The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  She started to walk again, wavering fatly on her high heels. Her body conveyed a torpid, Russian strength. Her marriage was obsessing her at present, she said, because her husband was not happy. He could not relinquish his past, the memory of his first wife, who’d been a harpy. ‘After she left him he sat five years alone, sulking and drinking, and he’s still affected by her. He can’t deny their daughters a thing.’ Her face puckered in revulsion. ‘They’re our chief source of argument, those daughters.’ She splayed out her fingers, which were stubbled in garish rings. ‘And there’s the cat. We argue about that. He can’t accept that animals are really humans, which of course they are.’ She sighed unlaughing. ‘A Moslem, you see.’

  I could salvage no insight from this rush of detail.

  ‘I know other Russian women married to Tajiks and Uzbeks,’ she went on, ‘but each one is different. Even the prejudice. Some of my husband’s family feel so violent that they can hardly bring themselves to see me. But others have been kind. There’s no pattern to it.’ Yet her voice was tinged with recklessness. I realised there was something I did not understand at all. ‘It’s hard for any Moslem’s wife. But sometimes the men may start to recognise a Russian woman’s intelligence. Native women are often lazy. They just sit and gossip while their children run wild. They can prepare meals, of course, but often they can’t even sew. No wonder Moslems need several wives.’ She was striding beside me now, with colonial self-confidence. ‘Yes, I know Tajiks who keep more than one wife – they celebrate second or even third marriages in secret with some mullah. It’s hard on everyone.’

  We had reached a side-gate of the mosque, whose guardian recognised her. He said quaintly: ‘Guests and good men are always welcome here,’ and we entered a courtyard murmuring with old men in blue turbans who leant on their sticks under the trees and dozed or hobnobbed on weathered benches. A balm of companionship filled the air, of past ways returning.

  ‘I wanted you to see this,’ Tania said. She spoke a halting Tajik with the mosque officials. They asked her where we came from, and looked pleased. Islam had always been tolerant in Central Asia, she said, without accuracy, but I knew what she meant. She did not fear religion, but politics. ‘It’s the politicians manipulating for their own ends – that’s what frightens me. Clans. We’re overrun by cliques like extended families.’ Their rivalries and subterfuge crept up to the highest levels of government, I knew, and created a delicate power-axis between Samarkand, Tashkent and the Fergana valley. The country’s apparent unity splintered apart as you thought about it.

  ‘But young people sometimes talk as if they had a nation now,’ she said. ‘They talk of being Uzbeks or Tajiks. It never used to be like that.’

  ‘You think they feel it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ She sounded suddenly harrowed. Some distress welled up in her whenever we touched on the future. Perhaps the old concept of a family of peoples, with Russia at its helm, was too painfully entrenched in her emotions.

  We went back past a medreseh, and peered in. It was the largest in the city, but it seemed deserted. The student cells were locked, and pigeons massed undisturbed under the porticoes. No caretaker emerged to greet or deflect us.

  Only days later did I learn the reason. According to hearsay, one of the clerics had raped a pupil. While news of this whispered through the city, the boy’s relatives had assembled to tear the man to bits. But instead, after negotiations with him, they had watched while he hanged himself.

  Unknowing, Tania and I walked in bewilderment through the school’s silence. ‘You will come and visit me soon?’ she asked. Her high heels rang on the cobblestones. ‘Yes. Come to us.’

  The north-east suburbs break against a grassy plateau which undulates for miles. Colonies of ground squirrels stand sentinel at their burrows, and a shepherd drives his black flock over the cemetery-like ground with sharp cries. Its abrupt banks and mounds betray an earlier Samarkand decaying into the grassland. The earth seems to writhe underfoot. Sometimes it splits open on abandoned excavations. The glittering mountains stare in. Wherever the bricks rise exposed, their tamped clay has reverted to earth. The walls have become natural cliffs whose fissures had once been gates, and the ground is ripped by gullies where streets had gone, or tossed into shapeless citadels.

  From the sixth century BC this ancient Samarkand, named Maracanda, was the capital of a refined Iranian people, the Sogdians, who traded along the Zerafshan valley and beyond. Alexander took the city in 329 BC, and here, in a fit of drunken hubris, transfixed his favourite general ‘Black’ Cleitus with a spear. But the Sogdians outlasted the fragile dynasty of Alexander’s followers. Famous for their literacy and commercial cunning, it was they, perhaps, who taught the Chinese the art of glassmaking. The Romans reported that their city walls ran seven miles in circuit, and they endured here until the Arabs conquered them in 712. Then, little by little, they dwindled away, until Genghiz Khan wrecked Maracanda in 1220, and put the past to sleep under the loam-filled earth. Later peoples named the site from the Giant Afrasiab, a mythic king of Turan: after failing to take Maracanda by assault, they said, he had buried it in the sand.

  In a museum nearby, the Sogdians falter back to life. Russian archaeologists pulled their corroded swords out of the compacted dust, their bangles, their buttons and bone clothes-pins. They seem to have worshipped early Persian gods, at a time of resurgent Buddhism. Monolithic altars and carved ossuaries emerged, and some precious fragments of seventh-century fresco, in which the Sogdian king (if it is he) receives embassies from as far away as Tang dynasty China.

  They advance to meet him against a hyacinth-blue field in cavalcades of dignitaries mounted on dromedaries, horses and elephants. In airy perspective they ride harmlessly above or beneath one another, but the plaster has dropped from them in obliterating grey flakes, as if they processed through storm-clouds. The lumber of elephants’ feet and the prance of hooves emerge fitfully out of the decay, while a file of egrets parades inexplicably behind. The Chinese tribute-bearers carry goblets and wands in a humbled cluster of girlish eyes and close-plastered hair, and their starched dresses, embroidered with wolves’ heads, seem to have hypnotised the painter. The king, meanwhile, walks forward to honour the image of his people’s god. His prodigiously pearled robes woven into lozenges, his dripping ear-pendants, his soft, jewelled headdress and the necklace which dribbles nervously from his fingers, invest his kingdom with an effete strangeness. Yet his subjects’ slender noses and delicate hands may have left behind their shadow in today’s Tajik people.

  I stumbled all afternoon over the indecipherable city, and emerged at evening by a tributary of the Zerafshan. Perched almost inaccessibly above it, under five grassy domes, was a half-forgotten tomb. An aged caretaker, slumbering nearby, opened its door in mumbled confusion, and there burgeoned before me into the gloom a monstrous mound. ‘This is the tomb of the prophet Daniel,’ he said. Tamerlane, he added, had brought him here from Mecca.

  Like the graves of other half-legendary figures revered by the Moslems – the tombs of Noah and Nimrod in Lebanon, the sepulchre of Abel near Damascus – it was built for a titan. Local people had believed that Daniel went on growing even after death, and they lengthened his grave every year until it stretched over sixty feet. Through the decades of Russian persecution it had been silently remembered. Its walls were still black with candle-flames.

  I must have cut a weary figure as I trudged back along the road to Samarkand, because after a while a young Tajik in a clattering Moskvich offered me a lift. Shavgat was returning from a three-week job as a driver, and invited me home to meet his little son and old father. He was handsome in a slender, Iranian mould. Alert, candid eyes gleamed in a long head smoothed by jet-black hair. But an Islamic maleness overbore his home. He had been away three weeks, but when his young wife came to the door – a wide-eyed girl who was not quite pretty – he extended no greeting to her, only ordered her to hurry up a meal. I never saw them exchange an
intimate word. Yet she was smiling and proud; for she had borne him a son.

  They lived in a traditional suburb, and made me welcome. I was growing used to these compounds now, whose gates clanged open on to a family courtyard where the father and his married sons each owned a stuccoed cottage, and gardens of roses and vegetables straggled in common. Inside, the walls and ceilings were painted in pale flower-patterns, and the crimson silks of newlyweds still flamed round the doors. The bride’s dowry was piled up inside cupboards and cabinets in mountainous quilts – fifty or sixty of them – and pyramids of unused tea-services. Dangling above one wall, two roundels of hardened bread – a mouthful bitten out of each – had been preserved from the farewell meal for Shavgat’s younger brother, who was serving as a soldier in Poland, and they would not be touched again until he returned.

  Shyly Shavgat’s wife carried in their infant son for my approval. A canary stuck like a toy to her shoulder. The baby clutched a papier-mâché dog sprinkled with glitter-dust. With them came Shavgat’s sister-in-law, a tallow-haired Russian girl dressed in native gown and silk pantaloons. They clothed her like a submission. She was pregnant, yearning for a son of her own. But the flamboyant dress only threw into crueller relief the sallow plainness of her face. She looked slightly bitter. I longed to ask her about her situation – questions which had eluded me with Tania – but it would only have been possible alone, and soon Shavgat was parading the baby in his arms.

  ‘Does he look like me?’ he demanded. ‘Does he? Does he?’ I hunted in the tiny face for any resemblance, but it only reflected – as in some simplified cartoon – the wide gaze and cusped mouth of the mother. She might have produced him alone, by parthenogenesis. ‘Tell me. Does he look like me?’

  But the moment was saved by Shavgat’s father, a gross, wily-faced peasant. He seized his grandson – the family obsession – and dandled him ferociously on his shoulder, while the child screamed and plucked at his Brezhnev eyebrows. The old man sobered only to pour scorn on modern times. ‘Everything’s terrible now. In Rashidov’s day the shops were full and everything was cheap!’ He flung his arm across their supper-table. ‘This would have been covered then. Covered! Meat was only three roubles a kilo, and now it’s ninety. And vodka, three roubles a bottle. Now it’s a hundred!’

  Their luxuries in these bare rooms were few and cherished. A cage-full of canaries fluttered and sang; a little stock of Marlboro cigarettes collected in a niche; and before sleep Shavgat rubbed hand-cream delicately into his palms, as if it were magic. We slept under quilts along the floor, he with his hands folded carefully over his stomach, while his wife went into the bedroom, her hair released down her back. The canaries fidgeted to a standstill, then never stirred all night, as if stuffed.

  In the silence I asked about the photograph of a woman hung in honour on the wall above us. A weak bulb dangling over the door lit up an unreadable sepia face. ‘That’s my mother,’ Shavgat said. ‘She and my father have been separated many years.’ His voice fell away. ‘Yes, it’s unusual with us Tajiks. But she’s a fine woman.’ He said nothing more, except that she was living in Chimkent – a beautiful town, where he sometimes visited her – and that she had never married again.

  For two thousand years Central Asia was the womb of terror, where an implacable queue of barbarian races waited to impel one another into history. Whatever spurred their grim waves – the deepening erosion of their pasturelands or their seasons of fleeting unity – they bore the same stamp of phantom mobility and mercilessness.

  Two and a half millennia ago the shadowy Scythians of Herodotus – Aryan savages whose country was the horse – simmered just beyond the reach of civilisation, like a ghastly protoplasm of all that was to come. Then the Huns flooded over the shattered Roman Empire in a ravening swarm – fetid men clothed in whatever they had slaughtered, even the sewn skins of fieldmice – and they did not stop until they had reached Orleans, and their rude king Attila had died in unseasonable bridebed, and their kingdom flew to pieces. But the Avars followed them – long-haired centaurs who rocked Constantinople and were eventually obliterated by Charlemagne at the dawn of the ninth century. Soon afterwards an enfeebled Byzantium let in the Magyars, and the fearsome Pechenegs rushed in after – Turanian peoples, all of them, who evaporated at last in the gloomy European forests, or settled to become Christian on the Great Hungarian Plain.

  Then, at the start of the thirteenth century, as Christian Europe ripened and Islamic Asia flourished, the dread steppeland unleashed its last holocaust in the Mongols. This was not the random flood of popular imagination, but the assault of a disciplined war-machine perfected by the genius of Genghiz Khan. Unpredictable as a dust-storm, its atrocious cavalry — neckless warriors with dangling moustaches – could advance at seventy miles a day, enduring any hardship. Only their stench, it was said, gave warning of their coming. In extremes, they drank from the jugulars of their horses and ate the flesh of wolves or humans. Yet they were armoured in habergeons of iron or laminated leather scales, and they could fire their steel-tipped arrows with magic accuracy over more than two hundred yards at full gallop. Consummate tacticians and scouts, they soon carried in their wake siege-engines and flame-throwers, and around their nucleus of ethnic Mongols rode a formidable mass of Turkic auxiliaries.

  By Genghiz Khan’s death their empire unfurled from Poland to the China Sea. Within a few years his sons and grandsons came within sight of Vienna, laid waste Burma and Korea, and sailed, disastrously, for Japan. Meanwhile, in their Central Asian heartland, the Pax Mongolica was instilling administrative discipline, commercial recovery, and a frightened peace.

  Tamerlane, the Earth-Shaker, was the last, and perhaps most awesome, of these world predators. Born in 1336 fifty miles south of Samarkand, he was the son of a petty chief in a settled Mongol clan. He acquired the name ‘Timur-i-Leng’ or ‘Timur the Lame’ after arrows maimed his right leg and arm, and passed as Tamerlane into the fearful imagination of the West. By his early thirties, after years of fighting over the splintered heritage of Genghiz Khan, he had become lord of Mavarannah, the ‘Land beyond the River’, with his capital at Samarkand, and had turned his cold eyes to the conquest of the world.

  From the accounts that are left of him, he emerges not only as the culmination of his pitiless forerunners, but as the distant ancestor of the art-loving Moghals of India. Over the terrified servants and awed ambassadors at his court, his eyes seemed to burn without brilliance, and never winced with either humour or sadness. But a passion for practical truth fed his unlettered intelligence. He planned his campaigns in scrupulous detail, and unlike Genghiz Khan he led them in person. He clothed his every move with the sanction of the Islamic faith, but astrology and omens, shamanism and public prayers, were all invoked to serve his needs. An angel, it was rumoured, told him men’s hidden thoughts. Yet he assaulted Moslems as violently as he did Christians and Hindus. Perhaps he confused himself with God.

  No flicker of compassion marred his progress. His butchery surpassed that of any before him. The towers and pyramids of skulls he left behind – ninety thousand in the ruins of Baghdad alone – were calculated warnings. After overrunning Persia and despoiling the Caucasus, he hacked back the remnants of the Golden Horde to Moscow, then launched a precipitate attack on India, winching his horses over the snowbound ravines of the Hindu Kush, where 20,000 Mongols froze to death. On the Ganges plain before Delhi, the Indian sultan’s squadrons of mailed elephants, their tusks lashed with poisoned blades, sent a momentary tremor through the Mongol ranks; but the great beasts were routed, and the city and all its inhabitants levelled with the earth. A year later the Mongols were wending back over the mountains, leading 10,000 pack-mules sagging with gold and jewels. They left behind a land which would not recover for a century, and five million Indian dead.

  Now Tamerlane turned his attention west again. Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus fell. In 1402, on the field of Ankara, at the summit of his power, he decimated the army of the Ottoman
sultan Beyazid, and inadvertently delayed the fall of Constantinople by another half century.

  Between these monotonous acts of devastation, the conqueror returned to the Samarkand he cherished. At his direction a procession of captured scholars, theologians, musicians and craftsmen arrived in the capital with their books and tools and fami-lies – so many that they were forced to inhabit caves and orchards in the suburbs. Under their hands the mud city bloomed into faience life. Architects, painters and calligraphers from Persia; Syrian silk-weavers, armourers and glass-blowers; Indian jewellers and workers in stucco and metal; gunsmiths and artillery engineers from Asia Minor: all laboured to raise titanic mosques and academies, arsenals, libraries, vaulted and fountained bazaars, even an observatory and a menagerie. The captured elephants lugged into place the marble of Tabriz and the Caucasus, while rival emirs – sometimes Tamerlane himself – drove on the work with the parvenu impatience of shepherd-princes. The whole city, it seems, was to be an act of imperial power. Villages were built around it named Cairo, Baghdad, Shiraz or Damascus (a ghostly Paris survives) in token of their insignificance. It was the ‘Mirror of the World’, and the premier city of Asia.

  Tamerlane himself confounds simple assessment. He kept a private art collection, whose exquisitely illuminated manuscripts he loved but could not read. His speech, it seems, was puritan in its decorum. He was an ingenious and addicted chess-player, who elaborated the game by doubling its pieces – with two giraffes, two war-engines, a vizier and others – over a board of 110 squares. A craving for knowledge plunged him into hard, questing debates with scholars and scientists, whom he took with him even on campaign, and his quick grasp and powerful memory gave him a working knowledge of history, medicine, mathematics and astronomy.