The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  It was hard to forget this as we strolled among the brick and stucco houses of the Russian streets, and entered the Moslem lanes behind, although they looked idle in the failing sun. Here and there a mosque was reopening, and the flash of women’s silk made a dark fire in the alleys. Oman found a half-empty bookshop and bought a Russian translation of The Castle, available here at last seventy years after Kafka’s death. He loved Dostoevsky, he said, and had heard that Kafka too was a painter of inner worlds.

  He found a hotel where we settled for three nights. It was the best in town, but Spartan, rowdy and haunted by black marketeers. We shared a fetid room, and were visited by rats. Oman barely noticed them, nor the stained bedsheets and toxic plumbing. Yet he indulged in fastidious vanities. Every morning he dabbed his thickened neck in eau de Cologne and often visited the barber for a hedonistic shave, and his shabby suitcase was packed with scrupulously clean shirts. Sometimes he would gaze for long seconds into the mirror, as if hunting for somebody who had gone, his shallow-set eyes separated by a double-groove of knotted flesh.

  But each evening I returned from exploring the town to find the vodka bottle lowered by his bed, a mound of cigarette-stubs and The Castle still unread. Then he would clamber to his feet, and a fearful anger release itself from him. ‘I just bought some lint. Four roubles! It would have cost less than ten kopeks two years ago! That’s the mafia for you!’ His voice flew up an octave. ‘That’s why this country’s being ruined! If you start any business they’re on to you in a wolf-pack. Everything you buy is old or broken. It’s got to end sometime. One day the people will get on their feet like they have in Tajikistan!’ Then he would seize a shirt or a razor or a packet of cigarettes and yell: ‘You know how much this cost only a year ago? Yes, only . . . and now . . .’

  Increasingly I realised how little I knew about him, and I came to dread these sessions. Suddenly all his features would contract into a bitter defensiveness, as if the short nose and blunt chin had been ingested back into his skull. It might have been the face of a boxer, were it not for its compact, fleshly softness, and the hazel eyes, which touched his features with a damaged gentleness.

  At last he would go to bed in a pair of crimson underpants, and sprawl above his sheets in the humid dark; but his snoring changed key all night, sometimes pulsing in a deep, body-filling respiration, sometimes gargling and shallow like a death-rattle, until a burp or a cough changed its chord. But by morning, immaculately shaven and spruce in a white shirt again, he would be off to hunt for bargains round the nearest bazaar, jaunty and game in a whiff of eau de Cologne.

  The royal palace, built in I860 by the repulsive Khudayar Khan, stretched a long façade above parklands of weeds and roses. Its blank arches and walls were sheened in a medley of garish tile-work, but its rectangle of ramparts had gone, blown up by the besieging Russians to the stupefaction of the townspeople. A heavy ramp still mounted to the gates in a baleful path of unwelcome, and entered between narrow towers. Inside, the 113 rooms had been completed only three years before the Russians sacked them, and their survivors spread round the porticoes of empty courtyards, where I walked in solitude. The whole palace was infected by a grotesque dilapidation which cruelly suited it. In one range of rooms a natural history museum was decaying unvisited, its stuffed animals tottering into dust under the intricately painted ceilings. The inner court, once interlaced with verandahs, stairways and pavilions, had dropped into a lake of rubble, and in the park a children’s playground was disintegrating. Schoolboys splashed naked in the preposterous fountains, and a defunct Aeroflot jet had come to rest among the birch trees. Seated under the weeping willows, a few lovers gazed away from one another in awkward unison, the girls flushed and coy in their earthy silks, the youths silent, their interlaced hands lying guiltily between them on the bench.

  The last khan had distributed his harem among his friends as the Russians closed in, then fled to Mecca. But some of his ancestors lay in a cemetery near the Friday Mosque – a wilderness of the dead, dense and secret with trees, where Oman and I found them one afternoon. In a high, turreted enclosure, their graves stood peeling and half-abandoned, with those of their prematurely dead children and a holy man. The courtyard was strewn with branches where worshippers, in pious servitude, brushed away the dirt from the floor. Two pilgrims, praying there, rolled over and over in the dust before the holy man’s tomb, then went on to worship robotically at the royal graves.

  All around the mausoleum, among the cubes and headstones of the dead, a flock of lesser holy men – sightless ancients, frosted in scanty beards – dispensed medicinal magic. These were the spiritual descendants of the dervishes who had always infested Islam – holiness and charlatanry inseparable, even in one heart. Their clients sat before them in the dust while the old men, swathed in tattered coats and turbans, breathed over their faces in spitting puffs, and murmured spells. There were masseuses, too, who stretched out passing worshippers fully clothed on benches or stones, gabbling enchantments, and in five perfunctory minutes would slap their arms and legs, tug at their finger-joints and rummage over their heads.

  Under the mausoleum’s gate I stumbled on four blind patriarchs crouched round a young couple. They breathed first over her, then over him, on and on, in a crossfire of whistling spittle. The lean husband strained fiercely forward. His young wife, her lips thin in a bitter, withdrawn face, kept her eyes averted from him. Beneath her jacket, close against her breast, she cradled a live chicken, a charm for fertility. For hours, it seemed, the old men swayed and incanted, their eyes shrunk to white slits, while their gusts and spits sought out the couple through their darkness, directed by the man’s nervous shifting on his haunches and the smothered clucking from the woman’s coat. She stared about her with a shamed hope. Sometimes she seemed to wince in terror. She was praying for new life, but was surrounded by death; and these blind sages seemed coeval with it, their second sight coiled unimaginably behind their eye-sockets.

  On a bench nearby a sickly boy was being blessed in his mother’s arms. His two sisters were giggling uncontrollably, but the child gazed back at his benefactor aghast, his face frozen and staring, and I thought how years later, if he lived, he would remember this terrifying blessing, and the strange old man with blanks where his eyes should have been, and the mausoleum looming behind. At last the woman got up and gave the man two roubles. His fingers fondled them and he mumbled something to her. Inflation had hit even holy men. So she handed him five roubles more, then went slowly away, cradling her sick son, between the graves.

  Oman had a friend in the town, an actor named Jura who was famous there. He was a master of askiya, the theatrical exchange of insults which could still be heard in tea-houses. His face was a mask of polished flesh, where the features were only sketchy afterthoughts, but humour fidgeted chronically beneath, and broke open a mouth fabulous with gold teeth. He had spent forty years on the boards, or bandying tea-house abuse rife with sexual innuendo, surrounded by the toothless hilarity of old men.

  His house was as prodigal as he was, thrown round a majestic courtyard overswept by fourteen varieties of vine. He shared it with four married sons, and had fifteen grandchildren scattered round Kokand. Even his gait was a study in amplitude – a kind of rollicking waddle. He wore a baggy, grey-blue suit, like a crumpled Chinese, but when we sat down to lunch its jacket strained to bursting, and his arms bulged like columns.

  We ate monstrously in his garish dining-room, sitting beneath a tapestry of damsels cavorting on a barge. Dish after dish arrived in gluttonous procession, all carried in soundlessly by one of those daughters-in-law who seem touchingly enslaved: a thin, frightened girl in flaming silks. She fluttered in and out, and barely raised her eyes.

  Jura spoke in a dead-pan monologue. Sometimes in his face I discovered only the cruel oval of the Mongol steppe; then a twitch of plastic flesh would presage a joke, or the mouth open in a second’s gleaming banter. ‘It’s in the blood,’ he said. ‘Humour. I was an only c
hild – an odd thing with us – and my father taught me askiya from boyhood. My grandfather and great-grandfather were court jesters to the khans. And their ancestors before that. All jesters. I don’t think it was a very safe job.’ I pictured, for a moment, a line of Mongoloid hunchbacks and wise simpletons rigged up in cap-and-bells. But he went on: ‘These jesters were most like wits and story-tellers. Sometimes there were many of them. In my great-grandfather’s day, my father told me, there were forty, and he the oldest.’

  ‘Forty of them . . . .’ Oman echoed his words from time to time in dreamy sycophancy. ‘The khan was hard to cheer up.’

  ‘The last one was like a wolf, you know, savage,’ Jura went on. ‘He told the forty one evening that if they didn’t make him laugh he’d have them executed. This was his own joke, I sup-pose, but perhaps it wasn’t. Then he sat in front of them, looking grim.’ He depressed his mouth and shoulders in surly xenophobia. ‘And one by one they all failed – thirty-nine of them – until at last he came to my great-grandfather. The khan said, “Make me laugh.” But my great-grandfather just yelled at him, “You mother-fucker, why haven’t you already laughed? What’s wrong with you?” And the khan rocked back in astonishment and started to guffaw!’

  This hoary jot of family history coaxed a smile from him, which instantly faded. He said: ‘But the line of humour dies out with me. My sons don’t act. And audiences are smaller now, much smaller. People stay at home watching television.’

  In the town’s theatre they acted classics too, he said – Schiller, Sophocles, Shakespeare. He had just played Iago in Othello, and it might have been a chilling performance, for the neutrality of his face seemed capable of erupting into any nature, and I wondered vaguely what other selves might lie beneath it.

  He and Oman went on eating long after I was exhausted. I watched them in awe. Fistfuls of potato and sheep’s fat vanished down their throats with a smacking of lips or a carnival burp. They plunged their spoons into the mounded pilau, plucking out choice gibbets of mutton or wodges of scented rice. Sweets and raisins disappeared in a trice. Vodka came and went. ‘And I have wine! From our own grapes!’ Jura flashed his science-fiction smile. ‘We’ll taste the oldest!’

  The gentle house-slave brought it in a jug, and we drank. It was pure vinegar. Oman, who had tossed it back like vodka, was racked by gasping coughs. Even Jura looked angry as he sent it away. But their spirits revived with the arrival of sugared sweetcorn and dried apricots, and the vinegar was exorcised in the renewed gurgling of vodka. Only after an hour did Jura lie back on his cushions, sharpening a toothpick with a gilded penknife, and regale us with descriptions of the towns where we were going.

  The citizens of Margilan, he said, were delicate and obsequious – his hand fluttered sweetly to his heart in corrupt invitation. ‘They’ll ask you to their home and then go out by the back door!’ Next he brought his fists crashing on to the table to illustrate the coarse robustness of the people of Andijan. And as for those of Namangan, he said . . . well, the men slept with one another. But the people of Kokand? ‘We’re the humourists! That’s our reaction to life. We laugh! The Margilanis simper, the Andijanis bluster, but . . .’ – his face puckered – ‘we laugh!’

  This thumbnail scenario was to haunt us during the next week’s travel, when time and again, as if by telepathy, towns-people reproduced Jura’s mannerisms with unsettling accuracy. As we said farewell, he announced with sudden grace: ‘This is not a Margilan man speaking, but my door is open to you whenever you come again . . . .’

  As we crossed the courtyard, his daughter-in-law waved to us shyly. I wondered about her – as I often did about such women, living in the extended family of strangers, under the rod of their mother-in-law. But now her look of fear had gone. She was cradling a baby son in her husband’s doorway, and as we went she lifted him up to our view like the badge of her honour, and was smiling.

  Next day the long, alluvial corridor of the Fergana valley began to steer us east. It scooped a festering cul-de-sac out of the mountains on three sides: a land more enclosed and volatile than any behind us. It was the easternmost limit of Uzbekistan. The icy tributaries of the Syr Dariya tumbled down from north and south to feed it, netted by dams and ordered through canals, and all about us the waters were sucked away by cotton-fields glossed with green.

  Across their giant plantations, and all along the roads, the mulberry hedges had been hacked back to writhing trunks as provender for silk-worms, and now filed across the fields like ghosts. Here and there, where electric cables intersected them, an ungainly stork would be hunched on each pylon above a ramshackle nest and two unsteady fledglings, their beaks ungratefully open.

  Half a millennium ago the emperor Babur, who was born here, wrote of the country’s flower-filled meadows, and of fruit so plentiful that melons were given away free on the roadsides. As a youth he had hunted wild ass in its hills, and loosed his hawks to bring down pheasants so plump that the broth of one could feed four men. But he was driven from these lands of his youth and never returned, and their lost paradise haunted him long after he had founded the Moghul empire in India. Even in the last century, before the Russians imposed cotton, travellers described the indolent beauty of brimming orchards, and the charm of tea-houses perched above cold rivers.

  While my mental map of the land was starred with historical leftovers and formidable mountains, Oman was travelling another country. His was dotted with promising bazaars and restaurants. He slowed the Lada to a watchful dawdle at any wayside market, then would march in to haggle over a pair of socks or a sliver of silk, for resale in Tashkent. These minor purchases put him at peace. He hummed tunelessly to himself. At every lift of the ground we would look out on a misted plain of orchards and whitewashed villages lanced with poplars, while far to the south the Pamir mountains were trailing their snow-summits across the blue.

  Fergana, the industrial core of all this valley, had been founded by the Russians only a century before. It was a centre of textiles and oil refining, but already it looked old. Avenues of plane trees tunnelled through its heart, dappling façades washed in a seductive peacock blue. So its poverty of shops and offices was tempered in this veil of splintered sunlight. Uzbeks and Russians still mingled, and files of blond and black-haired schoolchildren made mongrel undercurrents in the streets. But when I tried to find my way with a two-year-old map (Oman had vanished into the bazaars) half the road names were unrecognisable to me. Karl Marx St had transformed to Fergana St, Communist St to Samarkand St, Kirov to Constitution, Pushkin to Navoi.

  I sat down in the central mall. Beside me a man of eighty trembled faintly, continually, with Parkinson’s disease. He was trying to pull liquorice tablets from his pocket, but could not, and turned to me with a shiver of helplessness. Two maple leaves had settled undisturbed on his shoulders. He had worked all his life in the cotton-fields, he said, but did not know if the sprayed chemicals had infected him. He lived on a pension of 1100 roubles a month. I wondered how he survived. Meat alone cost over 100 roubles a kilo. But he had not eaten meat for many years, he said. ‘I live on eggs and bread. Pensioners do.’

  ‘And what do you do all day?’

  ‘When the weather’s good, I sit here and watch everything changing.’

  He did not see the sun-gentled city of my imagination. He saw threat. He could not fathom it. In 1989 the region’s youths had gone on the rampage against its minority Meskhetian Turks, who had been transported by Stalin from the Black Sea and never returned. Nearly two hundred were killed. The whole valley, dyed with a deeper Islam than the country’s west, was angrier and less predictable.

  ‘But it wasn’t because of nationalism or Islam,’ Oman told me later, ‘although the Meskhetians are Shiites. It was because of the Turks’ mafia!’ All evil, as usual, was rooted in the mafia for him. ‘The ordinary people had had enough. They said “Get out!’” He chopped the air triumphantly. ‘Out!’

  Yet the reasons for these upsurges were enigmatic sti
ll; an imponderable mix of economic distress and racial bigotry. In 1990, some three hundred people were killed in the Kirghiz town of Osh, where natives and Uzbeks battled over housing; and in the past few years half the large cities had grumbled with separate crises.

  Whenever this happened, Central Asia trembled. The frontiers of its states still ran almost as Stalin delineated them in October 1924, trying to follow ethnic realities. Sometimes they divagated nervously to join mountain headwaters with the plains which they nourished. The results were freakish. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan sliced up the Khorezm oasis bizarrely between them, while Tajikistan was crowned by a horn of lowland reaching almost to Kokand. Kirghizstan (which was shaped in 1926) straddled the Fergana valley like a snapped wishbone; and even now – as I conceived of Uzbekistan as a crouching dog – we were travelling along the creature’s preposterously jowled and bobbled snout as it thrust into Kirghizstan.

  Yet despite these convolutions, the peoples of each nation were helplessly interleaved. The Uzbeks overlapped their Kazakh borders, and were numerous in every other state, comprising one quarter of the population of Tajikistan. But the Tajiks formed the bedrock of Uzbek Samarkand and Bukhara, while the little Karakalpak nation, ethnically close to the Kazakhs, lodged discomfitingly in the dog’s groin. Russians littered every nation, of course, especially Kazakhstan, alongside Tartars, Ukrainians, Germans, Koreans, Chinese, Uighurs, Arabs and a host of others.