The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  ‘You don’t agree with it?’ He looked astonished. ‘Why not?’ His face was a childlike question-mark. ‘But it works!’

  Among the racketeers and bootleggers adrift in my hotel lingered a lecturer in the department of physics at Dushanbe’s university. He supplemented his breadline income by siphoning off hotel guests into private lodgings. When Oman had bargained at the reception-desk, this delicate figure had emerged from the lobby’s shadows, offering a list of private rooms – but they all lay too far from the centre. With a pucker of deference he had not pressed their merit, and returned to the shadows.

  But four days later I met Talib again, walking near the university. The fervid face, gentled in shelving hair, had been changed by its location from diffidence to self-esteem, and he invited me home. He lived in one of those flat-blocks whose tiers of splintered stairs and padlocked doors scarcely vary all the way from Minsk to the Pacific. But inside, his apartment had been prettified with alcoves and little chandeliers. His wife was cooking supper for their eight-year-old son in the kitchen, and his daughter, perched in the sitting-room, was playing on a Cyrillic typewriter.

  She was the perfect type of those lissom girls who chattered in flocks along the boulevards, holding hands and flaunting Atlas silks. She had the slender face and alert eyes of her tribe, and ran barefoot about the flat on long feet with prehensile toes, giggling and flirting a little. Out in the streets these urban shepherdesses, speaking their mysterious Tajik, seemed touched by enigma. But in the house Sayora suggested some international teenager, by turns sulky, warm and abruptly independent. She was reading economics to become a book-keeper.

  ‘Maybe she’ll marry and it’ll be hard for her,’ said Talib. ‘It’s always hard for women working. But I don’t believe Islam will change things for her. We’ll make our own Islam here. Can you imagine our women wearing the veil?’

  Sayora levelled a playful hand across her nose. Her black eyebrows converged at the centre in the way the Tajiks admire. She played on her beauty like an instrument. Her portly mother, bustling about us with sweets and nuts, made me at home with domestic questions which she answered herself. ‘Are you all right? . . . No, you’re not, here’s another cushion . . . . You will eat with us? Yes, of course, there will be pilau in a moment

  ‘Things will get better in this country,’ said Talib, infected by her homely commotion. ‘I don’t just think this, I know this. I even delivered a lecture to my students about it. It’s up to you, I said, you’re young, it’s your world. I’m an old man, I told them [but he was my age] and I can’t do much. But you can.’ He raised a frail fist. ‘And nobody dissented.’

  This belief in the future was ardent and mercurial, like him, rooted more in his desires than in reason. He burnt with patriotic longings. He belonged, I guessed, to the fragile alliance of democrats and Moslems which opposed the old government. ‘I used to be a Party member,’ he said. ‘You had to be, in the university. But hardly any of us believed in it, although a few did, and their world crashed overnight. Now we’ve had seventy years of Communism to mitigate our Islam, and perhaps it’s been civilising. I’m a Moslem like any other, but there comes a time when you feel: It’s enough!’ He thrust out his palms in repudiation. ‘Islam can be mild, you know.’

  Then his little son ran into the room firing a space-gun. He was thick-set and boisterous. He shot us all dead, twice. Talib, who was teaching him the poetry of Rudaki, disarmed him and tested him on an opening rubaiyat. The boy pressed his knuckles to his forehead, dislodging himself into duty. Then he stood to attention and chanted:

  Many a desert waste existeth

  Where was once garden glad;

  And a garden glad existeth

  Where was once desert sad....

  Talib turned to me. ‘You hear how beautiful the words are! And that was a thousand years ago!’

  His bookcase brimmed with Tajik poets, and he annexed all Persian culture to his nation, from Hafiz to Omar Khayyám (who had been a formidable mathematician). ‘And we knew about Communism long before the Bolsheviks came! Listen to this . . . .’ His eyes went dreamy as he quoted the poetry of Abdulrachman Jami, on how Alexander the Great was astonished to come upon a city in Sogdiana where everyone was equal, and all houses and gardens held in common, and poverty unknown.

  I asked: ‘And what did he do?’

  ‘He thought that they should have a czar,’ said Talib, ‘and he destroyed them.’ But this denouement did not trouble him. What mattered was the pre-eminence of the Tajik culture. More than two millennia ago his people had known and absorbed Communism. What could the Russians ever teach them?

  ‘But they’ve already taught you,’ I said. ‘Even in your university.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Talib tacked to this graceless wind. ‘But it’s good they’re getting out now. So long as they were here we could sit back and let them do the work: in administration, in the factories, everywhere But now we’ll be forced to learn ourselves, and that’s right. We’re losing our nurse and we’ll have to grow up.’

  He spoke with rueful warmth and only muted optimism. Perhaps, I thought, I was listening to the birth-pangs of his nation. For him, I slowly realised, it was a deep-set mission: the returning of his people to their own heart and tongue. He had already published six works on chemistry in Tajik for secondary school and university students. They were the first of their kind. And now, he confided, he had completed a dictionary of physics terminology, converting each concept from Russian into Tajik. It had taken him fourteen years.

  ‘But nobody will publish it. My publishers promised, but they have no paper now.’ He gathered up the typescript to show me. It was formidably long. I recognised the protective way his fingers riffled and stroked the paper. ‘It’s not the money I care about. It was something I had to do.’

  ‘Of course.’ This detraction of money touched me with affection. It was the first time I had heard anyone here say he disregarded money. ‘Someone must publish it.’

  ‘They will, in time,’ he said. But he left the typescript in his lap like an orphan. Sometimes, he said, he had gone back to early Tajik manuscripts, hunting for synonyms where the modern language had none; at other times he had been forced to invent them himself, struggling to conflate existing Tajik roots and suffixes. A single neologism might consume a week.

  Fourteen years! And at last this Casaubon-like enterprise teetered on the brink of the light. ‘But nobody’s interested in things like this now,’ he said, ‘just in demonstrations and in shooting one another.’ Abstractedly he weighed the book by sections on his palms, as if assessing its value or meaning, or its chance of surviving at all.

  His doubts were to be justified. Within a few months pro-government insurgents from the south would rampage through the city killing Moslem sympathisers, and I never discovered what happened to Talib, or his gentle family, or to the painstaking book which was to coax his people towards civilisation.

  Next morning in our hotel room an ancient black telephone sprang to life, and Oman started flirting with an unknown woman at the other end. She had dialled the wrong number (she said) but he would not let her go. He joked, cajoled and teased her, flattered a little, and reeled her in. She was a teacher, was she? How strange! He had thought of teaching himself . . . . Wasn’t that a Tashkent accent he heard? It was! Might he meet her in half an hour, then? Yes! His would be the green Lada parked outside the Lakhuti Theatre on Rudaki Prospect. He very much looked forward Wonderful!

  He replaced the receiver with an anticipatory ‘Oooh!’ Who was she? He had no idea. ‘They’re usually tarts telephoning from outside,’ he said, ‘but she sounded genuine . . . with a pretty voice.’ He writhed into a clean shirt. ‘I think she just wants a man!’

  He scrutinised the Oman in the mirror, patted his hair for several minutes, and spent a long time in the broken-down bathroom. Then he emerged to dab his ‘Moscow-Paris Eau de Cologne’ around his neck and on his chest, and made for the door. ‘I’ll see y
ou this evening!’ he called, and added from the corridor: ‘She sounded young!’

  I trailed off puritanically to the Orthodox church of St Nicholas, brushed by a transient loneliness. Momentarily I invested the siren voice with an ondine’s body, then promptly forgot her. Under the church’s vegetable dome and blazing cross the women in the gardens were old, and had turned themselves to God. Shuffling among the terraces in rubber boots and worn-out slippers, sipping water from a holy well, begging, praying, waiting – one of them stark mad – they seemed to be dying piecemeal and contented.

  But inside the church a mass christening was in progress. Some 200 Russians crammed into a side-chapel while a garrulous, whirlwind priest anointed their children and babies – on foreheads, eyes, wrists, chests, hands and feet – with a phial of oil and a wispy brush. He looked overworked, and had run out of pomp. But he dabbed crosses on the elder children as if touching up masterpieces. Then a batch of babies was slipped from its underclothes and plunged one by one into the font water, which he scooped over their heads in a gabble of names and a triple blessing.

  For an infant or two, this ceremony passed in stunned silence. Then there broke out a terrible, contagious howling. It spread from baby to baby in a bush-fire of unappeasable terror. Even the stoutest broke down. As each baby was returned wailing and sinless to its parents’ arms, it was instantly enveloped in shawls and kisses, but bawled remorselessly on. Dummies and bottles were rushed unavailing to the rescue. Cooing and burbling fell on scream-deafened ears. They urinated miserably over the floor or down their mothers’ arms.

  A few adults, meanwhile, reaching Christianity after the years of its persecution, bowed their heads over the font. Then, as the hubbub shrank, the priest marched among the babies and sliced off a damp tress from every whimpering head with a pair of kitchen scissors. Each curl he passed to the old woman following him, who kneaded it into a paste, while I watched with the bewilderment of any intruding Moslem.

  I imagined that these embattled Russians were experiencing a resurgence of faith. But when I asked another priest, walking in the overgrown gardens that evening, he said No. Our congregation used to number two thousand or more. There was scarcely room for them. But they’re less than five hundred now, and the baptisms, as you saw, were only fifty today, when there used to be twice as many.’

  He strode beside me in a gold soutane and hobnailed boots. But under its purple cap his face was fretted with lines, and his peppery beard turning white. Our people have gone back home – plane-loads and train-loads of them.’ He thrust out his arm at the setting sun, and I sensed in the gesture a homesickness, out of this deepeningly alien land, for the refuge of once-Holy Russia. ‘I’ve served here twenty years and I’ve never seen so few believers.’

  But now that the other religion, Communism, had died overnight, were people not renewing their identity in this one?

  No, he said bluntly, they were fading away. ‘Only after the troubles earlier this year a few grew afraid, and came to be baptised because of that. Fear is a great baptiser.’

  As we passed the church’s shop, stocked with a few pamphlets and icons, he burst out: ‘But people can read about their faith now! At last, after so long! Look!’ He pointed in the window. It was still a luxury to him. ‘The laws of God!’

  At first he had reminded me of those East Mediterranean priests who smelt of incense and garlic and mild corruption. But now I was starting to like him. I asked: ‘What about the future?’

  His stride did not falter. ‘I just go day by day. I’m not thinking about it.’ We passed the enclosure where the priests before him lay buried, remembered under flowers. ‘So long as there is just one old woman left in my congregation, the church will be open, and I’ll be here to serve her.’

  They were sitting, four or five babushkas, in the warming sun of the courtyard as I left. But by the time I reached the hotel, it was dusk, and Oman’s Lada was parked smugly in the yard behind. I remembered the siren voice of the schoolteacher, and felt a pang of irritated envy. Oman was seeing life!

  But I opened the door on a crestfallen back. ‘She never turned up,’ he said. ‘I suppose she was just joking.’ He saw my face and fell into rueful laughter. ‘Yes, there I was, running after her like a besotted boy.’

  But the indignity went on rankling. Why had she not come, he wondered? Did she never intend it? Perhaps something had delayed her. Or had she lost her nerve? ‘I’ve never had any trouble finding girlfriends in Tashkent. No, they’re not prostitutes. Some of them are married. We just meet in a dacha for a little holiday – half a day, perhaps, a day . . . .’ His lower lip jutted out like a child’s. ‘Why didn’t she come?’

  I couldn’t tell, of course. But one explanation did not occur to him, and I never mentioned it: that the young schoolmistress had glimpsed the stout and ageing Oman waiting there, and had walked past him without a sign.

  One morning I woke early after a night jolted by gunfire and Oman’s snoring and, in the thin light trickling through the window with the call to prayer, felt suddenly that we should be on the road. For a while now a mood of jaded restlessness had descended, and a sense of being trapped. The passes to our north were blocked by late snow, deflecting us towards the Afghan frontier before we circled back to Tashkent, and Oman too wanted to be gone: idleness provoked his demons.

  The moment we were on the move again, his ebullience returned. He smote the air and declared the Lada ready for anything. Its brake-discs had been mended and the red mud sluiced from every crack. So where would we go now?

  ‘To the grave of Enver Pasha,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know where it is.’

  ‘Nor do I. But we’ll find it!’

  So we started on a tortuous search, in the wake of a story seventy years old. Enver Pasha had risen from humble origins (his father a railway worker, his mother an undertaker’s drudge) to become a leading architect of the Young Turk revolution in 1908 and head of the triumvirate which ruled Turkey during the First World War. Proud, glamorous, ruthless, he was a master of conspiracy and an erratically ambitious general. No one could predict him. An avowed republican, he married an Ottoman princess. He was rumoured the finest swordsman in the empire. But by 1918 he was in flight from his country, and under sentence of death. Lenin welcomed him in Moscow as a revolutionary tool, and in 1921 despatched him to Central Asia, where the basmachi guerrillas had been tormenting the Bolsheviks for three years. Lenin seems to have hoped that the reputation of the charismatic Turk would entice rebels into the Communist fold.

  But Enver was dreaming something different: a jihad which would rouse the Turkic regions of Asia and weld them into a Pan-Turanian empire from Constantinople to Mongolia. The moment he reached Bukhara he escaped the city, went over to the basmachi, and proclaimed a full-scale holy war against the Russians. Messengers rode out to every guerrilla leader, urging their unity. He secured the support of the exiled emir of Bukhara, and arms and personnel from King Amanullah of Afghanistan. Thousands of recruits poured in. A shock of early victories, and the capture of Dushanbe, swept him to a brief glory. He declared himself ‘Supreme Commander of all the Armies of Islam’ and kinsman of the Caliph (through his wife), the legate of the Prophet on earth.

  But now the battle-tempered Bolshevik war-machine steamrollered east against him. The ill-armed and disunited basmachi could not halt it. One by one their strongholds were overrun, and they melted away, while Enver’s little army fell back on the Pamir foothills. His position was hopeless. He might have fled into Afghanistan, but flight was not his nature. Ten days before the end he wrote a farewell letter to his wife, saying that his men were being mercilessly pursued and could not adapt to defensive warfare. With it he sent a twig from an elm tree on which he had carved her name.

  On 4 August 1922, while the Bolsheviks closed in, he celebrated Bairam with a handful of his closest followers in the village of Abiderya. Soon afterwards, as his outposts opened fire on the advancing enemy, he leapt into the saddle, drew his sab
re and charged the Red machine-guns head on, followed by twenty-five companions. They drowned in a rain of bullets.

  The Russians did not know whom they had killed. One of the dead, spattered by seven bullet-holes but still dapper in a Turkic jacket and German field-boots, was carrying papers and a small Koran. These they sent to Tashkent for identification, and left the bodies where they had fallen. Two days later a passing mullah recognised the corpse of Enver Pasha. The news spread. The villagers of Abiderya streamed out to bring his body back, and thousands of mourners appeared like magic out of the hills. He was buried in a nameless grave under a walnut tree by the river. He was just forty. Even now, it is said, on the anniversary of his death, the descendants of his comrades-in-arms come from as far away as Turkey to pay homage at his grave.

  But confusion surrounded this story. Three years after his death an Austrian carpet-dealer, Gustav Krist, claimed to have spoken with the commander of the Red attacking force, who told him that Enver and his adjutant had escaped to a nearby spring, where Russian agents murdered them. Scouring my maps, I could find no trace of the old names. No Satalmis, where Enver wrote his last letter. No Abiderya, where he was interred.

  For two days Oman and I threaded roads across the bare hills. In Kurgan Tube, soon to be war-ravaged, we came upon a giant mosque half-built. Its work-force of Moslem faithful, who had given their labour free, had sensed the coming storm and trickled away in fear, leaving the architect alone there, boasting of its future size, while it disintegrated round him. He had never heard of Enver Pasha.

  The commander of the Red force had apparently told Krist that Enver was cornered near the town of Denau, and killed at the Aqsu spring nearby. We found the Denau fort circling its mound in a breached ring, and goats grazing in the town streets; but when we blundered up a track to the nearest Aqsu (the common Turkic word for ‘spring’) its inhabitants met our questions with baffled frowns.

  We took to badgering tea-houses along different roads. Every twenty miles or so we would stop off and question their habitués. Satalmis? Abiderya? Old men listened to us in puzzled confabulation, sitting comfortably in their tattered beards, and fingering scraps of bread. In the Tajik tea-houses our questions sometimes started up a gale of answers and counter-claims, which cancelled each other out. But in the Uzbek ones (for we were weaving between the two countries now) heads were scratched, moustaches tugged in sober rumination, and looks of honest vacancy appeared. Many claimed to know where Enver had fought. ‘But nobody knows where he was killed,’ they said. ‘Somewhere up there in the mountains . . . .’ Then tea-cups would be raised to pursed lips, brows would corrugate in surmise, and everybody’s gaze drift to the east.