What Am I Doing Here?

by Bruce Chatwin

  Mamayev Kurgan is a hill in a northern suburb where the Tartar Khan Mamay once pitched his royal yurt and where, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stalingrad, the Soviets have built a monumental complex to the Fallen Dead. During the battle, whoever held the hill held Stalingrad; and though the Germans took the water-tower on the summit, Marshal Zhukhov’s men hung on to the eastern flank. When they cleared the site, an average of 825 bullets and bits of shrapnel were found on each square metre. Leonid Brezhnev opened Mamayev Kurgan with the words, ‘Stones have longer lives than people . . . The monuments, however, were made of ferro-concrete – and Von F, as an expert on ferro-concrete, didn’t rate their chances of longevity all that high.

  The first thing we saw from the bus was the gigantic statue of The Motherland, striding into the haze and waving a sword instead of the Tricolour – for plainly, she owes her inspiration to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. From Lenin Avenue we then set off for the hilltop – but what an obstacle course lay in between! Like pilgrims to, say, Rome or Mecca or Benares, visitors to Mamayev Kurgan are obliged to progress round a sequence of shrines - Fallen Heroes Square, the Hall of Valour and many more – before arriving at the feet of The Motherland. And there are no short cuts! ‘Kurgan’ is a Turko-Tartar word meaning ‘hill’, ‘mound’ or ‘grave’ – and Mamayev Kurgan, with its grave, its temples and the ‘sacred way’, reminded me of the great temple complexes of ancient Asia. In this same steppe region a Turkic tribe, known as the Polovsty, used to set stone statues over their burial kurgans – and these, known as kameneye babas, served as a memorial for the dead, and a warning to tomb robbers.

  I could hardly help feeling that The Motherland represented Asia, warning the West never to try and cross the Volga, never to set foot in the heartland. The atmosphere was eerie, and religious: all too easy to scoff at; but the crowds, with their rapt and reverential expressions, were no scoffing matter. I followed a lame old woman into the Pantheon. Her down-at-heel shoes had been slit at the toes to relieve the pressure on her bunions. She shuffled forward, in a raincoat, on the arm of a younger companion. She had tried to make herself a little festive by wearing a red scarf shot with tinsel. Her cheeks were caked with white powder, and streaming with tears. As she crossed the Court of Sorrows, her raincoat flapped open – to show a white blouse covered in medals.

  At three, in the city planetarium, we watched a film of the battle, put together from German and Soviet newsreels (and adorned with cosmic overtones). The film was supposed to be violently anti-German, and the Germans had been warned not to attend if they felt squeamish. It could have been much worse. It never once stooped to mockery or satire; and in the heart-rending shots of wounded German prisoners, you felt that the film-makers, at least, were not glorifying the Soviet victory, rather showing the utter futility of war. That night, as we headed for the Volga-Don Canal, I sat at the bar beside one of the Panzer officers who sadly contemplated a double Georgian brandy and said: ‘For us Germans this has been a hard day.’

  The journey was ending. It was a sunny, silvery morning as we sailed into Rostov-on-Don. In the shallows a team of fishermen were drawing in a seine net. An old man sunned himself in an inflatable rubber dinghy. Tugboats tooted, and a crane unloaded crates from an ocean-going ship. There were old brick warehouses on the waterfront; and, behind, the city rising in terraces to the onion-domed cathedral on the hill. Along the esplanade, beds of Soviet-coloured salvias were waiting to be nipped by the first autumn frost. The ship’s band played ‘Shortenin’ Bread’ as we docked. Meanwhile, onshore, a troupe of Cossack dancers, none older than twelve, had tumbled out of a bus and were putting on a rival entertainment. Two boys held up a banner which said ‘Friendship’ in any number of languages from Latvian to Portuguese; and the girls, like drum-majorettes in their shakos and scarlet jackets, flicked their legs about amid the flurrying leaves. A hundred yards away there was a statue of Maxim Gorky.

  Rostov was a city of shady, tree-lined avenues shamelessly given over to private commerce. Policemen and policewomen sauntered round the street markets with an air of amused condescension while Armenians haggled with Russians, Cossacks haggled with Armenians, and wallets bulged with roubles as the piles of aubergines, persimmons and secondhand furniture, little by little, diminished. An old babushka gave me a bunch of bergamot and I went away sniffing it.

  Someone pointed to a slit-eyed woman with a shopping bag and asked, ‘What are all these North Vietnamese doing here?’ ‘They’re not Vietnamese,’ I said. ‘They’re Kalmucks. They’re the locals.’ The Kalmucks live across the river in their own republic. They were the last Mongolian people to ride over into Europe and they settled there. Even now, they are Lamaists. One Kalmuck boy looked very racy, with a sweep of shiny black hair, and a monkey chained to the pillion of his motor-bike.

  I went to the museum and caught a whiff or goat’s grease floating off the churns and ladles in a reconstructed Cossack cottage. In the section devoted to 1812 hung a portrait of V.F. Orlov Denisov, the regimental commander whom Tolstoy fictionalised, with a lisp, in War and Peace. There was also an English print, entitled ‘Foxy Napoleon – Tally Ho!’ and the following verse:Hark, I hear the cry Cossack

  They have got the scent of me

  I must take to my heels at once

  They are close to my brush.

  After dark on our last night in Russia, I strolled downhill, through the old merchants’ quarters, and saw a crystal chandelier alight in an upstairs room. The walls were covered with faded red plush and there was a gilt-framed canvas, of mountains and a river. I stood under a street lamp, and tried to imagine the tenant of the room. On the pavement, little girls in white socks were playing hopscotch. Two sailors, their caps thrust back on their heads, came out of a shooting-alley and sat down on the kerb to share their last cigarette. Then an old lady, in a grey headscarf, came to the window. She looked at me. I waved. She smiled, waved back, and drew the curtain.

  At the foot of the steps I passed Maxim Gorky, staring from his pedestal, across the gently flowing Don, towards the plains of Asia.

  1984

  6

  CHINA

  HEAVENLY HORSES

  The Emperor Wu-ti (145-87 BC) was the most spectacular horse-rustler in history. He craved the possession of a few mares and stallions which belonged to an obscure ruler at the end of the known world, and in getting them he nearly engineered the collapse of China.

  Of all the Sovereigns who claimed the Mandate of Heaven, Wu-ti was among the least modest. Other emperors would settle into a round of colorful ritual and harmless pleasures. Whatever they did was known to be perfect, in that their most insignificant actions mirrored the unchanging movements of the heavenly bodies. The ideal emperor, they said, should divorce himself from practical affairs and ‘ride on the perfection of his counsellors’.

  But Wu-ti knew at heart the dangers of taking advice from eunuchs, magicians and members of the old families. He was a monopolist. He believed it his right to order the everyday existence of all of sixty million subjects, to tax the rich out of existence and divert all money towards himself. Since, by the fact of his divinity, he controlled the seasons, his moods of love and hate merely reflected changes in the weather. When he castrated his Grand Historian, for venturing to put in a word for a disgraced general, it was no more significant, morally, than a hoar-frost.

  He was, however, an improvement on his predecessor, Shih-Huang-ti, the Great Unifier. He did not hound the intelligentsia and burn their books. He preferred to manipulate his subjects, not slaughter them. And like all selfpossessed people he was prey to doubt. Why should the Yellow River want to burst its man-made dykes? ‘You’re breaking the laws of nature,’ he shouted at the flood, but the flood raged on. How upsetting, too, when magicians turned out to be frauds! One adventurer dressed himself up in a feathered costume, pretended he was only half-mortal, and the wretch couldn’t even turn cinnabar to gold.

  Increasingly the Emperor po
ndered the uncertainties of death. Were there Immortals? Where were they? Was there an Afterlife? Or a yawning blank? He travelled up and down the Empire in search of the answer. He sacrificed on mountaintops. He followed up rumours of an immortal footprint. Sometimes the omens were favourable. One year they caught a unicorn, which was encouraging. Then the fungus of immortality sprouted inside the Imperial Apartments, which was better. But why didn’t the Immortals eat up the dried meat and jujubes he set for them on a special terrace? And how the court flatterers lied: first they told him to imitate the exploits of the Yellow Emperor who had been lifted, with his retinue, up to Heaven on a whiskered dragon. They then said, ‘This is the grave of the Yellow Emperor,’ which it couldn’t be. Then, realising their mistake, they said, ‘This is the grave of his coat and hat.’ Immortality was a very, very confusing topic. As he grew more confused and mistrustful, he concluded that the answer lay in the Far West – with the Heavenly Horses of the King of Ferghana.

  As the Chinese people had multiplied, their field systems had crept over the face of China like a skin rash. In the south there were rice paddies, in the north, millet; and as Chinese rainfall was irregular, farmers always had to irrigate their crops. In a mountain village the headman would delegate a cheerful work-party to dam the local stream. But down on the plains, stopping the Yellow River in spate required an authority more versed in the art of repression.

  Chinese civilisation, like that of Egypt, rose from the banks of great rivers. Under the ritual, the Emperor was Chief Water Authority; his government a machine for the control of corvée labour; his granaries the National Bank which could starve as well as feed. Imperial decrees used to begin ‘The World is based on Agriculture’; for the settled world - the only conceivable world – depended on fettering millions to the land and forcing on them a back-breaking routine of work on fields or dykes. Hence the horror of the officials when the machine broke down. Hence their dismay as they thought of the nomads on the northern frontiers. Hence their Great Wall – not so much a defence to keep outsiders out as a fence to keep their own people in.

  An ocean of grass extends westwards from Manchuria to the Hungarian Plain. Over its undulating horizons, mounted nomads moved their flocks on a restless search for food. In winter they sheltered under the lee of mountains from the buran or white wind of winter; in the spring they relaxed when the flowers lacquered the ground. They were squat men, glued from childhood to their horses, their faces as red as their leather boots. The elements, which hardened them, produced an inflexible attitude of mind. Perpetual movement was their creed, not simply to avert the bad consequences of sitting still, but as an end in itself. In their eyes man was a born migrant, settlement the perversion of degenerates, and cutting the soil to grow crops, murder. They had no use for ceremony. Their migration was their seasonal ritual, their music the howling of mastiffs, clanging of bells, and pattering of feet. But they did have an idea, terrifying in its simplicity, of an All-Powerful Something in a Bright Blue Sky. They called on it to justify all their actions.

  In the reign of Wu-ti, the nomads who hovered over the northern frontiers of China were the Hsiung-nu, who were to reappear as the Huns four centuries later when they ripped the Roman Empire apart. Living in felt tents or covered wagons they reduced their possessions to bare essentials, channelling their appetite for finery into brilliant clothes, patchworks of dyed skins and an art of metal ornaments that writhed with snapping monsters. In camp the rich lived as the poor, drank the same fermented mare’s milk and ate the same lamb. Wealth could be measured only in terms of livestock, and the lack of stored goods blurred social differences. In any case wealth in animals was precarious. One late snowstorm or a bad drought could reduce a rich man to penury; and this gnawing unease made him cast envious eyes on sitting targets in China. The steppe might appear limitless, but there was never enough grass to go round. Tribes were unstable within their territories and the nomad world was racked with raids and counter-raids.

  To a sovereign as spirited as Wu-ti it was intolerable to have a frontier boiling with these kidnappers and extortionists. Without provocation their mounted horsemen would spill over the Wall, swoop on farmsteads ‘like flocks of crows’, spatter the countyside with blood, truss up their loot and disappear into fogs. But he refused to be blackmailed into sending them provisions and silks (the Huns even had the nerve to call it tribute). If they wanted the luxuries of civilisation, they’d have to come and beg for them, prostrate themselves and become citizens. However, it was useless to argue with their ruler, the Shan-yu. Morally, he lived in another world. The only way of controlling the menace was a mixture of deceit and force. And as the Huns wore wolfmasks and armour with reptilian leather scales, it was preferable to think of them not as men, but as dangerous animals.

  To defeat them Wu-ti had to get horses, horses so fast they could outrun the Huns’ steppe ponies, for before the days of aerial bombardment the power of any empire depended on the extent of its horseflesh. But China was not good horse country, and the Chinese were not used to riding. Their past battles had been fought with chariots, but these were unable to compete with the mounted bowmen of the steppe. Although the Chinese had gingerly made some efforts to sit in the saddle, it did not come easily to them. Wu-ti insisted that his armies beat the Huns at their own game and he ordered the training of a light cavalry.

  He was rewarded by the discovery of a boy of eighteen called Ho-Ch’u-p’ing, who appointed himself the scourge of the Huns. In 142 BC he split off from the main army with a band of rough-riders, rounded the Gobi Desert, slaughtered the astonished enemy, captured a ‘million’ animals and made off with a prime minister. The Emperor loved the marvellous boy and kept enlarging his estate by several thousand households, but the boy said he couldn’t think of houses as long as a single Hun breathed. He lectured him on principles of strategy and advised him to read Sun Tzu’s Art of War (one day to become the military gospel of Mao Tse-tung), but the boy said: ‘The only thing that matters is how one’s own strategy is going to work.’ He was, one suspects, a little monster. He was nasty to his soldiers; one day in the middle of nowhere they were on the verge of collapse, and he had them level a private football pitch. However, the enfant terrible burned himself out and died very young. The Emperor heaped a huge mound over the grave, with a stone horse trampling a Hunnish bowman underfoot.

  Elsewhere Chinese diplomacy had been meddling in far-off places. Since nomads always quarrelled among themselves, Wu-ti attempted to persuade other tribes to attack the Huns from the rear. Some years before there had lived on the western frontier of China a people called the Yueh-chih, who had reddish hair and blue eyes and who spoke an Indo-European language similar, at several removes, to Gaelic. The Huns had horribly defeated the Yueh-chih and converted the skull of their king into a drinking cup. The latter had then trekked over the deadly sands of Sinkiang and had installed themselves near the present city of Samarkand. The Emperor sent his ambassador, Chang-ch’ien, to find them in the countries of the Far West and persuade them to return to their old pastures. He was delayed on the way for ten years by the Huns, but managed to escape and continue his journey. But the Yueh-chih had no desire to leave the Trans-Oxiana to become a buffer state in a scrubby waste between two equally rapacious peoples.

  That part of the mission was a failure, but Chang-ch‘ien had also visited the Kingdom of Ferghana (Ta-yuan). Its inhabitants will have been like the Tajiks who live in the region today, whiskery men with deep-set eyes. They were mad for commerce and lived in mud houses. It was a delicious country, abandoned by Alexander’s Greeks not long before. The valleys were strips of emerald between purplish hills. Jade-green streams flowed from the Pamirs through the gardens. White roses twined their way up poplars. There were peaches, apricots, mulberries, the most sumptuous melons in the world, and grapes, several varieties of which Changch’ ien took back to China – ‘The White Crystal’, ‘The Vegetable Dragon Pearl’, and the long one called ‘Mare’s Nipple’.
The ambassador also reported on the King’s stud of horses. They sweated blood, ate alfalfa, and their ancestor had descended directly from Heaven.

  From that moment horses and power politics were inseparable for Wu-ti. But it was, apparently, impossible to wheedle the Heavenly Horses out of the King of Ferghana. Then the Emperor heard of another people in the West called the Wu-sun, living in present-day Soviet Kazakhstan. They also had fine thoroughbreds and might be persuaded to attack the Huns from behind. In 111 BC the aging Chang-ch’ien, Wu-ti’s Central Asian expert, was dispatched with Imperial gifts, and, with considerable force of character, made the King of the Wu-sun prostrate himself. ‘If you do not prostrate yourself, I shall have to take them back.’ The ambassador then said the Son of Heaven would gratefully receive the horses as a gift. The King was pleased to send some, but in exchange he required an Imperial Princess.

  At this news Wu-ti consulted the Book of Changes. That convenient book replied: ‘The Heavenly Horses will come from the North-West,’ and so he horse-traded an Imperial Princess into the wilds of the Far West. The King was called K’un-mo and as a child had been abandoned on the steppe, where wolves were said to have suckled him and birds had dropped gobbets of raw meat from the sky. But to his bride he was a decrepit old man who could only drink a cup of wine with her. The princess wrote a sad little poem which the late Arthur Waley translated:A tent is my house,

  Of felt are my walls:

  Raw flesh my food

  With mare’s milk to drink.

  Always thinking of my country,

  My heart sad within.

  Would I were a yellow stork

  And could fly to my own home!