The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Within a few months the old regime would reassert itself; but already it was dressed in Tajik colours, and paid lipservice to a mild Islam. The certainties of doctrinaire Communism were gone. Instead the city was sinking into a chasm of nationalism and tribal feud. I wandered it in ignorant misgiving, and occasionally, where a Marxist memorial or a slogan remained, was touched by foolish nostalgia. In the contemporary chaos, these statues immortalising work and learning seemed invocations to a more enlightened time, and the heraldry of Communism – the slogans urging men to paradise – imbued with some lost knowledge and even a moral sweetness.

  In the windows of the Firdausi Library busts of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Gorky mingled with those of Persian and Tajik classical writers. A few years before this would have smelt of insidious colonialism: the absorption of native heroes into the Russian body. But now they looked innocently ecumenical, and echoed with ruined ideals. So I forgot for a while the corruption and evangelistic cruelty of the old empire, which had handed these people the poisoned chalice of a split identity, and understood those who wanted the Soviet Union back.

  In the library next day, I roamed among the deserted stacks where old, permitted titles mingled with fledgling new ones. Lenin’s On the Defence of the Socialist Motherland and Can the Bolsheviks retain state power? nestled beside D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. Only Lenin’s hypocritical tract The Rights of Nations to Self-determination rang with irony.

  ‘All this will go up in flames soon,’ said a Russian teacher hunting the card-index beside me. ‘These people are ripe for burning books.’ She was stout and bitter, with cropped hair. She worked in a small town in the hills, an enclave of mines and factories which had once been full of Russians. ‘The Tajiks are hopeless,’ she went on. ‘They just trade and trick. All merchants. Our Russian technocrats have already mostly gone, and the others are following – factory-workers and teachers. Everybody.’

  ‘You have no Tajik friends?’

  ‘I do, but this nationalism is growing every day. You can feel it all round you.’

  ‘And your school?’

  ‘Our classes are down from thirty to fifteen, and all amalgamating. Everybody’s planning to go. And I’ll go too, in the autumn, back to the Ukraine. People work properly there.’ Her face quivered with memory, perhaps too rosy. ‘It’s good in the Ukraine.’

  In my hotel the only other foreigners were Afghan merchants and students. Oman said they were trading in opium and heroin, which would find its way through the Baltic ports to the West. On the tarmac outside, a drift of youths was selling bootleg brandy and French (they said) champagne, and fraternising with a slovenly troupe of police. From time to time they moved in and out of the lobby in a tremor of secrecy and suspicion. Their eyes raked the doors for custom, while the handshakes and embraces rose to a crescendo. Friends or rivals would be plucked aside for a sudden confidence, and Oman would catch fragments: ‘ . . . seventy roubles . . . I can manage . . . ninety . . . as a favour . . . .’ Then the restless circles and pairs would reconvene, and their conspiracies start all over again. ‘My friend . . . tomorrow . . . dollars . . .?’

  The sight of the hotel terrace made Oman sick. Twenty years before, he had finished his military service in Dushanbe as the building was being completed, and a tile had dropped off the roof and killed his closest friend.

  While I was rambling the streets, he would set off to view the tea-houses and barracks of his past, but always returned a little melancholy. There was nobody left whom he knew, and the friends he remembered were mostly tragic. One had shot himself; another was killed when his tank tipped over a ravine. Then there was the Polish woman he had loved: a ravishing creature, he said, but married. Every night, while her husband was away, he had escaped the barracks to visit her, and returned before dawn. Even now her memory turned him maudlin. ‘I still know where she lived. Perhaps she’s still there. She was so beautiful, like a dream to me. I was just twenty-two.’ His fingers clasped and unclasped the remembered body. ‘But she would be fifty-three now, and our women don’t last like yours do. So I think I’ll not go. I’ll keep her memory.’ But he looked miserable.

  In the evening he would often winkle out scraps of meat from some half-closed shop, and would grill them into tough kebabs in the hotel yard, and brew up tea. But at other times I returned to find him slumped in tousled gloom among discarded newspapers and cigarette stubs, drunk. Then we would open our iron rations of tinned fish and calamary, and I would reassure him that we would soon be gone, for he was growing bored.

  After dark, when the traffic drained from the streets, the city went silent and a rash of stars glittered in our window. Then, from some distant suburb, we would hear bursts of automatic fire, which Oman recognised as Kalashnikovs, and hundreds of awakened dogs would howl from alley to alley in a mournful counterpoint. Morning brought news of men killed by random skirmishes in a city filled with armed civilians.

  These disturbed nights goaded Oman into vodka-loosened ramblings about the mafia, his troubled parenthood, or the whereabouts of God. His past was scarred by loss and hardship. His mother’s father had been a wealthy man, he said, and had owned a restaurant and a small factory, and was shot in the Stalin years simply for being what he was. Oman’s mother was only seven then. His father had been wounded in the Russo-Finnish war, and invalided out to Novosibirsk where he met and married her. Oman was the lone result. His father never truly recovered, and died when his son was ten. Oman posthumously adored him. It was this dimly remembered father who had built their family home at the epicentre of the 1966 Tashkent earthquake: a traditional brick-and-timber house which had survived when all around it the Soviet buildings crashed. ‘They were built inflexibly of concrete,’ he said. ‘So they just disappeared overnight.’

  On one of these distracted evenings, when the crash of small-arms fire kept us up late, the question of national identity nagged at me again, and I asked him if he were proud of being Uzbek. No Latvian or Georgian would have responded tepidly to such a question, but Oman answered: ‘It’s hard to feel it much.’ He looked a little bewildered. ‘Yes, I suppose I’m proud . . . but I’m proud of being Moslem too.’

  Yet I knew he was not a believer. Rather he felt part of the Umma, of the wider family of Moslem peoples: a generous but vague identity. Staring at his smoothed face, as at a cryptogram, I realised that this absence of national clothing did not seem a lack to him, only to me, soaked as I was, unthinking, in my own. His true nation was his extended family. It was this which surrounded him with the comfort of belonging, the womb-like flesh of his own kind.

  ‘I can trace my people over two hundred years,’ he said. ‘It used to be common among us, but it’s dying out now. So I’m teaching my youngest son the same.’ Then the old, stubborn hurt darkened his voice. ‘I don’t want to be forgotten after I’m dead.’

  I said exactingly: ‘Is it so important? A name?’ I was wondering what it really meant: the transient survival of some syllables in the collective memory.

  But he did not understand this. ‘I want to be honoured,’ he said. ‘I want my place back.’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘Yes, back.’ A fusion of anger and self-pity burnt just below his words. ‘I’ve been wronged in this life.’

  I said: ‘How?’, and at once regretted asking. He was seated at our table like a sulky child. Vodka swam in his voice and heated eyes, and I anticipated one of his generalised tirades.

  But instead he looked down at his hands on the table and said: ‘Nine years ago I was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. For something I never did.’ He gazed at me for my reaction. I don’t know what he saw. But I was aware, beneath shock, of unexplained things slipping into place. And now the words gushed helplessly from him, as if they had long been waiting: his terrible inner anger and sadness. His face tightened with inconsolable memories. ‘In those days I was director of a big combine, and somebody wanted my position. So he rigged a case against me, said I’d agreed to accept a bri
be. There was nothing I could do. It was a mafia job.’ His voice pulsed to a rhythmic crescendo, as if he were singing himself into fury. ‘So I was sent to prison on rigged evidence’ – he caught at the scruff of his neck – ‘and half a year later that man had a heart attack, and soon afterwards was sent to prison himself for something. Where he is now, only God knows.’

  I asked softly: ‘What was prison like?’

  But he turned quiet. His face convulsed. ‘I can’t even talk about it.’ And this silence was more potent than anything he could have said. He started pacing the room as if it were a cell, while his creased vest and trousers touched up the illusion of a convict. ‘I was already forty. But when they took me I just went into shock. I remember standing in that place dazed for almost three minutes. I just went on repeating, “There’s no sun, there’s no sun, there’s no sun.’” He glared upward. Then his words came in declamatory hammer-blows. ‘The cells were two metres by five . . . with six convicts in each one . . . three bunks to each wall. And sometimes another six were shoved in too . . . and they slept on the floor. We were cattle.’

  He struck the room’s wall with his fists. His eyes had filled with water. ‘Then after a year and a half I was sent to a labour camp not far from Tashkent, and in some ways it was worse than prison. We worked in the fields all day, and sometimes in that region, you know, the temperature climbs to forty degrees Centigrade, and we just laboured under that sun, so that our necks and ears swelled to twice their size . . . .’

  As he went on, I realised that for a long time inarticulate questions had been rankling in me, because all at once he seemed resolved. His air of private hurt and self-reliance, all his rancour and solitude, appeared natural now. It was a rare Uzbek official, I thought, who had never accepted a bribe, but I believed in Oman’s innocence. The rage which came riding out of him was too intense for show.

  ‘I wrote letters to everybody, on and on,’ he said, ‘even to Gorbachev and Lukyanov. And in the end the state procurator came down from Moscow to review my case, and asked me why I was so outraged and writing all these letters. I told him I was angry because I wasn’t earning anything and so was depriving the government of income tax’ – this joke momentarily ironed out his forehead – ‘and he asked me off the record what had happened, and I told him – just as I’m telling you now – and because of him I came out of that place after three years, and I thought: so after all, there is a God, and He is watching me.’

  He dropped into his chair again, his anger withered away. ‘Do you know, when I got out the policeman who had arrested me came and apologised and said “What could I do?” although he’d known I was innocent.’ He crossed his arms over his chest in ironic penitence. ‘”I’m sorry,” he said, as though he’d dented my car, “I’m so sorry!’”

  He cradled the vodka bottle against his chest, then one plump arm came up and covered his head in remembered despair. ‘After that I didn’t want to see anybody – not my old friends or work-mates, nobody. I took to working on the railway as a mechanic – I’m good at that – mending the refrigerators on trains.’ His voice rose again in a momentary, pathetic outrage. ‘I did that alone for three years!’

  I began: ‘You’ve started again now . . . .’

  But he was not listening. ‘Somebody should write my story. Why don’t you write it? I couldn’t write it.’ The vodka trembled into his glass. ‘I’ve got a stack of papers and documents. It would make a bestseller! Like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich!’ The drink was overwhelming him. ‘Did you know that one in thirty of our population goes to prison? And I reckon half of them are honest men, blackmailed.’

  I said: ‘But you’ve a fine house now, and good work. And your son’s married well . . . .’

  ‘Yes, but . . . .’ He gestured hopelessly. ‘I can’t enjoy them. I can’t be happy there. Not in my real heart.’

  In some vital part of him, I realised, he was broken. However much he travelled with his vans striking lucrative deals, this lesion would not heal. He looked flushed and spent. I did not know what to say. My arm around his shoulders brought his head half sobbing against mine, while the dogs began barking all over the city in the wake of new gunfire.

  In the 1930s, at the height of Stalin’s persecutions, a pious citizen of Dushanbe opened his house for the secret prayers of Moslems, and around this modest building there grew up the country’s central mosque and the residence of its spiritual leader, the Qazi. Now the Qazi’s faction, in alliance with the Islamic Renaissance Party (soon to be banned), was tasting a precarious power. But no delegation clogged the doorways, and nobody barred me from entering the courtyards, where a few builders were cutting sheets of marble at a lathe. The 160 medreseh pupils had just dispersed for the summer vacation, and an air of dereliction was about.

  But one student had been left behind. He could not afford the train home, he said, and was waiting for a cheap bus fare. ‘My father’s just a mechanic. He hasn’t the money to pay for me.’

  So we sat together under the sleepy porticoes. He was half Tajik, half Uzbek, and across his open face I fancied that the two worlds did battle, and that periodically the sturdy Turk in him was being sabotaged by a volatile Iranian. But he was callow and earnest. ‘We have to live on a stipend, you see,’ he went on. ‘Three hundred roubles a month. It’s not much. It gets paid by our brothers in Iran. Our government gives nothing for religion. They hate us.’

  I glimpsed a spark of anger, which was snuffed out at once by his enthusiasm. ‘But it’s all changing now! You heard about our demonstration? People came from everywhere! From the factories and collectives and state farms – old, young. When the police blocked the roads, they just went in on foot. And they were half starving. Some of them hadn’t received pay for six months, and there was nothing in the shops: no sugar, no meat, bread. Nothing.’

  But he was jubilant with the certainty of future triumph. His had been one of the thousands of faces massed in Independence Square a month before, and he had seen and felt their power. ‘This government is still run by old-time Communists,’ he said, ‘and that system was atrocious. Nobody could speak or believe as he wished. Now our law gives freedom of belief, but Islamic law will be better.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Will it also give freedom of belief?’

  He began: ‘Yes . . . .’ But he sounded subtly dissatisfied, as if Islamic law should magically unite everything, and cleanse it. ‘It will come. Perhaps in five years, perhaps in ten. But it will come like it did in Iran.’

  This chill certainty fell mildly from him. It seemed to him, after all he had witnessed, that an irreversible wave were gathering. Only five years ago barely twenty mosques were open in the country. Now there were 2500. He said. ‘I think the Iranians are the best Moslems.’

  ‘But they are Shia,’ I said, sowing discord. The Tajiks were almost all Sunni.

  ‘There may be a few Shia,’ he answered quixotically, ‘but most are Moslems.’

  I gazed at him in wonder. Iranian propaganda must have evaded all grounds for friction. He seemed infinitely manipulable. I asked: ‘You think there will be a revolution here like Iran’s?’

  ‘I pray God not. I believe it will happen gently.’ His fingers sieved the air, as if welcoming a breeze. ‘Some of our women are fearful, but the Ayatollah Khomeini said that women might work – and why not? – for five or six hours in the morning, and that afterwards they should tend the house. But look what they endure now! They slave from dawn to dusk in the collectives and get paid a pittance a month! As for the veil, that should just cover the head.’ He outlined a wimple, and smiled at me for approval. All this seemed decent to him, even free. Only his freedom was not mine, and I was scowling ungratefully. I was familiar with this recipe for cowled servants by now.

  I said: ‘Perhaps women should decide what women do.’

  ‘But that’s what they wear in Iran,’ he rushed on. ‘They cover the head and they look very attractive, the women, dressed like th
at.’

  ‘You’ve seen them?’

  He looked incredulous. ‘Of course not! I’ve watched it on television.’ He grinned at the simplicity of this. ‘Maybe I’ll study in Iran one day, or in Saudi Arabia’ – the possibilities filled him with awe as he spoke – ‘they give students a hundred dollars a month in Saudi Arabia! I couldn’t earn that in a lifetime! They have Islamic law there, but the biggest millionaires in the world!’ His eyes glittered. ‘That’s the place!’

  In his face the Turk and the Iranian had momentarily made peace, hypnotised by lucre. ‘But some of us will go to Pakistan after our four years here,’ he went on. ‘They have the best colleges there, because they teach English. Next year we will be learning English in this medreseh too . . . .’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s the world language. It’s the one you have to know. But Saudi Arabia would be best!’

  Somewhere in his imagination there shone a paradise of Islamic justice and gross riches. It restored his native pride, yet promised dollars.

  But wasn’t Islamic law hard on money-making, I asked? It condemned usury, limited private property and amputated thieves’ hands.

  ‘Amputation?’ He looked astonished. ‘Our law wouldn’t do that! No, no, it’s not like that at all. Only if you steal something big. A car, say. But if you steal something small, or steal for the first time, they’ll just cut off a fingertip.’ He held up his splayed hand. ‘Just a little, a very little. ‘ He laughed in depreciation, charmingly. ‘And the second time you steal, they’d still only cut off that, and then that and that . . . .’ He sliced off an imaginary sheaf of fingers. They dropped soundlessly on to the portico floor, until his hand was a stub. He was smiling at me now. It all seemed irreducibly logical to him, beautiful even. ‘Only then would the hand come off!’

  He was not really cruel, I knew. He simply belonged to a harsher world: the poor mechanic’s son.