Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  But by now my own transport had gone, and it was night. A padlock was rattling in the outer gate, where a caretaker was laughing that she would lock me in. I emerged to see a young woman robust in baggy jacket and trousers. A wool hat was pulled close over her wind-flayed cheeks, and her hair sprouted in two black side-tufts bound with blue ribbons. She had a spare yurt for the night, she said, and would make me supper.

  Nazira’s cottage was circled by a crew of savage dogs and donkeys. She lived alone with her white cat. The wallpaper bulged from the damp partitions of her room. She did not mind. When she tugged off her hat I saw a broad face with warm, overcast eyes. She was happy here, she said, because of the pure air and solitude. In this valley she was alone half the year. Sometimes her parents drove up with food from the little town of At-Bashy fifty miles away, and brought news of her two brothers who were training for the law. I wondered if she were being sacrificed to their ambitions, as she catered to stray travellers by the empty caravanserai.

  But no, she said. Even the small town of Naryn gave her claustrophobia; and she had never been to Bishkek, the capital. In summer she rode her glossy horses, crossing the mountains to Chatyr lake. In winter she loved the sudden whiteness, which could pile up a metre high, closing her in. Sometimes she would go down the track to her neighbours–sheep and cattle farmers–and they would drive their horse-carts across the snow, singing in the sunlight–and that was happiness.

  I was glad to be talking Russian again: its soft consonants came more intimately to me than a half-forgotten Mandarin. She crouched opposite me, one hand drifted over her bent knee, like the mysterious statue at Da Qin three thousand miles away where I had started. Her intermittent smile lit her with girlish charm.

  ‘Of course it’s hard here. It becomes very cold. But it’s beautiful. The cat and me and the donkeys, in the silence. Just me–and now you too!’ she added innocently. I could not tell what age she was. She laughed a lot. When she pulled off her jacket, I sensed a girl’s nubile body. On the walls hung an ornate silvery clock, careless of time, and a print of the Taj Mahal. She laid out supper on a quilt, where we squatted to eat by lamplight: roundels of bread, yak butter, mutton stew. Often she sat with her girl’s eyes downcast, heavy, thinking something. And the mountain air made my head light.

  ‘This Tash Rabat is not a caravanserai at all.’ She gazed at me with her grave innocence. ‘It is the fortress of King Rabat, a hero older than Manas even. My grandfather told me. This was his house. He knew.’ She nodded to one wall, where his photograph hung: a whimsical ancient covered in Soviet medals and crowned by a Kyrgyz hat. His words had descended to her in a garbled scripture. She believed in a secret passage and dungeons under the caravanserai, where the forty warriors of Manas–the Kyrgyz national hero–had been buried in some legendary time; and she had named her favourite dog Kumayik after the champion’s hunting-hound. ‘And even before King Rabat, there was a prince who was building this place for his old father, until he was lured away by a beautiful demon…’ She frowned. ‘But that may not be true.’

  I wondered who she ever met here. Didn’t she want to marry? Would her parents choose somebody for her?

  ‘No. If they did, I wouldn’t agree. I’ll marry the one of my choice.’

  He lived two miles down the valley and his people owned six hundred sheep. Soon he would be passing this way to visit his flocks on the Chatyr lake. He would linger here then, to talk. She was twenty-one, she said, which was late for a Kyrgyz girl to marry. And he was only twenty. ‘He studied in school in the same class as my younger brother. That embarrasses me. Do you think it matters?’

  ‘Not at all.’ It was he, I supposed, who took her singing over the horse-trampled snow in winter.

  ‘We ride everything together. Horses, donkeys, yaks…But there is one bad thing about him.’

  ‘How bad?’ I imagined alcoholism, disfigurement. ‘What thing?’

  ‘Well…He has to get up before dawn to milk his cattle–there are scores of them. Scores!’ She tugged at aerial udders with a grimace of boredom. ‘Yaks!’

  Later, in the sharp night air, I lay under quilts in the nearby yurt, and trailed my torchlight over it before sleep. It was a nest of colour. Its crimson skeleton of willow boughs converged on the apex of its dome in a carnival blaze. No surface escaped ornament. Across its tasselled felt hangings the chunky designs marched to and fro like a forgotten script.

  The thin air made for a febrile sleep. Musings about Nazira shelved into thoughts of home, and other eyes, other voices. Nameless insects were dropping into my hair, and I smelt the musty odour of felt. Hours later I was woken by a calf cropping the grass round the yurt, and I went out into the cold. Moonlight flooded the sky. The gateway to the caravanserai yawned like a cave in the hill, and its towers were frosted columns. Nazira’s donkeys stamped and coughed together.

  I listened to the river, and felt the traveller’s old excitement. The early Silk Road seemed to enter Central Asia as into somewhere wild and opaque. The great empires to east and west–China, Persia, Rome–petered out in its silence. The illusion was of a dark transition. But in fact this black hole in Asia’s heart nursed a delicate interdependence of nomad and settler. A distant disturbance at one end of the road trembled along its length like an electric current, so that the pressure of pastoral tribes along the Great Wall, in a relentless chain reaction, might unleash the Huns over Europe. A disaster could not occur in Asia, wrote Cicero, that did not shake the Roman economy to its foundations.

  After the dawn light had slid down the hills, and Nazira’s silhouette, anonymous in her jacket and wool hat, waved farewell from the river, I walked back down the silent track, and hitched a lift with a builder driving along the corridor to Naryn. To the east the mountains broke like a rough sea into the valley, while beneath them a distant tributary of the Syr Darya, the ancient Jaxartes, began its thousand-mile journey to the Aral Sea in a trickle of blue.

  The villages were scattered and few: mud cottages with corrugated-iron roofs and broken Russian fences. Their courtyards were piled with hay, and here and there a car stood in the dust, as blistered and old as ours. Often the graveyards looked more substantial than the houses of the living. They clustered along the ridges and rivers in dreamy settlements, their castellated turrets and wrought-iron domes sprouting Islamic moons and Communist stars.

  ‘They say we live like paupers and die like kings!’ Chingiz the builder laughed, too young to care. He had the physique and features of his people, heavier and more Mongoloid than the Uighur: his face a genial mask. ‘Things were better in the Soviet time.’ He gestured at the empty pastures–tousled swamps and plains of swaying grasses. ‘These fields were covered in sheep then–thousands of them!–and at this time of year they were full of hay. In the collective farms people had to work. But now some do, some don’t, and they’ve collapsed. Look how it is!’

  Under the hills the long sheds and pens of the farms lay in ruin. Only horse herds travelled the fields: glossy, long-legged creatures, chestnut and roan. The rough, strong horses and the smooth-running ones–‘Like aeroplanes!’ Chingiz guessed (he’d never flown)–replicated the Uighur horses of Xinjiang. The whole economy seemed to have reverted to its immemorial staple, the horse.

  We branched off the road to the ghostly quadrangle of a city built by a Turkish dynasty a thousand years before. Its battlements and towers hovered out of the scrub, enclosing nothing. Chingiz, following me along the broken walls, imagined them Chinese, but pointed far away to where a burial mound heaved beneath the mountains, and cried: ‘That is the tomb of Kochoi, the companion of Manas!’

  He had learnt about Manas from infancy. This superhuman founder–enshrined in oral epic–shed on his people their notional identity. Who were the Kyrgyz otherwise? The tsarist Russians had found them in their steep, insulating valleys, split into many clans, with no concept of a nation. They could speak their genealogies far back into the patrilineal mist, and that was their country. (Chi
ngiz could do this even now.) It was Stalin who defined their boundaries in 1924, brutally collectivised them and codified their language, packing it with loan-words to separate them from their Kazakh kin. And now, the Soviet vision ended, they clung to affinity with a half-mythic nation, the creation of a song.

  Chingiz longed only for stable times. He wanted a better job. He was laid off half the year. When he stopped at his mother’s cottage, I saw a hovel as poor as any Chinese home, its walls mud, its floors concrete. She was straining yoghurt in the yard. Her shallow nose and eyes were duplicated in her son, and her cheekbones polished islands in a wrinkled sea. When we left she clambered to her slippered feet like an old woman, groaning; and Chingiz winced. ‘You see how hard our life is?’

  To the west, as we went, the hills undulated like frozen sand. But to the east the mountains grew ever steeper as the noon haze dimmed them, until only their disembodied snowfields glittered high up, leaking glaciers and gleams of cloud. At every other hill Chingiz’s forty-year-old Moskvich gasped to a halt, its gear-box failing, its engine wreathed in steam. Already its body was disintegrating, half its dashboard had gone, its radio mercifully dead, and styrofoam belched from its seats. At every slope he would throw open the blackened bonnet and splash cold stream-water over its radiator, and we would lumber miraculously on to Naryn.

  ‘But the factories there are all shut down,’ he said, ‘and half the people out of work. Old people can barely stay alive. The average pension is eight hundred som a month’–that was less than twenty dollars–‘barely enough for bread. In the villages people grow vegetables and survive, and their children help them. But in the towns it’s hard. Some without families have just died.’

  The town was squashed in a vortex of hills. It looked slow and tired. A municipal palace stood in a dusty park, its statue of Lenin still in place, and the roads were lined with Russian trees. ‘But the Russians have left,’ Chingiz said. The men walked the streets in the clothes of a shabby West, their women in ankle-length dresses and headscarves. Only the white Kyrgyz hats made a jaunty commotion along the pavements. Some projected rakish beaks like ships’ prows, while others were fringed with black lamb’s wool or dangled cheery tassels. Still others resembled bells clamped over the head, or rose outlandishly tall, like the hats of dervishes; and occasionally the brim would disappear altogether, to leave a Scythian-looking cone. Chingiz, who lived here, recovered his own hat from his rubbish-strewn car and perched it at a sunny angle, before clasping my hand and vanishing into the bazaar.

  ‘We’re a poor country. We never looked for independence. It just fell into our hands. We should have had battles and rebellions against Moscow. But it was all done for us by others–Poles and Baltic people.’

  Even seated, Daniar looks tall, thick-chested. A troubled knot flickers between his eyes. He has come up from Bishkek to visit relatives where he was born. The tea-house where we sit is a no-man’s-land between his present and his past, when as a boy he roamed the grasslands among his grandfather’s cattle, slaughtered long ago in the slump after independence. We look out through the glass at people passing. He is waiting for his cousin to join him. ‘She’s only twenty-one. She can barely remember Communism. She’s different.’

  ‘You mean she has no fear? Or no regret?’

  He answers enigmatically: ‘Perhaps at my age it’s too late.’ But he is barely thirty. In the pale moon of his face his mouth makes only small disruptions. ‘My generation is not a happy one. We were brought up to believe in the Soviet dream. We sang those hymns in school, about a bright future, and I believed it all. Then when I was eighteen it fell to bits. Now what are we to believe? Islam? No…’ His eyes dart about him, hunting for something else. ‘That Arabic is not my tongue, it’s not my history, not my desert. We’re mountain people. Pagans, really. And we had seventy years of Soviet rule. We’ve got used to vodka…’ But he sips tea.

  Islam had always lain thin here, I knew, a late arrival in the nineteenth century, carried by Sufis.

  ‘Your parents believed?’

  ‘My father died by drowning when I was a child, I don’t know how. I don’t remember him. I only have photos and my mother’s stories. And this memory of my grandfather trying to understand. He was already old. He had survived a German concentration camp and then internment in the Gulag. But after my father’s death he tried to read the Koran, in Arabic, on and on, hopelessly. I think he couldn’t understand it at all. And I, too, would listen and try to get it by heart, without understanding.’ The knot trembles between his eyes, clears away. ‘It is in paganism that we pray for the spirits of the dead, to fortify them. Maybe my grandfather was seeking that again. The countryside is still full of paganism. People there talk of Unai Enye, the mother goddess, and remember the cult of the sky. Sometimes they’ll call on the sky to support them, or cry Tengri Ursun! May the Sky strike you! which can carry a terrible authority in the mouth of the old. And it’s the old who keep the past. I remember how my great-grandmother–she died at a hundred and nine–would drum her fist on my chest, my forehead, when I was ill, and wriggle her finger against my breastbone saying: This is not my finger, this is the finger of the spirit Batma Zura, healing you…’

  The old woman believed the boy’s illnesses sprang from anxiety. Sickness, to her, was fear. He had loved her.

  ‘As for Manas, the true bards died out long ago. It’s said they could see the scenes of battle with their closed eyes, and sang them from the heart, extempore.’ He speaks as of a mysticism. ‘But we have no temples, nothing. Nothing we can touch, except mountains. It’s all inside us.’ He taps his chest, where the old woman must have tapped it. ‘And I think it’s not enough. People don’t experience the Manas any more, not as they did. A few years changes everything. Younger people have woken to other things. My cousin is only nine years younger than me, but compared to her I’m asleep.’ He tilts his face in his cupped hands. It is a quaint self-image. ‘My whole generation, asleep!’

  And when Elnura arrives, I understand. She is button-bright, with short, streaked hair, and stylish jeans. She works for an NGO in Bishkek, and her husband is in government. Her eyelids are touched with blue.

  She sits beside Daniar, but belongs to a different time. She wears her impatience like a badge. She says: ‘Have you noticed about this town? There are no Russians.’ She stares through the window, turns to me. ‘Bishkek is full of Russians.’ She laughs, suddenly girlish–‘Too many!’–and turns back to the window, as if she has never seen her people before. I look out too, but some trick of personality makes me forget that Elnura is one of them. Their heavy heads seem stamped with masks: little mouths, clenched eyes, short noses. She says suddenly: ‘You know, to be Kyrgyz is to have no burden’–she feels her shoulders. ‘Others have a burden of history. But we–nothing! Nothing!’

  The same absences that Daniar regrets seem to release her. She loves only the bland, mongrel city of Bishkek, where she was born.

  ‘All we have is tribes!’ she says. ‘Mine is a sub-clan called “Five Stomachs”, I don’t know why. You’d think one was enough!’ She glances at her trim belly, and laughs the name away.

  But politics, I’d heard, were rife with tribal links, impenetrable to the outsider. The Russians had never fathomed them.

  ‘No, the Russians never understood,’ Elnura says. ‘And everybody hates them.’

  Her energy has assigned Daniar to near-silence, but now he says: ‘I don’t hate them.’ He doesn’t look as if he hates anybody. ‘We are intertwined with them.’ He is closer to them in time than she, more conscious of what they have given. It would be like hating yourself, a little.

  But Elnura looks at me, says relentlessly: ‘We feel angry with the Russians for degrading us. For treating us as second-class, for rejecting our language. It’s like a revenge now, against them. Now they must learn our language, as we were forced to learn theirs. I have to say, I hate them. Most of us hate them. You won’t see it on the surface, but it’s everywhere. My s
ister shivers whenever they pass her in the street. My mother too. She says she’s not a nationalist. “I’m not, I’m not! I just hate the Uzbeks–oh, and the Jews. And I hate the Russians. But no, I’m not a nationalist!” ’ Her laughter is like a scythe. ‘But we have cause to hate the Russians.’

  Daniar says: ‘My mother told me people here wept at Stalin’s death, just as they did in Moscow.’ His look of trouble returns. ‘But in the end, they left us too little. A poor Islam and a disgraced Communism…’

  Elnura sings out: ‘Nothing but the future!’

  That evening, walking along the main street, I trip over a broken paving stone, and at once a police car looms alongside. I see a huge, blotched face speckled with stray hairs, and missing teeth. He leans out, the door ajar. ‘Have you been drinking? Drugs? Whisky?’ He jerks his thumb. ‘Get in the back!’

  I affect not to understand. His fingers circle my hips, fumble the pockets. ‘Opium?’ He finds my passport, with visas for Afghanistan, Iran. ‘This is Arabic?’ The plainclothes driver sits dark and quiet. The policeman’s hands discover a wad of my money. Clumsily he folds the notes double under my passport. His fist closes over the dollars, then shoves the passport back at me. ‘You can go!’

  I grab his wrist. It’s like seizing a rolling-pin. I shout: ‘They’re mine!’ I am suddenly furious. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  He crumbles strangely in surprise, the face emollient. His vast fist releases the money back into mine. But I grow angrier, shout absurdly: ‘Where are your papers? Who are you?’ A rogue policeman, I think, or not one at all. Then the driver accelerates away.