The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Yet in a city still full of Russians, this Soviet order, I supposed, evoked nostalgia for a time when prices were stable and people knew where they were. Now everything had changed. The future belonged to the backwoods Kirghiz.

  ‘They’re flooding in everywhere,’ said a Russian lorry-driver. ‘When my people came down from Siberia in 1945, this town was all Russian and Ukrainian, with a few others. You didn’t see these black people about. You have blacks in England? What’s their position?’

  ‘It’s different.’

  ‘Well, we have these blacks in the city now, as many as forty per cent. They come in from the state farms because they don’t want to work. I don’t remember them here when I was a boy. We used to go out into the countryside and view them there, like monkeys. And now they’re here, not working at all, just buying and selling and apeing about.’ A pair of Kirghiz girls sauntered by, trim in black skirts. ‘They can dress all right,’ he went on, ‘because they’re in commerce. They even get foreign money.’ His eyes drifted over me, then unfocused. ‘But they haven’t got anything else. No industry, no brains.’

  ‘But they’re getting jobs.’

  ‘There aren’t any jobs. My sons have to work as teachers, on hopeless salaries. But where can we go? My parents are buried here, and my young sister . . . .’ A spasm of misery twitched him. ‘I can’t go back to Siberia, so I’ll stay. But many have gone, many, many . . . anyone who could.’ He planted his legs apart, and spat. ‘Now these blacks think they’re the bosses.’

  I crossed the bleak spaces to Lenin Square, and walked along the tended rose-beds of the presidential office. Out of the quiet came the long ringing of an unanswered telephone. I mounted the podium under Lenin’s statue, and stared down on the avenue for those vanished May Day parades of orchestrated happiness. All round the square the loudspeakers tilted disused on their posts, and in the podium centre, where a microphone had once relayed leaden exhortations, the wires drooped in a tangle of dead worms.

  I descended a flight of derelict steps to the rooms locked beneath. The marble passageway was discoloured and its balustrades falling. I trod gingerly, as if backstage. A broken water-pipe was dripping into the stair-well, and there was a stench of urine. The steel doors were barred, but already rusting away, and I peered through them into a sanctum of fetid emptiness.

  Trespassing off First of May Street along the stairs and passageways of the Writers’ Union – once a bureaucratic hub of mediocrity and obstruction – I met a writer named Kadyr. His urbanity and circumspection, even the cadaverous sensitivity of his face, seemed to set him generations away from his compatriots in the hills. Yet he had been born in a mountain village, he said, on the borders of China.

  We sat in someone else’s office by a deserted boardroom, on whose door the name of Chingiz Aitmatov, the expatriate Kirghiz novelist, was inscribed reverentially as if he were still inside. I asked what people did here now.

  ‘They don’t do anything,’ said Kadyr. ‘We’ve hundreds of writers, but no money . . . and our publishers can’t get paper. It used to come to us from Russia, but now everything’s atrophied. So at last we have our freedom to write – but no paper!’ His lank hair and glasses lent him a juvenile charm which drifted on and off. An ingrained wariness pervaded him. Questions turned him vague. ‘There was always too much that we couldn’t say. We couldn’t draw on our traditions or write our own history. Now our spiritual situation is richer, far richer, but our material one is hopeless.’

  ‘What did you used to write about?’

  ‘My novels were about nature,’ he said quickly, as if exculpating himself from something, ‘how the mountains sit in people’s spirits, and how people relate to them and to one another. There are inhabitants of Bishkek like that, and I suppose I’m one of them.’ He studied his hands. They looked too big for his body, which tapered away. ‘People call us “the mountain people”, because we’ve never really left the wilds.’

  To write of the mountains, I supposed, was a covert way of expressing patriotism.

  ‘It wasn’t dangerous,’ he said. ‘Nature is nature, whoever is in power.’ He picked a paperback from a shelf. ‘This is by me . . . .’

  It was a flimsy guidebook to Kirghizia. Opening it at random, I read: ‘Just as the eagle flies up from his eyrie my people have risen to the heights of unprecedented creative achievement thanks to their Soviet homeland . . . .’

  ‘Did you ask to write this book?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I approached the publishers in Moscow – and they said Fine, fine.’ His wariness had slipped away. He looked proud.

  I fingered the passage miserably, then pushed it under his eyes. I heard myself say: ‘Did you have to write that”

  He stared at it. ‘It was a kind of . . . well . . . formula.’ He did not look at me. We both laughed abruptly. For who was I to blame him? I had not lived in his grey nightmare. He began: ‘There’s nothing like that in my novels, of course. They’re about how the mountains sit in people’s spirits . . . .’

  But his voice flaked away.

  The Lenin Museum had been renamed the History Museum, but the history inside it was thin and distorted. Its lower halls were given over to a shadowy tide of Turkic peoples: Tartar warriors who had ridden these valleys in the eighth century with their battle-maces and round shields, sleepy stone menhirs that had stood above nomad graves, bronzes from lost Buddhist temples.

  To these the nineteenth-century remnants of the Kirghiz lent only a more intimate variation. The rag dolls of their children were here; so were their lutes and square-shouldered fiddles which had wailed to the chanting of the Manas – the Kirghiz’ Iliad which contains their whole history like a mighty palimpsest. With such instruments it was for centuries carried from yurt to yurt by the manaschi, travelling bards with prodigious memories, who only died out a generation ago. In the museum vitrines were goatskin bottles too, and leather funnels for the fomenting of mares’ milk, while the mountain horses – tireless creatures with stone-hard hooves – had left behind fragments of harness and stirrup-irons.

  Yet within the decade of the thirties this timeless cycle had dropped to earth. Even the most remote yak-herders were collectivised, and the first wheat-fields were creeping over the valleys. Bolshevism was celebrated in the museum’s upper storeys by a collection which was already itself history. It was like wandering the church of a dead religion: life-size gilded maquettes of canonised historic episodes, and cabinets of facsimile letters and documents, all caressingly laid out as if they were originals. But in fact there was nothing here at all: just the memory of propaganda. The busts of its proletarian gods and saints seemed to gaze out from centuries ago. They were soon to be removed.

  On the floor above, newly installed, were photographs of Stalin’s purge victims and of the exhumation of a mass grave.

  One morning, as I strayed round a collective warehouse near the western market, I heard distant chanting. At first I thought somebody had left a radio playing, then I emerged from passageways into a room hung with striplights. A woman in white chiffon was playing on an electric harmonium, while a projector threw on to a little screen some Baptist hymns in Russian. Among makeshift chairs some thirty people were singing in wavery unison. They looked like stocky Chinese: clear-eyed women and children in pressed frocks, three fresh-faced youths and a line of eldedy men. Nobody had dared remove the Communist standards dripping from the walls of their rented hall. The only other decoration was a vase of plastic carnations beside the harmonium.

  Mortals built a house, and the rains came,

  And the floods rose, and the house fell....

  Above them the head of Lenin bristled out of a poster charged Our beloved leader’, and a red banner was slung along the back wall, blazoned ‘The People and the Party are One’. Sometimes the crash of lorries intruded, rolling through the market beyond, and the distant shouts of bargaining.

  This house is built by you, and the rains come

  And the floods rise, bu
t the house stands,

  The house built by Jesus . . . .

  A pretty woman with a ravaged face conducted the congregation by hand, smiling with a pert, manic radiance, and the people copied her gestures as her hands fluttered and twirled in illustration of the hymns. ‘Jesus loves me’ – the palms alighted on the heart. ‘Jesus loves you’ – and the fingers shot out in front of them. ‘Jesus....’

  It dawned on me that they were Koreans. They sat motionless, as a pastor addressed them. He came, I later learnt, from South Korea, and was speaking the native language which many of them had forgotten. He stood with his feet together and his hands laced in front of him. A puerile lock of hair fell over his face, which shone with a strenuous happiness. Towards the end of the service he called out the name of a girl new to the congregation, and summoned her to ‘bear witness’. She stepped up in terror, dressed in an embroidered velvet jacket and matching hair-ribbon. ‘I am very glad,’ she began, ‘I am so glad . . . . I am so happy . . . happy . . . .’ then faltered into blushing silence, while everybody clapped.

  Then the pastor noticed me. ‘We have a guest,’ he said. He beckoned me up, and I heard my voice announcing my pleasure that I was amongst them, while the ranks of faces smiled back out of their excoriating goodness, and I grinned weakly. It was inspiring to see their little church growing out of oppression, I said — and as I uttered the words, they became true.

  Yet their happiness, their conviction of divine sanctuary, was tremblingly frail in the banner-hung hall, and now the din of the bazaar – where Kirghiz and Russians mingled – almost drowned out their singing.

  Jesus forever loving

  Beautiful Saviour . . . .

  At the end everyone embraced his neighbour on each side, murmuring the ritual ‘I love you’, and I found myself in the arms of an embarrassed taxi-driver. The community had only been worshipping here seven months, he said, and I must excuse the red banners. The hall was rented from a defunct Komsomol.

  But how had Baptists evolved in Central Asia, I asked’

  The taxi-driver knit his brows. ‘After independence a rich Korean Christian came here from Los Angeles and asked us what we were. We said we thought we were Buddhists, but we didn’t know. But the man said No, you’re Christians. And so we became Christians.’ The tale on his lips took on a biblical weight. His frank eyes examined me from a trusting face. Only a frail smile twisted his mouth, which seemed to acknowledge some strangeness in this. ‘Now there are seven hundred of us Baptists, and we increase all the time.’

  We walked into the blinding sun. I saw that his eyes were softened in smile-lines, and his springy hair touched with grey. His people had lost their history, he said. Even his name, Pasha, sounded synthetic. His ancestors had moved from Korea to Sakalin island. ‘But in 1937 Stalin transported them in cattle trucks to Kazakhstan. I was born there, and my father died . . . .’

  ‘Why did your people leave Korea?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Were you Buddhists before?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He looked faintly distressed. ‘But we became Communists in a way. I was a Young Pioneer and a member of Komsomol. But we didn’t believe anything. We were nothing.’

  We had turned our back on the market and were walking along a lane where a line of poverty-stricken youths and women squatted on wooden boxes. Each had laid out a few garments, cigarettes and tooth-paste on dirty newspaper in front of him, but two policemen were harassing them to go.

  ‘They’re selling things you can’t get in the shops,’ Pasha said. ‘They buy them up cheap on the side. That’s the only way they can live.’

  They sat in resigned tiredness, while the police harangued them. Then, slowly, they upturned the boxes and packed their goods away. They couldn’t afford the price of a market stall, Pasha said.

  An old man craned angrily above them. He clutched a vodka bottle wrapped in a cloth. ‘I work!’ he bellowed. ‘But what do these young people do? Sitting in the dirt!’ Work: it was the Communist shibboleth, from the years of faith and full employment. ‘Why don’t they do something manly?’ He shook his stick, but no one was listening. Behind his smeared, drunk eyes sat a whole era of failure.

  ‘What can they do?’ said Pasha. ‘We’re all just sitting about now. I spend my life waiting at the railway station. But there aren’t any tourists, and only two trains a day from Moscow.’

  The police had gone, and the black marketeers were setting out their wares again.

  Pasha said: ‘For seven years we’ve been told everything will get better, but I don’t believe it. Nobody here believes it.’

  The giant equestrian statue which had loomed above me in the night turned out by day to be a monument to Mikhail Frunze, the Bolshevik conqueror of Central Asia. In a standing insult to those whom he had vanquished, the town was renamed Frunze in 1926, and only reverted to the homely Bishkek with independence. But his statue still rode its plinth undamaged, and the thatched cottage where he had been born remained enshrined in a portentous museum. Piously preserved artefacts filled its modest rooms: ink-wells and gloves, a hanging cradle and a miniature rocking-horse, the veterinary bag of his Moldavian father still lying in the hall. Respectable poverty shaped the ideal Soviet shrine.

  But I was the only visitor, and someone had plastered the door with ‘I love Kirghizstan’ stickers. The Kirghiz attendant sat engrossed in a romantic novel. When I asked what people thought of Frunze now, her nose wrinkled. Old people may like him, but young people don’t.’ She flushed. She was very young. ‘He killed too many.’

  On a Sunday evening an old lady sits in the oak-filled park near Frunze’s statue. Her blue eyes are filmed over, and their brows almost gone. Her hands interlace over the haft of an ebony walking-stick. But beneath her headscarf the face shows an intermittent brightness, as if some memory woke it. Then the sunk eyes seem to see again, and she smiles a pale-lipped smile, and looks almost beautiful. ‘What is the time, young man?’

  I always get the time wrong in Russian, and she laughs. She is not Russian, she says, she is Polish, born in Vilna.

  ‘And what did you do there?’ I ask.

  I am used to Polish immigrants claiming titles and estates; but she says: ‘We had a back garden, and some pigs, and we grew things.’ Through the shifting oak-branches the street-lamps light up a face webbed in lines and hung with a fragile nose. ‘But the Germans came and smashed the town, and burnt our cottage.’ She strikes an imaginary match against her dress, ‘And we fled.’ I realise suddenly that she is not talking about the Second World War, but the First. ‘Then I worked in a hospital.’

  ‘As a doctor?’

  ‘No, I’m not educated. Just as a helper.’ She shudders, even in the warm night. Her legs disappear into woollen socks and bedroom slippers. She looks institutionalised. ‘Then I went to Vladivostok and was married to a surgeon – but he died long ago – and I came to Almaty and then here.’ Her stick taps the ground. ‘I’m ninety-six years old now, and my daughter is seventy-four, and some of my grandchildren are worrying about their pensions. So I’m old.’ She laughs almost coquettishly at the thought, it still seems to surprise her. ‘Look, wrinkles!’ She lifts her face to me. It is pale and sunk, but her eyes have come alive in it. ‘And my hands!’ She spreads them before me. ‘Look at them.’ Their veins coil like ropes under the mottled skin. She gazes at them as if they were someone else’s. ‘But whether things are worse with other people, or the country, I don’t know. I’m an old woman and I don’t know anything. I never did know about politics.’ Perhaps some inner safety-valve locks them out. She has not lived through the Stalin years for nothing. ‘And what do you do? You’re from England, ah yes, and you have your family there,’ she decides, ‘and things are peaceful.’ She locks her fingers over the stick again, pleased. ‘Yes.’

  Across the footbridge over the railway trickled workers from the suburbs, with a drift of the unemployed bent on petty trade, or on nothing. To the north the city crouch
ed in its forest, throwing up an occasional roof or a factory above the trees, while to the south the Alatau mountains shadowed the high-rise suburbs with a glitter of cloud-hung snow. Sometimes the whole bridge shook under me as a train packed with mountain marble rumbled west towards Russia, and hot diesel fumes blasted up from the track.

  Marble was handsome building material, said the man beside me, but the Soviets had always bought it cheap. He was a builder himself: a haggard Kirghiz on sick-leave. He glared down on the cargo rattling below. ‘My firm put up half the old buildings here,’ he said. ‘We even built the ministries. But now look! These new blocks are hopeless. Their concrete’s made of sand and little pebbles, and stuck up with steel bought from Russia. They don’t last. The rooms are boiling in summer and freezing in winter.’

  ‘And the work’s made you ill?’

  ‘It’s an illness of my profession. I’m a plasterer, and I’ve got trouble with my arms. They ache all the time.’ He looked older than his thirty-four years, all the youth worn out of him. ‘That’s the block we’re working on, there!’ He jerked his head at a concrete shell where a crane stooped idle. ‘But the work’s stopped because the steel hasn’t come through. It’s all like that now. I’m on half pay anyway, sixteen hundred roubles a month.’

  That was less than fifteen pounds. ‘You have a family?’

  ‘My wife looks after the children at home. That’s our Kirghiz way.’ He turned his back on the suburbs. A momentary happiness entered his thoughts. ‘I’ve got a little plot of land where I grow carrots and tomatoes, and one day I’m going to build a house somewhere, away from all this.’

  ‘That’s hard....’

  ‘The law allows it now, but often nothing happens. If you want to buy land, the local collective farm may just say No, and you’d have to bribe a chain of officials to get it. It’s all mafia.’ He was sounding like Oman now. ‘One day, when I’m finished, I’ll go back to the mountains. But it takes four days to reach my home village, first by plane, then on the hill tracks, it’s that far. People work for almost nothing there, but that’s where I’ll go back.’