The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  The Victory Day celebrations were muted that year. For the first time, there was no parade. Down the memorial avenue red flags still mingled with the national colours, and groups of Russian and Tajik veterans were hobbling separately, their chests ablaze with medals, towards the temple which sheltered the eternal flame. But a mournfulness of anti-climax hung about them. The ragged line of police had nothing to supervise. On either side, Second World War tanks and anti-aircraft guns stood on their plinths like relics of prehistory, and martial music sobbed from the loudspeakers. Inside the red-stoned cube of the temple, lilies, peonies, carnations and irises were banked around the sacred fire. ‘Nobody must forget’, raged the slogans. But young Tajiks and Uzbeks with their families were strolling about on holiday, and glanced curiously at the shuffling mourners, who looked suddenly redundant as if – in this empire of long memories – the war were at last receding.

  ‘I was at Potsdam and Berlin,’ confided one man. His lapels dripped with medals. ‘Look.’ He bowed his head to me. Under its powder of hair the skull was dented by a cavity empurpled with veins. I would not have thought anybody could survive such a wound. ‘I got that a week before the war’s end!’

  ‘I’m amazed you’re still alive!’

  ‘Alive? I’ve marched every year in the parade.’

  ‘I missed it.’

  ‘Well, there wasn’t one. There’s only this now.’ He jerked his chin at the silent veterans trudging about the flowers. He looked belligerent. ‘It’s because of that Gorbachev and everything he did . . . .’ He scanned me with filmy eyes. ‘Were you in the war?’

  ‘No.’ I wondered how old I was looking. ‘But my father fought in North Africa and Italy.’

  ‘North Africa . . . Italy . . . .’ The words fell experimentally from him. After their appalling sacrifice, Russians often forget that anyone but they confronted Germany. But suddenly he squeezed my arm in a brotherhood which overleapt the continents, and kissed my cheeks, so that I was moved by a vicarious pride, and I wished my father there.

  ‘Next year, I tell you,’ he said, as if to comfort me, ‘there’ll be a parade again.’ He opened his arms like a boasting angler. ‘A huge parade!’

  I wandered away into the memorial gardens. Tajik and Uzbek veterans were walking there too, and an old woman in full dec-orations was posing for her photograph. In their remembered war they converged – native and Russian together – at a point where time had superseded race. I went down glades lined with the busts of Heroes of the Soviet Union.

  ‘Look at them,’ one of the Uzbeks said. ‘The heroes are still there, but the Soviet Union’s gone!’ A delta of smile-lines flowed from his mouth and eyes, but he was not happy. He had the face of a wizened monkey. ‘I tell you as an old man, as a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, that it’s a bad thing. Absolutely a bad thing.’

  ‘You don’t want independence?’

  ‘No! Everything’s got worse. And it’ll go on getting worse and worse.’

  I stared at him, still touched by a vague wonder at the gap where nationalism might have been. A pair of policemen shambled by, their hats tilted back on their heads.

  ‘Only young people are glad,’ he said disgustedly, ‘because they don’t have to do any work. Look at those police! They just play-act and take bribes.’ He bent his arm in a mock salute. ‘Nobody works any more.’

  This, I knew, was more than the perennial complaint of the old against the young, the lament for uninherited beliefs. A gulf of unshared experience gaped between the generations. The world was slipping away from him. ‘And you wait,’ he said, as we circled back to the eternal flame. ‘In a minute hooligans will come and steal the flowers.’

  I loitered until noon while the crowds thinned. The soulful music throbbed and tramped in the loudspeakers overhead, as if the dead were on the march again, accusing. Then I remembered that I had promised to share Tania’s Victory Day lunch, and walked to her home down streets which were almost deserted.

  In the courtyard two sallow youths squatted by the gate, awaiting their turn with the prostitute, while a neighbour harangued them from his window. They looked sheepish, but did not budge. When I knocked, a middle-aged man opened Tania’s door, and from the photograph by her bed I recognised Petya, her husband. He was slim and dapper, with black hair and gold teeth. He looked almost designed. Despite his Russian name, any Slavic blood in him was subsumed by a Tajik darkness. He appeared younger than Tania, more delicate.

  Inside their love-nest, the drinking had already begun. Clustered round a table strewn with cheeses, pickled vegetables, brandy and wine, and facing a mammoth television, we watched a favourite Russian war-film The Warriors relayed from Moscow. ‘Today we remember our great dead,’ said Tania — already the brandy had curdled her speech to a squelchy aria – ‘all our millions killed in the Great Patriotic War.’ We lifted our glasses. Her gaze swivelled towards mine. ‘This was our time of greatest suffering, and today we remember all that . . . . Petya had an uncle killed, and I too.’ She added formally: ‘It went from 1941 to 1945.’

  ‘Ours began in 1939,’ I said.

  But they were not listening. A Russian platoon was charging across the louring skyline with fixed bayonets, and their brandy-bright eyes had turned moist with emotion. ‘So many gone . . . and what for? What for? I’m glad they cannot see us now. I’m ashamed . . . .’

  Only once these maudlin celebrations were interrupted. Petya’s son-in-law, a jobless youth who was hoping to start up some business, but did not know what, arrived nervously and sat down near the door. He looked haunted. ‘He’s useless,’ said Tania, as if he were not there. ‘All these young people, they just want to do business. They don’t want to sweat. He lost his last job because his wife’s having an affair and he kept leaving work to spy on her.’

  The young man got up and went away. Neither Tania nor Petya seemed to notice. Across the table the Germans were advancing towards us through a thicket of tank-blocks and barbed wire. ‘And to think our soldiers sacrificed themselves for a better world!’ Tania tossed back another brandy. ‘And what now? What now?’ Her eyes languished over Petya. ‘We were told we would achieve perfect Communism by 1980, and what did we have? Now we must build up our house again from nothing. On the old foundations? Or new ones? And how?’

  ‘How? How?’ echoed Petya, uncorking the wine.

  She said bitterly: ‘I realise now we have to do everything alone. You can’t trust anybody. People are just out for themselves. And I too, now.’ She turned up the noise of the television. ‘Let no man be your teacher, only God....’

  Petya stumbled from the stove with dishes of dolmades and meat-balls which he had cooked. He was already drunk. His face had loosened into a slovenly grin, and the eyelids hovered over his gaze like portcullises. Did I love his cooking, he demanded? I must love his cooking. He had cooked just for me. Black locks straggled about his neck from a thinning hairline. And did I not love his Tania also, his Tanoolya? Where would he be without her? He had no other homeland. The wine gurgled into our glasses.

  ‘I have five kinds of blood in me!’ His head knocked against mine. ‘You, you’re English – was it? – so you feel a homeland. But I, I am not Tajik or Russian or Uzbek, quite. I am nothing. Where do I belong?’ It was the fearful Russian cry of self-humiliation. ‘Before I was a Soviet man, but what am I now?’

  Nobody answered. This betrayal, they both felt, had wrecked their lives. The Soviet Union had been their natural state, in which they could shelter and identify, enrolling themselves in a nationless empire of the future. But overnight it had vanished. It had proved itself less potent, in the end, than the maze of fragile-seeming nations which it had sought to absorb. And it had gone with bewildering suddenness, like a genie from a broken bottle, leaving them no time.

  I said: ‘Perhaps you can be your own nation.’

  ‘That’s all right for you in the West,’ he groaned. ‘But for us here things work differently. People need support, a clan, a net-w
ork. But what have I . . . ? Do you love my cooking? I have cooked just for you!’ He flung his arms about me and demanded kisses. I felt miserably Anglo-Saxon as I skimmed his bristly cheeks and eulogised his cooking and tried to resist the procession of toasts which was mounting around me. To victory, to the future, to the past, to the war dead (mugs are never clashed here), to friendship – glassful after glassful disappeared down our slackly gaping throats. A moment’s solemn silence for the dead punctuated this revelry, then we were off again.

  By now Tania and Petya were surfing along on waves of self-pity. Their twin gazes meshed adoringly over the table. The wine trembled and slopped in their hands. Again and again she leant across to fondle him, or he her, fastening their lips on each other’s necks or noses or mouths, their stomachs and chests knocking over brandy bottles and jars of preserves. Sentimental diminutives burbled and multiplied. She was his Tanishka, his darling Tanyoosha, his little Tanoolya. And was he not her Petenka, her everlasting Petrousha, her faithful Petyulka? Yes, yes! They extolled each other, reproached then forgave each other, in an antiphonal euphoria which was at once slatternly, touching and absurd.

  As for me, I might have arrived from another galaxy. They knew, and asked, nothing about me at all. I was simply the occasion for festivity. I became irritated and self-reproachful as they descended into their oblivion. ‘Come! Come!’ crooned Tania. ‘Get drunk and I will lay you out with Petya on the bed. You can sleep the afternoon with us, and drink again this evening.’

  ‘No . . . .’ I was starting to hate myself.

  But as my stare reeled from Tania’s face to Petya’s, I wondered at their arrogance, and felt my last compassion veering away. I was thinking of the quiet dignity of Moslems at their prayers. Who were the Russians to teach the Uzbeks how to live? I thought drunkenly: perhaps a decade of Islamic fundamentalism, with its war on maudlin self-indulgence, would serve everybody right. I was starting to sympathise with the prostitute in the courtyard outside, who had earlier yelled at a Russian client that his self-righteous people had taught hers how to drink and fornicate.

  At last Petya succumbed backwards on to the bed, and lay like a baby with his forearms curled against his face, and started to snore. He looked thin and somehow desolate. Now and again an arm or a leg clunked on to the floor. Across the television screen the Russian infantry was massing for victory, unnoticed.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Tania said. She herself seemed no more nor less drunk than when I arrived. ‘But he’ll come round in an hour or two. He’s always been like that.’

  ‘How long have you been married?’

  Her voice dropped into monotone. ‘Actually, we’re not married.’

  Somehow I had known this. ‘Can’t he get a divorce?’

  ‘His wife doesn’t want to. She thinks it bad for her daughters’ status. She’s a vulture. I knew them early in their marriage, and she never spoke well of Petya, just called him “that alcoholic”.’ She glanced down at Petya. His snores had stilled to a distant growling. ‘He’s still obsessed by her. Some people say she’s attractive, but I don’t think so. Perhaps I’m just jealous because I am not a pretty one, but you judge.’ She pulled a folder from a shelf and plucked out sheafs of photographs: Petya as a pilot, Petya on his premature retirement being presented with a gilded clock. (‘It’s there by the bed. It’s stopped.’) And Petya’s wife: a strong-boned Slavic blonde, not beautiful. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Not pretty, no.’ But I understood the woman withdrawing herself and her daughters from the inebriate ex-pilot. ‘Perhaps she’s ambitious for their children.’

  But Tania said: ‘I could have had a child too.’

  A little drunk, I asked: ‘Have you no children?’

  She replaced the photographs on the shelf. Then, as she turned and looked at me, I saw her face transfigured by a kind of crushed and harrowing sweetness. ‘Last year I conceived a baby . . . . It was so grotesque somehow, at my age . . . . I’m fifty . . . and unmarried.’ Her eyes dropped from mine. She added in her sombre monotone: ‘I had it aborted.’

  Then she sat down and sighed with curiously mixed relief and despair. I touched her arm, unfelt. I wondered how many other lives here would darken into confusion if more deeply known. Petya was stirring on the bed, and sat up with a rootless moaning.

  ‘Petooshka?’ Her voice had regained its jellied solicitude. It was Petya, not alcohol, that made it drunk.

  He propped himself beside me. I imagined that he was selecting a role to play. He said confusedly: ‘We will drink again and you will stay the night. And tomorrow . . . .’

  ‘Tomorrow I go to Shakhrisabz,’ I said curtly. It was a town to the south, where Tamerlane had built his country palace.

  ‘Stay with us!’ Tania burst in. She had returned to her voluble, domineering self. ‘You don’t want to go to Shakhrisabz tomorrow! Or go for two hours – there’s nothing to see there! – and come back. We will wait for you.’

  Petya planted a kiss on her ring-studded hand. ‘Yes, we will make love together and wait for you.’

  Neither idea was appealing. ‘I want to stay there,’ I said.

  ‘You do not want to stay there!’ Tania broke in. ‘You want to be here! Come back tomorrow. Or don’t go at all. We’ll drink . . . .’

  Petya curled up on the bed again, but she went relentlessly on, ignoring anything I might really wish. She demanded and cajoled and insisted in a melodrama which sensed nothing beyond its own outpouring. In my mind her blindness to myself became fused with her blindness to her adopted and ungrateful country, to her spent life. Because she would not grant autonomy to any recipient of her giving, she seemed condemned to be hurt. Its separateness from herself, once she had embraced it, was unendurable to her.

  An hour later I said goodbye with her demands for my return still ringing about my ears.

  South from Samarkand a broad road ran fifty miles to Shakhrisabz, over an outlying finger of the Pamir. Beyond foothills rose a wraith-like curtain of mountains whose pelmet was lost in cloud. As my crammed taxi started to climb, the crags surged unsteadily about us in the mist. Everything paled, until the web of our splintered windscreen overlay only a watercolour softness beyond. Sometimes the road reverted to a cracked causeway unchanged since Soviet tanks moved down it to Afghanistan in 1979. All around, the mountain-scarps hung in diseased-looking palisades of flaking rock. Then we topped the pass and stared down through haze. A sandy fox watched us from the mossed rocks. Nothing else stirred. Half an hour later we had arrived in Shakhrisabz.

  It was a cool, harmonious town. To either side, the porcelain mountains herded it into its lush valley, and hung the sky with disembodied snow. The tea-houses along its main street were leisurely with old men, and the parks soft under willows. Tamerlane had been born a few miles to the south, and an after-glow of imperial patronage tinged the place. In later centuries it had enjoyed semi-independence from the emirate of Bukhara, and had flourished with more grace. Slavery was never allowed here. Even at executions, a traveller recalled, a criminal’s throat would be mercifully cut before he was hanged.

  Ruins still scattered it. The tomb of a son of Ulug Beg shone against the mountains, and a fifteenth-century congregational mosque survived in gutted dignity. Nobody guided or stopped me as I waded through poppies and cow-parsley into the wrecked mausoleum of Jehangir, Tamerlane’s oldest and favourite son. Carved doors swung into a rank and sickly desolation, where only a slung canvas protected the grave against the pigeon-droppings and bricks raining down from a disintegrating dome.

  But the glory of Shakhrisabz, dwarfing all else, gleamed in dereliction above its own parklands. Here the White Palace of Tamerlane had stood on the caravan-route to Khorasan and India, and had left behind a gateway so immense that nothing – not even the Bibi Khanum – could equal it. Such buildings were expressions of political power. The terror and grandeur of their appearance was crucial, for few ever entered them, and their gateways, like awesome warnings or advertisements, w
ere huger, more portentous, than anything inside.

  But I saw, as I approached this one, that it occupied a megalomaniac dimension of its own. It belonged among those dazing gargantuas of ruin – Karnak, Angkor, Baalbec – which might have been built by another species. Its central arch had long ago collapsed, but on either side a cylindrical tower merged into a nine-storeyed complex of buttresses and chambers, so that each jamb rose in a self-contained citadel 140 feet to a skyline of naked brick. The patina of tiles ripened as the entrance went deeper, edged in bands of peacock blue, packed with white script. Exposed for centuries, they hung precariously in veins of cobalt and gold high up – an inexplicable delicacy of calligraphy and flowers.

  The place was deserted except for a dreamy girl sitting on a ruined wall. She fell into conversation with the spontaneity of Turkic women when they feel unwatched. Tamerlane was definitely an Uzbek, she said, and from this I guessed her race. She walked naturally beside me. The ground was lightly paved inside the gate. High on either hand the piers were lanced by fissures and screamed with swallows, as if we were trekking through a canyon. Here the past was channelled to a narrow flood, and I sensed before us the limping tread of the monster over the grass-ringed stones, and the tramp of Shah Rukh after him, and of Ulug Beg and his patricidal son.

  The girl talked with the childlike candour which perhaps only a stranger could release. She had the rosebud mouth and almond eyes beloved of Timurid miniatures, but already the flesh was loosening around them, and at twenty-nine her life was full of sadness. Her father had died young of a heart attack, and her brother too, at twenty-five. ‘My mother still cries in the street.’ The girl was the youngest in this decimated family, and felt in debt to them, as if she had somehow failed. ‘I was accepted into university to study German without paying, because we were poor. My four sisters all got married, and helped me to live while I was there, since my stipend was so small.’ She smiled sadly. Her mouth was already full of gold teeth. ‘I had just two dresses, but they were enough.’