Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  Now she worked to help them. She had studied English and Korean, and taught privately. Many young people wanted to learn, she said. Korea had opened up for work, and her two elder brothers both planned to go. ‘My parents let me do what I like now. Anything. They’re afraid for my mind, I think…’

  She looked ashen, exhausted by memory. Her parents might well be afraid. She emitted a sad wildness. Before sleeping, she injected herself with sedative.

  She said suddenly, gravely: ‘When I was thirteen I fell in love. We couldn’t talk about it, we were only at school. But we loved one another. Now he’s in Fergana a few miles away–I hear about him sometimes from a classmate. It will soon be seven years since our class graduated, and my friend wants to give a party of reunion. Maybe he will come.’

  But then this brightness faded. Most of the boys were married now, she said, and many had children, and were living too far away. Perhaps there would be no party.

  In the main room, at breakfast, I sit surrounded by murals–pastel and delicate, in an old Uzbek style–where birds of paradise are perched among flowers. But all their heads, I notice, have been chipped away, leaving blank plaster above falls of harlequin feathers. ‘That happened six years ago,’ Mahmuda says. ‘My brother was very angry. He’s a decorator, and they were his work. But I used to pray here. And the Hadith says that angels will not enter a house where any living creature is portrayed. So I took a knife…I was strange then.’ She seems to be remembering another person.

  ‘Now I don’t pray any more, and I no longer read the Koran, because Arabic makes me ill. But I’m afraid. I’m afraid to think about my soul, because of all I have done. I don’t want to think of what will happen to me after I am dead.’

  The train to Samarkand was like a refugee camp on the move. Stacked on our bare bunks above aisles of cigarette-ash and sunflower seeds, our picnics stenching the air with mutton fat and onions, we edged west for sixteen hours across the constricted valley. Beyond our windows the land went by unchanging–cotton and horseless pastures where hay was mounded–and mulberry trees fringed the fields in crop-haired ranks, as they did in China. On one side the Pamir mountains were lost in rainclouds; on the other the shadowline of the Tian Shan faltered west.

  By nightfall the tortuous borders of Tajikistan were cutting across our track, and we stopped four times while guards bullied along our passageways, hunting for contraband and bribes. First Uzbek soldiers boarded, with hordes of plainclothes customs officials; then the dark green uniform of Tajik police appeared; an hour later the Tajiks boarded again, then the Uzbeks.

  In my cubicle an impromptu community coalesced in self-defence. Two women were taking textiles between Fergana and Samarkand, and a young schoolmistress with a baby was selling pillowcases and coverlets. Above them a sallow sweet-seller knelt on his bunk, trying to face Mecca. Every week they suffered the indignities of the officials fingering their wares, looking for trouble. ‘The Uzbeks are the worst,’ they said.

  At the last frontier I was ordered into a closed compartment where an inspector demanded why there was no Tajik stamp in my passport. ‘Nothing! Nothing! Why not? They should have registered you at the first border.’

  ‘They didn’t.’

  ‘Why are you not registered?’ He scrolled through his computer. ‘You will have to get off here.’ We had stopped at an unlit station, stranded in nowhere. ‘Well?’ He was wanting money, awaiting my acquiescence. I stared at him. ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’

  I was growing angry, refusing for the sake of the harassed others. It was easier for me. I was a foreigner, protected. I went on staring. Then he smiled, pushing his cap back on his head. He looked worse when he smiled. The big soldier standing behind me said: ‘Give him money.’

  ‘No!’

  There was silence. Then the inspector said: ‘It was a joke.’ He went back to his computer. ‘Perhaps you were registered.’ He handed back my passport, the soldier stood aside, smirking, and I left.

  Back in the open corridor, in the sudden silence of the stopped train, only a diffused breathing sounded, and the whimper of children. The women lay cowled in their scarves, their babies in their arms, and the old men’s boots, sticking out in scuffed pairs, fidgeted and shook as the engine started up again.

  Two hours later the stars were fading over Samarkand.

  Twelve years ago, in the dawn of Central Asia’s independence from the broken Soviet Union, I had stood on the city’s crumbling plateau and looked down on a sea of biscuit-coloured roofs and turquoise domes–and this image, circled in spring by snow-lit mountains, had printed itself insensibly on my mind. For a few minutes, as I stand here again, the memory persists, pushing nonexistent Russian trucks around the traffic island at my feet, and installing a defunct clock there, while the bazaars spread still ramshackle beyond, with a ghostly flyover beyond that. The valley fills with remembered mud homes, and a dark, restless tide of men is returning from market under the shattered hulk of Bibi Khanum, the cathedral mosque of Tamerlane the Great.

  But little by little this city–vivid for an instant in my memory–fades and reshapes into the present, until I grow unsure if it ever existed. It hardens into somewhere more self-conscious and sanitised. A new roundabout is in place below me, stubbled with globular lamps. Under the old clock is an advertisement for Unitel, and the cars are Korean-made. The bazaar has been rebuilt in a prettified Uzbek style, with curved walls of faceted mirrors, and a statue of three girls holding plates. In Soviet years this confection would have reeked of imperial condescension. But the Uzbeks have built it themselves. Streets have been renamed. Statues of Turkic grandees have arisen. And the Bibi Khanum mosque is no longer a gaping ruin but a thunderous restoration.

  Everything is huger than my memory of it. In the modern suburbs, hefty buildings have gone up–colleges, institutes–to join the dour Soviet blocks I remember. I wonder frenetically what I have forgotten, what imagined. I ask people: when was this built? Is that one new? But they rarely know. University students are trickling into the boulevards: girls in jeans or miniskirts, too young to remember Communism. The only veils are worn by beggars at the mosque gates, a Russian woman among them. Yet people say little has changed, except they are poorer now. The same queues are waiting for minibuses outside the bazaar, and unemployed youths loiter round the government drink shops, or at kiosks selling pop cassettes and gangster videos. For hours I wander wide-eyed, while around me the city recomposes itself: the new, the remembered and the forgotten settling at last under the snowless autumn hills.

  The oldest Samarkand, named from a mythic giant, has sunk beneath the plateau of Afrasiab in the city’s north-east. Once fortified with eight miles of ramps and iron gates, it is now a fissured wasteland where the shards tinkle underfoot. On the heights of the citadel wrecked by Genghis Khan–a gaunt, rain-smoothed bluff–the trenches of Russian archaeologists are filling with dust. Its crevasses were once gates, its gullies streets. Pavements and plastered walls, stairs and storage pits are sunk colourlessly into the ground. Here and there a trace of auburn pottery shines, iridescent glass, bones.

  This was Maracanda, metropolis of the Sogdians, the greatest merchants of the Silk Road. A sophisticated Iranian people–less a nation than a confederation of states–their city was already rich when Alexander the Great entered it in 329 BC, and it remained beautiful long after the Arab conquest in the eighth century scattered its people.

  On the plateau’s edge a small museum has collected Sogdian and Hellenistic things: cosmetics, carved chessmen, iron swords. The portable hearths of fire worship have come to light, still layered with ash; ossuaries where the bones of the dead were laid after dogs had picked them clean; and terracotta goddesses of earth and water. The Sogdians’ faith was a syncretic mix of Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian beliefs, tinged with Hinduism. Born traders–so the Chinese believed–their mothers fed them sugar in the cradle to honey their voices, and their baby palms were daubed with paste to attract profitable
things. Their slow, shaggy camels carried Chinese raw silk even to Byzantium. Xuanzang, passing through Samarkand in AD 630, described them as skilled in all arts, yet savage soldiers, who met death as salvation. Their armour was supreme in its day–they perfected chain mail–and they took back into China the secrets of fine glass, with horses and Indian precious stones, the skills of wine-making and of underground irrigation. By their heyday in the sixth century AD Sogdian was the lingua franca of the Silk Road.

  On the frescoed walls of a palace–the museum’s showpiece–ambassadors bring tribute to the gods of Samarkand. Attended by Turkish mercenaries, whose hair streams to their waists, the Chinese carry silk bales and cocoons to the foot of an obliterated throne. On another wall Vakhuman, the king of Samarkand, visits the tomb of his ancestors. Nothing is left above the stride of his outsize horse except the fall of a fantastical coat, embroidered with beasts in faded damson and white, his hanging bow and sword. But around him all is opulence and delicacy, as his court assembles to honour his lineage. Through voids of flaking plaster, above a procession of amputated horses’ legs, the boots of a royal wife survive, riding side-saddle. Two jewelled emissaries–on dromedary and elephant–are parading together in ruined pomp, cradling their wands of office; and a group of courtiers advances to meet the king in Persian silks like his, spangled with dragons; while above them all, defying gravity, a file of geese marches to sacrifice.

  At some time in the mid-fourteenth century, Tamerlane, the Conqueror of the World, was born into an obscure Turco-Mongol clan fifty miles south of Samarkand. In 1362 he was no more than a fugitive sheep-rustler, lame from war wounds. But within forty years, after nearly twenty campaigns of ruthless brilliance, he governed a bloodied empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the frontiers of China. All across Asia the cities that resisted him were marked by towers and pyramids of cemented skulls–old men, women, soldiers, children butchered together. In north India alone he left behind five million dead.

  Yet his was a complex barbarism. With ravening curiosity, even on campaign, he plunged into debate with a travelling court of scholars and scientists. He wanted to hunt down truth as he might an enemy. In his private library he gazed entranced at the illuminated manuscripts he could not read. He loved in particular the practical disciplines of mathematics, astronomy and medicine, and deployed his passion for chess over a board of 110 squares, on whose battlefield manoeuvred intricate new pieces–camels, war engines, giraffes.

  But his thirst for ascendancy overbore all else. He venerated Islam as a source of power, yet manipulated it cynically to his will. And his paradox was intensified in the refined dynasties he spawned: the Timurids of Herat, the Mogul empire of India. In the courtly miniatures of Bihzad and Mir Sayyid Ali, his painted descendants savour roses or cradle books of verse. They are delicate, even exquisite. But they stir a vague disquiet: the intimation that culture is not always gentling, and not humane. For those dreamy princes perhaps come fresh from murdering a brother or erasing a city, before they settle again to ponder tulips and open a book.

  In Samarkand Tamerlane built a capital to his own glory. After each campaign the city overflowed with captured scholars and craftsmen until it bulged south and west of Afrasiab into a walled and gated cosmopolis whose mosques and academies, arsenals and bazaars, were crammed with the skills and goods of empire. Its suburbs were named contemptuously after the great cities Tamerlane had conquered, and ringed with sixteen parks whose faience pavilions glowed heretically with murals celebrating his wars and loves. Yet even when not campaigning, he spent little time here. With the nomad’s unease in cities, he camped among the outlying gardens in a sea of silk-hung tents. His Samarkand was less a home than a momentous trophy, leached from his conquests.

  Near the city’s centre his megalomania reached its zenith in the Bibi Khanum mosque: a monument to God and to himself. It was pegged out with 160-foot minarets and sprouted the tallest of the turquoise domes which were to become a hallmark of his heirs. Returning suddenly from campaign, he executed its architects for building the portals too low, then himself flailed forward its construction, tossing meat and coins to masons who pleased him, while ninety-five elephants lugged its marble into place from Persia and the Caucasus.

  But the builders in their terror raised it too quickly, for within the emperor’s lifetime it began to crack apart. By the nineteenth century it had degenerated into a cotton warehouse and a stable for tsarist cavalry. Only in the last few years has it been shored up; and now restoration, little by little, is snuffing out the strange vitality of ruin, and building in its place a shining blandness. The titanic entranceway and colossal iwan–the vaulted, open-sided hall–the acres of glazed designs zigzagging blue and green across still vaster acres of beige brick, all have lost their voice. Dwarfed and a little bored by them, I trespassed into the central prayer-chamber, where the restorers had yet to go. Here, where the 130-foot dome leaked down cracks like inverted creepers, splitting the sanctuary walls through and through, the Bibi Khanum completed itself shakily in my imagination, and only the squeak of sparrows nesting in the cupola were not coeval with Tamerlane’s assault on heaven.

  At the heart of his city, where six avenues converged from its six fortified gates on to the Registan bazaar, there opens up a square of calm enormousness. Three great religious schools gleam over its empty space. One was built by his grandson, the astronomer-prince Ulug Beg; the others completed more than two centuries later. All have been restored, in recent years, to a serene, sanitised brilliance. On two sides their façades reflect each other in twin splendour, window for window, arcade for arcade. In their deep, 120-foot iwans the purple and aquamarine tiles that sprinkle every surface darken and intensify into panels of pure faience, where a barbed and beautiful Arabic surrounds the doors to inner courts. Beside them the stout minarets, netted in violet and blue, are leaning out of true like warped candles, and ascend to huge corbels supporting nothing.

  When I entered the courtyards I found the students’ cells intact, even to their wooden doors. But they had been converted to little shops whose dispirited owners sat chatting or asleep. Tourism had withered ever since 2001. I found myself buying things out of pity or embarrassment. I felt I had wandered backstage. Seen from here, the great madrasahs, the religious colleges, resembled awkward theatre-sets. Yet their cells were still sheathed in tiles, and bands of faience script, heaped about by unsold tourist goods, circled the halls with broken scripture.

  At the intersection of the Registan avenue and the fountains sloping to Tamerlane’s grave, a giant statue sits. The monster straddles its throne in heavy silks, his hands ready on the hilt of his scimitar. But his features have been transmuted to those of a philosopher-king, and a stream of wedding parties poses for photographs beneath him. Mounting the steps in a flock of fussing relatives, the brides ascend bare-shouldered under a cloud of silk and chiffon, their hair bound in jewelled coils or massed behind a tiara. They never smile. Their grooms climb self-consciously beside them in skewed ties and ill-fitting suits. But to the feet of Tamerlane (which are shod in outsize jester’s boots) they carry their bouquets delicately, and lay them in tribute on the marble ledge below.

  Looming above them, the Scourge of God has become the symbol and father of Uzbekistan. His feet, by the day’s end, are drowned in flowers. In late Soviet times he was either ignored or vilified. Now his statues are going up everywhere. Politicians invoke him, academics write encomiums, conferences abound. He appears on banknotes and roadside billboards; streets and schools and state honours are named after him. His example is extolled before the army. Unveiling his equestrian statue in the centre of Tashkent (ousting a bust of Marx), President Karimov hailed him as ‘our great compatriot’, and has even invoked him in the war against terror.

  Yet Tamerlane was not an Uzbek at all. He was Turco-Mongol. So were other reconstructed national heroes: his descendant Babur, founder of the Mogul dynasty–whose statue had startled me in Namangan–and the astro
nomer-emir Ulug Beg, whose broken sextant still curves like a giant escalator under the earth of Samarkand. And the proliferating statues to ‘the father of Uzbek literature’, the poet Alisher Navoi, celebrate a man who mentioned Uzbeks only to disparage them.

  It was late in the fifteenth century, in fact, before the Uzbeks arrived from the north, where their name had once attached to a khan of the Golden Horde. The name carried with it no national or ethnic meaning, and the world into which they settled was rich with overlapping identities. Islam nurtured the family and the umma, the whole community of the faithful: it preached no country. Nomads sang their lineage back to the seventh generation, and that, with the clan, was their home.

  So the tsarists, and the Bolsheviks after them, entered a land without nations, where a state was only the outreach of a ruler. Its heart was not an abstract institution, but a living dynasty. Its frontiers were blurred opinions. Craving order from this multilingual soup, Moscow prescribed labels, tinkered with languages, allotted suitable heroes and carved out countries as best it could. By the time Uzbekistan lurched to independence in 1991, the nation was a full-blown Russian invention. Its rulers, part of the myth themselves, discovered legitimacy in the Soviet fantasy of a pre-existing Uzbekistan, embracing the glory of Tamerlane now, and fading back into an indefinite past.