by Norman Lewis
On the plane, Natasha engaged me in earnest conversation on the subject of literature, about which she held many strong opinions. My guide—described by Valentina as the most brilliant of her pupils—turned out to be fascinated by English writers, and I learned that she had familiarized herself with the whole of William Shakespeare’s opus. On rare occasions a non-Slavonic sense of humour appeared to peep out, as when she mentioned her extensive knowledge of English limericks, from which she was apparently able to extract inoffensive titbits for presentation on suitably academic occasions.
The immensely long journey to Tashkent took its effect. Vilanski’s cynicism on the subject of the Socialist Motherland had been coldly received by Natasha, but, perhaps driven by boredom, he now began to lay siege to her as an available young woman. There was no place in Central Asia like Tashkent to have a good time, he insisted. The Pasha was an old friend who put him up in his palace whenever he visited. It was an Arabian Nights situation—why should she stay at a run-down hotel when he was sure he could fix it for her to have a good time in pleasant surroundings? Naturally he’d make sure that I, too, was well looked after.
‘Comrade, why don’t you change the subject?’ Natasha said. ‘Surely you can see I’m not interested.’
At Tashkent, a message left at the hotel broke the alarming news that a meeting had been arranged with the chairman of Samarkand’s council for six o’clock next morning. It would take two hours to travel there by car, said the man at the desk, and one had in consequence been booked. ‘Could there be some mistake?’ I asked, and Natasha assured me there could not. Samarkand, she said, had established a national reputation for its prompt and efficient handling of its affairs. The city’s chairman had trained himself to dispense with sleep two days a week, she had heard. Before entering politics, she added, he had been a well-known long-distance runner.
At four next morning we were ready in front of the hotel for the car. We reached our destination promptly at six o’clock, which, we soon learned, was the hour of maximum activity in Samarkand, an ancient and over-poweringly splendid town. Its centre was dominated by a cluster of mosques, each with a majestic dome roofed with tiles chosen to match the blue of the dawn sky, upon which it appeared as little more than a delicately pencilled outline. Within minutes of our arrival the town’s celebrated patriarchs, white-bearded under their tremendous turbans, came on the scene in solemn procession. We watched them align themselves at exact intervals along the city’s walls, where they were to remain until midday.
It was characteristic of Samarkand that our meeting with its chief citizen and the three members of his council should take place in the ancient rose gardens for which the city remains famous. The chairman, Abu Hasan, explained the function of the gathering of the bearded patriarchs we had so admired. ‘They are there,’ he said, ‘as the embodiments of justice and truth. To become a city guardian is to fulfil any citizen’s greatest ambition, and a long period may pass following a guardian’s death before he is replaced. We are fortunate at this time that no places have been left empty.’
The rose gardens among which we had been received began some hundred yards from the city’s centre and its assembly of magnificent mosques. It was an area that was flat and utilitarian, and planting and pruning were clearly in progress, while young apprentices were busily sweeping cuttings away. Abu Hasan was insistent that it was from precisely this spot that the garden rose had spread in its millions to all the civilized places of the world. Here 5,000 years ago the first rose as we know it had been grown to be worshipped as a spirit from heaven. Abu Hasan told us he had started his adult life as a fairly successful rose-grower, and had even exported his most valuable hybrids to European countries. These days pressure of his work for the community had limited his creative activities to three new roses a year, all of which were expected to take prizes in the annual show. One of these plants had produced a small flower that was not quite blue, and although she praised it with apparent enthusiasm in his presence, Natasha subsequently admitted that she found it bizarre.
Outside the city, the rose, having escaped captivity and blended with nature, came into its own. Abu Hasan took us up into the hills overlooking the town, where we were confronted by a remarkable scene of rambling roses spreading throughout the pines. The chairman amazed us by quoting The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam not only in the archaic Persian, but in Fitzgerald’s English translation. A short walk brought us to the place where the poet had first given words to his inspiration. It was from this spot, we were told, that Samarkand’s roses had begun their long journey into the hills, travelling at a rate of six inches a year. Now a brilliant floral vanguard had reached a mountain top streaked with vermilion eleven miles away.
Our excursion to see the mountain roses was only one of the attractions Samarkand arranged for its visitors. I was granted the exceptional honour of a tour of the splendid tomb of Tamerlane, although I was surprised that Natasha did not accompany me—possibly, as a woman, she was excluded from the experience. Although this was not specifically stated, it seemed likely in any case that only one visitor at a time was permitted to enter the building, for the official accompanying me remained at the entrance of the dimly lit tomb. The simple magnificence of this small, mosquelike building can hardly be equalled in the world. A flight of steps covered with onyx tiles takes one down to the basement, where, in the dead centre of the room, Tamerlane lies in his sarcophagus of jade. The legend is that when a ruler makes his pilgrimage here, the spirit of the great king may whisper encouragement to him from the grave. Absolute silence is the rule. I had removed my shoes at the entrance and as an added precaution had placed my hand over my mouth. On leaving the tomb the attendant bowed and thanked me for my ready acquiescence.
My request to see Bukhara, considered by some to be the most interesting of the ancient cities of Central Asia, was turned down as Valentina had warned me. The excuse given—that the city was still affected by the plague and was thus permitting no visitors—was readily accepted by Natasha. Vilanski, however, claimed that the authorities had closed off the city as a result of the ethnic tensions therein. In Bukhara, he said, the basically Muslim population was resisting a drive from Moscow to Westernize its Central Asian provinces. Vilanski told us that the Russian authorities were so determined to modernize these forgotten territories that they were persuading, or even forcing, Asiatics to change from Oriental to Western styles of dress. A great consignment of factory-produced (three sizes only supplied) Western-style garments had just arrived in Samarkand, he reported. He had been particularly amused by the spectacle of Asiatics, who usually wore slippers that could be kicked off in a matter of seconds when the time came to pray, wearing boots designed above all to resist the Russian snows.
The time allocated to the splendours of Samarkand was drawing to its end, and Abu Hasan informed us of his wish to throw us a farewell party in characteristic Oriental style. It was an occasion I welcomed with the greatest enthusiasm, for the chairman emphasized that his council was enthusiastically behind him in the project, designed to show their friends from the West what the East had to offer them. Unfortunately, it was an honour over which their guests were divided, for Natasha was an out-and-out Muscovite and had made it clear to me that she had come to Central Asia only out of loyalty to Valentina. She believed that our time together would have been better spent in the cities of European Russia, which no longer—as she put it—lived in the past. Vilanski, a romantic in these matters, took the opposite point of view. For him, the Far East was steeped in colour, legend and romance, and it had been one of the high spots of his career to have been included in our excursion. He had even taken a crash course in Arabic before joining us.
Natasha proposed to repay some of our hosts’ hospitality by organizing a movie show of an educational character, the films for which she had brought with her from Moscow. These specialized in sporting occasions in the capital, together with footage of young students training to become useful and well-
rewarded citizens in the many excellent professions open to them in later life. Natasha’s earnest proposals for the improvement of culture and opportunities in Central Asia met with outbursts of scornful laughter from Vilanski. Clearly, whatever hopes I had suspected him of harbouring for Natasha were now at an end.
Abu Hasan’s party was to begin, as celebrations do in Soviet Central Asia, at roughly the moment of dawn. It was the custom in Samarkand to set off ancient bombs, shells and other explosive devices collected from old battlefields on festive occasions, and the first victims of such jollifications often expired with the first light. No instructions in the art of enjoying oneself are called for in Central Asia—it is a capacity in the blood. Above all, the celebrants are in search of sheer noise and will go to extremes to procure it. In one town some fifty miles from Tashkent two railway locomotives had been involved in a planned crash, although it was reported that casualties had been skilfully avoided.
The day of the party coincided with the feast day of a minor saint, and we woke to the ringing of holiday bells promising citizens a day of less serious occupation, although with greater rewards. A bleached sky was full of mewing sea birds, and tufts of cloud among the minarets, and as we walked over to the chairman’s party we saw little girls, roused unkindly from sleep, being manacled to the lambs they were to guard during the festivities, and important old men, turbans scrupulously tied, moving like chess pieces through the morning mist towards the nearest place of worship.
There is little in the way of preliminaries to a party in Uzbekistan. Sudden action is there as if by electrical contact, and participants rise from their beds, throw on whatever clothes they can find and immediately spring to life. We moved through a throng of revellers into the town’s principal square, where we were soon joined by an Uzbek tribe, bringing their special vision to the sightlessness of urban existence. Unlike the townspeople, the souls of this mysterious tribe had been preserved by a kind of holy ignorance. All of them, even the queen who led them through their deserts, preserved their illiteracy, careless that they appeared to outsiders to be lacking in intelligence. Everything they possessed, whether bought, bartered or stolen, had taken on a sacred meaning. Their wizards had painted mystic signs on their bodies and had draped themselves with soles torn from a consignment of Muscovite shoes, now promoted to fetishes.
‘So you’ve run into them before,’ someone said, and I told them about the prison ship. ‘Their art saved them,’ I explained. ‘It wasn’t food that they craved. It was bits of coloured cloth to feed the imagination.’
‘They talk to their horses like children and their horses talk back,’ the man said. ‘Or so they tell you.’
In proof of the approaching victory of the West, time had set up its court in Samarkand. Here in the square, a large clock, imported from Moscow along with the new boots, had been fixed to the façade of an ancient fort. Soon it beat out the hour of midday—although this remained six o’clock by old-fashioned Muslim custom.
The chairman produced dancers for our entertainment and musicians accompanied them on archaic instruments. I was joined by Natasha, who, though she remained cool in her attitude to all such Oriental display, had been forced as a matter of courtesy to put in an appearance. Vilanski pushed his way over, and placing at risk any final hopes of Natasha’s favour, he joined in the general acclamation of the performance. ‘It is certainly interesting,’ Natasha decided, ‘but to be perfectly frank it doesn’t appeal to me. After all, we’re Westerners, and our tastes were formed in a different environment.’
The star of the occasion was a tall, muscular-looking woman who we learned was the Horse Princess, Princess Faraha, unofficial head of the Uzbek people. The chairman brought her over to us so that we might see her dance at close hand. Her arms were laden with bangles to the elbow, and she wore a species of veil currently in fashion, which reached only to the tip of her nose. The accompanists beat their tambourines and she went into a short but highly Oriental dance routine in which the muscles of her stomach were put to remarkable use. It was a dance I greatly enjoyed, but inevitably it called forth Natasha’s wrath. Although it did not seem impossible that Princess Faraha understood English, Natasha turned to me and remarked loudly and insultingly on the spuriousness of the proceedings. ‘The Princess’s people are from the Sholdava Steppe,’ Natasha said. ‘They still live on the wild sheep they hunt on horseback.’
I asked if there was any possible chance of seeing them in action. The Princess seemed about to reply when Natasha cut in. ‘I’m sure that something could be arranged for you through the Ministry,’ she said, ‘but I warn you that these people are still quite primitive, and any photographs you might be able to obtain are not likely to be suitable for public exhibition.’
As soon as the entertainment was at an end, the Princess knelt to receive her traditional reward. Only a few years before this would have been a gold coin first pressed against her forehead then handed over with due ceremony, but now the chairman simply passed her a fifty-rouble note.
Thus gold had turned to paper, and what would once have been an audience dressed in the tribal splendour described by travellers of the past had become a crowd clad in mass-produced garments from Russian factories. How sad it seemed that these people who had designed and cultivated the first rose gardens of the world and built these overpowering mosques should now be obliged to turn their backs on colour and clothe themselves in the uniforms of a utilitarian world.
At the party I had met a native of Tashkent who had emigrated to the States and lived there for two years before his return. Since the building of Tashkent’s airport he had been employed by the region’s developing tourism industry, and his special responsibility was the opening up to the public of the Sholdava steppe—one of the great unexplored places of the world. I spoke to him at length about the project, and he was ready with a series of convincing replies.
‘You heard of the snowmobile?’ he asked. ‘We’re all set up to make snowmobiles for sand.’
‘What is there to see?’ I asked.
‘Pygmy sheeps,’ he said. ‘Same size as not big dog. You ever see pink rats? You gonna see them there. One mountain lion used to be around but now old. Maybe dead. Anyway no trouble.’ The sandmobile, he said, would follow the routes used by the horsemen of old. The great problem, of course, was that the steppe was in a perpetual state of change.
‘One day big hill, next day wind comes and is small hill. No tribes, only families. One husband, two wives. If a woman finds man to feed her she will marry that man. When no more food, she will go away.’
‘That is sensible,’ I said.
‘Not only one Sholdava,’ he went on, ‘are many steppe. The rulers live in highest places and food is brought to them. The Horse Princess comes also to all these places. If a ruler feeds her she may marry him for a short time. Then she will go.’
‘And someone else will feed her?’
‘That is why she is princess.’
‘If I provide the food would she marry me?’
‘Maybe you are not too much for her in some way, but I think that she will.’
My new friend promised to take me to see the steppe, and we set off together on a day-trip early the next morning. In the late afternoon we reached a small, ruined town, beyond which the steppe’s frontier of pale greenish gold shone in the distance, a glistening, emptied world forming a small corner of a forgotten universe.
I soon saw why my friend had found it almost impossible to write a tourist guide to the great steppe, for even as we studied the horizon through our binoculars the view changed.
‘You go look for mountain there yesterday, and that mountain is not there today,’ my friend repeated. ‘A week passes and nothing the same. If wind is OK comes smell of peaches, but then it changes, and you cover nose from smell of death.’
After the success of our excursion, it was decided that we should make a longer exploration of the steppe, but the next day my friend failed to appear. In his s
tead his representative arrived at the wheel of an old Ford V8 fitted with extra large wheels and oversized tyres. He was a pure Uzbek, small, dark and eager to please. Unfortunately, he was the possessor of the difficult name of Vloc, which sometimes produced a titter when I attempted its pronunciation. The sandmobile was not ready, he said, assuring me in a mixture of Russian and English that this was all to the good. ‘In Ford we get there,’ he explained, ‘in sandmobile, maybe.’ A brusque change in the weather accompanied the appearance of this unexpected form of transport. It had rained during the night for the first time in two months, and the sky was clotted with plum-coloured clouds.
A shapeless human form under the blanket covering the back seat caused a few moments of confusion. To my surprise, after the removal of the covers this shape became recognizable as the Horse Princess, and I now remembered some mention at the time of the chairman’s party of her forthcoming visit ‘to my steppe’. The change in her appearance was remarkable. She was wrapped in the unflattering garments of a working woman. Gone were the bangles and necklaces, and the shadowed eyelids were no more. But, above all, I was astonished to see that no trace of the vulgar paint-assisted fairground good looks of two days before remained. They had been replaced by an air of unmistakable intelligence. I felt a certain relief that Natasha had declined to accompany me.
We were headed, I was told, for the village where the Princess had been born. ‘They call it a village,’ Vloc said, ‘but there are only four or five huts, with more horses than humans living in them.’ While we were discussing our prospects a rent appeared in the sky’s grey covering, rain poured down and almost instantly smoke began to rise from the sand. It would dry, Vloc said, in a matter of hours—especially close to the hills where the drainage was good. As we had come to a halt, he broke out the food he had brought in case of emergencies—in that part of the world they fell back on edible worms in times of shortage—and he showed me the offerings he proposed to place in front of the horse shrines should we receive a hospitable welcome at our destination.