The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  ‘The conductors here tell me it’s hopeless my wanting to conduct. They say “Give up! It’s no good!” But I don’t listen.’ Her laugh was tinkling steel. ‘They think I should concentrate on my piano playing. That’s a woman’s role. It’s good work, but some of our singers have God-given voices which they scarcely cultivate, and then I’m angry. I’m hard on them, and they resent it. They don’t think it’s my place!’ She sliced a hand across her throat, as if she were committing suicide, then her voice darkened into mockery which was not yet cynical, but might become so. ‘No, no, you are just a woman, Dilia, you should do as you’re told But I’ve never done that. The Russians say “If you’re afraid of wolves, don’t go into the forest”, but I’ve gone in and I’m not coming out now.’

  She looked so young, I found myself saying: ‘What do your parents feel?’

  ‘My parents are dead. I live alone. My father was a railway engineer and she a teacher, but ill all her life. She was glad I loved music, but they wanted me married. They wanted grandchildren.’ She took off her spectacles and lifted her face in profile, consciously stilling herself. Without her glasses, she appeared harder. ‘Nobody understands my not marrying. But I never liked the men my parents produced. I’ve always liked older men.’ She looked momentarily shy, as if this were a vice. ‘When young men courted me, I pushed them away. It was sensitivity I wanted, and intelligence.’

  ‘And children?’

  ‘Children aren’t important to me. It’s only important that the man should love me.’ She turned from my gaze again, but her hands wrenched at one another above A German Requiem, and her voice assumed its mocking lilt. Oh no, you must have children and live among saucepans, Dilia. Don’t you want that? What’s wrong with you?’ She laughed again, buoyantly. I could not foresee when this laughter would grow bitter.

  ‘You may still marry,’ I said. She was, in her hard way, beautiful.

  But she dashed this aside with her hand. ‘With us, women often marry at seventeen. Twenty-three is old – and I’m thirty-one!’

  ‘But still . . . .’

  ‘Marriage here can be terrible. When women get what they want, all they do is whine for more money. Men drink and beat their wives, and the women are silent and cover their bruises.’ She closed the score on her lap. ‘But you want a career more than a family, Dilia? Oh no, that’s terrible.’

  She would have been unusual in any country, I thought, but here in the man’s world of Kazakhstan she was extraordinary and moving. We sat for a while, silenced by her impasse, until an old man tottered towards us, his chest ribboned with warmedals. His was a near-ancestral face of Russian suffering, its lines deep-etched in hopelessness, its eyes bleared. As he stooped down to us, he breathed out beer fumes. ‘I need to eat, young people . . . I need to eat.’ He waved at a tea-house through the trees. His slack mouth rambled between obsequiousness and a ghost of dignity. ‘Is it possible for you to give?’ Dilia raised her clinical profile to him, said something distantly, and we both gave. ‘Thank you, thank you.’ He scrutinised the money in his palm, then bowed to us frailly and stumbled away.

  She said: ‘I feel sorry for these old Communists who fought in the war, and believed. They’ve got nothing left now. Everything they valued has collapsed, everything they lived for. That must be hard.’

  I liked her then. I had expected the old man to awaken her intolerance: his mind and body ransacked by himself and the world, his past so far from her imagined future. He would not have guessed her sympathy.

  She went on as if no one had interrupted: ‘Everybody apart from me seems to accept things. Perhaps I should not have been a woman.’ She smoothed her hands over her face, as if eradicating lines, which were not there. It was an ageless face, without discernible expression; and her figure androgynously slim. ‘But there was a man . . . .’

  He had been a visitor to the concert hall, a Lithuanian Jew who had encouraged and perhaps loved her. He had invited her to Vilnius, but her parents had been horrified.

  ‘Because he was Jewish?’

  ‘No, no! Because he was not Kazakh. Men can do what they like, but a Kazakh girl must take a Kazakh husband!’ Her hands wrenched in her lap again. ‘But I deceived them, and went, and we were happy. We walked in the park, and talked. He was forty-five.’ She looked suddenly naïve, forlorn. ‘Now he’s in America, and thinks I should go out there too. But what would I do? I could bear to work as a waitress for a year or two, but after that, if I didn’t become a musician, I’d starve inside.’ She touched her heart in the Russian way. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do. Here I have my music. But over there I think I might have nothing.’

  ‘Perhaps this friend would help you.’ But I did not know what was happening inside either of them.

  ‘Perhaps. When he telephones from there, he sounds happy. It’s my voice that sounds sad to me . . . . I feel sad after he’s gone.’ She replaced an imaginary receiver. ‘Lonely.’

  So she remained between her lesser world and the cruel challenge of America, and did not know what to do. Only the small, determined mouth and tightened profile said that she was not to be pitied.

  Next morning I flew to Karaganda, the second city of Kazakhstan. This was no more than a feint into the heart of a steppeland spreading thinly peopled towards Siberia, for you could travel it for weeks and encounter no one. Far down, under the wings of our groaning Tupolev, drifted an unchanging, dun-coloured earth, where cloud-shadows moved in grey lakes and there was no glint of life. It was hard to look on it without misgiving. In these secretive deserts and the grasslands lapping them to the north, the Russians had for decades concealed an archipelago of labour camps, nuclear testing sites, ballistic missiles and archaic heavy industry. It was the dumping-ground of unwanted nations. Around the handful of those exiles it hammered into stature – Dostoevsky soldiered here in disgrace, Solzhenitsyn festered – millions more succumbed into death or obscurity. Trotsky spent two years banished in Almaty, before the murderer’s ice-pick found him in Mexico.

  From time to time the land had floated visions. In the late 1950s Russians and Ukrainians flooded into the northern steppes to plant a hundred million acres of wheat and barley on Kruschev’s ‘Virgin Lands’ (lands not virgin at all, but Kazakh pastures) and for a few years the scheme flowered spectacularly, before soil erosion called it to heel. From the Leninsk space centre near the Aral Sea the first Sputnik shot into orbit, the first dog ascended, then the first astronauts.

  But the testing sites near Semipalatinsk have left half a million people ill with radioactive sickness, some of them – in Stalin’s time – exposed intentionally as guinea-pigs. Over a region now riddled with unfissioned plutonium, some 500 bombs, exploded over forty years, have undermined a bewildered populace with cancers, leukaemia, heart disease, birth defects and blindness, so that the first act of an independent Kazakhstan in 1990 was to ban all tests on its territory. All across this blighted country, lead smelters and copper foundries, cement and phosphates works still plunge the skies and waters in poisonous effluent, and some two million Kazakhs and Russians are rumoured chronically sick from the pollution.

  But as we floated above it, the steppe looked untouchably vast. Here and there a green valley scored it, the excrement of a mine appeared, or a lonely quadrangle of wheat; and as we descended towards Karaganda a speckling of dark cattle and pale sheep, invisible before, emerged against the void. Beyond the airstrip the road travelled across an empty plain. The sky thundered. After a long time villages of dachas and allotments started up, many half built and all deserted. Then came steel-works bannered in smoke; and suddenly the suburbs of Karaganda shot up in twenty-storey flat-blocks like a futuristic Hell. They clustered in concrete islands, separated by wasteland, so that the whole city was ringed by these desolate micro-regions too far from one another.

  We jolted down splintered streets. It was a young town, founded in 1926, and it seemed ownerless. In western Russia it was the butt of black jokes: a synonym for nowhere. Its
only purpose was the coalfields on which it sprawled. Of its 700,000 inhabitants, most of them Russians, one quarter laboured under the ground. Above ground, it looked half abandoned. To these choking warrens the Second World War had added an arsenal of iron works. All through the Stalin years the place was filled with ex-convicts still half in exile. From its railway station, still grim with floodlights, the packed Stolypin carriages had shunted their prisoners to a nest of surrounding labour-camps, and lorryloads of others vanished to nearby Samarka and Kengir, whose inmates in 1954 at last revolted – men and women together – until tanks overran them leaving 700 dead.

  My hotel stood in the centre. Its concrete was cracking, and it owned a gaunt restaurant selling black market drink. When my room’s telephone rang a woman began to enquire after her son, whom she had lost. She had dialled the wrong number. Her voice echoed from another time.

  I went out into the streets. They were enormous and near-empty, their buildings the colour of dust, undecorated. Hammer-and-sickle banners still dangled across the roads, and a few people lingered at bus-stops or beer-wagons, as if in refuge from something. On the façade of the Miner’s Palace, a screen of gross columns, sprouting figures of workers and soldiers, concealed some cringing Arabic arches; while opposite, in an ensemble of brutish, soot-coloured brotherhood, a Russian and a Kazakh miner upheld a chunk of coal. In its terrible isolation, I thought, the city might have been going mad. Its coal was poor, and produced a corrosive ash. Its river was strangled by radioactive waste, its air tainted with carbon. In winter, they said, snow turned black before it touched the ground.

  When the labour-camps were broken up in 1956, Karaganda was flooded by ex-convicts, some of them educated liberals, who could not go home. They settled here beside their ex-jailers, and for a generation the city took on a gentler tinge. But it remained a wilderness of exiles, forced or voluntary. Now, at the end of Peace Prospect, the wooden concert hall, long closed, was falling to bits. Even the KGB headquarters – a Doric palace stuccoed grey and white – looked unoccupied (but was not). Outside a cake shop I passed 200 people queuing: doughy women in plain scarves and skirts who might have belonged in the forties, but for a dash of lipstick.

  The German was queuing too: a man with glittering blue eyes and an uprush of grey hair. It was a face with more delicacy than life had allowed its owner. ‘Nobody belongs in this town,’ he said. ‘It’s vile. My home was in the Ukraine before the war, but my father was shot in the repressions four months before I was born’ – he marked the months off with his blistered fingers –‘ . . . March . . . April . . . After that the bits of my family moved to East Germany, then to Siberia, and now here.’ He said ‘here’ with a sour shudder. ‘I’ve worked here twenty-four years as a builder, and it’s become hopeless. I haven’t been paid for three months. There’s no law, nothing. Even the Russians don’t have a country, nobody has a country. I want my son to go to West Germany, and I too. I’d rather be buried there.’ His smile dispersed over a mouthful of gaps and stains. I remembered my gap-tooth and grinned back at him. ‘I’m not afraid of work. And I’ll pick up the language.’ He hoisted a few German words into his Russian, but they came thick and distorted. ‘Anywhere’s better than here.’

  Roaming the outskirts next day, I believed him. The coal-mines ringed the city in waste-heaps where the shaft-wheels turned in their scaffolds as if this were the thirties. So steeped was the place in secrecy that visiting delegates from Europe, suggesting aid, were offered no geological maps. The safety regulations (an official confided) were routinely flouted. There was no money left. Inside grim offices, where I was refused per-mission to go underground, illuminated cabinets glowered with the penants and medals of Soviet labour awards.

  Yet the surface lethargy deceived. In 1989 these fearful tunnels spat out their miners in a strike which was echoed across the Union. Its men were young, angry and organised. They demanded, and won, an independent trade union. After sixty years of servitude, the workers were on the march. But their model, they said, was the United States of America.

  Chapter 12

  The Mountains of Heaven

  It was almost July. For over a hundred miles the Alatau mountains, the western ranges of the Tienshan, shadowed my bus south along the Kirghiz border, while the road ran dead-straight in their lee, seeking out a pass. Beyond a velvety massif of foothills, the snow-peaks frothed in backlit clouds, as if swept by pale fire.

  Beside me sat a shy Kazakh girl who was studying electrical engineering, and was going home. Sometimes she turned a child’s face to mine and questioned me about Europe. She spoke in a whisper, through goldfish lips. Whenever I asked anything about her, she whispered ‘Who? Me?’ as if no one had ever enquired about her before. She got out in the middle of pastureland, clutching a watercolour of roses, and walked away towards a herdsmen’s village in the hills.

  After two hours the bus crested a pass and entered tablelands of grey rock sheened in grass and flowers. We had crossed unsignalled into the mountain state of Kirghizstan, the easternmost reach of Central Asia before it drops into the deserts of Xinjiang. Of all these troubled nations, this was the most remote: an Alpine sanctuary of less than four and a half million people. When independence came, power slipped from the grip of the old Communists, and the liberal president – alone in Central Asia – ruled by political concensus, and was trying to free the economy.

  Around me in the bus sat the nation in miniature: some Russians, Uzbeks and a scattering of fugitive minorities. But in the ascendant, a jovial, rustic people – perhaps related to the Kazakhs – bellowed and slumbered and guzzled gross picnics. Seven hundred years before, the Kirghiz ancestors, harried by the armies of Kublai Khan, had migrated from the Yenisei river in Siberia, and centuries later percolated the Tienshan, mingling with the valley tribes. Their Islam was thin. They were nomad warriors, whose currency was the sheep and the horse. Divided by steep valleys, they had thought of themselves less by nation than by tribe, until Stalin rooted them in villages, and decided who they were. Then their language was codified with Russian loan-words to split them from the Kazakhs, and their boundaries fixed.

  Towards sunset our bus climbed to a rain-swept plateau which rolled its polished rocks to the skyline. In the distance, shoulders and haunches of mountain came lurching out of clouds. Then farms and small factories appeared, and the long suburbs of the capital, Bishkek: Slavic cottages with carved eaves and fences frail in a tangle of vines and vegetables. Blonde women were basking on the verges in the last sunlight, grazing a goat or a few chickens. Everything seemed smaller than elsewhere: the flat-blocks, the streets, even the statues of Lenin diminutive in their workshop courts.

  Night had fallen before I reached a hotel – an ornate Stalinist survivor, rowdy with Kirghiz farmers in from the mountains. But I was sick of the leathery mutton and solyanka soup in the hotel restaurants, with their sodden rice and sweet fruit juices, and I wandered out, warm with expectation, into the town’s dusk.

  It was filled with the scent of chestnut trees, and a sliver of moon was rising. I felt I was not in a city at all. It seemed only obscurely inhabited. Every path and avenue was wrapped in a thronging bank of trees, where the streetlights hung in lonely orbs, like outsize fairy-lights. It was as if its builders had tunnelled the place out of forest, gouging dark glades and country lanes, which sometimes opened on woodland clearings inexplicably ablaze with buildings.

  From end to end of the city’s heart, the boulevard once named from Dzerzhinsky, but now Peace, pushed through indecipherable foliage where a few lovers sat, not kissing or fondling, but curled together in a kind of speechless longing. Once a gaunt equestrian statue loomed above me. Its arm stretched black against the black sky, but I could not discern its face, nor read its inscription. I stopped on a railway bridge of rotting wood. A Russian couple was embracing in silence, her back arched over the parapet as they kissed. From here the city lights glimmered against a starlit glacis of mountains, and I suddenly dreaded t
he daylight, which might return the place to Soviet drabness.

  Yet at first, dawn revealed nothing. It seemed a city built for farmers. Rustic cottages crammed its alleys, slithering with canals where gardens of cherry and apricot flowered. A rural invasion of Kirghiz was infiltrating the suburbs and crowding the shops. They looked like last-generation herdsmen, coarser and burlier than their Kazakh cousins. I watched them in fascination. They lumbered along the streets as if breasting mountains, and would drop unthinking to their haunches on the pavements. Their mastiff necks rolled into barrel chests. Their hair was cropped into a utilitarian black bush, beneath which the jowled, brachycephalic heads belonged in Mongolia. In fact a physiognomic map (if it omitted Tajikistan) would find Turkic features inexorably flattening eastward from the Caspian, until it arrived at these shambling, short-legged mountaineers with their full lips and ruddy, fierce-boned cheeks. Many looked like pantomime peasants. Their rolling-pin arms swung out from muscle-bound shoulders, and their felt hats lent them a doltish gaiety. But within a generation they could refine to a tenuous urbanity, and these other Kirghiz too were all about, running small businesses in the liberalised economy, percolating the civil service.

  As I neared the city’s centre, the streets still burrowed through oak and acacia, and parks blossomed with syringa and handkerchief trees; but the forest was teeming with traffic now, and at the end of streets I glimpsed factory chimneys.

  Suddenly, without warning, the greenery opened on stonepaved desolation. On one side stood the marble parliament, with the marble state museum behind. There was a pale hotel complex and a blank war memorial. A bullying Lenin, huge on his pedestal, commandeered the main square. All at once the city had lost touch with its people, who clattered round it in old Zhiguli and Moskvich cars, or walked numbly in the void.