Once, in the barren spaces behind the Registan, I came upon a marble platform holding the sixteenth-century tombstones of the first true Uzbek dynasty, the Shaybanids, enthroned in 1500. It was, in a sense, the pantheon of the Uzbek nation. Yet it was deserted. Nobody read its faded inscriptions, nor laid flowers. When I questioned passers-by, they knew nothing about it.
For the Shaybanids had arrived too late. Their invasion suggested uncomfortably that something other than Uzbekistan had existed here before. So the Russians, and the Uzbeks themselves, mislaid them.
I walk between flowerbeds to the tomb of Tamerlane. Beside me a hoarding pairs his image with a photo of Karimov: the grim emperor shadowing the grim president, opportunists both. But past the butterflies shifting among the faded chrysanthemums, the makeup of identity itself grows elusive to me, and in its variousness slips away from state manipulation. I remember how a woman cooks her pilau with quince, as her mother did. How her neighbour arranges the photographs of her grandparents on the carpeted wall, just so. The flutter of her father’s hand to the heart, in greeting. I remember the way laughter separates us, like a private language. How bread is shared, and water splashed from a ewer over the hands. How babies are eased to sleep in the cradle, and what is sung to them.
And now the tomb spreads around me. Its fluted dome, taller than anything nearby, glitters in sudden solitude, and seems–in its aquamarine beauty–the quintessence of all its kind. Inside, the burial chamber is huger, more brilliant than I remember. It is as if the tomb of Attila or Genghis Khan had been discovered, and was strangely exquisite. You catch your breath as barbarism turns into beauty. Beside you the walls are sheathed in green onyx, while just above eye level a frieze of engraved jasper records the emperor’s deeds, pricked out in faded gold. High above the stalactite recesses, the dome sheds down a level fall of gilded leaves. They drop in a net of golden stucco over the bays and spandrels, and fill the chamber with a soft, refracted light. And below, in the centre of the floor, the cenotaphs of the dead are long, carved blocks of marble and alabaster. Here lies Tamerlane’s son Shah Rukh, emir of Herat, and Ulug Beg, his murdered grandson. And in the centre, darkly shocking, the emperor’s stone is a six-foot block of near-black jade, the largest in existence.
He died in the winter steppes in 1415, on his way to attack China, and was brought back here to lie by his favourite grandson, dead of wounds two years before. Embalmed in camphor and musk, he was sealed in a lead coffin, and interred in the crypt beneath his stone. For months he was heard howling from the earth.
I stand by the crypt door, above its dark descending ramp. The caretaker is old and nervous. As we go down, lit by a naked bulb, I see the emperor’s grave-slab below, more elaborate than the rest. In 1941 Russian anthropologists had opened its coffin and found the skeleton of a big man, lame on his right side, with scraps of ginger beard still clinging to his skull. I smooth my fingertips over the slab’s broken surface. It is carved with a genealogy which Tamerlane never claimed in life. In a dense Arabic script, it traces his line back through Genghis Khan to Adam. And it roots him deep in Islam through Muhammad’s cousin Ali–catalyst of the schism between Sunni and Shia–far back to the virgin Alanquva, who was impregnated by a moonbeam.
They are so few now. Eleven women and two old men, bowed in the incense-laden air. They stand, the Russian Orthodox, in shifting worship, or shuffle along the walls to light a taper. But the spaces between them ache with those who have gone, returned to a Russia they barely knew. In fifteen years the Slavic population of Uzbekistan–once two million–has shrunk to less than half. The congregation barely sings. The little choir outnumbers it. Beside every worshipper is a ghost family of others whom fear of isolation has taken away.
The survivors stumble to their knees and touch their foreheads to the cold floor. Their voices rise trembling and old. Kyrie eleison… Upright again, they cross themselves on and on, as if nothing can cleanse them. O Lord forgive us. The priest–slight and fair and younger than anyone here–stands like a lost angel at the altar. The liturgy throbs and sings in the long cadences of the Russian rite, whose stanzas fall away like a chanted sigh. A woman wanders toward the icons to kiss the Infant’s cheek, the pierced feet, the candle’s sheen on a painted hand.
Old women–child victims of famine, collectivisation, bereavement–what is there to forgive? One of them slides down her clenched stick, weeping, to the floor. I want to lift her up. But this grief is not discretely hers, I know. It is diffused, almost impersonal. It is not to be pitied. Suffering is the crucible of redemption. It is sanctioned by Christ’s wounds: fostered, treasured, recreated.
The waves of the liturgy sweep over us. As the congregation bows towards the Host, my mind is drawn back compulsively to Russia’s past, to suffering endured like the nature of things, like descending rain. Sometimes it seems as if in Russian eyes there were no individual guilt: only sin, vast and communal.
But as the priest moves among us, censing the icons banked along the walls and pillars, he might be consecrating a museum. The pale martyrs hold up their swords and books like broken spells.
I want to ask him–we are sitting in the courtyard now–about his people’s past, and conscience, but my Russian fails me, and he only frowns and smiles. It is the beauty of the liturgy, he says, that educates the heart. He ascribes the fatalism and hopelessness of the Gulag years to the numbness of a degraded people. ‘They had lived too long in darkness already. They couldn’t feel anything. That was Satan’s time.’
I feel harshly impatient with this. Some people, I say remorselessly, found a premonition of the Stalin years in the Orthodox Church itself, in people’s timeless subjection to authority.
The priest is unperturbed. ‘Whenever we sin, we say goodbye to God. He grows distant from us. In those days, in Satan’s time, they thought only of material things, like you in the West, although they did not have them.’ He looks at me too mildly for reproof. Above his young face, I am surprised to see, the fair hair, tied back with an elastic band, is greying.
So Satan had turned the world upside down, spilling out humankind. Blame was displaced on to a phantom. There was nothing more to know, nothing to ask. The Gulag commissars had retired long ago, with medals and pensions. Not one had been arraigned. Russia had turned its back on the past. And I, how could I understand? Since the Holocaust, my world had made a duty of remembrance. Russia, like China, had chosen forgetfulness. That, said the writer Shalamov, was how people survived. A nation was not built on truth.
The priest goes back slowly to the church. The caretaker’s children are sitting like waifs on the steps. For a while I accompany him in his duties, as if he may hold some secret. This is the power of innocence. Others appear too: a young woman in love with him. Whenever she comes close, he makes the sign of the cross between them, as if to obliterate her. And a little girl follows him about adoringly. They share the same honey skin, blonde ponytail and receding chin. I ask: ‘Is she your child?’
‘She is my child in God.’ He is not married, but lives in a tiny room off the refectory. ‘This church was built a hundred years ago by a childless couple. They said: whoever prays here becomes our child. It’s protected by angels’ wings.’ His green eyes trust me. ‘It will protect you too, who have prayed here. Where are you going now, all alone?’
Usually, in answering this, I curtail my journey. It invites disbelief, even alarm. But now I blurt out: ‘I’m going across Afghanistan…then into Iran…’
Quickly he signs the cross above me. ‘God protect you!’ Then we walk across the sunlit courtyard to the gates. For a moment his hands stay delicate on their padlock, reluctant for me to leave. ‘Be careful. Only here, in this church, is light. I never pass these gates without thinking I am going into darkness.’
Up the eastern ramparts of the old city, a sunken path is lined with tombs where the women and warriors of Tamerlane were buried in chambers of jewelled intimacy. In the early morning a few swallows dip among the
plane trees, and the first pilgrims are already arriving: old men and village women glinting in Atlas silks, who haunt the way with the patter of their sticks and prayers. Their goal at the stairway’s end is the grave of the half-legendary Qusam ibn Abbas, cousin of Muhammad, beheaded in the seventh century by Zoroastrian fire-worshippers. From him the necropolis is named Shah-i-Zinda, ‘the Shrine of the Living King’, who in his immortality underground was perhaps conflated with some pagan demigod.
You climb a stairway of intricate splendour. Its hexagonal stones are mellow underfoot. Here and there a willow brushes the path, or a swallow chirrups from a cupola. On either side the tomb façades converge in waterfalls of pure faience, sometimes only twelve feet apart. Their colours are turquoise and kingfisher blue, often on a dark blue field, tinged by olive or Pompeian red. Half close your eyes and you imagine this a street of the living, lined with mansions of inexplicable richness, their doors open. Sometimes their porches are lined by six or eight vertical bands of glazed terracotta, perforated with a spider’s delicacy, so that the whole building seems to glisten in a skein of blue lace. Over them a gallery of fifteenth-century ornament unfurls: interlocked flowers, a dusting of stars, tears, wheels, a lexicon of scripts. To the illiterate eye, calligraphy and foliage intertwine, words become leaf-stems, creepers blossom into letters.
But walk up the steps of these mansions, and the anterooms are chill. Like the great gateways of contemporary palaces and madrasahs, the portals betray their promise. Their inscriptions sound with pure loss. ‘All creation is passing…there is no friendship but in sleep…The tomb is a gate which all must enter…’ You go through the radiant doorways into small chambers faint with fresco, where the grave is a stone cube or plastered mound. Here and there, across their flaking murals, a heretical dragon roams or a crane takes wing. Perhaps some Mongol paganism lingered, dressed in Islamic faience, among the fierce aristocracy interred here. Or the presence of so many women–imperial wives and sisters–lent a more private sorrow. (‘Here a precious pearl is lost’: this above Tamerlane’s niece, dead in her young beauty under a vault faienced with tears.) The pilgrims crouch and murmur with upturned palms. Pigeons nest along the ledges. Only when you reach the precinct of the saint do you read on his porcelain grave that those killed in the path of Allah will never die.
Northward from Samarkand, the last foothills of the Tian Shan fade into the Kizilkum desert. These formless sands, sprinkled with salt flats, spread through deepening wilderness west to the Aral Sea; while to the south the Amu Darya, the early Oxus, starts to curl north-west along the borders of Turkmenistan. The fertile heart of this region–the Arab ‘Land beyond the River’–is the fast-flowing Zerafshan whose waters, flecked with useless gold, come down from the Pamirs to die in the desert beyond Bukhara. From there the central Silk Road went across the Turkmen flats to Merv, but I planned to follow an ancient branch south into Afghanistan, and to push on seven hundred miles towards the frontier of Iran.
Meanwhile the road to Bukhara carried me west. Beside me the Zerafshan no longer nourished the cherry, fig and almond orchards–with the best apricots and nectarines in Asia–extolled by nineteenth-century travellers. Instead gangs of students were harvesting the state cotton fields, whose reddening foliage, salted with blooms, dwindled far into the haze. Cotton, under the Soviets, had been the country’s fatal monoculture. But now its legacy–dried rivers, disease-bearing pesticides, salinated earth–was being belatedly curtailed. Apple, pear and plum plantations were struggling in the wastes, and wheatfields spread a blaze of yellow stubble.
Toward sunset I entered the modern town of Navoi, and the stalled Socialist future. An industrial brainchild conjured from the desert, its Russian workers had abandoned it in droves. Half the high-rise flats gaped empty, while the chimneys of the surviving factories–electrochemical and textile plants–retched out the pollution which had steeped the fields and rivers for decades. A colossal statue of Alisher Navoi, the Turkic poet elevated under Moscow, was stranded in a park of fading flowers
I walked along streets now full of Uzbeks. A few kebab-sellers had appeared, and some beggars. A man’s voice–wheedling, importunate–reached me from the kerbside. His trousers were stained with urine, and blackened toes stuck through his sandals. ‘Can you let me have…’–I stared, shaken, at a European beggar on an Asian street–‘…a tiny dollar?’ He touched me with confusion and vicarious shame. I wanted at once to efface and to claim him. I could not tell the Russian’s age; but he carried a stick, and his teeth were almost gone. He was on a pension, he said, and alone.
We went into a nearby shop, where I bought him sausage, bread and a little wine, and sat out at a table in the cooling night, where Uzbek girls were selling ice-cream. He eyed me with the obsequious opportunism of the drunk, but was sometimes peremptory too, as pride surfaced. He called out to the Uzbek girls: ‘Daughters! We have a foreign guest here, bring us a cup, get us some water…’ and they giggled and did so. Then he pulled the food from his bag and spread it over the table, as if I were his guest, and by this fiction we tried to forget the Soviet humiliation. But in his filmy eyes I saw, despite myself, an empire and faith faded away; and in the suppressed ridicule of the Uzbek passers-by–they seemed to know him–I felt the gulf deepen between us. I asked: ‘How are these people?’
‘Not like our people.’
Beside his holed socks and frayed jacket, my pullover and crumpled trousers looked suddenly opulent. But we carved the loaf with our penknives and passed each other sausage. He’d lived here for many years, he said, working as a builder. ‘I came here in the Soviet time. You’ve heard of our Lenin?’
We poured wine into our cardboard cups, but did not drink to Lenin. I asked: ‘Where is your family?’
‘My sons are in Moscow.’
‘You could live there?’
He thumped his stick. ‘They haven’t invited me.’
‘Your wife?’
‘She’s dead.’
Suddenly, as if a switch had turned, or the little wine gone to his head, his eyes found their focus and clenched into suspicion. Perhaps I had asked too many questions. He said: ‘Have you your passport?’ Knocking over his wine, not noticing, he fumbled through its pages.
Then I realised he had come here as a convict. A city labour camp (designated Uya-64/29) had supplied building labour to many projects in Navoi, including a secret chemical plant. His fingers trembled through the passport’s leaves. Who did he think I could be? What secret police would be interested in him now? But he doesn’t think, of course: years of fear are thinking for him. And now he found my photograph in the alien booklet, and ran his thumb under the Uzbek visa. Then he lurched across the table in relief or contrition, and kissed me.
The best days, he said, were those of Stalin. ‘That was the time!’ He got to his feet and dropped the leftover food back into his bag. ‘In those days you either worked or you went to prison. You got work in five minutes!’
Maybe he was speaking of himself. Maybe he was even sincere. And now, straightening, he said: ‘Thank you.’ His stick tapped the pavement. ‘Well, goodbye…’ Moving away, shaking a little, he seemed to have summoned a last dignity, then hesitantly turned. ‘Can you spare something for cigarettes?’ Then: ‘No, no, you’ve given enough…’
So I came next morning to Bukhara, city of old tyranny and holiness, and the last to fall to the Bolsheviks, when in 1920 its dissolute emir fled to Afghanistan. Among its meshed courtyards the alleys wound in a muddy bloodstream that never quite petered out, and flaking plaster walls converged on blackened timbers across the lanes. Cars and even donkeys disappeared. The sounds were all muffled or tiny: a radio playing, a child singing. I walked excluded, without direction. Carved and studded doors pocked the walls like closed mouths.
I emerged into a centre quieter than I remembered. Tea-houses tinkled around a green pool, where old men were gossiping on wooden divans, as if continuing stories left off years before. Their heads nodded und
er powder-blue turbans or black skull-caps, and some still lounged in multicoloured chapan coats. But there were fewer of them now. Everywhere seemed thinner, tidier than my memory. Just to the west, where the mosques and baths of the once-holy city crowded, a desert of restoration spread. Everything was being renewed breakneck in a glaring brick. The air choked with its dust. The gates of the great religious schools were stranded ajar, but in their courtyards the cells had become nests of shopkeepers, hung with cheap jewellery and carpets, their alcoves broken, their beds gone.
These mighty academies were mostly raised by the Shaybanids in the sixteenth century, when the city flowered into pious glory, supplanting Samarkand, while the Silk Road withered away to either side of it. Then Bukhara ‘the Holy, the Noble’ still burgeoned with crafts and merchandise. Its chimney-tall minarets bristled above two hundred mosques like factories pouring out faith. Even in the nineteenth century a shell of this civilisation remained. Bukhara was the fashion model of a decayed world. Its aristocracy rode horses decked in turquoise and gold, or minced pompously on high heels, and the depleted bazaars were still piled with Turcoman rugs and caressing local silks (worn by women under gowns and horsehair veils) and swarmed with Hindus, Tartars, Jews, Persians, Armenians, even Chinese.
But by then the eight miles of ramparts and gates were a rotting theatre-set. Under its feeble emirs, the city was shutting itself away. Its hundred stagnant pools and open canals, polluted by cattle and dogs, were spreading incurable diseases; pederasty was rife, and a slave market in Persians and even Russians survived. Before the 1870s scarcely a Westerner ventured here, and those who did reported a place of confusions: filthy, proud, steeped in a depraved decorum and piety.
Shadow of the Silk Road Page 23
