The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Sometimes the river stilled to a flood below sheer cliffs, and our road weaved alongside between precipices which refracted each other’s light and sound, and tossed down threads of water-fall for hundreds of feet. We were close beneath the pass now, and had entered a stark gallery of ravines, roughed up by winds which blasted through them inexplicably.

  Soon afterwards our road crept under hanging snowfields through the shepherds’ villages of Takfon and Anzob. The people seemed to grow ever more inbred. We came upon fragile academics crowned by high brows, women with bewitching green eyes and old men sporting Roman noses and Dundreary whiskers. Occasionally I would glimpse a disconcertingly European face, as if some friend from England were scrutinising me from under a skull-cap.

  A little farther on, where the Yagnob valley opened, we found two men heaving goats into the back of a truck. They wore old jackets and split boots. Shyly, feeling suddenly intrusive, I asked them their origins.

  Yes, they said, they were Yagnobski. They all spoke Sogdian in the home, young and old, and had inherited the language from their parents, by ear. They sat before me by the river: an old man with a face of grizzled peace, and a pale-eyed youth. They shared the same lean features and retracted brow and chin. For months a cassette-recorder had lain neglected in my rucksack, but now I pulled it out and asked the old man to talk for me.

  He settled nervously before it. The only sound was the rush of the river. Then he began to speak as if in a reverie: an elusive language filled with gutturals and soft plosives, and a sad, rhythmic energy. He concentrated on it as if remembering a song, his eyes overhung by tufted black brows and his knees locked in big, liver-spotted hands. He kept his stare on the recorder’s winking lights. The youth joined him in a pattering tenor, and fell into the same melancholy cadences, until all their sentences seemed to wilt away in disillusion.

  I listened almost in disbelief. This, I told myself, was the last, distorted echo of the battle-cries shouted 2500 years ago by the armies of the Great Kings at Marathon and Thermopylae, all that remained from the chant of Zoroastrian priests or the pleas of Persian satraps to Alexander the Great. Yet it was spoken by impoverished goatherds in the Pamirs. Once or twice some fragment floated up to me with the eerie resonance of a common Indo-European tongue – ‘road’ sounded identical in English, ‘nose’ was ‘nez’ – but the rest was incomprehensible.

  I thought they must be declaiming poetry or saga, but no, they said in faltering Russian, they were simply talking about the hardness of their lives. They bought goats in these mountains and sold them 200 miles down into the plains. As for the past, the old man knew that his people had been driven here by invaders, and that they had carried with them records inscribed on horse-skin vellum. But he was vague about all dates.

  The young man too looked blank. The Yagnob villages were dying, he said. Life there was too isolated, too cold. In the early sixties people had begun to leave for Dushanbe and for lowland towns to the north. He himself had been born on a state farm in the plains. ‘That’s where our people are now. On the collectives. We hear Sogdian only in the home. I had three years in school, and nobody taught it.’ He looked content with this. ‘It belongs to the past.’

  Oman and I returned down the bitter valley of the Fandariya, then up over the last range of the north-west Pamir, meeting the snowline at 11,000 feet, where he dashed icy water recklessly over the boiling radiator and engine. Then we descended to grasslands and at last into the farmed and industrial plains which flow north towards Tashkent. He stopped only to buy two giant carp at a fish-market, then sped on grimly into the night. We were both exhausted as the city outskirts limped past us. But as we neared the house we became aware of a blaze of lights and merriment, and a horde of children ran out to kiss him.

  He looked bewildered. ‘We’ve got guests.’

  Then Sochibar and his daughter-in-law ran out too, and embraced him. It was his eldest son’s birthday, and he had clean forgotten it.

  The party was on its last, drunk legs, and half the forty guests had gone. The remainder were all relatives, together with Oman’s mysterious middle son and a clutch of in-laws. Two long tables had segregated the sexes, and still groaned with uneaten salads, fruit and sweets.

  A hard core of celebrants greeted us, and in no time we were sunk in shouting revelry. They were gross, simple men who bawled jokes in Uzbek, which scarcely bore translation, and plied me with mutton and vodka. Everyone was drunk. I sat between a post-office official and a chef on the railway, who jabbed me in the ribs or shoulder whenever he wanted to speak. I felt numbly detached. Meanwhile the women murmured together at their own table, not drinking, or fluttered about their husbands, hoping to leave. But the men went on bellowing and quipping and roaring in crescendoes of boorish glee.

  Sochibar’s father – a tiny, gnarled teacher, long retired – sprawled across the table to kiss and embrace me. ‘I know all about English history,’ he babbled. ‘You have a dynasty, the Stuarts, and your queen is Elizabeth III now . . . .’ His eyes peered half-seeing into mine. ‘Oliver Cromwell, he was a man of the people . . . .’

  Slowly, I realised, the men’s table was dividing. At first Oman had sat wanly toying with his food, and once we had caught each other’s eye and smiled complicitously from the bond of our journey. But now he was drunk again, and was accusing his sons of fecklessness. The eldest boy, in whose honour the party was being given, stared doggedly back from the head of the table, waiting for his relatives to go, while Oman’s words reeled about him. Sometimes his pretty wife darted up behind, whispered things and took his arm. But Oman railed on, now turning on his second son, who sat down resignedly beside me. He was a handsome twenty-year-old, with an undirected urge to work in pop music, and a look of helpless charm. Once he tried to defend himself, but three or four men of Oman’s age at once assailed him, shouting and wagging their drunken fingers.

  During a lull the youth turned to me and said: ‘My father just talks. He only ever talks. My mother’s wonderful. I owe everything to her . . . .’ Oman, I knew, had deserted her long ago, and perhaps some buried guilt prompted his raging. ‘I don’t need his help,’ his son went on. ‘I don’t need anybody helping me. Nobody.’ And this too must have been Oman’s trouble, that his authority was not embraced.

  An hour later, as a new squall broke out, the men’s voices jacked themselves up to a battering climax. A few Russian phrases laced the Uzbek clamour, so that from time to time a shred of meaning floated across to me. At first rival gangs of supporters had restrained Oman and one of his brothers-in-law from hitting one another. But now they all rose in fury and soon a battle was raging under the verandahs. At its root lay the dispute over Oman’s sons, but other vendettas were rankling to the surface, and fighting had broken out among their supporters too, huge with grappling and fisticuffs, into which several wives threw themselves in a useless plea for peace, while the neighbourhood dogs set up a long, delirious baying.

  The eldest son, whose birthday had slipped away at midnight, continued to look bored at the head of the empty table. I sat there too, an inviolable guest, surprised at my own peace. Once I thought of intruding; but I imagined their shame afterwards, and kept my seat. Meanwhile the fantasy of the extended family toppled in dust about me: its happiness, its pliant union. The figures dimly battling round the porch were raw with their own truth: parents who stop loving their children, ageing people who have no place.

  Yet these families, I thought, more surely than Western ones, outlive their individual members, and cushion every loss. For better or worse, they superseded every loyalty outside, and often rendered public life shallow and nearly meaningless. And now Sochibar and others were breaking up the fights one by one, pushing and complaining at the men, while gradually the flung punches cooled to bravado and the pugilists disappeared through the gates still shouting their imprecations, and some grudging reconciliations and handshakes began.

  As the last guest departed, the remaining women cleared a
way the china then folded the table-cloths over the debris of glass and cherry-stones and drained bottles. Meanwhile Oman was smoking, staring over the verandah into darkness. ‘I’m sorry, Colin. I don’t know why they behave like that. They were defending my sons against me . . . .’ He was black with misery. For a long time he went on lighting cigarette after cigarette. How these sons had wounded him, why fecklessness so infuriated him, I never really knew: whether his own hardship had turned him intolerant, or whether he feared to see in them some continuance of his self.

  We were deprived of any long farewell. It was scarcely dawn, and our heads were reeling. On the station platform we clasped each other numbly.

  More than any facial expression, more than the dejected warmth with which he said goodbye, or the pudgy arms embracing mine, I remember Oman’s back as it dwindled towards the exit. Steeped in a dogged gallantry, it seemed to voice in its small span all his resistance to the unjust world. I felt at once relieved and bereft as it receded without turning into the crowds, and my train began slowly to heave itself northwards into the steppes of Kazakhstan.

  Chapter 11

  Steppelands

  I was entering the fringes of a formidable solitude. For almost a thousand miles Kazakhstan stretched northward in rolling grasslands and dust-coloured desert. For hours, on all sides, the land was the same: a treeless wilderness under a dead sky. It lay like a caesura in Asia’s heart, as if this were the earth’s natural state of rest. Here I was out of the tilled oases and into the nomadic hinterland, from where centuries of warrior-herdsmen had descended on the valleys of the south. Pink and yellow wild flowers still seamed the soil, but thistles were dying over the shallow slopes, and the passengers around me looked out on the sameness with a numb, unfocused gaze. Only occasionally the grassland became pimpled with volcanic-looking hills, where Hunnish, barrel-chested horses grazed, and nobody was in sight.

  For more than a million square miles this opaque nation sprawled between China and the Caspian. It was the size of Western Europe. Its people had coalesced as late as the fifteenth century from Turkic tribes which had swept in from the northeast nearly 1000 years before, and from Mongol invaders, and the Russians found them sprinkled over their vast plains in three confederate hordes. As the czarist settlers inched towards the trading centres of the Uzbek valleys, and of Persia and China beyond, the Kazakhs fell first into alliance with Russia, then into servitude, until by the mid-nineteenth century they had all been overrun. But they had still been a nomad people, who circled with their herds over huge migratory paths, and Islam sat light on them. Even now, when most of them were grounded in State farms or cities, Moslem doctrine was buffered by ancestral custom, and a little unfamiliar. And the Russians’ presence soon created deep changes. They settled as grain farmers, disrupting the pasturelands, and swelled to a majority in the region.

  In time Kazakhstan became the waste-bin of Moscow’s empire. A rash of labour-camps covered it, and Stalin transported whole unwanted peoples here during the Second World War. Then the Soviets chose it as their prime atomic and nuclear testing site. Entire regions were envenomed by radioactive dust, while the titanic factories of an antiquated heavy industry still suffocate others in a toxic fog.

  This was the most Russified of Central Asian states. Its government, like most others, was composed of old Communists under a new name, barely irked by a mosquito-cloud of opposition parties. Yet now it had sponsored a drive towards privatisation which was biting deep in commerce and agriculture. Quietly, with independence, the climate was changing. The high native birth-rate had already lifted the Kazakh population just above the Russian, and the economic ties with Moscow were straining. The mineral and energy resources of Kazakhstan – the biggest deposits of iron, copper, lead and zinc in the old USSR – were alerting international business, and Western companies cautiously investing in its gas and oil fields.

  Islam was only a gentle influence here, and the Russians and Kazakhs were interleaved by moderating layers of ethnic subgroups, some 20 per cent of the populace: a million Volga Germans, with exiled Crimean Tartars, Ukrainians, Poles and Meskhetian Turks. There were leftover Chechens and Ingush from the Caucasus, Uighurs who had fled China, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Karakalpaks, Greeks and a cloud of others. I shared my carriage with three Korean women, whose families had been deported from Russia’s far east in the thirties. They were bound for Moscow, they announced, then whispered that they were continuing to Warsaw but were afraid of the mafia, since travellers to Poland were known to carry dollars or merchandise. ‘There’s nothing but gangsterism now,’ they said.

  Beside me sat a genial Kazakh schoolmistress supervising an outing of fourteen-year-old Dungan girls – lissom, Mongoloid creatures, whose Chinese Moslem ancestors had migrated across the border a century before. They squeezed into the carriage to view me. They wore pink digital watches and cheap rings, and their nails were varnished. They all wanted to travel, then to become seamstresses. Under their fluent, high-pitched Russian, some scraps of Mandarin survived.

  ‘They had to learn Russian before,’ said the teacher, ‘but now it’s all changed and everyone wants to speak Kazakh. In business, in government.’ She was a big, raw-boned woman with the inflamed cheeks of a cruel land. She looked as if she could bear anything. ‘My husband speaks beautiful Russian, and is valued in his institute, but he talks Kazakh only poorly. I know it’s strange, but there are Kazakhs like that. And now the world’s turned over. On feast-days and at weddings all the old customs are coming back – the horse-contests, bridal games and costumes, and the drinking of mare’s milk.’

  Yet it sounded artificial as she said it, as if her people had become sightseers. ‘What do younger people think?’

  ‘Oh, the young are all right!’ she said. ‘It’s the old who find it hard. My parents, for instance, don’t like what’s happened. My father remembers the war. Those were terrible times, and they bound us to the Russians. He fought at Stalingrad, and lost an arm.’ Her jolly face cracked open on flashing teeth. ‘And in the famine of the thirties, during the repression, my parents almost died of hunger.’

  ‘Were they victimised?’

  ‘No, no, they were just ordinary people on a state farm. Everybody suffered . . . anybody who owned a few horses or camels might be liquidated. My mother remembers that time well, how people were eating anything – dogs, cats, their own shoes. One day she gave a little boy a handful of grain and he ate it too quickly and died in front of her. I think she remembers this often

  Yet the old people went on feeling nostalgia for the past. Their bitterness, where it existed, fell far short of their sufferings. In 1920-23, towards the end of the Civil War, almost a million Kazakhs died of famine, and later the forced collectivisation was crueller here than anywhere in the Soviet Union. Between 1930-33 a ferocious and chaotic campaign to settle the nomads and reduce the richer farmers led to Kazakhs burning their grain and slaughtering their cattle rather than let them fall into alien hands. Almost half the livestock of the steppes vanished. Some people fled towards China, but only a quarter survived the trek; others were killed by the Bolsheviks. Out of a Kazakh population of only four million, over one million died of famine or dis-ease. By the end of the decade the Great Terror had decimated officials, teachers and a whole generation of early Kazakh Communists. Yet even now, with independence, people scarcely spoke of it. The tragedy had descended on them impersonally, perhaps, on native and Russian alike, and was scarcely scrutable.

  The woman went on: ‘My father still thinks things were better then. He says people were kinder to one another, that they had more heart. But now it’s each for himself. Everyone’s just bent on business. But I don’t think we’re really a business people, not like the Uzbeks.’ She let out a crackling laugh. ‘We’re just used to rearing sheep!’

  As I looked into her cheery Mongol face, it was simple to imagine her back in the grasslands where her people had roamed a generation ago. Yet sh
e lived in a flat-block in Chimkent. ‘Those places are wrong for us. I’d like a garden, or a dacha, but we haven’t the money.’ Then she perked up, as if all pessimism offended her. ‘But we have our freedom now! We can speak the truth at last. That’s the first, the most important thing: to speak the truth.’ The common sense of this, which had eluded generations of her rulers, fell from her with the sturdiness of old platitude. She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a cold chicken leg. ‘We will make progress now.’

  Outside the window the grass had thinned over a plain dusted with saxaul. Only occasionally the land lifted to a far slope where sheep-flocks stuck like larvae, or a herdsmen’s village fringed the railway with winter cattlesheds built in whatever lay to hand: fragments from dismembered trucks, old tyres, rusted bedposts. The solitary faces watching us pass seemed to replicate the featureless plain: a heartless waste flowing northward to Siberia.

  I got out at the first town we reached. Turkestan was a poor, sleepy place, spreadeagled among dusty trees under a blistering sun. Tramping its streets and empty shops, I felt suddenly jaded and lonely. I wondered what Oman was doing. Some of the people around me were Uzbeks still – Turkestan was an early site of pilgrimage – but the stocky childlike Kazakhs were all about. They looked guileless and enduring. Their faces, economical with low brows and close-set ears, seemed shaped for battling head-winds. Epicanthic folds squeezed their eyes to humorous cracks, which sparkled out from a plane of thick-fleshed bones.

  I found a hotel which charged me fifty pence for two nights, and shared my room with a Kazakh metal-worker from the north, who had arrived in a lorry to buy steel joists. Maruya was perhaps forty, but showed the boyish agelessness of his people. He blundered about the room as if he wasn’t used to one. Out of his frayed haversack he pulled little bags of cheeseballs and bread, eight cans of pig fat, a toothbrush and a bundle of garlic for his wife. It was too cold to grow garlic where he came from, he said – a village near Dzhezkazgan, in his country’s bitter heart. A foot of snow had fallen even in May.