Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  I sat in a half-lit restaurant, among a different people. A heavy woman with large, soft eyes and hennaed fingernails served me kebabs on sesame-sprinkled bread. From the room beyond rose an ornate, liquid song, and the plunk of a native lute. I had forgotten people sang. Sometimes outside, a horse-or donkey-cart trotted by in the night, driven by grizzled men in skull-caps, whose wives dangled their thick-stockinged legs over the side. And once a blind man came in, led by a child, and was given bread. This was the Muslim world. I was in another nation, only half acknowledged by my map.

  A fleeting nostalgia touched me. I remembered a young man in Damascus forty years ago, seated alone like this, eating, watching. But now those around me spoke not Arabic, but the scuttling, stressless language of a Turkic people. Compared to the tight, boyish Chinese, the Uighurs seemed released into sensuous adulthood. They were bigger, laxer, more varied. Mongol cheekbones sometimes undercut hazel eyes, auburn hair, features thicker spread. The young women had a lush prettiness, which loosened early. Whatever etiquette constricted them, something vivid and earthy had kept alive, and was singing to a lute.

  Perhaps this hedonism came down from those Turkic tribes which had coalesced in the sixth century all along the steppes of eastern Asia. The Uighur had founded a kingdom in north-west Mongolia, and their military prowess kept the Tang emperors on their throne–at the price of much silk–before the Kyrgyz scattered them in the ninth century. Then they rode their shaggy ponies to the oases of the Tarim basin north of where I sat, their felt homes piled on carts and camels, and absorbed the ancient mélange of peoples settled there. In time, spreading, they lost the eclectic Manichean religion which had clothed them with Persian art and dress, and they turned to Buddhism. Centuries later they became scribes and teachers to the Mongols of Genghis Khan, before converting to Islam. Now they had become a living palimpsest of the Silk Road. Nationalism had passed them by, until anger united them against the suffocating Chinese. Scattered through the Taklamakan oases, their traditions were the easeful, mercantile ones of another time. They traced their myth of origin to a multilingual king.

  In the only hotel a surly receptionist offers me a room at double price–five dollars–and a clutch of Uighur maids comes to stare. I can understand nothing anybody says, behind a palisade of sanitary masks. I know only that I am alien to them, that they are talking about me, and I suddenly feel irretrievably separate.

  Later one of the women comes in with a thermos of hot water, which she sets down by the porcelain tea-cups on my table: a Chinese custom. Tentatively I ask about life here, and she starts to talk in a shy Mandarin.

  The work is lonely. She earns 350 yuan a month, less than fifty dollars. She gazes at me with something between hope and anxiety, and says: ‘My face is pale, did you notice?’ She pulls off her mask.

  ‘Yes.’ I do now; it is broad and strange.

  ‘It’s like a Westerner’s. Someone–my grandfather’s father, I think–came from somewhere else. I’m not sure where…’

  She sleeps in a cubicle behind a glass window: a bed, a chair, a ring of keys. ‘It can’t be helped.’ She points out her parents’ home on my map. It is a desert village eighty miles away. Then she leaves.

  But she takes away with her my sense of alienation. Suddenly the world beyond the room no longer belongs to others, or to anyone at all. Solitude is its natural condition. Fancifully I imagine it inhabited only by the excluded: a mass of exiles.

  In the next-door room, hours later, I am woken by a raucous argument, then somebody weeping.

  Within a few miles the road disintegrated into the desert. Floodwater from the Kun Lun glaciers had ignored or torn away its makeshift bridges and buried its asphalt under stones. Occasionally the mountains loomed in and out of haze to the south, then disappeared, and we were crashing across the scars of their rivers or winding over drifted sand. My bus was a skeleton, its seats punctured by cigarette burns or gutted altogether, its windows cracked, its arm-rests disintegrated to steel rods. Its only passengers were Uighur farmers, shaken into silence by the road, their booted feet spread sturdily and their heads thrown back in clusters of spiky beards and burnished brows.

  There was nothing else on the track. Thirty or forty miles to the north our way was shadowed by old towns which had died in the desert alongside strangled seasonal rivers and vanished lakes. From the fourth century AD the retreat of mountain glaciers had turned their traders and farmers into semi-nomads, until deforestation set in and the desert drifted south. Three hundred settlements, it is said, lie under the sands of the Taklamakan. Whenever the wind pushes the dunes clear, petrified timbers poke up where orchards and wheatfields were, and explorer-archaeologists a century ago traced monasteries and fortresses, and dug out murals and silks desiccated by the dry air, with hundreds of documents on wood or paper, clay seals, even brooms and mousetraps.

  For fourteen hours we struggled westward through this changing desert. For mile upon mile the roots of camel-thorn and willow lifted the surface into archipelagos of rumpled sand, littered with bone-white twigs. Then the earth would smooth to a savannah of bleached grass, running over ground so salinated that it petered out under seeming fields of snow. A white-breasted hawk was perched on a stump, waiting for something to move. A tamarisk tree shone green above underground water. Once a herd of wild-looking donkeys crossed the track. Then the pure dunes would tremble into existence again and curve in yellow blades to empty sky.

  And over this desolation, centuries of caravans had moved. Through my splintered window I looked out on their memory with amazement. At different periods, everything on the known earth had passed this way: frankincense, rhinoceros horn, cucumbers, musk, dwarfs, lapis lazuli, peacocks, indigo eye-shadow (the monopoly of the Chinese empress), even a caged lion or two. Wares changed hands so often, or so distantly, that their origins became fabulous and forgotten. Amber was carried down from the Baltic along the Russian rivers by red-haired giants (‘the most disgusting savages the world has ever seen,’ thought Persian middlemen): wherever a tiger died, some Chinese imagined, its eyes became amber underground. In the seventh century even a pair of Arabian ostriches was marched to China–their speed and digestion (they ate metal) a great marvel.

  Just to my north the route along the choked wells and streams had grown harsher with the centuries, but the barren Kun Lun offered perverse protection: nomads and bandits shunned it. And now, towards evening, the road smoothed out, the sun went down softly, invisibly, into the haze, and the Uighur farmers were all asleep. A wind started to moan over the dunes. Only a handsome woman in a gold-threaded headscarf went on sitting upright in front with her child beside the driver, singing.

  We came into Cherchen at nightfall. Along the mud-walled streets, double gates swung on to family courtyards where old people reclined on wooden divans, and women moved in a glint of gold. Here and there a rustic mosque sent wobbly minarets into the night. Cherchen’s centre foreshadowed all these oasis towns: a few wide Chinese streets converging on a crossroads, where a pillar quoted the sayings of Mao Zedong, or his statue greeted a grateful Muslim peasant. And all around were the massed, unspeaking suburbs of the poor.

  But in the centre our bus was flagged down and a team of SARS officials boarded: a faceless policeman, a lanky municipal worker and an official in a peasant cap and dark glasses. An edict had gone out from Beijing, the official said, that any travellers who couldn’t prove their movements must be quarantined for two weeks, the length of time the virus took to develop.

  I fixed my mask uselessly over my mouth. But my luck had run out. SARS had broken out in Jiayuguan, the official said (it seemed to be following me). He was very sorry. I answered, with deepening hopelessness, that Jiayuguan was already a thousand miles behind us, but five minutes later a truck was taking me to a quarantine compound. I felt the irrational guilt of someone already ill. The driver averted his face from me.

  It was an empty municipal building, stranded in fields. The official released the
chain across its entrance, and stayed on the other side. ‘You can’t leave here.’ In the weak moonlight his dark glasses gaped like eye-sockets. Perhaps some second-hand memory of camps or sanatoria tinted this harmless scene with horror, because I began instinctively to look for an escape.

  A grizzled doctor came to the gate to meet us, but did not dare shake my hand. A bevy of nurses flittered behind him. Above their masks their eyes were wide with alarm and curiosity. One of them led me inside to a big room. Under a birth-control poster in Uighur, a white bed stood on a white-tiled floor, with a rickety table. The doctor pointed out a makeshift lavatory built in the grounds a few days earlier. It already stank.

  ‘In two weeks you will be dead,’ he said, ‘if you have it.’ But he spoke gently, as though apologising to me.

  Minutes later everybody had vanished down the gaunt corridors. It was after midnight. By some electrical freak it was impossible to turn off the neon lights in my room; so I slept in their glare, like a prisoner under surveillance, pulling the sheet over my eyes. Waking hours later, I went out into the moonlight and walked along the perimeter wall, wondering how long I would be here. I was not afraid of the disease–I had been in wilderness for weeks–but of bureaucracy closing in, shutting down roads, frontiers, time. I imagined counting off the bricks–one for each day–that decorated the top of the wall enclosing me. A low wind was coming off the fields beyond.

  ‘This place frightens me.’ Dolkon’s eyes flicker above his mask. He is very young. We sit on the steps in the sun, after a watery breakfast. Because everybody wears a mask, we belong to the same tribe: but we barely speak and never smile. It is a badge of shame. By daylight the compound looks unkempt and abandoned, like the site of some crime committed long ago. We are the only inmates. Dolkon comes from the Niya oasis two hundred miles away, and is interned for three days. He is worried about his mother.

  ‘And your work?’ I wonder what he does: a Uighur youth with thin arms and frail, pointed features. His hair is boyishly parted, and flops across a pale forehead.

  ‘My job is temporary. Just clerk’s stuff. I want to finish university…’

  ‘University?’

  Perhaps it is our present desolation that makes this seem remote. The hot brightness of the day adds to its unreality. And this strange youth. He looks too fragile to have survived in this land. He has the hands of a pianist.

  But he comes from a village of subsistence farmers, where his mother was widowed young, with four children. ‘We own just one mu of land.’ His arms describe a fraction of the courtyard in front of us. ‘That’s all we ever had. Whenever I or my sisters asked for anything as children, my mother could only say: “God will give it to you.” ’ I sense him smiling. He is thinking of home, where his mother is fretting at his absence. He says: ‘She is very determined, very intelligent. The only one in our village like that, no, I don’t know why. All the other peasants took their children out of middle school to work in the fields. Only she did not. So I got accepted at Urumqi University, for computer studies.’ It still sounds a wonder to him. He speaks as if it were not his doing at all. ‘I worked in a cotton mill to pay for my first year. Now I’ve got this clerk’s job, boring, which will buy my second year. My mother still works on our mu of land. But it will be all right now…’

  I try to imagine this woman. Her lonely intelligence is inexplicable in her son’s head. He says: ‘But I take after my father. He was always contriving things. That’s how I am.’

  Then there flows out of him, fervent and forgetful of my poor Mandarin, a torrent of inventions which have flowered in his head. There are nine or ten of them, he says, and if just one works he will be happy, and perhaps rich. He has designed a grain-sifter which requires only two people to operate it instead of seven and which separates wheat from husk so clinically that the result will be almost pure. ‘I remember in childhood how my parents laboured over those machines. The dust was terrible. It may have killed my father. My machine will have no dust.’ He has already paid a metallurgist to make the first component, and is saving up for the second. And a host of other brain-children teems in his mind, creations I cannot grasp, although from their rush there surfaces a pen (he had already designed it) which would automatically transcribe handwriting on to the computer screen.

  I start: ‘And when you return to the village…’

  ‘No one understands. No one is interested. I think they hate me. But I’m dreaming a dream…’

  For a moment this phrase resonates unlocated in my head; then I remember another, coarser dream, and the would-be tycoon Huang. ‘You need to find partners,’ I say. ‘Businessmen.’

  But Dolkon is rushing on. ‘Everything’s changed in my village now. In my mother’s generation, she was the only one. It was very hard for her. But now all the young fathers want their children to get educated, before it’s too late…’

  I listen to him with growing astonishment. At first he had seemed a chance anomaly in this peasant world: a coddled only son. But now he has become a mystery. The everyday computer had released in him some talent that could bypass wider knowledge, all that had been denied him. It was its own language. I smile at him through my mask. Now his brittle-looking knees and wrists, interlocked beside me, suggest not malnutrition but the rarefied fragility of some genetic loner. There are moments when I have the illusion that my mental world interknits perfectly with his, as if we were children only of our time, not of our race or faith. Our grandparents, I think, would have seemed far stranger to us than one another. Then suddenly, out of the blue, he would say: ‘What are the peasants like in England? How do they deal with irrigation problems?’

  ‘We have a lot of rain.’

  ‘Here it rains twice a year.’ He glances at the blank sky. ‘Do you have cattle over there?’

  Across the courtyard a chain rattles. The official appears with another policeman, and five traders from Hunan are brought in. They had hoped to do business in Xinjiang, but will be shipped back out of the province tomorrow. A new edict has gone out, the doctor says, from the provincial capital of Urumqi. Everyone entering the province will be quarantined. He picks up a bucket of disinfectant and an antique spray. He is a Uighur, gentle and old, interred here with us, forbidden to cross the chain. ‘More than three hundred have died now,’ he says, ‘many of them doctors. Seventy per cent, I believe, doctors.’ He looks at me softly from over his mask. He is telling me that he is afraid. ‘We’ll see.’

  The Hunan traders are playing cards in the sun, slapping them on to the ground. They try to flirt with the nurses, who are trapped here too, and frightened, and who dart in and out of the rooms in flashes of green uniform. The doctor passes the spray over the men’s trousers and over their playing-cards in the dust. It is grimly impressive. Even in this hinterland the mass machinery for social action is in place, and this disinfection crusade, however belated, is moving along the nerve-system of countless bureaucracies to stir the farthest extremities of the nation. Doggedly the doctor plods from end to end of the compound, spraying our feet, spraying the wheels of a beached lorry, the chain sagging between the gateposts. He performs these useless-seeming duties with a forlorn dignity. He too does not want to die here.

  Walking along the perimeter wall, Dolkon and I look out on the fields as if on a foreign land. He says: ‘It’s useless hating the Chinese, I know, or blaming them for SARS. But their policies are hateful. “It’s socialism!” they say. “It’s socialism!”’ He spreads his thin arms, mocking without bitterness. ‘But there’s no socialism here. Officials just do what they like. And somehow the system goes on…’

  ‘Do many believe?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe a few. But most of the Uighur Party members are secret Muslims. You pray in the home, and nobody knows. They keep Korans, hidden. And when they die, and are safely out of reach, they are buried in the Muslim way, with a mullah officiating.’

  As we walk, he takes off his mask. It is like a sign of trust, inadvertently touchin
g, and I remove my own. His face is more haggard than I had imagined, his lips thin. He is looking at me too. It is as if only now are we uncontaminated. We smile.

  ‘These are useless things,’ he says, and scrunches the mask into his pocket.

  He starts nervously to smoke. ‘Before my father died he wasn’t a practising Muslim at all. But as he declined he asked the village mullah for instruction, and was buried in the Islamic faith.’

  ‘Why did he die?’

  ‘He had lung cancer.’

  ‘And you smoke!’

  ‘Well, youths in my village do. Alcohol too. Yes, I know it’s not Islamic, but we all do it. If you don’t, you’re not really a man.’

  ‘It’s the same in the West.’

  ‘I’ll give it up.’ He throws away a stub, then lights another. ‘Older people are better Muslims. You should see our mosques on Fridays. But the young are drifting away. They see TV in the villages all the time. And the internet has changed them.’

  ‘Internet? In the villages?’

  ‘Not exactly. But it’s in the towns, and villagers come back with its knowledge.’ He adds, wonderingly: ‘People like me, I suppose. So it is seeping through. And then they want to get out. They want a modern culture.’

  Dolkon regrets this; yet he embraces Western freedoms, and yearns wistfully to travel.

  I ask: ‘You go to the mosque?’

  ‘Yes, it is important.’

  I have the fleeting image of a fatherless boy, hunting for male authority. He says: ‘But the Chinese believe nothing. It shows in their culture. Look at this Uighur doctor, for instance. I talked to him last night. He is kindly, you can see it, a humane old man. But the Chinese doctors aren’t like that. They are not individuals.’

  I wrestle with this in silence. It is not true, of course, but I know why he says it. His people accuse the Chinese of coldness and constraint.