The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  Yet he had gone on with that secret, apparently futureless labour, year after year, and I could not tell whether he had done so out of disgust with his surroundings – in self-cleansing – or from a writer’s fascination with his material. ‘But even in the middle of the Brezhnev years and all the hypocrisy,’ he said, ‘I didn’t believe people could go on for ever living lies. Not for ever. It had to end.’

  For a man born in the Stalin era, it was a high hope. But his was an instinctive and obscurely irrepressible faith, grown out of the surety that indoctrination must falter in the end, because every generation was born innocent. ‘At the moment every-thing’s in chaos, and everyone’s bitter,’ he said. ‘Our lives have become too expensive, ever since perestroika. But it had to happen. It may be hard now, but it will get better . . . .’ Perestroika, after all, had transformed his life. He had to believe in it, in the freer future. He was, in a sense, its symbol and harbinger.

  He was walking in a nervous, high-strung stride. He seemed at once buoyant and vulnerable. His novel had sold an astonishing sixty thousand copies in Turkmenistan. ‘It was the first thing of its kind allowed here,’ he said, ‘a scandal.’

  But I questioned aloud how his nation would extract itself from the Soviet shadow. Of all the people in the old Union, these were the least prepared for independence. For seventy years Communist models and propaganda, collectives and institutes, had overlain all Central Asian. Then, overnight, as in some schoolchild’s fantasy, the teachers had gone away, leaving behind the message that the lesson was wrong.

  ‘But we were never close to the Russians,’ Oraz said. ‘We Turcomans have an utterly different character. Have you heard of Turcoman chilik? It’s something like our essence. It means independence, even idleness, and hospitality and courage. It’s a kind of pride. The Russians chose to flout it. If a woman touches a man in public, for instance, that is against chilik. Modesty between the sexes goes deep with us. Even in marriage, we never kiss in front of our children. All that is private.’ Chilik seemed to express a sober, Turkic dignity. It eschewed passions, or any violent self-seeking. ‘But of course since the Russians came, all that has been diluted. Even the idea of dictatorship is alien to us. We were always free . . . .’

  A moment later we passed the newly opened Iranian embassy – a drab tenement riddled with nesting pigeons – and he looked at it with distaste. ‘Our temper is different from the Iranians’ too. That fundamentalism won’t come here. We’re a sane people.’

  He was describing an old north-south watershed: the divide between an effervescent Persia and the more slow-tempered Turk. He spoke as if there was something unmanly in extremism. Besides, the Iranians were Shia, and barely a century ago the Sunni Turcomans had enslaved them as worse than unbelievers.

  ‘Our people aren’t interested in dogma. We don’t persecute anyone for his beliefs. Some of the Russians may be leaving – those not born here – but most will stay. They’re welcome to stay – but not as rulers. This is our land, and it will be a good place.’ He laughed a blithe, confident laugh.

  His patriotism was guileless, often naïve. He believed in his people’s inherent righteousness, as the Russians had once believed in theirs. The Turcomans were naturally peaceable, he said. It was a myth of Soviet historians that they had ever warred among themselves. We passed a statue of Stalin’s henchman Kalinin, which would soon be replaced by a monument to Turmenistan’s first prime minister, shot for his patriotism in 1941. ‘Nobody knows where he’s buried, but he’ll have a memorial here.’ As we tramped across a cenotaph to the Second World War dead, Oraz said: ‘This, at least, we share with the Russians. The victory over Fascism!’

  It was one of those overblown yet harrowing monuments that cover the old Soviet Union: a statue of motherhood towering opposite an eternal flame shut in by blood-red marble pillars. The dead were still remembered in mounds of chrysanthemums and gladioli. But the eternal flame had gone out. Its broken gas-vent hissed faintly. I did not have the heart to tell Oraz that many thousands of Central Asia’s soldiers, embittered by Stalin, had deserted to the Germans.

  Yet he seemed, for the moment, immune to disillusion. He was bright with an imagined future. I feared for him. I wondered if anyone of his generation had believed in Communism at all.

  ‘Maybe one per cent.’ He laughed harshly.

  ‘The very poor?’

  ‘No! The others. The officials.’ We had entered a park where a statue of Lenin survived. It hovered angrily above us. ‘And now they don’t know what to believe.’

  Lenin stood on a ziggurat brilliant with Turcoman tilework, and lifted a declamatory arm towards Iran. Beneath, an inscription promised liberation to the peoples of the East.

  ‘There are fifty-six Lenin monuments in the city,’ Oraz said. ‘This one will stay and the rest will go.’ He was striding round the dried fountains which circled the monument, suave in his suit and tie, while above him the baggy-trousered Lenin crumpled his cloth cap in his hand. ‘Maybe in time this one will go too. But not now.’

  I felt perversely glad that it would remain: a gesture of moderation, and a fragile acknowledgement of the past. A group of visiting farmers was posing beneath it for a snapshot. The photographer – a dour youth in a T-shirt blazoned ‘USA: Nice Club’ – arranged them in a crescent of interlaced arms and cheerless faces. I thought: so people still come to be photographed here, out of habit, or some tenuous loyalty.

  But as the youth adjusted his tripod, I peered through the lens and saw that his clients were framed against the plinth of oriental ceramic, which rose to the top of the photograph and amputated Lenin somewhere in the sky. ‘We don’t include him any more,’ the youth said. ‘He’s out of fashion.’

  But what, I wondered, could replace him? As Oraz and I trudged around the state exhibition hall that evening, I felt the Turcoman culture slipping irretrievably away. The modern paintings regaling the walls celebrated it only in synthetic images – tribespeople plucking lutes or riding through misted mountains in a swirl of antiquated robes. The artists were tourists in their own past. At the end of the hall a sixty-foot-long Turcoman rug, rumoured the largest in the world, hung in a crimson waterfall of patterned symbols.

  ‘I wish I could read these for you,’ Oraz said, pointing out emblematic horses and birds’ eyes. ‘They would tell you half our history.’ He shook his head. ‘But I can’t.’ Even the classic art of poetry, he said, was dying.

  ‘Does nobody write it any longer?’

  ‘Oh yes. Everybody writes it. But nobody reads it.’

  That night, wandering the emptied streets alone, I came upon the marble podium where the Turcoman president and his ministers had once saluted May Day parades. Until a few months before, it had been the city’s political heart. Now it glimmered derelict beyond the street-lamps. As I climbed on to its rostrum, the marble and limestone carapace of its walls was cracking under my hands. The crowning statue of Lenin had gone – as if an enormous bird had flown from its roost – but the pedestal, torn in its removal, had been boarded round by wood painted to resemble stone, as if the wreckage of those stupendous foot-prints was still too painful to expose.

  I stared down on the avenue beneath, thickened to seven lanes for the passage of parades. A wind stirred dead leaves over the steps. I remembered what Oraz had said about the people’s disbelief in Communism. Yet that night I fancied that it still pervaded the sleeping city – in the slogans which nobody had dared wipe from the walls, in the jargon on people’s lips, even in Lenin’s statue lingering in the park nearby, warning that his ghost be not provoked.

  Korvus was an old man now. Beneath a burst of white hair his face shone heavy and crumpled, and his eyes watered behind their spectacles. Thirty years ago he had been Turkmenistan’s minister of culture, and a celebrated poet; and he was a war-hero in his country. Authority still tinged his stout figure as he greeted me. He wore an expensive Finnish suit and a gold ring set with a carnelian. Yet a Turcoman earthiness undermined
this prestige a little, and a loitering humour.

  He seemed to live in schizophrenia. His public life had been spent in Soviet government, but his house nested in a Turcoman suburb sewn with family courtyards, vine-shadowed, where the hot water ran in fat pipes on struts above the lanes, and people shed their shoes before entering the homes, in the Islamic way.

  He ushered me indoors. He looked gentle, preoccupied. He lived with the family of his eldest son – the hallway was scattered with toys and shoes – and as I entered the sitting-room I stopped in astonishment. I had stepped into an engulfing jungle of Turcoman artefacts. It was as if I had dropped through the floor of the bland Soviet world into an ancient substratum of his people’s consciousness. Phylacteries in beaten silver set with semi-precious stones, horsewhips and quivers and camel-bells, the tasselled door-frame of a yurt tent still darkly brilliant in vegetable dyes – they covered the walls with a barbarian intricacy.

  ‘My son and his wife collect them,’ the old man said. He looked vaguely unhappy.

  ‘They’re magnificent.’

  He sat beside me on a divan. I could not tell what he was thinking. His whole life had been directed towards a Soviet future, in which national differences would disappear. Yet for years, piece by piece, his son had been harvesting his people’s past and pouring it over the walls in a lavish, speechless celebration. It hung before the old man now like an indictment. It was the history he had abandoned.

  But after a while he said sombrely: ‘I think it is right that this has happened, and that we have our freedom. It is right that the old Union is split up.’ He spoke as if he had fought against each sentence before it had conquered him. He did not look at me. ‘Although the war seemed to unite us.’

  The war: he had returned from it with a chestful of medals – ‘like Brezhnev,’ he laughed. He had survived the ferocious tank-battle of Kursk, and fought through the terrible winter of 1942-3, when the thrust of the whole war changed and the world was lost to Hitler. His face ignited as he spoke of it. He relaxed into its simplicity. Things had been easier then. Somewhere in the fields of south Ukraine, he said, he had attacked a German tank single-handed and been hit by shell splinters. ‘I regained consciousness in the snow, covered in blood.’ Humorously he patted his chest and back, wriggling his short arms around his body. ‘I didn’t know if I was alive. How were my legs? They were still there. My head? That was on. But my back and side were ripped, and my hand a mass of ligaments. So I packed snow round my wounds, and the German fire missed me and I crawled away. Later one of our officers – a hooligan type with a motorcycle – charged up and filled me with vodka and drove me off. I was operated on in a field hospital under gas, and woke like this.’ He held up his hand. I saw that two fingers were gone, their stubs welded in a wrinkled trunk. He grinned at it.

  In the bleak, triumphant years after the war, he had gone to Moscow to study. Perhaps he had believed in the Soviet unity then. He had married a Russian orphan, and returned to Ashkhabad a hero. He chuckled and drew his maimed hand across his chest to conjure ranks of medals. Later he had written poems about the war, and love lyrics. He had become head of the Turkmenia Writers’ Union, then its Minister of Culture in the sixties.

  But how much had he invested in his authority, I wondered? Had he believed in Marxism-Leninism or in literature or, arcanely, in both? It was hard to ask. He looked so old now, and somehow depleted, yet comfortable. He had taken off his jacket and put on a lumpy cardigan. His damaged hand rested on his knees. But his wife lived in Moscow – she did not care for Ashkhabad, he said – and he came and went between them, not exactly separated. His life seemed now to have resolved into these divided loyalties. They were perhaps his truth.

  I wondered how easily this family cohabited: the failing war-hero and his film-director son Bairam – who was working on a study of Red Army atrocities – and a garrulous, ten-year-old grandson. A depthless chasm of experience seemed to gape between them all.

  Bairam came in later, pale and ebullient, without the look of closed unsureness which I often saw about me in the streets. He grew excited by my interest in Turcoman things, and presented his collection piece by piece, unrolling hundred-year-old kelims at my feet in a patter of discriminatory pride. These were not the soulless products, dull with aniline dyes, which 200 underpaid girls (he told me) turned out in the local Soviet-built factory. They were works of love and patience, whose skills had been inherited from mother to daughter. He brought in jewellery too: necklaces which had flooded the breast with lapis lazuli and silver bells; enamelled and filigreed frontlets that clipped on to the woman’s ears before cascading about ber in a tumult of chains. They trickled like water through my fingers.

  Meanwhile the old man switched on the television which stood among the nomad regalia, and drank brandy mixed with Pepsi Cola. ‘I used to drink too much,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘But I hardly drink now.’ On his chosen channel the Ashkhabad Orchestra, dressed in white tie and tails, was playing Moussorgsky.

  Bairam was full of projects. He was working on a film which would have been unthinkable two years before, he said. It was a documentary on his people’s flight from the Red Army during the forced collectivisation in the 1930s, when a million Turcomans and others had fled into Iran and Afghanistan.

  He spoke like his father, in sudden bursts of feeling, while still holding up jewellery for me to admire. ‘We’re even showing a sequence on the Red Army machine-gunners mowing down the refugees in the mountain passes. Yes, this happened.’ He held up an amethyst frontlet, as if it might have belonged to the dead. ‘The film is being bought by Moscow television! They asked us to cut out what the Red Army did, but we said no. So they’re transmitting it whole!’ He let out an airy laugh. It was an astonishing reversal of power.

  His father went on listening to Moussorgsky, but after a while ambled out into his courtyard. It must have been simpler to survive the war and all the Stalin years, I thought, than to meet this shock of independence. But Bairam waved the notion away. ‘No, not for my father. He was already independent. He never believed in the Party. He left it twenty-four years ago.’

  I asked in astonishment: ‘Why?’ Leaving the Party was tantamount to suicide.

  ‘There was a sort of scandal . . . when he was Minister of Culture. They said he travelled too much – in Turkey and India. The KGB got after him.’

  I thought: so in Moscow’s eyes his ideas had become contaminated. ‘What did he do after that?’

  ‘There was nothing he could do. After you’d left the Party, that was the end of you. There was no chance of a job. So he sat at home and wrote poetry . . . .’ He smiled weakly. ‘That’s how I remember him, all my childhood.’

  So whatever had happened, I had not understood; and the old man’s look of hurt and reconciliation sprang from something older than his country’s independence. A little later I asked him about Oraz – who had written his subversive novel from the heart of government – and Korvus only said: ‘I know who you mean by this man.’

  The note of censure was unmistakable. A residual loyalty to the system, perhaps, had been disturbed by that betrayal. He himself had simply resigned, and become a poet.

  On Sundays, when the central market opened, the farmers spilt into the city. Behind their hillocks of tangerines, pomegranates, beetroot, peppers and dried apricots, they waited from early morning with dogged unconcern: a people whose faces expressed all the fierce gamut of Turcoman change. There were Mongoloid faces whose cheeks had stayed creaseless into old age, and long Caucasoid ones with startling pale eyes, and Bedouin visages where the beetling noses erupted beneath tapered brows. A few of the older women, in the remembered modesty of youth, still touched their concealing scarves to faces no longer beautiful, and squatted all day before a cupful of onions or carrots from their private plots.

  The shoppers trudged disconsolately among them. Sudden inflation had sent the fragmented Soviet Union into shock. Everybody was complaining. Everybody had a
dirge of comparative prices on his lips. On e kilo of meat costs a hundred roubles now . . . last year it was just ten! Everything was better under Brezhnev . . . .’ And the Russians who moved among them looked as poor as the rest.

  It was here that I met the artist Momack. He was drifting about, like me: a slight, middle-aged man in baggy jeans and trainers. In this rough ambience he looked faintly theatrical. He had the sensitised melancholy of a king in a Persian miniature. A satiny beard swarmed blackly up to his cheekbones and liquid eyes. He felt close to these farmers, he said. They seemed nearer to his people’s roots. But I could not imagine them feeling close to him.

  He drove me to his studio in a twenty-year-old Zhiguli saloon. Years ago, he said, he had daydreamed of selling all his paintings and buying a Mercedes Benz. ‘I love those cars.’ He tapped his splintered windscreen. ‘But instead I’ve got this.’ The Zhiguli might have been assembled from scrap metal. It moved in spasms, and swung about like an artist’s mobile.

  We clattered down Gogol and Pushkin streets – ‘I hope they keep those names,’ he said. ‘They were real people, writers not politicians . . . .’ He hated politics. Even Islam was not a belief to him, but a habit. It had always rested lightly on the pastoral Turcomans. He had counted three new mosques being built in the city, he said, but they signalled a mild cultural resurgence rather than a doctrinaire revolution. ‘We Turcomans never so deeply believed. We never had many mosques. It was enough just for five or six people gathered in a house to pray . . . .I remember that as a child.’

  His studio stood in a suburb still scattered with the dwellings of 1948 earthquake victims. The building had lain derelict for years, until he and some friends had restored it. Now it had become a nest of gaunt ateliers where nobody seemed to be working. A debris of sculpture lumbered its courtyard – two decapitated leftovers of Socialist Realism carved in silver-painted polystyrene, and a discarded portrait-bust.