The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Relaxed in the young sunlight, and freed from the polite reserve of their elders, the young men pummelled me with questions. The West shimmered in an El Dorado beyond their reach, but their black eyes settled on me as its exemplar. Back in England, did I own a house, a car? What did it cost to marry? But the price of a Honda or a flat reeled into meaninglessness. Inflation had already turned their own prices into bedlam, but the disparity between the dollar and the dwindling rouble laid waste all comparisons. A plane ticket to the West would alone have cost them over a year’s salary.

  But there was one thing that baffled them entirely. Why wasn’t I married? Later they confessed that they had all been aching to ask me this, and now it sprang from the lips of an open-faced youth who had listened to everything in silence. Here, after all, every man married automatically. Even Hakim looked at me with bewildered charm. ‘You miss all the sweetness of life!’ he cried, and the others gazed at me in mute accord, while the shadows splashed over our half-forgotten meal, and the blacked-out quail cages shifted in the branches, and they waited for a reply.

  ‘Where is this sweetness?’ I asked. The question held a Socratic quaintness. ‘With the woman or the children?’

  Hakim answered at once: ‘With the children, of course, with the boys!’

  But in the West, I told them, it was more often the woman who inspired the longing to marry. I could not convey to them a world in which the preciousness of one person might change a life’s course, or the chances of love refute the ordered programme of matchmaking and childbirth.

  The callow man echoed: ‘Just the woman?’ He was frowning.

  ‘Yes.’

  They started munching their food again in perplexity. Whatever secret yearnings might rankle in them (and I’d met several who had seduced other men’s wives), there was too much of market-place practicality and clan responsibility in their hard lives to allow of understanding any other. A woman was only a woman, after all. But a child was a descendant, bone of your bone, who would carry on your blood and memory, and secure your continuance in the chain of things. I, as far as they could see, was a cul-de-sac, an unaccountable exception to natural law.

  They ranged about for other explanations of me. Women and commerce, they presumed, were the motives for travel. What were Arab women like, they wondered, and the French? Was it true that Japanese women were made differently down there? Had I ever had a Chinese?

  In me, I realised, they were being left with an ungraspable paradox; yet to them I inhabited such riches and freedom that perhaps the secret of my solitude lay somewhere there.

  The sweetness of life. I saw myself in their eyes, and was touched by a fugitive melancholy. They gave me cherries in parting, and a small knife. Their questions posed an innocent challenge, and to some I had no answer.

  For a few days Oman and I dawdled east through a country where cotton-fields were interrupted by alfalfa, wheat and rice paddy. In Namangan we saw no trace of the veil now, and drove on towards the old capital of Andijan where Babur had been born 500 years before. Even its people were beautiful, he wrote, and its meadows, sweet with violets and tulips, would tease him far into his exile. But now, as Jura had intimated, Andijan was rougher and less pastoral, an oil and cotton town whose streets were sober with yellow stucco. So at last we slipped over the Kirghiz border into the town of Osh, and prepared to move south to the Pamirs.

  In these towns the hotels were baffled by the arrival of a foreigner. Some accepted us, but quadrupled the price. Others telephoned the police asking what to do, but the police did not know either. The rules had all gone. Then Oman, growing irritated, would stump into the police-station and cry out at every official hesitation: ‘Hasn’t the Iron Curtain come down yet?’ or ‘I thought Stalin was dead!’ and the officers would look foolish and acquiesce, or angrily refuse. Eventually we would succumb in some cramped room reeking of urine, where I would try to write notes under a weak bulb and Oman would smoke and read Arthur Hailey. (He had abandoned Kafka, who scooped about in himself too much, he said.) Then I would return from a night ramble to find him overcome by boredom or sleep, his shapeless body thrown down among his sheets as if by somebody else.

  By now we were barely seventy miles from the Chinese frontier, separated only by a neck of mountains where the Tienshan and Pamir converged. It was from the Chinese that the Fergana valley people had learnt precious metallurgy, paper-making and the sinking of wells, while the cultivation of vines and clover had travelled the other way, along with a breed of horses different from the stocky battlers of the steppes. Over two thousand years ago these Fergana horses came to the ears of the Chinese emperor Wu Ti, who coveted them for his new-fangled cavalry. They were said to sweat blood and to be of celestial descent. In 104 BC a Chinese invasion left its dead strewn along the deserts and mountains of a 3000-mile route-march; but the tribute of horses was secured – beautiful, high-strung creatures, akin to the modern Arab.

  But in Osh we sensed nothing of China. The frontiers had been sealed for sixty years, and were only reopening far to the north-east. The first blades of intervening mountains rose from the outskirts. Legend ascribed the town’s foundation to Solomon, and by the twelfth century it had become a holy place. Its inhabitants were pious and a little mischievous. When travellers rested in its meadows, the local urchins would open the river sluices and drench them. Now earthquake, decay and Soviet rebuilders had conspired to emasculate it.

  I walked here weakly in the morning after a poisoned supper of noodle soup, and left Oman moaning on his bed. He was, in any case, afraid of the town, where riots between Kirghiz and Uzbeks had left 300 dead eighteen months earlier. The Uzbek rumour-mill had placed the killed at over 1000, and he’d seen amateur video-film of the massacres which still drained his face. The agents of these horrors, I knew, must be walking in the streets about me, and the dominance of the Kirghiz – a pastoral race of recent nomads – edged the town with a ruffianly freedom. They were burlier than the Uzbeks, blunter, more secular. Their white felt hats, jaunty with tassels and upturned brims, touched them with an incongruous comedy. Beneath this headgear you might expect to glimpse the blond complexion of a Russian fairytale prince. But instead, an arid plane of Mongol cheeks appeared, and an innocent, unfocused gaze. ‘They’re just shepherds,’ Oman had said, and waved them nervously away.

  But the town seemed deceptively at peace. I saw no sign even of the earthquake whose epicentre had trembled here two weeks before (and had rattled the crockery in Tashkent). The cracks in our hotel walls had been there for years.

  On the western outskirts a rocky spine of mountain, named the Throne of Solomon, must have given the town birth. Here, pilgrims believe, the king viewed the city which he founded, and on its summit descended into the grave. Solomon’s tomb became a haunt of Sufis, of course, and for decades the Russians tried to halt the secret pilgrimages there. Officials railed against the ‘sectarian underground’ and ‘reactionary Muslim clergy’ with paranoiac anxiety, and in 1987 tried to neutralise the site by encouraging tour-groups of East Europeans there.

  Now the spur hovered open above me, tufted in shrubs and grasses. At its foot a stone plinth still trumpeted the dictums of Lenin. Nobody had bothered to remove it. On a municipal hoarding superscribed ‘The Best People in Osh’, the empty boards were dropping apart. Crowds of local sightseers were climbing the path in funfair mood: boisterous youths, and schoolgirls in white-aproned smocks, like truant parlour-maids.

  I trudged up after them. Concrete steps zigzagged askew along the mountain’s rim. Bushes and trees were speckled with telltale rags. But all zealotry – Moslem or Communist – seemed past. It had gone under the trampling feet of sweaty weekend vacationers slung with cheap cameras. Flocks of sturdy women had kicked off their high heels to grip the steps barefoot, and seemed to wear their silks not as a national statement but a pretty fashion. On the crest, the Sufis, shorn of their bogey status, remained as they had probably always been: a handful of elderly men in search of
peace.

  A light wind brushed the summit. The tomb of Solomon was a rebuilt chapel facing Mecca. An old man dispensed blessings, assisted by his son in an Adidas tracksuit. Some say that Solomon was murdered here, and that his black dogs still lurk in the fissures of the rocks, where they lapped his blood and ate his body. In the last century, invalids would press their heads into the crevices as a cure. But now the tomb was screened off by the coarse, flushed smiles of Kirghiz families lined up to photograph themselves, their women’s faces dashed in sweat and rouge. Below us, Osh curled among its trees in a foetal crescent, while beyond surged the nakedness of the Pamirs, whose cloud-coloured peaks infiltrated the sky, then vanished.

  I yearned to travel these mountains, but Oman was losing his nerve. On my descent he reported that the road I had chosen into Tajikistan was snowbound. He had been talking to lorry-drivers. He had heard of passes over 10,000 feet, he said. He did not want to go near Tajikistan at all. The country was in civil war. On our hotel television he came upon a blurred news bulletin which reported shooting on the roads around the capital. When I remained obstinate, he started to look miserable and to tramp about with a boyish, hurt air. But he spent the afternoon locating bread, mineral water and soggy strawberries. He made a few bargains. And soon the buoyancy and slight fatalism which I liked in him resurrected, and he cried: ‘Then we’ll go! Let’s try it! We’ll know when we arrive!’

  My wanderings in Osh, meanwhile, came to an end in the upper room of a defunct cinema. I had noticed young men loping furtively through a door labelled ‘Cosmos Video Hall’, and had followed them up a dank stairway. At the top I paid five roubles and entered a curtained room. Some fifty men were seated on plastic chairs, leering in rapt stillness at a television hoisted on to the wall in front. As I came in, the screen flashed and up came Blondie, produced by ‘Svetlana’ and filmed by ‘Mr Ed’. It was a hard-porn movie purveying clichés of fantasy sex – multiple, oral, underwater – between four tireless studs and a stable of dyed blondes. Its stock American dialogue had been dubbed slackly into Russian, and its garnish of sports cars, yachts and private swimming-pools suggested a synthetic paradise somewhere in the idle West. From the darkness the men gaped up expressionlessly. Their hands strayed to their crotches. The gulf between their reality and the profligacy on screen yawned so hopelessly that they might have been watching science fiction. They huddled before it like impotent conspirators. How would it seem, I wondered, when they returned to their plain suburbs, to the swarthy, unpampered bodies of their own women?

  An hour later they slunk out, shielding their eyes against the sun or the world, where the Throne of Solomon thrust against the sky. I asked one youth what he thought, and he said the film was OK, but expensive at five roubles. Already its gross, depersonalised dream seemed to have dimmed out of his face, and he was returning to other cares and to the qualifying daylight.

  The day before we crossed into the Pamirs, Oman and I drove north through poor Kirghiz hamlets to the little town of Uzgen. At roadside police barriers brutal-looking officers flagged down anything that passed, but viewed me with hospitable surprise, and let us go unsearched.

  Uzgen clustered below a pass of the Tienshan in a green valley; and here, beside a field damp with poppies and clover, all that was left of an early capital of Mavarannahr lay mouldering in the sun. Three mausoleums and a minaret, raised in the confi-dent simplicity of patterned brick, marked the site of a city whose empire had straddled Central Asia. For a century and a half, between the year they overran the Samanids in 999 and the time they vanished under Mongolian invaders, the obscure Karakhanids ruled here in unreachable splendour at the antipodes of the world. Who they were, I scarcely knew: a Turkic people, I had read, whose loose-knit federation was constantly in flux. Yet their dominions spread huger than India.

  I waded through grass to the mausoleums. They appeared to have been restored, and then abandoned. Their portals were scooped from a single façade: tall frames of decorative brick flanked by engaged pillars. Within them, the doorways to the chambers were encrusted with bands of terracotta foliage and colonnettes, from which the colour had long ago been washed away. Columns, friezes, vase-shaped capitals – all were covered with the same perforated blanket of relief work: dry, subtle, exquisite.

  One doorway, in particular, stood almost free of restoration, and in that desolateness shone with a honeycomb intricacy. Under a whole gallery of geometric patterns carved foliage oozed and crept, and a sensuous wriggle of calligraphy overswept half the gateway. But the arches led from nothing to nothing. Their dead had gone. Outside, from the ruin’s height above the valley, I imagined the capital poised schizophrenically between cultivation and wilderness. For the Karakhanids were the first of the Turkic dynasties in Central Asia – hesitant precursors of the waves to come – and their site looked pastoral and impermanent even now, cramped on its hill beside the graves of their nomad kings.

  Chapter 10

  The High Pamirs

  The first foothills folded round us under a cloudy sky. Horsemen overflowed the road with flocks of mud-clogged sheep and goats, descending to drink at a distant tributary of the Syr Dariya which meandered beside us. We were entering a half-pagan country of summer nomads. Once or twice we passed a wayside grave speared with horsetail banners and rams’ horns, and here and there a herdsman’s yurt crouched like a dirty igloo on slopes spotted with cattle.

  Then the valley narrowed. The earth-built cowsheds of winter villages appeared, deserted now. The river cut through the earth in a silty torrent, and flash-floods spinning down the gulleys had torn off chunks of tarmac and dropped them into its valley. Thunder-clouds rolled from every defile and rose from the summits as if they were steaming. The lowland heat had gone. Ahead of us arteries of snow trickled down the mountain-flanks, and the earth darkened to a sooty shale where wind had broken the ridges into blackened spikes. Oman let out bleak noises of foreboding. The snows had withdrawn late this year, he’d heard, or not at all.

  Then our road mounted into a stadium of white peaks which shook out black streamers of cloud thousands of feet above us. Crows flew in the valleys like blown ash. The river turned green. Wherever the road had torn a cutting, it exposed a stark magenta earth, which sometimes splashed bloodily to the snow-line. Below us I glimpsed red and white crags tossed up through the clouds. Then the road turned to dirt and for an hour no vehicle passed us. The police posts were all deserted. As we spiralled above the snowline, clouds plunged across our track and we entered a monochrome void. A harsh, blurred light refracted from the snowfields. The road hung in disconnecting whiteness. Once we brushed past a gang of shepherds – black-faced men with forked Mongol beards – and the headlights of a solitary lorry glowed out of the pall. Then we emerged from the clouds into a planetary upland without sun or shadow or colour. The rounded hills and mountains looked exhausted and disembodied, as if the land had grown ill, and flowed before us unbroken into a white sky.

  The Alai range – the northern bastion of the Pamir – was behind us now, and soon we were descending into a wide valley. Here, at over 10,000 feet, the headwaters of the Kizylsu, the Red River, gathered to slide westward 400 miles, until they had swollen to a raging force which deluged into the Amu Dariya on the edge of Afghanistan. But in the silent valley the river was only a shallow twine of streams. Herds of chestnut horses cropped their banks. As we turned west, the mainstream, crimson with silt, was wreathed about with ice-green tributaries, running side by side. The grass twittered with invisible birds. Their sound – and the weak patter of the rivulets – deepened the silence.

  But we had crossed some indefinable divide. The air was utterly still, and the whole sky transfigured to a vivid, artificial blue. The snow-peaks to our west stood in Tajikistan; those to our east were glittering out of China. In front of us, in a glacial palisade which shadowed the valley for a hundred miles, the Transalai mountains – the Pamir heart – shone in the sky as if formed from some rarer element than ours.
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  We stopped by the shingly streams, and gazed. Along our whole horizon the mountains made a frozen tumult of spires and ridges, erupting to over 23,000 feet. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo recalled that even birds did not survive here. The plateaux are sprinkled with frozen lakes and lie under so intense a cold that their stones crumble away and the earth unlocks its plants for only a few summer weeks. The impact of the Indian subcontinent, pressing into Asia’s underbelly, still squeezes up the Pamir at a rate of two-and-a-half inches a year; but the ranges to the south-east are rising even faster, and over the millennia the monsoons have dwindled away. They have left a region of mummified emptiness. In the permafrost of its high valleys even the snow is only a dust and the wind blows not in storms but as a nagging, sandpaper restlessness in the starved air. Against this awesome cold, some of the bulkiest mammals on earth have developed: the yak, the Marco Polo sheep, and Ursus Torquatus, the world’s weightiest bear. Even now, in late May, icicles fringed the river banks, and when a west wind sprang up it cut like a scythe.

  A young shepherd, riding up on a brindled colt, shared our bread with us, resting in the saddle. Winter kept its snows for the valleys, he said. Sometimes they reached above his shoulders – he raised his hand eloquently to his neck – then his people coralled away their herds and fed them by hand. They called this valley paradise, yet suffered the highest proportion of still-births in the world, I’d read. He glanced along the road where we were going. Two days earlier, he said, it had been severed by a torrent of red mud For an hour we drove west along the ghostly causeway of the valley, arrow-straight down a gravel track. Once we passed a faded hoarding which still read: ‘Glory to the Defenders of the Soviet frontiers!’ Beyond it a cemetery streamed with horsetail standards. And always to our south the mountains kept pace in a phantasmal counterpoint of scarps and pyramids, where cloud-shadows spread a dim commotion, and hawks wheeled.