The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  We went down an echoing corridor, where outsize stoves loomed like pillars. In the studio was a primitive press for Momack’s etchings. He sat down awkwardly. His life’s work lay stacked around us, unsold. The canvases banked up in shelves or were heaped against the walls. As a student he had become infatuated by Picasso and Chagall, and over the years his paintings had grown dangerously unrepresentational. They had sold only to friends. After perestroika, he said, he had enjoyed some acclaim in Moscow and even Eastern Europe. But life was hard now, he was so isolated. He supported two daughters by his first wife, and by his second a little son, who had yesterday been circumcised and cried all night.

  Hesitantly he showed me some pictures. His early oils were romanticised scenes of Turcoman village life, and faltering essays in Picasso. But his etchings and watercolours were besetting and strange. Obsessively he had painted weddings and mirages. Above all, mirages. It was as if his people’s past shimmered just out of reach, maddening and ungraspable to him. His figures were like ghosts. They walked or rode in abstract deserts and mountain-valleys, and they reeked of melancholy. They were people in moonlight, in flight. Their shadows on the sand or rock were as important as they were, and were often doing something different.

  ‘These are only attempts,’ he said. ‘You can never achieve what you want, can you?’

  The grief in him, the hunt for some rootedness in the past of his violated people, perhaps arose from an orphan’s distress. His father and two small sisters had been killed in the 1948 earthquake, leaving his mother pregnant with him; and when he was only thirteen, she too had died.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why I’m already going white . . . .’ He touched a plume of ashen hair spurting back from his temples. He was still only forty-three. No wonder all his pictures seemed to weep for a lost motherland. He had chosen to inhabit the fringes of his city, among the victims, and his friends came from the minority peoples who float between the Russian and Turkic populace in all the capitals of Central Asia: Armenians, Tartars, Jews, Koreans, Poles.

  Had he conceived of his painting, I wondered, as a way back to his past?

  ‘No, no, nothing like that now.’ His expression dissolved into a kind of tragic softness. ‘It’s only line and colour. That’s all. Line and colour. No, I haven’t rediscovered my culture, just extended my technique.’

  Some of his pictures descended into a peculiar literalness. In one the words of an illuminated Turkish manuscript hung like a curtain behind a bearded artist. But the composition dwindled away in four parts, the words faded and the figure was pared to a shadow. ‘This tells that without knowledge of his past a man is nothing,’ Momack said pedantically. ‘He can’t understand himself. He disappears.’

  Now he was fingering a watercolour labelled Marriage: a Study of Old and New. A village bridal dress – the vivid crimson of fertility — lay in a museum vitrine, brilliant but inaccessible; while beside it, in virginal white, posed a Western mannequin bride. Under her veil, she was naked.

  I longed to find some geographical heart to this diffused nation, but there was none. It owned no Vatican, no Acropolis. Its people had perhaps drifted westwards into the Karakum desert in the tenth century, but even this is unsure. Late in the nineteenth century the advancing Russians found them scattered beneath the Kopet Dagh foothills in fortress villages and nomad camps. Of all the Central Asian peoples the Turcomans had the firmest sense of their own nation, and the strongest will to fight. Yet even amongst them this statehood was a cloudy concept. They thought of themselves first by tribe – Tekke or Yomut or Salor – and their frontiers were in constant flux.

  Only the little town of Geok-Tepe, I thought – some twenty miles north of the Iranian foothills – might have covertly been remembered as a national shrine. In 1879 the Turcomans had thrown back a czarist army from its walls in a rare reverse for the imperial arms in Central Asia, but two years later the Russians returned under their sanguinary general, Skobelev – Old Bloody Eyes’, as the Turcomans came to call him – and laid siege to Geok-Tepe again.

  Inside its three miles of mud-built ramparts the most savage and powerful of the tribes, the Tekke, had assembled ten thousand mounted warriors for a last stand. Artillery failed to dismantle this redoubt, so the Russians sent in sappers to mine the soft earth beneath its walls. After twenty days of siege, a two-ton explosion and a rain of artillery blew a breach almost fifty yards wide, killing hundreds of defenders; then the Russian infantry charged forward with their bands playing, and streamed through the breach. Hand-to-hand fighting broke the dazed Turcomans. They fled out of the fortress with their women and children, and were massacred indiscriminately in their thousands. For years afterwards the plains were scattered with human bones, and the tribespeople only had to hear a Russian military band playing for their women to start wailing hysterically and their men to fall on their faces in terror.

  Yet Geok-Tepe became a legend of heroic failure, and when I mentioned it to Korvus’s son Bairam, he grew excited and insisted on driving me there. It was only fifty kilometres away, he said. He knew a local historian who would join us. We would go to the burial-place of the Turcoman war-leader Kurban Murat. ‘We’ll have a party!’

  By the time we left next morning, the party had mushroomed uncontrollably. We clattered out of the city in a Volga saloon stuffed with his friends from the state television company. There was a mocking film-director, already drunk, a mouse-like scriptwriter, and a cloudless colossus of a historian with a pock-marked face. Scenting festivity, they had abandoned their desks en masse and were stirring up a carnival euphoria.

  Even before we left the outskirts, they had waylaid a friend in his butcher’s shop. Through a swinging jungle of fly-blown cow and sheep, we thrust our way into a mud-floored storeroom and squatted down in this sordid secrecy for a random picnic. Roundels of bread and saucers of cucumber appeared, and soon the tiny room resounded to the splash and gurgle of vodka. An infectious jubilation brewed up. We toasted one another’s countries, families, businesses, futures and pasts. Turcoman and Russian oratory blundered together in helpless pastiche. Occasionally the butcher came in to snatch up a knife or a bloodstained apron. But we were soon past caring. Shoulders and necks were clasped in inebriate brotherhood, and bawdy jokes recycled as the film-director implacably refilled every-body’s glass.

  Even in my vodka-soaked trance, I recognised the director’s strangeness. He was the group’s self-appointed jester, but he had the face of a ravaged clown. With his every movement a shock of greying hair floundered above two goitrous eyes. Much of his humour was lost to me, but the rest was subtly self-degrading. The others laughed sycophantically. The role of joker had become his distinction, his passport. He appeared close to breakdown. ‘English culture! Turcoman culture!’ He lifted a shaking glass. ‘These are high cultures! Not like the Russians . . . .’ Our glasses clashed. ‘I love England . . . . Most of all I love Princess Anne! That is a beautiful woman!’ His eyes came bulging close against mine. He was slopping vodka into my glass. ‘Vodka’s the cure for everything!’

  Only the historian did not drink. ‘He is a very serious man,’ the clown gabbled. ‘He wants to talk history with you. But he says drink fucks his brains.’

  The historian’s face cracked into a smile, which survived there senselessly a long time later, as if he had forgotten it. All his moods traversed these slow gradients, and remained stranded in his expression after all feeling must have gone.

  By now the damp from the earth floor was seeping up through our socks and trousers. But we settled drunkenly into the last crusts and dregs. With dimmed amazement I remembered that the men squatting in this butcher’s store were the sophisticates of Ashkhabad. But their formal shirts and ties now looked like pantomime, and our party seemed to unleash in them some deep, earthen craving, older than Islam.

  An hour later we were meandering over a potholed road towards Geok-Tepe. For miles Ashkhabad seemed to extend itself over the scrubland in scattered villages of p
ale-bricked cottages and dishevelled gardens. The country had a vacant, incomplete look, as if it were earmarked for a suburb, and was waiting. Pylons and telegraph poles criss-crossed the plains in a dirty spider-web. Heaps of piping and rubble littered the roadsides. Every building appeared to be unfinished or falling down, with no moment between consummation and decay.

  We passed cement and asbestos works, and wine distilleries. Then cotton fields and vineyards appeared, and collective farms named ‘Sun’ or ‘Glory’, adorned by faded slogans celebrating strength and labour. Once we crossed the Karakum Canal flowing westwards seven hundred miles from the Amu Dariya, the classical Oxus, to fertilise all these oases beneath the Kopet Dagh. It ran in a brown tumult between concrete banks and encroaching reeds.

  Soon afterwards, driving through pastureland, we came upon an enormous graveyard. Many dead from the Geok-Tepe massacre had been interred here, and a year afterwards the Turcoman leader Kurban Murat was buried amongst them. He was not only a warrior but a Naqshbandi Sufi, a holy man, and his tomb became a lodestar for pilgrims, and a token of resistance. Far into the Soviet era it was secretly venerated. ‘It had just decayed to a mound,’ the historian said, ‘but people remembered it.’

  We scrambled through a gap in the concrete wall. The saint’s tomb had been clumsily rebuilt: a brick cube under a clay dome. We had all sobered a little, and now went swaying in silence through the grass towards it. All around us heaved an ocean of nameless mounds misted with white poppies. The historian said: ‘Two of my great-grandparents were killed in that battle. They’re buried here too.’ He knew the place, but did not go there. He eased open the door to the tomb of Kurban Murat. Only the director remained outside, suddenly ashamed or indifferent, running his hands over his face in the Moslem self-blessing.

  We peered into a wan light shed by the perforated dome. We were alone. The grave-mound swelled huge and constricted in its walls. It was covered in green silk. At its head, pilgrims had left variegated stones, and several hundred roubles lay there untouched. Three times we circled the grave anti-clockwise in the Moslem way, squeezing along the walls. Nobody spoke. Then suddenly, violently, at the grave’s head, my companions prostrated themselves and struck their foreheads against its mound. I gazed at them in mute surprise. All at once the place reverberated with the ancient, tribal prestige of the dead, and of all the unutterable past. Their foreheads were covered with dust when they rose.

  Next moment we were outside, among the graves again. A few swallows were twittering in the grass. ‘Many people come here on the anniversary of the battle’ — the historian snaked out his arm to conjure queues – ‘especially the descendants of the dead.’ But the dead were mostly anonymous. Here and there a Turcoman samovar, discoloured and rusting, betrayed the presence of a grave, or an inscribed headstone showed. But most were marked only by the raw earth breaking through a weft of shrubs and poppies.

  ‘Do the Naqshbandi come?’ I had read that they still pervaded Central Asia.

  But he said: ‘No. They’re not important. Our religion is older than theirs, older than Islam. We have our own faith. That’s why we can’t accept fundamentalism, or Iran, or any of that.’ His face confronted mine like a blank moon. He wanted me to understand. ‘The people who come to our shrines, they’re not exactly Moslems, you see, although they are called that. Their belief is earlier . . .different.’

  Lingering beside this clannish mausoleum – the lair of a sainted warrior – I believed him. It reeked of ancestor-worship. The formal practice of the mosque, all the structures and theologies of urban Islam, seemed far away. This was a secret place of tribal memories, and anger. ‘The Russians killed fifteen thousand of us on that day, many of them women and children, and lost three thousand of their own.’ The historian stared across the rough, earthen sea. ‘They were barbarians.’

  Yet he had invented the number of enemy dead. Against the piteous Turcoman casualties, the Russians (perhaps minimising) put their own at fewer than 300. But the historian’s history was glamorous and simple. He was rebuilding his country’s past as dangerously free of truth as the Russians had once created theirs. Wandering the graves, he claimed a 7000-year ancestry for the Turcomans in this land, as if they were the pure descendants of Neolithic men. He had reconstructed them not as idolatrous slavers who had veneered themselves with a more sophisticated faith, but as an ancient, homogeneous people steeped in early wisdom.

  Now the director was stumbling along the path beside us. ‘It’s not our tragedy!’ His shirt gaped open above a straggling tie. ‘It’s their tragedy, the Russians’ tragedy! It’s the Russians who had to leave this country, not us. Like the British from India or the French from Algeria!’ His clownish eyes strayed over me. ‘Like all colonialism – it’s the tragedy of the colonisers!’

  I mumbled uncertainly. Colonialism seemed to resolve into no such easy patterns. He was drinking himself to death like any Russian.

  ‘It’s their disaster, their mistake!’ His arm trembled towards the graves: ‘These others were not mistaken . . . .’

  An hour later, as we motored towards Geok-Tepe, the odd, reckless fervour overtook him again, and he insisted on stopping. Nobody dared refuse him and soon we were all lolling in the grass with two more bottles of vodka and a bag of halfliquefied cheese. Beside us glinted a stagnant pool, where a concrete sluice was channelling away water from the Karakum Canal. It gurgled miserably. By now my head had floated clear of my body, and my feet were unfamiliar to me. I recognised them dimly at the far end of my legs. The self-made clown had turned us all into children. We laughed in a gale of idiot mirth whenever he opened his mouth. A few dusty shrubs concealed our scandal from the road. ‘This is a beautiful Turcoman place,’ he cried, and everybody laughed.

  I was aware only of the historian secretly condescending, touching my arm from time to time, and his eyes said: I’m sorry. And sometimes Bairam pushed bread and cheese at me and whispered: ‘Eat, eat, don’t just drink. Save yourself ...’

  I longed to tip away my glass unseen, but the director watched me with fevered eyes every time he refilled it, and demanded toast after toast. Then – half in jest at first, half in absolution – he would slither his hands over his face in the Moslem blessing, until they were squirming down his cheeks in cynical desperation. But he muttered: ‘I’m grey. Only good men go grey . . . . Look at these others . . . .’ He got up and staggered in the grass. ‘This is a beautiful place . . . . Will you give my love to Princess Anne? . . . Our is a high culture ...’

  We never reached Geok-Tepe, but somehow circled back to Ashkhabad in a nimbus of alcohol. At the hotel, where my floor-lady usually sat at her post in bored watchfulness, the desk was vacant and I fumbled in its drawer for my room-key. Then I stopped. A piece of paper had caught my eye. With a shock I found myself reading a report on my own movements. Scrupulously it noted the times I had left and entered my room, and the identity of those who had visited me. I felt slightly sick. An old tension took hold of me, familiar from twelve years before, when the KGB had dogged me through the western Ukraine. The paper reminded me of what I already knew, but which in the pleasure of the day I had forgotten: that this was not a free country.

  But to whom, I wondered, did the local KGB report? Were they being cleansed of their Russian element and turning purely Turcoman, or had the links with Moscow been preserved? Above all, what was their point? But most likely, I thought, they would change only with the slowness of those Jurassic sauropods which possessed two brains, one in the head, one in the base of the tail: an organism of unwieldy, vegetable instinct. For a while they would simply continue doing what they had been programmed to do, however senseless, because that is what they had always done.

  The next moment my floor-lady appeared, agitated. An obese Russian babushka with hennaed curls and pencilled eyebrows, she too seemed to belong to a fading species. She greeted me with a wriggling wave of her fingers, then groped for my key in her pocket, shooting me smiles. ‘How stupid of me
. . . .’

  Next day I revived my plans to reach Geok-Tepe. A driver named Safar offered to take me seventy miles for barely two dollars (the devaluation of the rouble had turned the dollar to gold) and we set off past the same factories, cotton-fields and jaded pasturelands. The country grew poorer as we went. The cottages spawned shacks of corrugated tin: animal pens, dwellings, lavatories. Weather-blackened men idled in the doorways with dark, Bedouinish women in black dresses and flaring headscarves. Over the grasslands roamed flocks of karakul sheep and lambs – the source of astrakhan wool – and small, one-humped camels. But the fields were fringed with salinated marsh which shone like dirty snow.

  By now the Kopet Dagh mountains were teeming across the southern horizon, and dropping their foothills in our path. A storm raged beyond them, discolouring the sky. Suddenly a military airfield appeared. Outside their camouflaged bunkers, the jet fighters were all pointed at Iran thirty miles away over the mountains. I was unsure if foreigners were permitted on this road, but the old rules had broken down, and the airfield was circled only by broken barbed-wire and derelict watch-towers where nobody watched. The next moment we were past.

  I wondered what people thought of this arsenal in their midst – the forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States — but Safar only shrugged. He had done his military service in a chemical warfare unit near Bukhara, he admitted, and he didn’t mind the Russians. ‘We can get on with them. They’re all right. The Russians won’t go away.’

  But they were already going away, I knew.

  I wondered about Safar. A dust of white hair flew back from his brows, and his long face was deeply lined. Yet all the lines had gone the right way, and his nose craned over a loose, laughing mouth.

  But his life unfolded in tragedy, as I was now expecting here. In the earthquake, when he was only a boy, he had lost his three-year-old sister buried under the debris, and his father had disappeared long before during the Stalin years.