I walked into Karl Marx Park and made for the anonymous square once named after Lenin. A bust of Marx, aswirl in a hurricane of hair and beard, still glowered down my path with the ridged brows of a Mongol warlord. Someone had laid a red carnation beneath him. Beyond, the way was lined by shashlik and pilau vendors, doing poor business, and empty restaurants which in Moscow would have lain under siege.
I crossed the swollen canal which had divided the czarist town from the native one, and entered the void which was once the largest square in the Soviet Union. A thin drizzle descended. It was less a square than a formless plain dotted by dwarfed monuments, ministries and gardens, and bisected by streets. A bridal couple circling the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the far side was almost invisible. Only the god himself, the biggest bronze Lenin in the world, threatening from his fifty-foot plinth behind belching regiments of fountains, tried to dominate these tremendous acres. But his gestures were meaningless. The clenched eyes, everybody knew now, were gazing into nothing. The scroll he clutched contained a terrible mistake. The tarmac in front of him had been scored for the May Day march of soldiers twenty-three abreast, but the tribune at his feet was walled off and labelled ‘Closed for repairs’. ‘They’ll take him away soon,’ the driver had said. ‘But nobody knows what to replace him with.’
A man was lying among wet rose-bushes nearby, the rain falling on his face. I wondered if he were ill, but as I bent down to him he only murmured ‘Comrade . . . .’ and closed his eyes again, drunk.
I settled on a bench under the trees, while the rain thickened around the great statue. In the blank square, all the certainties had gone. It was emptier than it had ever been. A few women tripped between puddles under bright umbrellas, and a policeman was reading a sodden newspaper. I turned up my shirt collar in a gesture of self-protection, while the rain began falling on me steadily, inexorably, out of the trees.
A month later, the statue of Lenin was gone.
It had become a city of unemployment, nerves, locked doors. In my hotel the drains blocked and the electricity faltered; dawn light flooded in through wafer-thin curtains, and the black-varnished furniture was falling to bits, its drawers spilling to the floor at a tug. In a night-club across the road, louche young Uzbeks drank with their innocently rouged girls, while a cabaret of half-veiled odalisques wriggled to gutted pop music. In this temple to their lost civilisation, complete with prostitutes and bouncers, the clients sank into a counterfeit of the West: raucous, extravagant and forbidden.
The hotel guests were mostly on business. An Israeli foreign office agent was scouting to open an embassy, but everything belonged to co-operatives, he said, and nobody would sell. Two Chinese delegations were trying to nose out trade (but falling ill on the Uzbek cuisine). An American Mormon had started a food-processing plant, he said, and the KGB, who had once harassed him, were now pestering him to sell them things.
Someone had given me the address of Jassur, an apparatchik who financed business initiatives. But when i reached his institute it was half-inhabited. Its receptionist slumped asleep with her hennaed hair loosed over her knees. I padded past her. Two dyed-blonde secretaries were gossiping at the boardroom table, and Jassur was sitting between them. They scattered to a sofa as I entered, while he retired importantly to his desk.
His hair dusted back from a creaseless forehead and a face which looked oiled and rather child-like. The desert of his desktop was broken by a bottle of champagne and three pieces of paper. On a table behind him, the attendants of activity – an electric typewriter, a word-processor, a fax machine – stagnated beside three telephones. A guitar stood in a corner. A map of America hung on one wall.
‘I was awarded this post last week. I am the director here.’ In the amber-skinned oval of his face the eyes and slight moustache made an unreadable code of black dots and dashes. Beneath them, when I enquired about his work, a pair of fleshy lips budded like an anemone, and soliloquised in English with formal smoothness, as if he were addressing a panel.
‘I dispense money to various companies for projects. I’ve been in many foreign countries, and understand them. I have started a joint stock company with one of our gold corporations and with Saudi Arabia and Syria. I was two weeks in Israel and changed my position very much on the Arab question. I was two years in Moscow in the military academy there, very close to things . . . .’ I listened to him, unspeaking. The anemone lips seemed to move independently of his face, like an oracle. ‘I’ve been in the States, and I speak almost perfect Spanish, better than my Russian or Uzbek. Uzbek’ — he dismissed it with a pout — ‘is just a language for the family. I was at Harvard University for a month. And I have a speciality: the Soviet view of the Western world. I’m told that it is interesting . . . .’
I was glad, I said, to find somebody optimistic about the economy. But I stared bleakly round the office, then back at the goldfish face. Its lips were moving again.
Optimism? Well . . . I am trying to set up contact with South Africa for the purchase of gold-mining equipment. Theirs is the best in the world. But our government here doesn’t help with this. They are afraid to make contact with South Africa, I think. But I believe it is a great country, a fine country to work in.’ He said in the same anointed voice: ‘I hope to go there to live.’
‘For ever?’
‘Yes.’ So after all his trumpeting of status and possibility, he was getting out. ‘South Africa has a great future.’
I said I thought its future more uncertain than Uzbekistan’s.
‘You think so?’ He looked at me as if I had propounded something extraordinary. For a moment he was silent. I gazed back into the nurtured face of an infant, at once self-adoring and disappointed. Then his voice turned petulant, as if he had found it for the first time. ‘But I don’t want to go on relying on other people. Here everyone is dependent on someone else, and nobody does anything. I want just to rely on myself.’ He pointed narcissistically to his brow. ‘Myself!’
This was precisely what a Westerner should have wanted to hear. It was odd how futile it sounded. ‘What about your work here?’ I gestured foolishly round the office.
‘It’s hopeless. My job is to dispense money. But I have nothing to dispense.’ He looked like an angry cupid. His hands opened in a gesture of helpless deficit. ‘I want to get promotion somewhere. We’re starting embassies around the world now, and I want to be in one of these. But you have to know somebody.’ His voice dwindled into naivety. ‘People’s sons get these positions. Perhaps my joint stock company’ – he savoured the words ‘joint stock’ as if they conferred some talismanic stature – ‘perhaps that will give me the opportunity to travel.’ But this company was dwindling to a paper idea, or perhaps a fantasy. ‘I want to work at an American university, where I can use my Spanish . . . . they use a lot of Spanish there, in administration.’
His imagination was roaming at will now. He inhabited a cloud of dreams. He did not see that the Uzbek provincialism which he so despised was also his own. ‘I want to sell my military expertise to South Africa. That’s the country. East Germans are doing this too, selling their knowledge there, I know. You can do what you like now. It’s all open.’ But whenever his secretaries’ chatter fell silent on the sofa opposite his voice dropped into confidence, and now he was almost whispering: ‘But I can’t get through to South Africa . . .’
The world was beginning to bewilder him, a little.
‘Then I’d try somewhere else,’ I said.
‘I applied to UNESCO for a fellowship, last year. I heard there were very few applicants. I made a breakdown of my project about Soviet concepts of the West, and word-processed it myself on this’ – he pointed to the god-like machine. ‘But that was months ago, and I haven’t had an answer. I don’t understand this.’ He fumbled in a drawer. ‘There was a man going to help me in England . . . his name was Stewart Davis. Do you know him?’ He handed me a crumpled card. ‘I haven’t heard from him. We get no information here. If I want to
telephone someone in England, I must wait three days.’
Yet this man, I reminded myself, was the head of a government institute.
‘You must excuse me.’ He suddenly stood up. ‘I have to see my wife in hospital. She has just given me a son, but she is producing no milk. That is the problem with our modern women.’ He repeated his gesture of hopeless shortfall. ‘Shall we meet tomorrow in your hotel? I have a publishing project I wish to discuss . . . .’
I agreed to this with foreboding, wondering what favours he would ask. But I need not have fretted. Next day I waited for him at the arranged time, and for a further three hours, but he did not come.
For a long time, immersed in the challenge and strangeness of a new country, I imagine I am missing nothing of my own. Then an intruding memory – a chance thought, a facial resemblance – ignites a transient but overwhelming homesickness, like some unacknowledged weariness, and I try to return for a moment into my own mislaid tradition. So, after weeks of hearing only Turkic folk music and pop song, I went nostalgically to the state playhouse where the Russians had once planted opera and ballet as the ambassadors of their empire.
It was a hefty, mongrel building, raised half a century before by the architect of Moscow’s KGB headquarters and of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square. Its charmless façade had been truncated by lack of funds, and instead of rising to a skyline of victorious statuary, it petered out in a row of apologetic turrets. But an icing of Islamic decoration frosted all its surfaces, and continued over the auditorium and lobbies in a wintry beauty of white and pastel stucco. Along the upper hall, busts of the Turkic poets mingled coldly with Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Moussorgsky, and dish-shaped chandeliers of latticed plasterwork mottled the ceilings with a net of fractured Islamic light.
This patina of native culture, usually devoted to the mosque, had been subtly enrolled into the Communist scheme of things. Secularised, it had thrown a superficial sanction round the propagandist dramas and ballets of the day, and in return it had lost its soul. So I wandered round the halls in guilty pleasure. They had a snowflake delicacy. I was almost alone. A few Russian matrons were promenading with their daughters, but they looked lost and dowdy. Their high heels echoed over the wooden floors. And when the curtain rose on Esmeralda, an old ballet hectic with gypsy child-stealers, distraught heroine and murderous priest, the auditorium was barely quarter full.
Yet habits died hard. Over loudspeakers the dancers were still announced by their grandiose Soviet titles – ‘People’s Artist of the USSR . . . . Honoured Artist of the USSR . . . .’– and the ballet unfurled in a shameless melodrama underscored by subTchaikovskian music. At its end a limping beggar triumphed over religious despotism by tossing the lecherous priest over the battlements, and the auditorium sent up a splutter of applause.
As we trooped out into the vestibule I saw, of course, that the spectators were mostly Russian. They were cooing and purring. Perhaps this theatre, with its fleeting, sentimental ceremony, was all that remained to them for a shrine. But they were so few in its gaunt spaces, they seemed embattled. The Moslem decor looked newly liberated around them. Where once it had appeared tainted, even sinister, it had now entered into its own.
Ludmilla had been to Esmeralda too, and had thought it beautiful. At the age of thirty she lived with her mother in a cramped flat near the city centre, and her life was devoured by books and music. Russian friends introduced us, but I might as well have met her in the pages of nineteenth-century literature. She was suffering from a nameless allergy, which often made her faint, and she shook my hand frailly. She had Polish, Ukrainian, Tartar and even Uzbek blood, she said, but she looked wholly Russian. She talked about books while her fingers writhed in her lap. She had contracted a synthetic, Slavic charm, whose veneer had eaten inward, like acid, until its lilting voice seemed to have become her own. A fountain of auburn hair dangled about her shoulders and sprouted in a mauve-ribboned knot on the crown of her head; and from the centre of this cascade watched a white, pinched face with intelligent eyes and delicate, enquiring lips. Yet she swayed and wriggled her shoulders in shock at any-thing she said, as if it must be foolish or betraying.
‘No, I never studied literature. It’s just . . . a passion.’ Her tone at once embraced and repudiated such a thing. ‘My father thought the only proper professions were medicine and engineering. I wasn’t interested in either, but when I was seventeen I went to study construction in Leningrad. All the time I really loved the arts, but of course nobody asked me what I wanted.’ She laughed ornamentally, without bitterness. ‘I just did as my father said.’
‘You don’t regret that?’
‘No . . . no. Then I went to Kiev and studied to teach computer technology. It’s a safe job.’ She said wistfully: ‘It’s the future.’
‘Your father wanted that too?’
‘Yes.’ She tilted her head with the charm which was not quite hers. ‘But he died seven years ago.’
Her passions revolved around sporadic concerts of Vivaldi and Mozart, and flowed into the privacy of her reading. She nursed an aberrant love for Dostoevsky and an indifference to Tolstoy – she fluttered with embarrassment at this – and had read European classics in the old translations of Russian Parisian immigrants: ‘They wrote a cleaner language.’ She had long ago devoured Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn in samizdat, and had developed an obsession for science fiction and fantasy.
‘But it’s strange,’ she said. ‘Nobody seems to read any more. Before, Tashkent was full of cultured people. But not now. Maybe life has become too hard, I don’t know.’ As a young girl, perhaps, she had entertained the illusion of a world run by cultivated men, and it had left behind this melancholy afterglow. And when she said ‘No, I’ve never married,’ she did so as the waif on the train from Samarkand had done, as if at thirty all possibility were gone. ‘My parents were very strict. It wasn’t easy to meet men.’
Yet she announced this coolly, unsoured. As the veil of stylised sweetness slipped a little with the ease of conversation, I thought I discerned in her the scrupulous, rather particular and intelligent nature which some men might fear. It was a gentle but not a generous face, the eyes alert and only conditionally giving: a face discreet and a little sad.
She toyed with her dress collar. Five friends were precious to her, she said: women who had cherished her during her elusive illness. ‘But many others have gone away, and live in Israel or even Spain. I had a lot of Jewish friends, and now they’ve gone. They were the most interesting here. My best friend left a year ago for Tel Aviv, and for months I wept . . . .’
Into this circle of female comradeship, I thought, the intrusion of men could be coarsely disruptive. I asked: ‘Will you leave too?’
‘No, I’m happy here,’ she said, ‘although it’s growing harder. If you’re honest here, you’re poor. It’s becoming difficult for decent people to survive at all. You have to belong to a mafia. But I don’t think the future will be very good anywhere.’ A flutter of her hands dispersed it. ‘I think the whole Revolution was a mistake. We could have improved ourselves gradually, steadily, without that chaos. And now everything’s hopeless with us, poor Russia. We’ve become an example to the world of what not to do, how not to be!’ She smiled with ornate irony. Here Russia’s spiritual mission had reached its tragic obverse: its failure had taught the world only a negative truth. ‘And think of the blood . . . .’
But it was hard, sitting beside her, to realise that the Revolution had happened and been undone at all, because she seemed to predate it. In her bleached, old-fashioned dress and reclusive frailty, she belonged in the country houses of Chekhov. Her Ukrainian ancestors, she said, had arrived here with an eccentric cousin of Czar Nicholas II, whose palace still decorated the city’s centre. She should have been reclining there. She kept touching her wrist to her forehead. Perhaps convalescence was her nature, I thought. Talking with her, I had the fancy that the Revolution was still brooding below the skyline, that Lenin was waiting in Switzerland
again, and the czar still on his throne.
The advance of suburbs and boulevards had eroded the old Moslem quarter, and left it under siege. Its insanitary tangle of clay walls and twisted tarmac, the tunnelled entranceways and secretive yards and roofs where spring tulips grew, had always been anathema to totalitarian rulers, and were often threatened with demolition. It was too hidden from them, too various and unaccountable. But the 1966 earthquake which ravaged the modern town had left this subversive warren eerily intact. Its beams and walls had merely shuddered a little, shed a skin or two of dust, then subsided.
I explored it fitfully. Its derelict mosques were starting into life again, but humbly. In cemeteries murmuring with willows and doves, the gravestones were inset with photographs of a severe, portly people, who flaunted Soviet service medals but were buried under the Islamic crescent.
I strayed into the courtyard of the Imam Bukhari medreseh, the highest seat of Islamic learning in the country. It was soft with apple and persimmon trees. Three years before it had been permitted twenty-two students. Now they numbered 300 youths who devoted their days to the Koran and the Traditions, the study of Arabic and Islamic law, with a little mathematics and English. I peered through the classroom doors. Arabic grammar was scratched over the blackboards. In the language laboratory the cassette-players were all broken, and the desks tufted with snapped wires. Poppies sprouted through the concrete of an abandoned volleyball pitch.
But a feel of leisured study prevailed, steeped in old certainties, the rhythms of a life denied for seventy years, and instead of apprehension I was filled by a fleeting nostalgia for this halflost faith in the scented garden, for the shy students with their clasped books who talked pleasantly with me under the arcades, for their conviction in an overseeing Father. There was no breath of the excluding anger which I had once encountered in pre-revolutionary Tehran.
The Lost Heart of Asia Page 22
