The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  In a cloud of frustration, as we were driving south of Denau towards the Afghan border, we stopped at the local military commission. ‘These fellows know everything,’ Oman said, and we marched brazenly in. A surprised Russian captain received us, grew interested, and telephoned an old comrade, who asserted that, yes, Enver Pasha was buried in the nearby village of Yurchi, with other basmachi in an unmarked grave.

  We drove there in high hopes. On the edge of a deserted football-pitch dotted with cattle, we came upon the tomb of the regional Bolshevik commander: a concrete mound under an iron star. It was simply inscribed: ‘Licharov 1889-1924’. He had been killed two years after Enver.

  Then we reached a hill overgrown by graves, with a tiny mosque below. Its ancient caretaker, lean and bright in a sky-blue gown and turban, ascended the cemetery before us on noiseless feet. A breeze sprang up and nudged white butterflies out of the scrub. A pair of rams’ horns, old companions of prestige and death, curled on a post in shamanistic sorcery. To the west the mountains shone like Christmas decorations. The village spread below, and a thin canal.

  We came to a pit on the lip of the hill. Thorn bushes were crowding into it. The old man stood on its brink. ‘I’m too young to remember that time,’ he said. ‘I was only seven. But the people who guarded the graveyard before me told me what happened here. After Enver Bey’s last battle the captured bosmachi were shot at the foot of the cliff below.’ We peered over the hill’s edge on to an empty track and a sprawling fig tree. ‘Then their bodies were thrown into this well. It was a hundred metres deep, so you can imagine how many of them! And they said that the body of Enver Bey was among them. That’s what they said.’

  Wind-blown thistles rasped against the headstones. ‘Do pilgrims ever come?’ I asked.

  ‘People come.’

  ‘On the anniversary of the battle?’

  He looked baffled. ‘I don’t know when the battle was.’

  I waded over the hill-crest through shin-high grass and cow-parsley droning with bees. Nothing fitted the official story. No river skirted the grave, and the only walnut tree shaded the mosque. The village, above all, had always been named Yurchi. Here was only the memory of an execution-ground. Enver Pasha, I now felt, had died farther east, in the Beljuan hills near Kulyab. But we could not go there. The region was sinking into war, swept by the killings which the Kulyab tribesmen would soon visit on the capital. As for the Yurchi mass grave, it only added another layer of enigma and confusion to the story.

  I asked the man: ‘There was never a river below?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, resurrecting a phantom doubt, ‘there was a river here twenty years ago, instead of the canal. It forked beside the graveyard then.’

  A call to prayer rose from the mosque below in a throaty wail, to which nobody answered. Then the only sound was again the scratching of the thistles against the stones.

  As we neared the Afghan frontier, the mountains to our west and south sank into haze, and desert hills glared in their place. The air shimmered in a 110°F stillness which blistered the fields. Gangs of women were breaking the soil with spade-headed mattocks, or culling the cotton in blackened hands. Just north of Termez, where the Russians had built their bridgehead into Afghanistan, we swung into a sordid scrubland crossed by pylons and wasted canals. Beside us the Amu Dariya moved through a sliver of green, and Afghanistan lay flat and yellow in mist beyond. We turned north where a crimson river wound between mud-flats. The slopes reddened into angry mounds and ridges, and the yurts and pens of goatherds appeared. But after an hour we crested a watershed, the river had gone and a clear stream was flowing with us where cornfields dribbled round champagne-coloured hills.

  Since leaving Dushanbe we had described a frustrated loop almost to Samarkand. The euphoria of being on the road again had evaporated days ago, and hours passed in silence. Our differences were suddenly exacerbated. Oman longed to speed home with the car radio yelling. For him only occasional bazaars punctuated the barren stretches in which his inexplicable companion contemplated scenery, talked with somebody useless, or wandered a ruin. He was pining after other companionship. Yet whenever we reached a hotel he regarded my desire for a separate room as wasteful and a little insulting, and I rarely achieved it. He did not want to be alone.

  As for me, a long-festering irritation had risen to the surface, and Oman was suffering for it. The remorseless cupidity which surrounded me day after day had brought on intolerance. In the town streets the eyes raking over me saw only an assemblage of material possibilities – a watch, a pen, a chance of dollars – and I began to long for any disinterested curiosity or pleasure. And now this misanthropy spread to Oman. I bridled at his habitual cheeseparing in restaurants, and the monotonous cataloguing of inflation. He could not resist economy. Although I had given him a gift worth several times the cost of our journey, he was subtly absent whenever a bill had to be paid. The sums were always paltry, but they left me resentful.

  In penitence now, belatedly, I record how costly life had become within two years: the price of a chicken had risen from four roubles to 300; a sheep from 300 to 5000; even a box of matches from one kopek to 1.30 roubles. Petrol had gone up 150 per cent in less than a year. Flour, cooking oil, butter and sugar were all rationed. Money was on everybody’s lips, except mine.

  Meanwhile, as Oman and I sipped lagman or munched samsa meat-balls in streamside tea-houses, our rambling talks, conducted in a clash of disorganised Russian, became sparser and more abstracted. And Oman’s impatience to be home had been exacerbated by the gradual failure of the car. For over 200 miles between Termez and Shakhrisabz he nursed an overheating engine, until we were topping up the radiator with spring water every quarter hour. This deepening setback fired him into a new round of invective against crime – he thought he had been cheated by mechanics – until he burst out in favour of Islamic law.

  ‘Yes, I think it would be good here!’ His voice had tensed to its self-hypnotised sing-song and his hands flew about the steering-wheel. ‘People don’t understand anything else! You in Europe say that it’s uncivilised, but civilisation is a process. It’s gradual.’ He lifted his levelled hand in a jagged procession of generations. ‘These people need to fear.’ He was almost shouting. ‘It’s the Russians who brought in this thieving and prostitution! I remember my father telling me that in his day nobody stole. Doors were left unlocked everywhere, even by jewellers! Then in the thirties thousands of Russians came down from Samara during the famine and ever since then Tashkent’s been full of robbery.’

  So it was all the Russians’ fault. I felt the legend of his nation’s purity growing before my eyes: the conviction that evil does not erupt from within, but is imposed from without. ‘Islamic law may be cruel,’ he said, ‘but it wasn’t that cruel. In the reign of the last emir of Bukhara, I’ve read, only eight or nine people were executed by being thrown from the Kalan minaret. I know it wasn’t very nice, but it wasn’t many.’ Yet his face remained foolishly merciful. Once or twice he swerved on the road to avoid killing sparrows. ‘If only there were a thousand honest, intelligent and energetic people in Uzbekistan – just one thousand out of twenty million! – we’d be all right. But where are they? Where?’

  As we ground to a halt in Shakhrisabz, where I had been happy two months before, he discovered that the engine was exuding water. ‘I think the cylinder block’s gone,’ he said. ‘It’s a big bit of trouble.’ He peered under the bonnet. ‘I’ll have to find a lorry to tow us back to Tashkent.’

  ‘But that’s over two hundred miles away.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I watched his face for violence, but none came. Petty expenses and boredom turned him stingy or sad, but this disaster seemed to release something in him, as if he needed it. A strange calm welled up. He grew carefree, even buoyant. When I asked him how much the repair would cost, he shrugged and puffed across his palm, dissipating a mountain of roubles into the air. ‘Don’t worry! It’s not your problem. To hell with it. Let�
�s eat!’

  He was his old self. He paid for a lavish supper and talked about his pantheon of writers: Maupassant, Jack London, Rousseau, James Hadley Chase He spoke of happier, commercial travels, before the days of his disgrace: how as a young man he had taken ten lorries packed with melons into Siberia, and made a killing. Once he had flown 250 tons of fruit and vegetables to the Kamchatka peninsula. There hot geysers created natural saunas, and many Russian women, whose husbands were away fishing or with the battle-fleet, languished uncontrollably But all this, he said with a nostalgic sigh, happened in the golden Rashidov years of corruption.

  We left the car in a yard labelled ‘Autorepair No. 35’, and strolled at sunset under the gates of Tamerlane’s palace, where Oman became lost in astonishment, and talked about the building’s splendour without once mentioning its cost, and traced the swoop of swallows round the broken arches. Swallows had nested in the lamp-brackets of his home in Tashkent, he said, and Sochibar had planned to expel them. ‘But I threatened to expel her first!’ He laughed like a boy. ‘And look how they built in those days! Six centuries ago! Our hotel will be gone in a few years, but this . . . .’ He paused and glanced up. ‘But I think it needs repairs.’

  I could not blame him for having repairs on his mind. ‘I prefer it unrestored.’

  ‘But imagine it completed! It would be magnificent! If I were a Rockefeller . . . .’

  The damage to the Lada turned out lighter than we had feared: only a worn-out gasket. Next morning Oman bullied five languid mechanics into replacing it, while I rambled irresponsibly along a nearby river, planning a last sortie into the Pamirs.

  But that evening I returned to our hotel to find that Oman had been arrested. Apparently he had come back drunk an hour before me, and had instinctively identified a KGB officer in the lobby, and insulted and tried to assault him. My heart sank. I had no idea what they would do with him. By old Soviet standards, his behaviour was insane, and the Uzbek KGB had not changed with independence.

  I tracked him down to a pavement police-post near the hotel. The door had been left momentarily ajar, and I glimpsed inside. It was like viewing an old, ugly lantern-slide. The cramped room was lit by a single bulb, which cast an orange glow on the circle of uniforms and plain clothes. Oman stood in the centre – small, stout, intransigent – while a sleek-faced man in an anonymous suit was questioning him from behind a desk. Above hung a photograph of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police. In Moscow his statue had been toppled by chanting crowds the year before. But here he presided undisturbed. I heard Oman’s voice rising with its impassioned hurt, and saw his arm starting to lift in fury or helplessness. Then the door slammed shut.

  I sat on a wall outside. Two or three other men were loitering in curiosity. ‘They’ll probably beat him up,’ one said. But Oman had not seemed afraid. Instead, drink had blinded him, and dropped him into a pit of anger and self-pity. I was afraid he might antagonise them further. In his sudden aloneness, engulfed by humiliation and memories, all the old, wronged bitterness would be welling up in him. Perhaps it would inhibit them, I thought, if they knew he was with a foreigner. It might be harder to treat him as they wished.

  I pushed open the door in assumed naivety. He was seated now. The plain-clothes officer was haranguing him. The others stood above him like clichés: square-built, expressionless, out-of-date. Dzerzhinsky glowered from the wall. Oman was my driver and friend, I said to his interrogator, and I would be responsible for him . . . . A second’s bewilderment passed. The officers’ eyes all turned on me. Oman’s head suddenly bowed. For a moment the cross-examiner looked baffled, then a big, pale-eyed officer loomed against me, pushed me back without a word, and closed the door softly in my face.

  I lingered outside for what seemed a long time. I could no longer hear the voices of either Oman or the police. The loiterers grew bored and drifted away. A few cars passed down the warm street, and a half moon rose. Then the door burst open and Oman emerged alone. His shoulders were hunched in fury. He was hopelessly drunk. He turned round and bellowed at the emerging officer. ‘I’m a man, I’m not a sheep! I’m – not – a — sheep!’ His fists shook in the air. It was faintly ludicrous. I pulled him away along the pavement, while the big, bland officer stood and watched. Oman turned and bawled: ‘I’m not afraid of you, sonny!’

  ‘Don’t you call me sonny,’ the man said wearily, as if this had been going on a long time.

  ‘Sonny! Swine!’ yelled Oman. ‘Swine! Sonny!’

  I flung an arm round his shoulders and propelled him away. ‘They called me a sheep!’ he cried. ‘They said, “You’re just a sheep, a Soviet sheep!’” He was close to tears. Soviet was a term of abuse now, it seemed. To be Soviet was to be a traitor. ‘Well, if it’s true, for the first time I say “Glory to the Soviet Union!’” His fists whirled in the air again. ‘Glory! Glory!’

  Eastward, where the Zerafshan river descends from the northwest ranges of the Pamir, a splintered road followed it under a mottled sky. At first it crossed empty flatlands. Then the mountains grew out of the horizon, lit by isolated sunbeams, and gathered along a valley corridor which led us unnoticeably up. Oman was overwhelmed by posthumous shame, and nothing I said could lift it. He drove in a sombre oblivion. We were climbing back into the westernmost spur of Tajikistan. As we neared the border a platoon of Uzbek soldiers stopped and searched us, but there was no other sign of a frontier.

  It was up this causeway that the Tajik ancestors, the Sogdians, had fled from Arab invaders in the eighth century. For more than fifteen hundred years they had lived along the Zerafshan in a loose-linked galaxy of oasis princedoms. These, with Bactria to the south, were the cradle of the Iranian race. But Turkic and Arab incursions at last confined them to the great cities, where their Tajik descendants survive, or drove them deep into the mountains, and the valley which we followed still seemed to echo their desolate migration.

  Near modern Penzhikent, one of their last towns stood in ruin above the river. Rain and wind had compacted its clay brick to yellow bones, so that houses, streets, gates, temples all traced themselves over the earth in a sleek cipher. The modest compass of its ramparts, half sucked back into the ground, exuded domestic peace. Its people had been craftsmen and Silk Road merchants, above all, and ingenious farmers. It was the Sogdians who gave wine to China, and apricots to the world.

  I left Oman brooding in the car, and entered the city. A sea of wild flowers overswept the battlements – purple heliotrope, pink vetch – and through the roofless passages and breached rooms spread a lake of poppies. I blundered between enigmatic doorways and culs-de-sac, then out along avenues to where the ruler’s citadel crested its mound in a cluster of chambers and towers. Even in ruin, a feel of private opulence survived. The mansions, many free-standing, had crashed in two storeys about their pillared reception-halls, but here and there an early iwan – the vaulted porch of a later Persia – showed in some façade a little grander than the rest.

  Among the debris of roof-beams, stairs and carbonised wooden statues cluttering the courts, archaeologists had uncovered fragments of fresco: pigments faded to damson, maroon and a backdrop of smoky blue. They portray a rich, ceremonious people at banqueting and war. In their idealised faces the features show delicate and small. An unearthly luxury pervades the nobles seated cross-legged as they feast. They converse unsmiling in a flutter of thin white hands. Their embroidered tunics are caught in at the waist, and beneath their tiaras the hair is immaculately trimmed, or falls in black sidelocks. Swords and daggers droop ornamentally across their laps. They carry wands of almond blossom. It is hard to know who is a god and who is a mortal. The warriors who gallop or saunter to battle on magenta chargers are the stuff of Persian epic. But the bangled beauty who plucks at her harp might be a human or a celestial. For the city, it seems, was home to many gods and heresies, infused by Buddhism and a host of Iranian deities and resurrection cults.

  The long, crestfallen faces of the Sogdians’ fr
escoes survive in their Tajik descendants. But as the Sogdians fled east, pushing into gorges now choked with their wrecked castles, their language and their blood became mixed with others’. The Sogdian tongue seems to have lain close to the Persian of the great Achaemenian kings, and to the sacred language of Zoroastrian scripture. But it was already dying out among the Zerafshan oasis peasantry a thousand years ago, and the ancient idiom of Persia – the language of Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, Xerxes – had vanished long before.

  But high in the Zerafshan watershed, I had heard, where Oman and I pursued our way in silence, a few villages of the secluded Yagnob valley still spoke a remote dialect of Sogdian. Their isolation had fossilised them. Squeezed between precipitous mountains, and cut off half the year by snows, they had lived in enforced wretchedness and purity. Somewhere, I hoped, just beneath the avalanche-blocked pass of Anzob, we would find the valley entrance. But Oman only sighed at this foolishness. Such a people no longer existed, he said.

  Around us bloomed orchards of pomegranates and the ancestral Sogdian apricot, until the Zerafshan dropped into a long abyss, and the villages found only precarious perches on mats of green beside it. We clanked over a bridge and up a jagged gorge, following the Fandariya tributary. The villages grew guttural Sogdian names. I imagined a half-lost elegance about their birdlike women, whose hair occasionally flamed from their dark heads in a shock of auburn. The farmers seated in the tea-houses seemed to mimic their frescoed ancestors; but their bowls brimmed with noodle soup instead of wine, and in their laps the gilded swords had perished to knobbled sticks.