The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  After a while Oman’s daughter-in-law entered and flitted round him, adjusting his napkin and pouring out coffee. ‘She’s a fine girl,’ he said, ‘but my son’s hopeless, a playboy. I tell her all the time to be tough on him, to grab him by the ears and shake him.’

  But she did not look as if she could be tough on anybody. In her narrow face the eyes were soft almonds. She had been brought up gentle, he said, the daughter of his best friend. He played a video of her wedding four months before, while she watched with a sad half-smile. Across the screen the ritual bouquet-laying at three or four war-memorials, and a banquet in a bleak hall, were followed two days later by a Moslem wedding and an orgy of pilau-guzzling in the courtyard of their home. After the video ended, she slipped away.

  But by now Oman had weighed anchor on a sea of vodka. We drank to peace everywhere, to our looming journey, to British-Uzbek concord. He said: ‘Tashkent has just been twinned with Birmingham! Oh Colin, there is a bigger difference than they know!’ His dark eyes were watering. ‘I don’t know what will happen in this country, but I’m afraid everything is on the brink. Things are like they were in Germany before Nazism in the twenties. I’m afraid Communism will come again by December, or Fascism.’

  ‘Or Islam?’

  ‘Those people only pray to God, I’m not afraid of that. God expects honesty and right behaviour. It’s these other people . . . .’ He drained another glass. ‘We may have civil war one day. Then my neighbour who wants Communism will shoot me, who doesn’t, and so on . . . and on . . . .’

  His spirit was draining away. He looked older again, and touched by a sombre authority. Some latent bitterness, too, shook in his voice’s loneliness. These bouts of pessimism, often followed by a savage self-unfurling, would soon become familiar to me, but that evening I only watched in surprise while he levered himself to his feet and said good-night.

  For a long time I lay awake in the silence of the spare room and of the suburb outside. It seemed unnaturally still. The street lights printed leaf-shadows on the curtains, and occasionally one of Oman’s wire-haired dogs yelped itself awake on the verandah. At last, in this filtered light, I fell into a confused sleep, hypnotised by Oman’s shelf of European books and their arcane Cyrillic authors hanging above me: Jek London . . . Aleksandr Dewma . . . Artoor Heyli . . . Jems Hedli Cheis . . . .

  For the next four days, birthdays among Oman’s friends delayed us with an outbreak of parties round the city. In my memory they have blended into a single guzzling revel, which roisters through the cramped rooms of high-rise flats and dappled suburban courtyards. The tables creak beneath the same glut of side-dishes: the chocolate-coated biscuits in their paper wrappings, the bowls of raisins and walnuts and apricots, the heaped and saccharine confectionery.

  Then the people dance. Their upcurled arms seem to free the swaying bodies below into a celebration of erotic power. But the men are already a little drunk, and begin to filter into other rooms. It is their wives who want the music. Sturdy Uzbek and Tartar women, they kick off their shoes and thump the floor with feet fringed by gaudily varnished toenails. Their frizzed hair bounces round features concertinaed in flesh, and their eyes glint out from mascara pools. The mood is at once dreamy and ebullient, tinged by the sentimentality of Russia and by a stirring sensuousness.

  There is rarely a Russian present; but the Moslem Tartars, whose language lies close to Uzbek, often look indistinguishable from Slavs, and stretch a tentative bridge between the cultures. ‘The Tartars just took the Russian women when they invaded,’ Oman said, ‘and this is the result!’

  The men, meanwhile, have reconvened around the vodka bottles, where old comrades pledge their love in bouts of clannish connivance. They were in college together, perhaps, or in business, and somewhere a marriage has cemented the families. They clamp their wrists together where the veins bulge — ‘Blood brothers!’ – and pour out advice, trust, knowledge. ‘My true friend!’ Nothing, for the moment, is more important, more overwhelmingly real, than this male fidelity. The vodka gurgles and the eyes gleam with replenished belief in the world before they become overcast by drink and the phrases dither into platitude. Then the circle of love expands to include anyone present. Soon all barriers and differences are declared void, and only emotion valid, as if benign drunkards everywhere are doomed to slip into the same language. Vaulting insights are asserted with the heat of discoveries just made, until every declaration becomes a sodden Eureka from the heart. All around, the heads nod sagaciously, as if testing some mighty truth; a zealous celebrant takes it upon himself to fill the glasses of the rest; and the next toast blunders on its way in a jumble of metaphors and goodwill. ‘We are many farmers, but we till one earth . . . .’

  Eventually the foreigner, too, stumbles to his feet and blurts out his gratitude and love, while a bonfire of benevolence ignites around him. But outside, the town has gone still and the stars are shining, and at last the guests depart in a clamour of tenderness, leaving behind only a few party bores, elderly men mostly, too drunk or important to move. For a while an inebriate litany continues in the starlight: ‘What difference does it make . . . black, white, Asian, American? . . . People are just people .... What matters is the heart . . . . There is no difference in the sight of God . . . . We are all one . . . . God is One . . .’

  But at these parties, too, sit surly men and shy women who sink out of notice and are the first to slip away. Social and dynastic rivalries simmer beneath the chatter. Perhaps that was why Oman’s wife shunned such gatherings, and he himself sometimes looked isolated. Once his hostess turned on him and hissed: ‘Tell Gulchera this is the last time I ask her to a party if she won’t come!’

  The people eating and dancing beside me might turn out to be lawyers or restaurateurs, carpenters or businessmen, who chattered democratically together. They inhabit my memory now in raucous isolation, vivid, sentimental and open. Once I found myself gazing into a face of rare Turkic beauty. Over her cheekbones the bronze skin stretched tense and fragile, lit by a pair of hazel eyes. She was an economist whose government institute had foundered for lack of funds, and she was married to a fat, wordless lorry-driver with chest-hair bushing between his shirt buttons.

  On my other side a jolly Tartar woman in a candyfloss pink dress had dismissed her drunken husband after ten years of battering marriage. ‘I told him I didn’t want any maintenance. He couldn’t hold down a job anyway. I just wanted him to go. So he went.’ She was bringing up their two children while operating an elevator on an eleven-hour shift.

  Once, too, as I danced among the stout legion of my contemporaries, Oman’s daughter-in-law appeared in front of me, confident in her young beauty, the bride of four months. In my drink-dazed eyes she danced like a reborn Salome. It was impossible to relate her to the women lumbering around me, to the matron she would one day become. The music thumped and howled. Her arms swung above her with a rhythmic violence and her belly wriggled bare between a pruriently modest skirt and a little jacket. Then she was gone.

  Somewhere else an old man buttonholed me with melancholy evangelism. Parties like this, he said, crooking a finger at our lavish table, would soon be extinct. Things had been declining for forty years, and would go on getting worse. A pair of quizzical eyebrows tufted him in comic bewilderment. He could remember a heaven, he said, when Stalin’s law prevailed, and crime was unknown. ‘There was justice then. You didn’t escape prison by knowing somebody-or-other. Vendors in the bazaar would just cover their wares in a cloth and find nothing disturbed next morning!’ A perverted truth clung to this. ‘The canals were so clean you could drink from them. The air smelt good. Most people had a room or two, and enough to eat, and clothes. People were not rich, but they were honest. Buses were enough transport, and some horses. And I had a first-rate bicycle’ – his hands lifted in delight – ‘made in Birmingham!’

  Then he dwelt on the mystery of creation and its irreversible decline, on how God had designed a man and a woman and given them frui
t trees – ‘and there were some cows too’ – and everything had grown up from this radiant simplicity. His eyes began watering. He deployed walnuts across the table to illustrate the triple rotation of crops, and mimed the waking up of the earth in spring, and its snoring in winter. But then there became too many people, he said – again he crooked his finger at the gluttonous guests crowding our table – and bosses and kings had appeared. His upturned eyebrows floated in airborne sadness. ‘And now people think that after this life they’ll just go into the earth. So why should they be honest? Why not grab what you can? Nobody cares any more.’ He let a pinch of raisins trickle from his hand. ‘Because afterwards they’ll be dust . . . .’

  Chapter 9

  Into the Valley

  Dawn had not broken when we moved east out of the last suburbs of Tashkent. Our headlights swung over an empty road. We were keen with the journey’s start, Oman singing to himself as he steered around the potholes, while I sat awake in high spirits, and the faintest apprehension.

  After a while, as if some deeper shade of darkness had overprinted the night, I became aware of the cones and triangles of mountains standing on the blackness of the southern horizon. One by one they detached themselves into three dimensions, and within a few minutes the sky was lightening and the stars were peeled away.

  But Oman said: ‘It’s still dark ahead.’

  At first I imagined storm-cloud. But then, as the sun rose and dangled like a weak bulb, I realised that from end to end the earth ahead lay under a leaden ceiling of smoke. Desolating flat-blocks, pylons and allotments of withered sunflowers appeared, and the next moment we were in the coal-mining town of Angren, whose deposits had been torn open in 1942 to feed the Soviet war-machine.

  Nothing might have changed since then. In front of us a landscape of primitive horror had opened up. It belonged to Britain’s collieries in the thirties, or to the Pennsylvania coalfields of the Depression. Under that sky of cruelly filtered light, the whole plain was littered with industrial dinosaurs: coal-fed power-stations and factories like old Meccano sets, strangled in their own chutes and pipes, and chimneys belching yellowish waste. Their windows were smashed or blank. Some were dead on their feet, their turbines and gangways left to rot unremoved. Murals of Lenin flaked from their walls. Others looked derelict, yet had only just been built. Silver water-pipes wriggled for miles between them, sloughing their lagging here and there, and overarched the road like abandoned gateways, while on the town’s eastern limits yawned the amphitheatre which tyrannised it, ringed with pink rock. We got out of the car and gazed down hundreds of feet. It plunged beneath us in a black stairway. It looked less like an open-cast mine than a canyon, in whose centre the waste-tip surged in a crumpled mesa. Trains and dump-trucks tinkled and whined far below, while the town teetered and smoked on the excavation’s lip, and the first peaks of the Tienshan, the Chinese ‘Mountains of Heaven’, glittered in the polluted sky.

  In this wasteland a depleted colony of Germans remained, deported from the Volga by Stalin in 1941. Among cottagey suburbs, an old man, dozing in his courtyard under a Homburg hat, could still speak a stumbling, lonely German although his ancestors had lived in Russia for over 200 years. Ever since Catherine the Great had ushered in her countrymen as farmers, they had settled on the lower Volga, and the old German could remember from his childhood its modest prosperity. He had the Stoic face of a man whom huge events had misruled. His working hands rested on his knees, and his big shoulders were bowed a little. He spoke in husky Russian.

  Everything had been all right until the war, he said. ‘But on August 28th 1941 – that was the blackest day of our lives – Stalin deported us all within three days. My family were taken to northern Kazakhstan, where we worked in military construction. The people hated us, because they knew who we were. A year later my father died, broken, and I was sent to an arms factory in the Urals. We never saw the Volga again.’ He spoke all this placidly, as if its history were long ago. ‘After the war I married a German and worked as an agronomist for the rest of my useful life. Then we came here where my sons and daughter are. It was difficult out there in Kazakhstan on our own. We’re old.’ He straightened his back against the chair as if resisting this. ‘But of course people here don’t understand how we came. Some of them think we’re ex-prisoners-of-war

  ‘Even now?’

  ‘Even now.’ He clambered to his feet and returned with a wooden box. ‘But you see I served the Soviet Union well.’ He opened the lid on a row of work medals, and pinned one to his lapel. ‘You see.’

  So even he, suffering the immigrant’s split identity after eight generations, had sheltered under the blanket impersonality of ‘Soviet’. I asked tentatively: ‘Have many gone back to Germany from here?’

  He looked vaguely troubled. ‘Yes, many.’

  ‘What do they write back?’

  ‘They say they’re sad. The shops have everything, but they’re sad.’ A few words of German had strayed into his Russian. ‘I have relatives who’ve gone to Hamburg, and it’s very tough. After all, they were born here. They barely speak German. But at the beginning it’s always difficult. It’s like that everywhere.’ He looked at me as if he had read my thought. ‘No, I won’t go. Who wants me there? No one needs me. I’ll stay here with my old woman. Or perhaps we’ll return to the Volga . . . .’

  ‘You think that will happen?’ Even now, I knew, politicians were deliberating the revival of the autonomous German region there, and Germany itself was lobbying for it, in a bid to deflect a tide of immigrants from its own borders.

  ‘I think it may happen,’ he said. ‘And if the republic’s established there, many will go.’ He smiled for the first time. ‘I, too. I don’t want to lose the feeling of belonging to my nation.’

  I said: ‘You can’t lose that now!’ But I did not believe that this Volga republic would be recreated, and a few weeks later Moscow refused it. Perhaps the ingrained fear of Germany, or vested interests in the old republic, had proved too strong.

  ‘The Uzbeks have been fine with us,’ the old man said. ‘But it’s not the same as your own land.’ He folded the medals back into their box. Engraved with Communist stars and portrait-heads of Lenin, they already looked like museum exhibits. ‘And I want to speak my people’s tongue again.’

  A few hours later our Lada was circling into foothills. Beneath us the Chirchik river made a wild corridor through the rocks, while the road above us corkscrewed into treeless passes. Erosion had flayed the slopes to powder, spotted with shrubs and gashed by scree-filled ravines. These were the last gasp of a massif which had swept west more than a thousand miles from the borders of Mongolia.

  Now, over a pallid membrane of grass, the heights were scarlet with tulips. Once we blundered over the rubble of an avalanche which had shaken loose after earth tremors two days before. Then we were spiralling upward through tightening circles, where crags burst in black fists, and the mountain-crests wheeled overhead in shining parapets of snow. Cloud and rain gusted across the road. The next moment we were over the pass and descending a valley where a stream slithered down a thread of villages. Maple, apricot and silver poplar followed one another in a long brilliance of yellow, crimson and green, while isolated scenes unfurled like a Chinese scroll: a horse grazing under a footbridge, a house decaying, an old woman munching bread on a scarlet mattress. When we wandered into the hamlets of mud and poplar-wood we found farmers and silver miners, Uzbek and Tajik mingled, who fed us fruit and new-baked bread.

  At intervals along the road a police-post would flag us down and Oman trudge off to present his papers and return often deprived of some petty bribe: a few cigarettes or a ten-rouble note. ‘We never used to have all this! Never! So why? Why?’ Then the festering anger would erupt and his thick arms pummel the steering-wheel. ‘Ninety-five per cent of our people are poor – how does a peasant live on twenty dollars a month? – and five per cent are rich and corrupt. No wonder people are starting to call for a Stalin! The Mafi
a in Sicily are a kindergarten compared to ours!’

  An hour later we were crossing the Syr Dariya, the old Jaxartes river. Legend claimed its valley to have once been so populous that a cat could stroll from wall to wall, or a nightingale flit from branch to branch of its orchards, all the way from Kashgar to the Caspian. Now a 300-yard pontoon bridge moaned and clanked under us. Beneath it the river poured west in a silt-heavy flood, leached by cotton-fields, before curling north to cross the Kizilkum desert and vanish in the Aral Sea.

  By evening we were nosing into Kokand. The old town looked young now, nondescript in its grid of Russian streets, but its past drenched it black, and suffused its most innocent inhabitants for me. It had been called Khoh-kand, ‘town of pigs’, from the boars which infested its marshes, but in time the name grew other connotations. By the start of the nineteenth century, together with Bukhara and Khiva, its khanate had carved up the core of Central Asia, ruling from the rich Fergana valley to the steppes beyond Tashkent. Its citizens were known for cowardice and cruelty. Their khans were murderers and debauchees. Even their subjects loathed them. Their land was stubbornly fruitful — it exported wool, silk, fruit, hides and opium – but within its eight-mile battlements the town eventually became an arsenal shrunk among fields and cemeteries, and its diseased waters turned the inhabitants cretinous with goitre. The Russians absorbed the khanate in 1876, after routing an army of 50,000 for the loss of six dead, and abolished it wholesale.

  Yet a moment of tragic distinction visited the town in 1918. In the chaos of the Revolution a Moslem congress assembled here to set up a rival government to the Bolshevik soviet in Tashkent. It was a unique sign of united national sentiment in Central Asia, and a first and last attempt to achieve democratic unity by peaceful means. Claiming that it spoke for the masses, Kokand appealed to Lenin in vain. The Tashkent Bolsheviks attacked the ill-armed town, slaughtered some 14,000 citizens, indulged in an orgy of rape, and burnt or mined every house and mosque. Then a tremor of fury and realisation surged through the Moslems, and within a week the whole region was in flames. It was from this moment that the bosmachi guerrilla movement arose to plague the Red forces – and continued fighting for another five years – and that Moslem faith in Communism was lost.