The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  By evening the men had gone away, and 500 women students flooded into the courtyard. Thin veils snowed their hair and shoulders. It was the end of term. One girl – a pretty teenager whose veil slipped from her curls – incanted a prayer of thanks to God and to her teachers, while her father stood beside me and wept with pride.

  In the residence of the Grand Mufti, the galleries murmured with wimpled secretaries and delegations. A throng of several hundred men and women crowded the central hall for the announcement of their pilgrimage to Mecca. Thousands would go eventually, where a few years before barely a pilgrim had been released.

  I lodged a plea with the Mufti which I feared would be refused. In his library, I knew, was reputedly the oldest Koran in the world. It had belonged to the caliph Othman, third of Mahomet’s successors. In AD 655 he was murdered in Medinah, and it had fallen blood-stained from his hands at the aya: ‘And if they believe even as ye believe, then are they rightly guided. But if they turn away, then are they in schism, and Allah will be thy protection against them.’ Soon afterwards the adherents of the fourth caliph Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, were bloodily overthrown and the kinsmen of Othman succeeded him, and from that time there began the deep Sunni-Shia rift in Islam.

  I waited uncertain in the library courtyard, where children were shaking mulberry trees. After three hours the squelch of the young fruit underfoot announced the librarian, a middle-aged man with a spade beard. ‘You have a camera?’ he demanded. ‘You have a recorder?’

  He relaxed when I shook my head. He led me into a reading-room of baroque charm, where gilded pillars upheld a little gallery with a crescent of desks, and a staircase spiralled up. The painted ceilings shone delicate under a lanterned skylight, and in showcases along the walls glowed Koranic manuscripts of minuscule beauty. I admired them cautiously. The librarian’s stare scoured me. Under his robe I heard the telltale clink of a key. Shamelessly I let drop my scant knowledge about the caliph’s Koran, and translated the blood-stained aya into stumbling Russian. He said gruffly: ‘You know this?’ But he was looking pleased, almost genial. Then he just said: ‘Come.’

  An iron door opened in the wall, and we entered a tiny room. Behind us crept an old mullah from Urgench, whom I had befriended in the courtyard. The librarian backed away. In the wall before us hung a massive copper safe, fronted by thick glass. ‘Our holiest book.’

  And there it was. It resembled no other Koran that I had seen. It bore no illumination, nothing exquisite at all, but was strong and utilitarian, with the beauty of something primitive. It lay mounded on itself in separate pages: thick, deerskin leaves. The script flowed long and low over them, like a fleet of galleys going into battle. The strokes were broad and strong. They belonged to the harshness of history, not the embroideries of faith.

  ‘Ali took it away to Kufa,’ the librarian said, ‘and when Tamerlane conquered Iraq he brought it here. It is stained with blood, but I cannot show you.’

  We stared at it through the glass a long time, while I imagined its leaves slipping from the fingers of the eighty-two-year-old caliph as he fell, and schism fanning out into half the world. Over a century ago, a traveller claimed to have seen it lying on a lectern in the tomb of Tamerlane, where mullahs chanted from it day and night. But by the time the Russians conquered Samarkand there was not a native in the city able to decipher it. The imams of the mosque where it was kept, it is said, sold it to the Russians for 125 roubles, and it remained in the Imperial Public Library in St Petersburg until the Bolsheviks returned it.

  In the dim light of the cramped room we gazed at it with separate thoughts: the white-robed librarian, myself and the mullah under his soiled blue turban, who began hesitantly to pray.

  I met Bachtiar in a tea-house off Navoi Street. He wanted to practise his English on me. Under a T-shirt blazoned ‘Commandoes’ his chest and shoulders swelled like a body-builder’s, and he folded his forearms in self-conscious layers of muscle. He was pure Uzbek. A basketball cap skewed backwards on his head, and beneath it the blunt, boy’s face, still peppered with adolescent spots, confronted the world with a look of stunned belligerence.

  He spent his time on the streets and in the gym. He had built up his body by boxing, he said. It had become his life. ‘But I think your memory goes. My best friend was a champion, but he forgets everything now, he got hit so many times.’ He bunched his fists threateningly against his jowls. ‘But being a boxer, you feel better in the streets, you walk differently.’

  He did too. After we left the tea-house, he straddled beside me with the bow-legged threat of a prize-fighter. He was an open challenge. Military service, he said, had taught him self-reliance, solitude. ‘I don’t trust anybody. Not my parents, no. Maybe my three closest friends. But nobody, in the end.’ He spoke of his conscription in a string of tense, unresolved memories, his voice pitched higher than natural. It made a harsh, tuneless music, as if petrified into one expression, like his face.

  ‘The army was meant to bring us together – Russians, Baits, Uzbeks. But the Russians were bastards. They thought because I was an Uzbek I must be some kind of wild man, you know, come in from the desert. We were out in Brandenburg, in freezing winter. The officers would punish you by pouring cold water on the floor and giving you a rag to mop it up. It took hours, while your hands froze. And then we’d fight. Russians against Ukrainians, Uzbeks against Russians.’ His tone was one of long, harsh grievance, still breathy with rage and surprise. ‘Then one day a Ukrainian fellow attacked me because I didn’t lend him my boot-polish. Another held my arms while he punched me. When an officer appeared and stopped them, I hit the Ukrainian so hard I broke his nose and he fell down under a canteen trolley in a pool of blood. I thought he was dead. And the officer took out his pistol and fired bullets round my head. I was so terrified I just stood there, staring at him, frozen. For a year after that I used to stammer ‘

  We stopped under parkland trees, where he turned with his odd, glazed stare unfocused just above my eyes. I was beginning to understand it. I asked: ‘What did you do when you got out?’

  ‘I made a street-gang with my three friends – Uzbek, Korean and Tajik. We used to go up to the race-course where black marketeers sell their stuff on stalls – leather jackets, dark glasses, stuff from Europe. I’d pick something up as if I wanted to buy it, then hand it to the friend behind, who’d hand it to another, who’d disappear with it. The seller would yell “Where is my goods gone?” and maybe he’d grab me. Then I’d hit him . . . .’ His voice, normally hard and toneless, suddenly faltered. He said: ‘I hope you don’t think badly about me for this. I think it’s more honourable than taking bribes, like lawyers do, like everybody else does.’

  I did not know how to answer. He was engulfed by an obscure rebellion. I could not fathom it. The chaos of his values seemed to stem from outrage at any world he knew. His father was not some petty gangster but a high official. ‘We don’t talk together.’ In his hunt for self-esteem, he was full of quaint chivalries and taboos. He rebuffed my attempts to pay at the next tea-house we entered, and recoiled from exchanging my dollars.

  Irked by my silence, he asked again: ‘Well, do you despise me?’

  He was like a hurt child, desperate for good opinion. I said: ‘No.’ But I could not judge him. The mafia here, tangled in ties of clan and family, had deepened into a labyrinth more complex than anywhere else in the old Soviet Union. Russians who attempted to penetrate it had either been excluded or enrolled. The illicit businesses which mushroomed in the seventies, the private cultivation of opium, drug-trafficking and prostitution, had bred a shadow-world of extortioners and protection racketeers, with legions of predatory gangs compared to which Bachtiar’s was small fry. These mafias fanned down from the highest reaches of government to the poorest shopkeeper or policeman, and because they battened on Moscow they had acquired a halo of spurious patriotism, which united all classes in accepting them. Between 1984 and 1987 almost the entire top echelons of the Uz
bek Ministry of Internal Affairs was arrested and purged. But nothing changed.

  I asked: ‘Have you ever done anything else?’

  ‘My father makes me study English now, at an institute.’ Snatches of Western pop song began to spangle his talk, culled from Pink Floyd, The Who and a host of others. ‘You think I’m talented? “Sweet Impressions . . . . You mean a lot to me” . . . .’ The songs held a lodestar magic for him: America. ‘Our gang split up four months ago. The police caught one of us and beat him senseless. They’re all bastards. They use rubber truncheons with steel inside. You may come out of the station an invalid for life, and nobody can do a thing. “Maybe it’s the end of the road” . . . . The police just get witnesses against you. It’s easy. You’ll come out trembling, your whole body . . . .’

  We were out among trees again. Bachtiar swung idly on the ball of one foot, practising karate-kicks. ‘The police beat me up once. They tried to pin a theft on me, which I hadn’t done.’ He lashed casually at the air. ‘But I hit back and cracked some-body’s head against the wall. If he’d got a hospital certificate, I’d have gone to prison. But it didn’t reach the courts. It just reached my parents.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ A pop song faded on his lips. The karate went still. He lumbered beside me, suddenly deflated. ‘I’ve never asked my father about it. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear he paid money to get me out.’

  We crossed a bridge over a canal in angry spate and peered down into the cinnamon water. He said: ‘I want to give up that sort of work.’

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘No. The tea-houses here are all in the hands of two mafias, which divide up their protection. I work as a bodyguard for one of the mafia bosses sometimes. It’s not much. You just have to look tough.’ He turned to me as if about to ask again ‘Do you despise me?’, but saw my expression and glanced away.

  This assignment, I thought, was uglier than the other, because these bosses might do anything. They were petty kings. In the Rashidov years the notorious Akhmadzhan Adylov, who claimed descent from Tamerlane, had governed part of the Fergana valley like a separate country. Only after his arrest in 1984 did the details emerge of his slave-labourers and concubines, his estate furnished with lions and peacocks, and of his underground prison and torture-chamber, where he sprayed men with icy water in sub-zero temperatures until they died. His subjects had bowed to this without a word, just as they had done more than a century before under their khans. Rashidov himself, the Uzbek Party chief, a lisping sybarite whom Brezhnev had loaded with honours, had been judged a national paragon and entombed splendidly in Tashkent’s Lenin Square. In Gorbachev’s time his body was quietly removed. But now, in an ugly signal of his country’s principles, the Uzbek president had restored this godfather to honour and proclaimed him a hero.

  Bachtiar was gazing into the muddy waters, singing ‘Sweet Impressions’. ‘I think my boss is in the prostitute racket too,’ he said. ‘The other day I saw some pimps who’d brought two tarts for the Pakistani businessmen I was dealing with. I didn’t understand what was going on. I just heard them say, “You’ve seen the merchandise. What about it?”’

  Then the credulous Bachtiar had trudged over to look at what goods they had brought, and saw two girls in the back of the car. ‘They were quite pretty, but I went numb. It was the first time I’d seen that trade.’ A high, smarting hurt was in his voice. I anticipated one of his incongruous chivalries. ‘The girls opened up their blouses to show they had no skin disease. I just felt sick. I told the Pakistanis that if they took them, then our own deal was off, and they let them go.’

  He sounded bewildered. ‘I’m going to stop this bodyguard work,’ he said. ‘You see, I’ve never beaten a guy up. I’ve seen what they’re like afterwards – covered in blood and shaking, everything shaking. I don’t think I could do that to anyone . . . .’

  My gaze drifted over the cumbersome scaffold of biceps and deltoids which had become his self-esteem. He had built up his muscles and his pride together; but it was all bravado. He had no heart for it. He did not seem to know whether to applaud or despise himself. He went on peering down into the water. Then he fastened me with his look of aghast blankness – the same look, perhaps, as he had fixed on the officer whom he thought about to take his life in Brandenburg – and just said: ‘I think I’m rather a pathetic person, really . . . .’

  Nobody is quite as you remember them. Oman seemed younger, more ebullient and less predictable than when I’d met him the year before and we had planned to travel together. He was compact and stout, like a soft toy, with short arms and legs, and a crumpled face. Perhaps because of his grey-flecked hair, I had imagined him more mature than me, and it was with a shock that I realised he was ten years younger. He had grown up in post-war poverty, he said, assigned with his family to a single room in the mansion of a long-dead Russian count. As a youth he had worked in a factory producing bodywork for cars, then became a foreman in a lorry depot, and now, bubbling with free enterprise, he transported goods in two small vans of his own. Unexplained blanks yawned in this biography, I knew, but how important they were I could not guess, and his family affairs were rife with silences which he did not fill.

  He lived in the farthest outskirts, where Uzbeks had built their traditional houses in suburbs around Russian flat-blocks. Skirted by verandahs, the big, half-empty rooms were laid out for summer round a court of apricot and cherry trees, and cooled by vine trellises. Their decor dithered between cultures. Pilasters and flowers were painted lightly over their walls and ceilings, and the quilts and china of a long-ago dowry heaped the illjointed cabinets. The dados were hung only with rugs; but from roundels in the carved ceilings fell miniature chandeliers, and a video and colour television tyrannised the sitting-room.

  All this Oman threw open to me with tycoonish pride, his eyes moist with welcome, and exploded little grenades of optimism around him in fluent Russian: ‘This is my son! That’s my wife! Those are my dogs!’

  Yet they barely responded. His wife, Gulchera – a heavy, silent woman who never ate with us – pushed forward a charmless ten-year-old son to take my hand. The boy looked like the disenchanted daemon of Oman. I had the eerie feeling that he was older than his father. He walked already with the straddle of a Turkic adult, and beneath his dulled eyes the mouth sagged in seasoned disdain. Oman’s eldest son was an angry-looking youth of twenty, who lived with his bride in a range of rooms on the far side of the courtyard. His middle son he never mentioned at all.

  But for the moment, he was jubilant. On a table cluttered with festive dishes of mutton and cherries and pyramids of nuts and caramels, we balanced my large-scale maps and traced our future journey with meat-stained fingers into north-east Uzbekistan. Eased by vodka, we vaulted over the Tianshan foothills to Kokand. ‘No problems!’ Oman’s cheeks bulged with sweets like a hamster’s. ‘We can go anywhere now!’

  Soon a betraying trail of gravy was meandering among the towns of the Fergana valley and along the headwaters of the Syr Daria. I had visas for none of these places, but Oman blew this aside. I was his guest. Travelling on obscure roads in his tough Lada saloon, we would drop out of authority’s sight. The police posts were unconcerned with passengers, he said. They just took bribes. So our greasy fingers jumped the border into Kirghizstan and turned towards the Pamirs. Beyond the Alai mountains we moved south-west along a distant tributary of the Amu Dariya, and approached the Tajikistan border. But here Oman faltered. Tajikistan was in civil war. In the capital, Dushanbe, mobs were rioting.

  ‘We won’t get in,’ he said.

  But on the map the road crossed the north-western Pamirs in a glittering trajectory which was impossible to resist. ‘Let’s try it and see.’

  ‘We should take a third person,’ he said seriously. ‘A guard. Three will make a proper gang.’

  ‘I don’t want a proper gang.’

  But his stubby fingertip remained at the border. He sa
id with an uncertain smile: ‘I’ve read that soon a monster will rise up, another Tamerlane. It’s predicted in Nostradamus. Did you know that Nostradamus foretold the fall of czarist Russia and the fall of the Soviet Union? To a month!’

  Sortilege and clairvoyance had flourished all over the Soviet Union, but I had thought Oman a sceptic. Now he said: ‘Nostradamus foretold three great tyrants – Napoleon, Hitler and a third – a man in a huge turban. And he’s coming this year!’

  I scowled in disbelief. ‘We’re still going to Tajikistan,’ I said.

  His vodka-softened eyes flickered over the map in vain search of distraction. Then he murmured without conviction: ‘You’re the boss,’ and his finger nudged over the frontier and followed mine down the wild road to Dushanbe, jinked south to the Afghan border, and traced a long loop home.

  By the time Gulchera marched in with bowls of strawberries, his rumbustiousness had returned. ‘We’ll try it! Let’s see!’ He smote the air with self-mocking gallantry. ‘My wife won’t mourn me . . . .’

  A smile started on her face, like a crack in concrete. ‘He’s a monkey,’ she said. ‘He was born in the Chinese year of the monkey, and in the Moslem year of the lion. What kind of an animal is that?’

  I laughed. ‘It sounds effective.’ But this confused beast was closer to Oman than I knew.

  We enshrined the map among a debris of dishes, and tucked into the strawberries. A month’s sybaritic travelling shimmered across the simplified geography in front of us. The emerald sliding of the valleys one into another, and the whitening contours of the mountains from which glacial rivers dribbled and great peaks ascended, filled me with longing. Here were some of the highest summits in the world. It was a region almost untouched. China, Afghanistan, Kashmir hovered just off stage. Oman, too, had contracted my infection, and was remembering his war-service in the early seventies behind the still-quiet Afghan frontier. We sealed our plan with a glut of cherries and sweet liqueurs. It would be a walkover, we decided.