The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Oh, Nurkhon,’ said the same man: he complied mesmerisingly with Jura’s honeyed parody. ‘She was taken down a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So that everything will be more beautiful.’ His hand fluttered up to caress his heart. ‘You see, our times have changed. We used to have nothing. Now we have our freedom.’

  ‘So you pull down statues of women?’ I was brewing up a Pygmalion affection for Nurkhon. ‘I thought the people of Margilan were milder . . . .’

  ‘Ah, we are.’ Effete smiles suffused him. ‘We’re a sweeter people than the others. We are more feeling. We believe more strongly in Islam. We wish everybody well.’ His voice was a sugary glissade. ‘We make no distinction between one race and another. We welcome everybody.’

  ‘Then why . . .?’

  ‘Because we need order,’ he lilted. His smile was like makeup. ‘Stalin, I think, was a good thing, whatever anybody says. My father fought through the war for him and even took his picture. We need somebody cruel here now.’ He went on in the same fastidious, courtly tone: ‘Cruelty is good for people.’

  I said: ‘Your mosques would be shut down again.’

  ‘We don’t need the mosques. I learnt my Islam from my father, and from old men in the tea-houses when I was a child. It was alive then, and we all listened.’

  ‘But . . . .’ I faltered. This was like handling water, or the slithery local silks.

  Our families here are everything,’ he simpered. ‘We are each a little dynasty, all merchants.’ His fingers touched his heart again. ‘They say we can sell anything.’

  An enormous family of merchants and teachers, to whom a Turkic friend in England had given me an introduction, lived near Namangan in the countrified suburb of a town famous for its craftsmanship in steel. Oman and I arrived unheralded, and found ourselves peering into a labyrinthine courtyard, thronged with fig and persimmon trees and traversed by a rivulet where roses bloomed. Somewhere in this compound’s heart lived an ancient progenitor, whose sons, grandsons, nephews and their families inhabited the households all around in a maze of kinship which I never unravelled.

  A suave English teacher named Hakim, the youngest of this brood of sons, ushered us into his reception-room, where a rosy wife bustled and children marvelled at us through beautiful, dark-lashed eyes. Hakim spoke a bookish English. My friendship with Fatima – a distant cousin whom he had scarcely seen – and my penetration to his home filled him with fitful amazement. Periodically his face would loosen into a rather sensuous concourse of alert eyes and mobile lips, and he would breathe out: ‘How remarkable!’

  All day and far into the night Oman and I sat in one of those big rooms whose pastel-painted walls and ceilings were familiar now, while a procession of relatives, flushed out by the news of our coming, trooped in to share our pilau and tea. Grave, open-faced men, flecked by moustaches and accompanied by silent wives, settled around us in ceremonious enquiry, dignified in their dark jackets and skull-caps. Sometimes they resembled a meeting of shy farmers, their thick hands splayed over their knees or tunnelling discreetly into the pilau. Their eyes shone in passive scrutiny. Formally they asked about Fatima, who began to take on a half mystical presence among us. To many of them she was only hearsay, but they grew sad when I told them she had parted from her husband, became intrigued by her car and flat, and revived when they heard she was succeeding in journalism. Sometimes, under the pressure of their questions, I found myself reinventing her to please them. I expressed her enthusiasm for returning to Uzbekistan, but I did not know when this might be. I enquired after babies and school diplomas on her behalf. They answered with sober pride. But yes, I said, she was well, she had not forgotten them – and their faces split into ranks of silvered teeth.

  For a brief half-hour I slipped into the courtyard under the persimmon trees, where a niece of Hakim found me, and we sat on one of the throne-like Turkic benches. In the branches above us a tame quail sang in a cage. The girl was seventeen, and physically adult, but her face looked empty of experience, like an infant’s. She was studying to enter university, she said, and wanted to specialise in English, but she was too shy to speak it to me.

  What would she do with this English, I asked?

  ‘I’d like to be an interpreter,’ she replied, smiling at me, ‘for the KGB.’ Her legs swung childishly. The prismatic trousers of Atlas silk had eased a little up her slim, unshaven calves. ‘I think that would be interesting work.’ The KGB was just a job, an institution which had always been there, like the army or the local collective farm. ‘But I think they don’t often take women, they prefer men.’

  ‘What else could you do?’ I asked anxiously. ‘What do you enjoy?’ It was like talking to a ten-year-old.

  ‘I like tennis.’

  ‘Tennis?’

  ‘Yes. You know, at a table. And I’d like to travel. I love travelling.’ But she had not ventured beyond Bukhara, and when she asked where I had been her gaze settled on me with a soft wonder. ‘That’s what I want to do: travel. I don’t want to marry before I’m twenty-five. Twenty-five is late, but I won’t sit at home all my life.’

  ‘Not a good Moslem wife!’ I was beginning to believe in her future.

  She wrinkled up her nose. ‘I don’t go to the mosque. That’s only for men. I don’t like that sort of thing.’

  ‘You wouldn’t wear a veil?’

  ‘No!’ It was a hushed, violent monosyllable. ‘I think that’s revolting.’

  At nightfall, from every house in the compound, the men converged on our reception-room. While Oman and I occupied the place of honour opposite the door, they circled out from us in a cross-legged ring, like a pow-wow of tribal elders, and a timehonoured banquet unfolded. No woman was present, but even the young boys ate with us, and from time to time Hakim rocked a wooden cradle where his infant son lay tied with scarlet sashes. From a makeshift catheter attached to the baby’s penis, a potty in the cradle’s base was filling with urine. He lay there immobile as a mummy, howling.

  The men, meanwhile, touched their faces in self-absolution, and launched into drink. More insidiously than any propaganda, I thought, vodka had leaked into their culture and undermined their Islam. They toasted in the Russian way, the cups emptied wholesale down their gullets – pledges to peace, to Fatima, to their arrival in London one day (I tried vainly to imagine this), and to my safety – before dipping their lepeshka bread into bowls of oily mutton, or seizing handfuls of strawberries.

  Then the conversation darkened. They spoke of troubles in neighbouring Namangan, where women had been browbeaten to accept the veil and self-appointed vigilantes had administered Islamic law, parading petty criminals. Recently the police had moved in and arrested fifty of these zealots, they said, and a good thing too.

  ‘They were only a few hundred,’ said a young man. ‘A lot of them were people without work, I think, bitter people. Youths.’ He looked only a youth himself.

  ‘They wanted to create their own power-block,’ said a merchant, ‘their own mafia.’

  ‘Just mafia!’ Oman cried. The word always electrified him. ‘We don’t want them! What we need is business. Freedom to do business!’ I dreaded this. Vodka turned him voluble almost at once. Two or three toasts, and he was throwing his arms about and discharging a battery of theories and platitudes. ‘Islam wasn’t meant to be like that!’ he clamoured. ‘Where is it written in the Koran that women have to wear veils? It isn’t, it isn’t!’ He started punching the air. ‘It’s not appearances that matter but the heart!’

  The others began to look embarrassed while his voice mounted and his eyes swam with a fevered glitter, as if he might weep. They all agreed with him – they were nodding in stately unison – but he was snowballing into an uncontrolled passion which they mutely repudiated. They fingered their spoons and cracked nuts and looked a little away. Only when he subsided did they return to life. Then, with homespun decorum, they rejected fundamentalism and ‘the Iranian model’. They would follow
‘the Turkish model’, they said. Their Islam would be their own, temperate and hospitable.

  ‘Our people aren’t like the Iranians,’ somebody said. ‘We think in a different way.’

  They tacitly despised them. All that emotion, they implied, was unmanly. They settled back on their cushions.

  ‘In time we’ll create our own system,’ boomed a giant. A short beard fell from his chin like a tattered bib. ‘But at the moment, you see, we have no feeling about ourselves as a nation. History is the key, and the Soviets took ours away. We were sold a mass of Bolshevik stories, and nothing of our own. In secondary school, where I teach, the text-books devoted only two lines to Timur, the world conqueror. Two lines! And they just described him as rotten.’ He spoke with gruff irony. He clenched his fists and said: ‘But now our books are being rewritten by Uzbek historians, who have proper access to the archives!’

  I wondered how much truer these would be. The past here seemed to change all the time. It was impossible to foretell it. I wondered, too, how he had felt, teaching a certain truth one year, then overturning it the next. After perestroika, I asked, how had he faced his students?

  It was a cruel question, but his jovial smile remained. ‘I just explained to them that the facts were unknown to me too! I hadn’t known them either! But that now it was possible to know the truth, so we were starting again. What first opened our eyes, you know, was the invasion of Afghanistan. They say that nearly half the Soviet force came from Central Asia, and I believe it. Moslems ordered to fight their fellow-Moslems, Uzbeks against Uzbeks, Tajiks....’

  Had they been sent, I asked, on some mistaken propaganda notion, or out of simple ignorance?

  ‘Ignorance,’ a gaunt merchant intruded. His eyes flickered back and forth, as if he were missing out on some deal. ‘The Russians never learnt anything. Not from anybody.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the history teacher said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. But they were still sending us in long after the start. It made a terrible bitterness. My brother was one. Many just deserted, and are still living over there. And in the end people started refusing to fight.’

  ‘Refusing?’ I asked. ‘Here in Central Asia?’

  For the first time his face fell, and his smile vanished. In a tone of puzzled shame, he said: ‘No. Sadly, there were none here. The conscientious objectors were all Russians. They demonstrated in Moscow. But we . . . we just did as we were told.’

  Then I thought of the paradox in these people: their mixture of rustic sturdiness and fatal acquiescence. Even in the last century travellers had remarked how they took on the protective colouring of whatever power was dominant. As my hand came to rest on the edge of the stilled cradle, I found myself wondering about this helplessness in which as babies they were bound for months, and a herd of Freudian dogmas lumbered into my head, drifted away . . . .

  ‘We have far to go,’ the teacher said simply. ‘We haven’t moved as the Russians have. We don’t have democracy here at all. Just a sham. They talk about it all the time, of course, but do nothing.’

  ‘At least you’re ruled by your own people,’ I said: so one layer of repression had been peeled away.

  They nodded approval. ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’

  Oman was rocking the cradle. ‘This is our democracy!’ he cried. ‘It’s just an infant!’

  The baby started bellowing again; but his father released him and stood him on his feet, while everyone watched and applauded. He looked like a young Hercules. He was stroked, kneaded, saluted, lectured and kissed. Then Oman seized him and lifted him up and down above his head like a trophy. ‘This is the future Uzbekistan!’ he cried. Tears shone in his eyes. He was dangerously drunk. ‘Here is our country! Look how fine he’ll be!’

  He was playing to the crowd, I knew, ingratiating himself. Yet at the same time he was subtly condescending to these provincial teachers and tradesmen, and soon he began preaching against people in Tashkent who thought themselves superior to other Uzbeks. It was absurd, he claimed. Why should they think so? He entirely disagreed with it. But his denial came with a drink-loosened suavity which belonged to the theatre of another civilisation. As he flaunted the baby on his shoulder, the others looked back at him with mixed deference and unease. He engaged and slightly awed them. But they did not trust him.

  And now Hakim stretched up and eased away the child from Oman’s alien and uncertain hands. Somewhere, it seemed, he had gone too far.

  Our voices leaked into an unhappy silence. Hakim strapped the child back into his cradle, then touched my arm in embarrassment and in his quaint English changed the conversation: ‘I am unable to make known if my English language is good or not. I wonder if you in your office can give me a blank with on it a stamp?’

  ‘A blank?’

  ‘Yes, a blank. If I have a blank, I can show to authorities.’

  Oman was shifting beside me, drunk, wretched.

  ‘We don’t have such forms,’ I said. ‘I’m just a private writer . . . .’

  ‘But if out of your position you would write that I’m good with English, and say you famous English writer, even without the blank, would maybe help.’

  So I promised to send him a reference from England (and wrote this shamelessly on my return) and he relaxed again, and went back to rocking his howling son.

  The next moment everybody rose in respect. Tiny and frail in the doorway, wrapped in a dusty coat caught round with three sashes, the family patriarch hovered, still light on his feet. He was ninety-four. Under the coil of his turban a pair of light, leprechaun eyes glistened shallow in their sockets, and an ashy beard jutted spryly in front. As he alighted beside me, a semi-circle of earnest, deferential faces turned as one man to listen. My presence became the occasion of his history, which his progeny must have heard a hundred times, but nobody uttered or stirred.

  He had been a Silk Road merchant in the old days, he said, carrying gold from the Fergana valley into China’s far northwest, and returning with silk on eight camels across the Pamirs. He had weathered the tracks which the Chinese graded ‘big headache’ or ‘small headache’ passes, but on his last journey, as relations worsened between the Soviets and Xinjiang in the early 1930s, the border bridge was dropped into the Ili river and he’d been stranded on the far side.

  ‘But the Chinese governor was a man of honour,’ he said: his silvery voice belonged to a faraway age and place. ‘He exchanged our gold for wool and ferried us back across the river. But that was the end of my travelling. I couldn’t go back. So I became a butcher in Almaty, and married there.’

  As the men strained for every note of the treble voice, I thought how hopeless had been the task of Communism here – its suppression of the past and hurrying-in of the new. For the past was seated amongst us, innately respected, in its triple sash and worn coat full of years. The true country of these people had been their genealogy, which they used to memorise through generations back into myth (tracing themselves to Adam), and dignity still lay in age. The health and longevity of the old man was a subject of clannish marvel and pride among his descendants, and as his history dwindled away in the abattoirs and domesticity of Almaty, and his offspring warmed back into conversation, he buttonholed me with health tips.

  ‘I’ve never been ill . . . .’ He was sitting bolt upright, his legs supple under him. ‘I used to drink a bottle of vodka with every meal . . . and my meals have always been the same: one kilo of mutton, one kilo of rice, and half a kilo of sheep’s fat. That’s how I’ve lived on. Remember. I recommend it. I’ve had a little trouble with my left knee this last year, I don’t know why.... But that’s all there’s ever been wrong with me.’

  His digestion was perfect, he said, but he had no teeth. One grandson shredded cucumber for him, while another cracked and crumbled some hazel-nuts. I hunted in his face for any clue to his endurance, but found myself staring into a visage of uncanny agelessness: clear and almost featureless, except for its goblin eyes. The bridge of his nose sank untrace
ably into his cheeks, leaving only an isolated flare of shell-pink nostrils. He had outlived most of his seven children, but his youngest daughter, whom he had fathered at sixty-four, still visited him.

  ‘But everything was better,’ he began, ‘in the time of . . . of . . . that man Nikolai . . . .’

  ‘Nikolai II?’

  ‘Czar Nikolai, yes Those were good years. Nobody bothered you. There were just camels and horses, plenty of horses, yes, and quiet And then the Soviet Union came and everything got collectivised and rearranged.’ He shook his head. His neck trembled with wrinkles, like a lizard’s. ‘And it was a lot of trouble . . . for nothing . . . .’

  Towards midnight he got up – ‘I’m going to visit my nephews! I’ll be back!’ – and by the time we had clambered respectfully to our feet, he had tripped away.

  An hour later the last guest departed, Hakim unfurled quilts over the floor, and Oman rolled himself up, his voice turned maudlin and tearful: ‘I’m sorry, Colin. It was not me that was talking, it was the vodka.’ Then he snored sonorously, horribly, for hours, shifting an octave whenever he turned over, while Hakim made a lighter, nasal moaning beyond. Finally the patriarch returned at an early hour of morning and lay like a statue on a catafalque, wheezing, with his fingers laced over his stomach, and his beard pointed at the ceiling. Their wind trio rose and filled the room.

  At a time before anyone in the town could remember, an itinerant holy man had struck water from its ground and been buried where the cold streamlets descended a hillside. Now acacias and chenars plunged its terraces into a subaqueous light, and tea-houses spread their divans among ornamental pools, where men drank discreetly – for this is a holy place – and women played with their children round the tomb.

  A posse of Hakim’s younger relatives took me there in the morning. A few nights before, the town’s Lenin statue had been pulled down (‘they always go in the night,’ somebody said); but the holy man’s tomb was under restoration. All around us, as we squatted before our mountainous breakfast, the tea-house habitués were deep in confabulation, and had hung up their cages of pet quails in the branches overhead. Sometimes, Hakim said, they pitched the birds against one another in a bloodless battle of nerves, and laid bets. But now the aviaries, each one cowled in a black hood, dangled in silence among the leaves, while the quails sulked underneath.