The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Less than thirty miles from the Tajik border we reached the village of Darvat Kurgan, and found a lorry depot where we downed a meal of noodles and cold soup. It was from here that in 1871 the Russian explorer Fedchenko had looked across with longing at the Transalai, and had given his watch to the Kokandi garrison commander as a bribe to let him proceed. But at once the watch stopped – the commander had childishly wound it to death – and permission was withdrawn. Only later did Fedchenko return and discover the glacier – almost the largest in the world – which sprawled out of sight for fifty miles in the massif across our valley. Now the Kokandi fort had become a warehouse and was crumbling away, its towers half collapsed and its loopholes blocked with mud.

  Three miles farther, in the impoverished village of Chak, our track disappeared among mud alleys. They looked abandoned. A few bald-headed Bactrian camels stood among the hovels, and did not stir as we nosed our way through. We splashed over a gulley, and found the only path out of the village. Ahead of us hung a wooden bridge whose struts stood thin as sticks in the river. My heart sank. It was the only way west. I thought we might edge on to it and test its strength. Then suddenly Oman shouted ‘We’ll see!’ and set the car at it headlong.

  For a second it crackled like dry biscuits under us. Then we were over and charging up a precipitous bank.

  I yelled: ‘Weren’t you afraid?’

  ‘Of course I was!’ he yelled back.

  Now the mountains engulfed us. Their flanks crowded the track in vertiginous gulfs and spurs. Through their flaccid earth the river had dropped sheer, opening up purple veins, and soon it was winding in a blood-coloured trickle a thousand feet below us. Our route was a maze of ruts and stones, and we went in clouds of reddish dust which clogged our hair and eyes.

  Oman settled at the wheel with a strange, sombre glee. I had misjudged him. It was not hardship or challenge which turned him morose, but the emptiness of ordinary living. But now crisis freed him into near-recklessness. His only sign of nerves was a dangerous urge to smoke, and once, glimpsing the track fringing the precipices in front of us, he blessed himself. He never paused before a new wave of congealed mud or stones, simply drove his twelve-year-old Lada at it full tilt, and bullied us through or over.

  But we had entered a deepening wilderness. Beneath us the river plunged unseen through a corridor of chasms and gulfs barely forty feet wide, while we wandered along its rim high above. Across our track the snowfields poured down shale and melted ice, turning it to a sepia rink. And it was these mud-slides which most threatened us. Set loose by shifting glaciers or rains, they descended in noiseless slicks which sometimes engulfed whole villages, leaving nothing behind. A few days earlier, unknown to us, a Tajik hamlet of a hundred souls had simply vanished from sight under an avalanche of liquid earth.

  All afternoon we laboured on. Once only the liver-coloured slopes which walled us in burst open on a white gallery of mountains, brilliant and untouched, peak piled on peak, and desolately beautiful as they shone down on the wastes through which we blundered. At last a landslide turned our path to quagmire. Oman set the car at it again and again, but we dropped axle-deep into an ocean of red mud. We clambered out and piled stones round the wheels, but nothing moved. Bit by bit, we were sinking. I imagined enduring the night here, our doors locked against wolves, while we waited for any help. But after an hour a truck-full of Kirghiz shepherds arrived from the other direction, their bedding and chattels mounded about them – wild men with flayed cheekbones, who heaved us clear with a rope.

  We pushed on through fallen rocks and snow, and somehow we never stuck again for long, but wove and charged our way out, with no man or vehicle in sight, and the light failing. At sunset we came to a stream under an alpine meadow, where cattle grazed, and we washed, exhausted, and Oman eased the car into its ford and swabbed it tenderly down. In the ageing light above us an eagle circled. There was no sound but the boiling of the distant river in its canyon.

  Somewhere we had crossed unnoticed into Tajikistan. No military or police post marked the border. ‘They think there’s no road through,’ said Oman, with a glint of pride.

  But this was a country in civil war. It was the poorest and least urbanised of all the republics of the old Soviet Union. It endured the highest birth-rate, but its population was barely five million. Alone in Central Asia, its people were not of Turkic but Iranian stock and language, and some made common cause with their fellow-Tajik mujahedin over the Afghan border. Now, in the capital, an incongruous alliance of Moslems and democratic liberals was confronting the ex-Communist government. Their schism was heated by clan rivalries and by the dichotomy between an industrialised north and an impoverished south; and within a year war was to claim some 20,000 dead, and set loose a torrent of refugees.

  But this evening, at sunset, nothing disturbed the mountains which circled our sky. As we eased west into the night the crowding slopes receded, and we descended into a broad valley. My map disclosed a few villages on the north bank of the river, and in the first starlight we crossed a bridge over a tributary among apple and cherry orchards. As Oman negotiated a room in a bleak inn, curious faces multiplied round us. In this region, at least, a tenuous peace prevailed. But nobody believed we had come from the east. The track was impassable even to horses until May, they said, although a heavy lorry might get through. Who were we really, they seemed to be asking? And from where had we actually come: an Uzbek and an Englishman?

  As we sat in our room, opening a celebratory tin of tuna fish, we were joined by a Tajik and an Uzbek who owned a bus for transporting village wedding-parties. Sherali was a copybook Tajik. His fierce, Iranic features were drenched in a silky black beard and set with rapier eyes. Yet often he looked indefinably bewildered, and his suave courtesies seemed to have been borrowed from somebody else. His Uzbek partner was a near-dwarf named Sadik, who proffered a curved arm in handshake, as if he had suffered a stroke.

  In the cool night we huddled round a table and exchanged road and war news, and a little food, and dim philosophies. The villagers here were still quiet, Sherali said. It was the mountains that should be feared. ‘People don’t understand them. The mountains can be very sensitive, very terrible. A man may go hunting and fire off a shot and it sets the whole valley moving, or people shout to one another, and even the reverberation of their voices is dangerous, and finishes them.’

  ‘We’ve seen those avalanches.’ Oman had swelled like a bull-frog. ‘We crossed six or seven.’

  ‘Last year,’ Sherali went on, ‘in those mountains where you were, forty-two climbers disappeared. They were caught in a mud-slick and buried. Only one was separate from the rest, and got back to tell us.’

  The dwarfish Sadik, meanwhile, was insinuating his lit cigarette between the others’ dangling fingers, allowing each a puff before he retrieved it. From time to time he stared into my face with the half-evolved eyes of a lizard, then nudged me with a question. But his voice came always in a venal near-whisper as if everything he said must be secret or ugly. I at first thought him a little imbecile. ‘Who are the most famous footballers with you?’

  My mind went blank. I’d been cut off from England too long. A few months earlier, I was sure, I could have named several.

  Sherali continued with a kind of fiery sadness: ‘Those mountains have claimed more lives than any war . . . .’

  But Sadik’s saurian gaze was still on mine. Perhaps he was doubting if I were English. He said resentfully: ‘England is the birthplace of football . . .’

  Then, in a fit of recall, I said: ‘Gazza!’

  He had not heard of him. ‘He must be young,’ he said, and went on questioning me. ‘I knew an Englishman once who gave me a coat. What clothes do you have?’ He reached through my jacket flaps and fingered my pullover.

  But Sherali broke in: ‘Look! We’re just back from a party!’ He delved into his bag and lifted out something wrapped in newspaper. ‘We drove two soldiers back to their village after service in Sib
eria. Their family killed a sheep and gave us some!’ Jubilantly he unwrapped a steamed head, complete in its skin. ‘I’ve never met an Englishman before! We’ll celebrate!’ The skull had been sliced laterally, shearing off its mandible and exposing the meat inside the cranium and upper jaw. He dangled it in front of me. ‘Delicious!’

  I stared at it uneasily. Its eyes were closed under dark lashes half steamed away. Its ears stuck out delicately, like a deer’s.

  Sadik said: ‘This Englishman gave me a suit . . . .What will you give me?’

  But Sherali had stripped away the sheep’s skin in a flash. Its yellow skull ogled the ceiling. ‘Eat!’

  I heard craven excuses dropping from me. ‘It’s not my country’s custom . . . .’

  ‘You don’t eat mutton?’

  ‘Not like this . . . .’

  I felt a hypocrite. These men gluttonously acknowledged what they were eating, whereas my sensibilities had been manicured. But they did not mind. Sherali opened another bag and poured out a mound of moist, rather bitter haloumi for me. Then they upended the sheep’s skull and dug their fingers into the cheeks and brains. It was grey, soft meat. They sucked their hands luxuriously. Even Oman, after fruitlessly offering round our tuna, settled down to cram his mouth with filmy morsels. Sadik tried to dig out the eyes with his penknife, and snapped the blade. Sherali levered one up with a fork and popped it joyfully into his partner’s mouth. I heard Sadik’s teeth crunching the eyeball. ‘These are wonderful!’

  ‘I’ve heard.’

  Within five minutes the head was stripped to a memento mori. It looked hopelessly reduced, like a fossil. Its spirit seemed to have transmigrated into Sherali and Sadik. Their tongues caressed their lips in remembrance, and they grinned collusively at one another, as if they had shared the same woman. Their business partnership was rooted in childhood friendship, which the war had not yet disturbed. Uzbeks still numbered one quarter of Tajikistan’s populace. Uzbek troops, alongside Russians, had even been called in to shore up the status quo.

  ‘Me and Sadik never faced anything like this before,’ Sherali said. ‘Some people resent our friendship now. Nationalists. But we’ll keep on together.’ Yet they were starting to feel threatened. Their self-conscious pledge of comradeship might be the first sign of its disintegration. ‘Who would ever have thought the Soviet Union would fall the way it did?’ The war brought on Sherali’s look of bewilderment. ‘Just one man brought it down . . .’

  The searching sharpness of his features still prejudiced me to believe him more intelligent than Sadik with his pancake cheeks and dead eyes. But now Sadik said: ‘No, that empire was ripe for falling. Its own system did it. It was rotten.’ Then he turned to me with his corrupt whisper. ‘What will you give me? You see my knife is broken. Do you have a knife?’

  ‘Only from Fergana.’

  ‘That will do. Anything from you . . . .’ His stare never changed. He said: ‘Tell me, who takes more drugs, do you think, England or Tajikistan?’ He injected his arm with a phantom needle.

  ‘I don’t know.’ But I wondered what was in his cigarettes.

  ‘I’m telling you, England does . . .’

  I snapped: ‘But Tajikistan grows and exports them.’

  ‘That’s just business.’

  I was starting to hate him. I turned to the others, while his eyes tormented the back of my head. He began: ‘Who fucks more . . .?’

  But Sherali was lamenting his country’s deepening crisis. He did not understand it. Nothing but a quiet pragmatism fell within his understanding. ‘I’m a working man. I just want to feed my family, and get on with my living.’

  Oman nodded. ‘Lenin at least said one good thing: “Politicians are all prostitutes!’” The vodka was out, and his eyes had started their sweating. ‘Just think. Here we all are – Uzbek, Tajik, English – and we’re all friends! Why can’t it always be like this? Why can’t . . .?’ Then the fatal bottle passed between us, and the toasts started their rounds, and set in train grandiloquent musings. So, in this close room under the cleansing mountains, we dropped into the recurring lament of travellers who find themselves released from race and class and context, and momentarily entered a heart’s region freed from all differences.

  But in the morning I found my knife had gone.

  For 200 miles, as we made for the capital Dushanbe, the river prised apart the valley where streams of scarlet and ice flowed side by side. Nothing seemed natural. Fluffy clouds dangled in the mountains, as if hung up for a court masque. The snow-peaks stacked above green hills, and the crimson gash of river-beds drew us through a country of white, emerald and synthetic red, as if the national flag (a similar confection) had bled over the landscape. From time to time our track still disintegrated into a rutted causeway where an avalanche had passed, and tilted up putty-soft scarps or squeezed to a sliver under cliffs. But little by little the snow withdrew, until only the Pervogo ranges far to the south shone white.

  In their villages of clay and brushwood, the Tajiks walked in harlequin colours and a touch of defiant grace. Longest settled of all the Central Asian peoples, they had been driven from the Zerafshan valley and into the mountains by Arab and Turkic invasion almost thirteen centuries ago. They had intermarried with Mongoloids, but an Iranian physiognomy prevailed, and from village to village the faces changed. Some were inbred and delicate. They showed long, European features and heavy noses. Sometimes the hair curled russet or auburn above their high brows, and their faces shone with blue or green eyes. All the colour which had drained out of the Kirghiz towns returned on this side of the mountains. Even the old men glittered in gold-threaded quilts and bright-hued skull-caps: biblical patriarchs with dripping beards, who crouched still limber on their haunches by the wayside. Children sported embroidered shirts and dresses, and the lean, handsome women walked in fiercely brilliant gowns with their headscarves tied piratically around their foreheads.

  Within a few months, during open war between Moslems and the old Communist regime, this secluded valley would be invaded by its clan rivals from Kulyab to the south, and swept by Russian tanks, and the refugees would be pouring from the villages in their thousands on the way to Afghanistan. But for the moment the land dropped westward in hushed apprehension. Beneath us the river inscribed idle hieroglyphs over its flattened bed. Sometimes now it measured half a mile across, while a hundred tributaries meandered to meet it, carving up the hills like cake. Then the flow would narrow to a flood, slap-ping itself into rapids, until it left our road altogether, plunging south, and we followed a milder river towards Dushanbe. The country softened round us. Its lower slopes were tinted with vetch and rock roses. Their scent gusted over the road. Orchards filled with yellow grosbeaks and the darting of blue-green rollers, and a booted eagle coasted across our path.

  We limped towards the outskirts of Dushanbe, nursing two broken brake-discs. Vigilantes and armed police flagged us down as we entered, and searched us. Armoured cars waited in the alleys nearby. Beyond them the city had gone unnaturally quiet. Scarcely a car moved in the streets. Ranks of plane trees muffled and darkened every avenue, where a few trams and taxis jittered. Fear of earthquake had built the city low, and its offices and apartments lined the boulevards with three-storey façades washed in faded buff and blue. Here and there some sop to oriental taste had sanctioned a rank of pointed arches or a filigreed balcony. But there was an old Russian feel of life rotting away behind appearances. The municipal rose-beds seemed to be blooming in solitude, for themselves, and the pavements looked too wide for the pedestrians. In this half-Moslem ambience, the sexes walked separately, and the slender women still wore their native brilliance. But people hurried in preoccupation, mostly alone. Nobody raised his voice. When men met, the eloquent language of Moslem handshakes – the cordial double-clasp or the perfunctory touch, all the graded signs of friendship or distrust – was magnified in the tense streets. The hovering mountains bathed them in cold air, and turned the avenues into gleaming culs-de-sac. />
  This was the ghost-city which the Russians were leaving. Before 1917 it had been a small village, but with the arrival of the railway in 1929 the Bolsheviks had made it their own, and until recently only half its people were Tajik. In common with all Central Asia, its factory workers and the bulk of its specialists had been Russian. But every month they were streaming home in their thousands, and now, during an armed stand-off between government and opposition, a paralysis had settled over the city. Its appearance of peace was only the stillness of suspense or the stagnation of closure. Along its avenues, in the serenely banked façades of flats and businesses, windows were boarded up or blocked, balconies sagging and crevices leaking weeds. In half-abandoned newspaper kiosks the familiar Western icons – posters of karate and bodybuilding heroes, Pink Floyd, prints of Solzhenitsyn selling for three roubles – looked foolish or redundant.

  I walked along the old Lenin Prospect (renamed Rudaki Prospect after the Tajik national poet) which made a dog-leg through the city’s core. It was suffocated in chenar trees eight deep, but empty of traffic. In Independence Square, the previous month, a huge demonstration of Moslems and liberals had threatened to assault the Supreme Soviet in session. After a fourday protest, fluttering with green Islamic flags, they had forced the resignation of the whole Presidium. Close by in Freedom Square, two days later, a counter-demonstration had seethed round the president’s office shouting pro-Communist slogans. The pink and white government buildings still shone surreally in front of us, flying the national flag; but opposite, the Lenin colossus raised in 1960 had left behind only a plinth of shattered marble.