The Ends of the Earth

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The Ends of the Earth Page 31

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;


  As evening falls, the shepherds herd their sheep into pens, while the cowherds drive their cattle along beside the ditches, between the rice paddies or parallel to the road. At one point on the route, three boys have set up a small bicycle repair shop. They’re wearing cardigans that match their turbans. Their friends, who come rushing up when we stop, show their red henna-dyed hair beneath their embroidered skullcaps. An old man catches an escaped lamb and lobs it over the walls of his compound.

  Otherwise, everything is quiet on the road and only the fact that we pull over and stop gives people’s activities some focal point. They come running in our direction from even the most far-flung huts, and even the cattle drovers and their animals pause for a moment to look at us, as the sun spreads its opulent late afternoon light across pools of water standing in the fields.

  The lads tell us that they’re unemployed, and swiftly add that they have ‘no future’. Two of them had only recently come to this region, their parents’ homeland, from the Pakistani refugee camp in Peshawar, but now, as they put it, ‘we’re dying of boredom here’.

  And it’s a fact that hardly any group finds it as difficult assimilating themselves into the poverty-stricken home region of their parents as young people, who have left behind the utterly different world of the Pakistani transit camps and are now supposed to make a life for themselves without electricity whist living alongside a road in northern Afghanistan, in the company of two thousand five hundred other families. They smile their most engaging smile, but you can see it’s already choked with traces of fatalism:

  ‘It’s so boring here,’ the youngest of them says, ‘I’m sick of life.’

  Now they’re thronging in from the grazing paddocks and the rice paddies, the little kids with their widows’ faces, approaching us in what look like pyjamas, attentive but as mature as shrivelled buds. Who talks about the undiscovered potential of these kids? If you ask them about their ‘free time’, as we call it, they look at you with astonishment. You have to explain the term to them; likewise, they find it hard differentiating ‘playing’ from ‘eating’ or ‘tending livestock’.

  One of the children nuzzles up to its mother like a goat kid. Young animals have a habit of expressing their love like it’s some vital function. There’s nothing about this child that wouldn’t also apply to a baby animal, whose tenderness does not come across as practised, but as needy for affection as the day it was born.

  But we have to press on. If you follow this road for its entire course, you find yourself in China. We cross the ‘Three-Waters-River’, pass rice terraces, okra fields and shallow scrapes in the ground, where camels and sheep are watered. We turn off onto dust roads, where little girls are running to school, and that’s where we’re headed too – a school that nowadays takes in eight hundred children from twelve villages. All these children are required to help out on the farms, bringing food to their fathers in the fields and looking after the animals. Some of them have to walk a full hour before they reach the sign at the school entrance that bears the motto: ‘Knowledge And Skill Help People Get On’. What is to become of these children, and what of the people here who find themselves displaced by the ravages of war, destroyed, killed or driven into exile? They will be condemned to grow ever poorer, their harvests will dwindle, basic commodities will become scarce and their village communities will be swamped by refugees.

  The pastel glow of the sunset spreads across the steppe: alone against the backcloth of the opalescent sky, the camel driver stands with his eleven animals, the youngest of which is two and the eldest six. We approach him in the ditchwater hues cast by the early gloaming.

  ‘Ai ha!’

  The camels slow momentarily, look round at their driver and then trot on.

  He stands there leaning on his crook and gives us the same shepherd’s look he gives his animals. Yes, he tells us, they’ve all got their individual characters, and moods too. And no, he doesn’t always accompany them: when they start trotting, he’ll sometimes run after them. They become particularly temperamental in winter, kicking out and biting one another. You’ve got to watch out than that they don’t injure each other. No, they don’t have any natural predators, only the landmines; jackals will only go for smaller sheep, and snakes don’t trouble them either.

  ‘No one can defeat a camel!’

  In the interim, the camels have slowly made off.

  ‘Aren’t you worried that you’ll lose your camels while we’re standing around here chatting?’

  He gazes patiently into the grey-blue haze of the darkening steppe. Then he just shakes his head.

  It’s a good ten minutes before he finally picks up his coat and takes his leave of us, saying he really ought to go and look after his animals now. Then he promptly heads off in the opposite direction to where they went. Only later do we learn that he also tends a flock of sheep, which have long been grazing somewhere out of sight. He was too polite to pass by without exchanging a few words with us. As he’s leaving, he turns around once more:

  ‘You want to see the Amu-Darya, right?’

  ‘Yes, we do.’

  He just keeps nodding as he walks away.

  By now, all that’s left of the sun is an orange-grey shimmer on the horizon. The camels trot off to the pitch-black quadrant of the sky, while the shepherd dwells in the lighter zones. And now night falls with a silence so profound that it even muffles the barking of the dogs and the bleating of the camels, whose hooves leave no imprint and make no sound on the cushioned ground. The new moon rises, and Nadia says:

  ‘On the first night of a full moon on the steppe, it’s traditional to kiss your fingertips and make a wish.’

  We do it.

  The next day, not far from the end of the road, we come across a run-down frontier post, where a border guard is standing outside a hut. There’s a little shop here too, with a straggly-bearded derelict leaning against the balustrade; maybe he’s a hippy who came here and never left, or a Sufi mystic or a mental patient. All around, between the huts, lies abandoned military hardware rusting in the fields. All in all, a blind, hopeless place built around a border barrier and manned by a couple of marooned, forgotten people.

  The road ends in front of a gate through which we’re permitted to enter the port facility – or to be more accurate the graveyard of junk that now occupies the site where a thriving port must once have operated. What the destruction of war has left behind, combined with loads of rusty bits of metal gathered from the surrounding area, now lies piled up between warehouses, loading ramps and a monstrous crane gantry. It rises up above the brackish water of the sluggish river with all the operatic drama that people in former times must have experienced when confronted with the first great machines of the Industrial Revolution. The effect is like one of Luchino Visconti’s stage sets, transposed to the world of machine poetry, like an allegory of a hundred years of technology grandly rusting into collapse. And the arm of the great crane points blindly across the river towards Tajikistan, as if it had been frozen in this pose.

  The Amu-Darya is grey from the clayey soil it washes from its banks. It seems to have acclimatized itself to its surroundings. Its banks are silty; on the face of it, the water appears to flow quite sedately but in fact there’s a powerful undertow, which only now and then reveals itself through flow marks left on the bank. Not long ago, a man on horseback tried to reach safety by fording the river to Tajikistan. The rider and his mount battled heroically, locals reported, but both drowned all the same.

  Broad strips of mudflat remain where the river has ebbed, shot through with tidal creeks and crumbling ditches. Upstream from here lies the little makeshift ferry, which crosses the river on request. Over on the far side in Transoxania, at least according to travellers, another world begins, as evidenced by the greenness of the landscape and the towering chimney stacks. Once upon a time, a paddle steamer even ran from the Russian bank, while the Afghans used sailing boats, which took them as far as the Aral Sea.

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p; When we get there, the ferry has just tied up over in Tajikistan, between a couple of nondescript industrial units and containers, which echo the spirit of the Afghan side of the river: a posthumous landscape, the landscape left behind when all events have drained away, remaining as a place-holder for an absent history. But no sooner have we turned our gaze eastward than we notice that the steppe is still there, the yellow-green steppe that stretches away endlessly into bleak vastness.

  It would take nothing to enliven this confused mess of mud, ruins and war debris. As if he were aware of this, an old man on crutches suddenly appears over the harbour wall. His potato face gapes at the dust-grey sky like he’s trying to get scent of something. A flock of birds rises up with a great screech, at the same time as children can be heard screaming in the distance. Then there’s near-silence, just the sound of something metallic clattering in the wind. A gust carries voices over to us, and even the birds nesting on the crane make a few desultory noises, so grating that they scarcely sound like birds any more. Footsteps can be heard walking away on the gravel. One of our companions has spread his prayer mat out on the mud and is performing his devotions with his eyes turned upwards. All at once, a holiday quietness descends over the place, an unreal atmosphere like the exhalation of time between two wars.

  Our little group makes its way carefully down to the water’s edge. The jetty is deserted and devoid of any signs of life, like no one’s crossed here for years. Nothing here is beautiful; but for all that, the sheer concentration of certain objects – the stone slabs, the rusty equipment, the bushes and the weeds, the rubbish and other detritus – makes it seem as though it has all purposely coalesced into this elaborate constellation to create an impression of unsurpassed blandness.

  Of all the attractive non-places I’ve seen, this one has a particular allure. Clear off, it says, there’s nothing here, turn around, don’t look at me, don’t retain any memory of this, stop being here, just go away. I dip my hands into the yellow-grey and milky shimmering water of the river. It’s like plunging them into cold, liquid opal, and someone’s about to tell me that there are Hellenic and Buddhist statues lying on the riverbed, thrown in by the Taliban, and that bodies regularly floated past here, which is why the water might still be host to infectious diseases.

  The harbour wall is covered in luxuriant yellow lichen. There’s a pontoon floating in the water but in all likelihood no one has landed on it for years. The only thing on it is a blue plastic chair, facing the steppe on the far side. If you turn around, a moment later you’ll be saying: I only imagined this place.

  In this moment, an arrowhead formation of migrating birds rearranges itself as it flies over the river. There are plans to build a bridge here soon. The only people to object have been former Afghan and Russian soldiers, not only because of their old animosity, but also because they know full well, as do the powers that be, that the main beneficiaries of such a bridge would be the drug smugglers.

  And who isn’t casting envious eyes over there, where, further downstream, a few scant gold deposits still attract prospectors, or where raw opium is processed, which just through the act of crossing the river multiplies many times in value? A kilo costs three thousand dollars on this, the Afghan side of the Amu-Darya, whereas it’s worth ten thousand over in Tajikistan, a mere five hundred metres away, and one would be naïve to imagine it’s only the Tajiks and the Afghans who are fighting for a slice of this trade.

  One of the most influential people in these parts is an American citizen. Nobody knows anything more about him, or is willing to divulge them in any event. The only thing I can get out of two locals is his nickname: ‘White Ibrahim’. One of the Afghans who has attached himself to us tells me about a German diplomat who smuggled seventeen kilos of opium out of the country undetected in his luggage; he sprayed his stash with a scent that the drug-sniffer dogs found repellent.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because it was me who sold him the drugs.’

  Now we’ve got to the far side of the landscape, we follow its imperative and turn away, turn round, turn about-face. It’s a multiple turning away from a landscape which comes to an end, which draws a line called the Amu-Darya under itself. The steppe welcomes us back once more in all its desolate magnificence.

  The night spreads far and wide. Is that now the most silent silence? It’s as if someone has lifted a glass cloche off the steppe and replaced it with a sphere that descends from above and goes down into the earth and creates a far more widespread and solemn hush than before. Pure atmosphere mingles with our silence. And something resonates within it like breathless anticipation. And into the silent realm that is open to the skies above, from below there now comes the noise of a single dog barking, way off, a sound that has only been instigated to make the silence all the more palpable.

  The silence of the steppe: the minute you hear a noise far-off, you’re up close to it – in the distance, that is. But if the steppe stays quiet, all you’ve got for company is your own breathing or the sound of your own footsteps. In other words, you’re totally absorbed in yourself. And that’s a rare place to be.

  Toraja

  Among the Dead

  My friend Hannes was a diminutive dandy with a noble- looking cranium, thick black swept-back hair, and a ring with a skull on it. Above and beyond being my friend, he was also my mentor, who would occasionally deliver mumbled monologues on such subjects as the portrayal of death on Mexican sacrificial mounds, the mummified corpse catacombs in Palermo or the necrophiliac wood engraver José Posada and his prints of the Dance of Death. Hannes was an avid collector of images of death from anywhere and everywhere: in folklore, scrapbook pictures or in kitsch items from the turn of the nineteenth century.

  His entire flat, in an old building with winding corridors, a real warren of a place, was peopled with skeletons – grinning, dancing, riding, grave-digging, guarding, copulating, always grotesque figures with large, reproachful eye sockets. Friends and visitors had differing views on the collector’s passion that had brought this assemblage of objects together. Yet Hannes, who wasn’t much given to introspection, had little interest in the theory behind them; he was merely objectifying his own fear. His real motivation in assembling this collection, rather, was to observe the human imagination in its preoccupation with letting death run riot in the world while remaining somehow oblivious to its own mortality.

  As a direct result of this, Hannes set great store by everything corporeal. It was just that he invested greater trust in the body in its spontaneous manifestations of life than he did in any moral code. He ascribed a certain intelligibility to functions like sex, puking, shitting, pissing, coughing, farting, blushing or getting an erection; blood, semen and other bodily fluids, they all meant something to him, they were all quite literally expressions of life.

  Then, one day, I was preparing to set off to Southeast Asia for a year, where Sulawesi – or Celebes, as the island was still called back then, just as Jakarta had once been called Batavia and Ujung Pandang Macassar – was also on my itinerary. I said goodbye to Hannes, who got up from his desk, which was covered in death’s-head netsukes, to let me hug and kiss him farewell, and in return he dispensed the following advice:

  ‘If you really do make it to Sulawesi, then you’ve got to go to Toraja Land, in the Rantepao region! You’ll see the famous pile dwellings there with their brightly painted saddle-shaped roofs, and if you get the chance you must attend one of their funeral ceremonies. They’ve got a couple of the most original death cults in the entire world there.’

  For sure, I’d heard of those tall pile houses, swooping dwelling-ships with bamboo roofs and built entirely without nails; they also boasted painted friezes on the gable ends, extensive carvings and buffalo skulls hung on the façades opposite the rice stores. The Toraja were a fabled people, descended from a race of Cambodian seafarers who had fled their original home on the coast when they were threatened by Muslim invasion and made their way into the in
terior of the orchid-shaped island, where they finally settled in a series of remote valleys.

  They fell between various religions. Though basically animistic, espousing the belief that the dead lived on in the places they had inhabited in life, they did assume some elements of Islam into the practice of their religion, and likewise some Christian elements too with the arrival of the first missionaries.

  I travelled most of the long route from Ujung Pandang, the capital of Sulawesi, to the highland region of Tan Toraja sitting on the roof of the public bus, amidst pieces of luggage, two cages containing valuable turkeys, and three youths playing cards, whose interest in me quickly evaporated when we found we had no language in common. The only person I struck up a reasonably fluent conversation with was Michael, an earnest student who was heading back home to attend a family celebration.

  ‘So, what brings you here?’ he asked me.

  ‘I wanted to disappear.’

  ‘And are you managing to?’

  ‘Like a shadow.’

  ‘But a shadow doesn’t cut stone.’

  We kept on talking in this curious vein. He bade me farewell in a very cosmopolitan way when, at the first bus stop on the territory of the Toraja region, I clambered down from the bus roof to try and find somewhere to stay. I was very close to getting sunstroke, and for the next two days the severe sunburn that I’d suffered while sitting up on the roof laid me low with a fever in a losmen, one of those family guesthouses you find throughout Indonesia.

  Determined to press on into the more remote village areas, I set out on foot on the third day. The rice paddies were shimmering so brightly in the sun that it hurt my eyes; the fresh, bright green of the new plants seemed to be alive with the constant breeze that blew through the grasses and the monochrome paddyfields. Nowhere was the elegant asymmetry of Southeast Asia displayed better than in this landscape, and I ventured, sometimes walking and sometimes hitching a ride from one village to the next, ever deeper into the rural life.

 

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