-deceased him. Inside, the chambers are nearly bare. Here and there a smashed tile sticks to a grave or a shadow of fresco lingers, but the cenotaphs are simple cubes and rectangles, mostly uninscribed. It is the entranceways which give voice to the distinction, and perhaps the belovedness, of the dead. They are tiled vertically by eight or ten different friezes in turquoise and gentian blue, powdered with stars, wheels, flowers: a whole lexicon of motifs. They hang there in ravishing detail. Sometimes white inscriptions twine them. Occasionally a touch of oxblood or pale green intrudes. Many panels are raised in deep relief, as if wrapped in a veil of loose knitting, so the sun glitters over them unpenetrating. They are an aesthete’s paradise.

  But pilgrims steer for the avenue’s end and the tomb of the legendary Kussam ibn-Abbas, cousin of the Prophet, who carried Islam to Samarkand, it is said, and was martyred here in the seventh century. ‘Those who were killed on the way of Allah are not to be considered dead; indeed, they are alive,’ runs the aya on his grave, and it is perhaps from this that the necropolis takes its name of Shakhi-Zinda, ‘the Shrine of the Living King’. As late as the 1920s, before Stalin stifled religion, its underground cells were full of devotees fasting and contemplating in enforced silence for forty days at a time. The martyr, they said, lingered here unseen ‘in the living flesh’, waiting to expel the Russians. Beyond the shrine, all along the sunlit heights of the vanished ramparts, thousands of graves still spread within the sacred force-field of his tomb.

  A pair of deep-carved walnut doors lurches open on its antechamber. Dust-filled beams of light hang in the dark. Glimpsed through its grille, the porcelain grave is delicate and small. It unfurls in four jewelled tiers upon the bare floor.

  ‘It was the fire-worshippers who killed him. Persians, you know. They cut off his head.’ The burly, soft-faced man who dispensed prayers here touched his neck with a karate chop. ‘But then what happened? The saint didn’t die, no. He picked up his head and jumped with it into a well!’ He tucked an aerial head under his arm, like a Tudor ghost. ‘And there he waits to return, in the Garden of Paradise.’

  Crouched along the walls beside us, ranks of village women let out bleating hymns, their scarves dropped over their faces, their legs doubled under them, their shoes off. Sometimes they turned their furrowed hands upwards while old men led them in half-sung prayer. A bevy of town girls came in and squatted opposite self-consciously. They were necklaced in seed-pearls over their high-ruffed dresses, and their hair drawn tight under nacreous clasps in the style of the day. They fell silent almost at once, listening to the unfamiliar words. They seemed to be sucking nourishment back out of their past, learning from these ancient peasants who they were, or who they might yet be.

  From time to time the burly man went out to pray with other pilgrims in his cell – a converted tomb – where I would hear him chanting in a plangent, musical voice before he returned to sit in the sun. The whole sanctuary was resurrecting now, he said. Its mosque, closed down since Kruschev’s day, was open again, and the pilgrims returning.

  And what of the saint, I asked? Had there been miracles?

  He could not answer for others, he said. ‘But I myself . . . I used to have high blood pressure. It got up into my eyes somehow, and into my kidneys. I thought I might not have long to live, and the doctors couldn’t do a thing. So I came here to clean the dust round the saint’s tomb.’ He gazed at the walnut doors with rested eyes. ‘And now I’m well again.’

  Then a younger man sat down beside us. I saw, beneath the cap of a medreseh student, a white, possessed face. He wanted to know what we had been saying. The burly man went silent. Under the student’s hot, arid stare our conversation spluttered up again, then died.

  A medreseh had opened recently in Samarkand, he said coldly, and he was there. I remembered it, of course, and the rape and the mullah’s suicide, but said nothing. ‘The top graduates’, he went on, ‘will complete their studies for a few months in Saudi Arabia or Iran or Pakistan.’

  I tried hopefully: ‘Doesn’t your Islam differ a little from theirs?’

  He hooked his forefinger into a knot of indissoluble union. ‘We are all one. The Koran is one. Our faith is one.’

  I sat there a long time, touched with alarm, before he went away, irritated by my questions. The burly man remained seated in silence beside me, relaxed in the sunlight. Now the Russians had gone, I asked, what enemy was left for the Living King to expel? Couldn’t he rest?

  ‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask others things like that. But the saint expels the sorrow in people. That’s why they come here.’ An old woman was kissing the door-jambs in front of us. ‘And eventually he will return.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘Yes, I believe it. He’ll return at the end of the light.’ A millennial fatalism overtook him. ‘Perhaps if we live long enough, we’ll see it.’

  I went back down the funerary way, wondering about the nature of its dead. (Who, for instance, had been the niece of Tamerlane laid under a dome decorated pathetically with faience tears?) As I passed the grave of the astronomer Kazyade, teacher and friend of Ulug Beg, my thoughts turned to heresy and science, and a confused train of history flooded in.

  All through the fifteenth century Central Asia was filled by the quarrels and luxuries of the Timurid princes, successors of Tamerlane, with their poetry and miniatures (and weakness for wine and catamites). Hedonism and science ran free. Tamerlane’s son Shah Rukh reigned – a mighty prince – from Herat in Afghanistan, where years before I had seen his wife’s college toppling in ruin, while their own son Ulug Beg governed as viceroy and then sultan in Samarkand. A century later a great-great-great-grandson of the emperor, Babur, ruled here in brief h
appiness before fleeing the Uzbek invaders south, and left behind him an autobiography of entrancing humanity. It was he, years later, who founded the Moghul empire in India, and carried into its rice-deltas the vigour and epicurism of Central Asia, whose bulbous domes were to fruit in the Taj Mahal. Here the schizophrenic spirit of Tamerlane survived (or so I fancied) among the imperial chess-players and refined Moghul gardens, and lingered too in sudden, often intimate acts of cruelty – that terrible divorce of aestheticism from compassion which was to trouble all his descendants.

  In Samarkand meanwhile, the empire of the dead conqueror was disintegrating. Its economy was too shallow to support it. The city workshops still produced their rich cloths and metal, and the finest paper in the world – a skill taught here by the Chinese seven centuries before – but the Silk Road was dying. Tamerlane’s wider conquests, which settled no government in their wake, were now revealed only as the megalomaniac raids of a brilliant predator.

  Ulug Beg, his grandson, ruled with a different glory. In the 100-foot observatory which he built on a hill outside Samarkand, frescoed with embodiments of the celestial spheres, a caucus of astronomers and mathematicians fussed over azimuths and planispheres, traced the precession of the equinoxes and determined the ecliptic. Here he discovered two hundred unknown stars, and recalculated the stellar year to within a few seconds of that computed by modern electronics. But the pietists, of course, hated him, and in 1449 he was killed by reactionaries led by his own son. His observatory was damned ‘the cemetery of the forty evil spirits’, and levelled with the ground.

  In 1908 a Russian schoolmaster, Vladimir Vyatkin, after calculating where the observatory must have stood, dug down and hit the arc of what appeared to be a primitive escalator. Now sheltered under a modern vault, its twin marble parapets swoop side by side through the excavated earth. Meticulously jointed and calibrated, they are the section of a titanic 180-foot quadrant along whose rails ran the astrolabe by which Ulug Beg bearded God and identified the heavens.