The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  We tramped into the town to a bare restaurant, which served up only lagman. Maruya stared about with a curious, blank con-fusion. ‘I don’t know this town,’ he said. ‘I can’t understand what the Uzbeks say.’ I warmed to him, in faint surprise. It is the traveller’s illusion that everyone is assimilated except himself. But Maruya, trudging about with his gauche smile and his bag of garlic, was as much a stranger here as I was. My own alienness plunged him into mystified silences. His knees jittered under the table. ‘Where I come from,’ he said, ‘there’s a factory which the British built years ago, for cloth-weaving.’ He gazed at me with a renewed wonder. ‘Then the British left in the Revolution.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘Afterwards the famine came. The old people still speak of it, but there are hardly any old people left. Almost my whole village died of hunger then.’

  ‘How do you forgive that?’

  ‘It was very big. Three million of us died, you know.’ He gave a dulled, compensatory smile. He did not try to explain anything. This blackest estimate of three million was becoming truth all over the nation. ‘But that’s all over now. We’re not haters. Our people get on all right with the Russians, I’ve plenty of Russian friends.’ His voice lowered in old habit. ‘But they’ve ruined our young people. They drink and drink. We never did that before. And many are out of work.’

  ‘Do you intermarry?’

  ‘Our men take Russian wives. But not the other way about. I’ve never heard of that. Our people won’t do it.’

  I asked again: ‘How do you forgive it?’

  But he only said: ‘Everything’s hard with us, and cold.’

  Next day all the old Soviet Union arranged its business around the witching hour when a televised Mexican soap opera called Rich Men Also Weep sabotaged any other life. It happened once a week and was wending through 150 episodes. At four o’clock, all over Central Asia, workers and machinery glided to a hypnotised standstill. Turcoman farmers and Uzbek shopkeepers were alike caught up in the incandescent question: would Pedro marry Rosalia? Villages fell silent. City transport dwindled, and televisions in hotel lobbies attracted such crowds that I would imagine there’d been an accident. The characters in this melodrama inhabited a world of unreachable glamour, yet were household familiars and the objects of heated speculation. The very title Rich Men Also Weep suggested a subtle amendment to decades of other sympathies.

  It was at this quiet hour that I approached the sanctuary which broke in incongruous glory beyond the shabby suburbs of Turkestan. The shrine of Sheikh Ahmad Yassawi, founder of a once-powerful Sufi order, had been inaugurated by Tamerlane in 1397, but never quite completed. Circled by battlements which had flopped into ruin, it broke through the wasteland in a tawny mountain of walls and gateways. It was the Kazakhs’ holiest shrine. Pilgrimage here ranked second only to Mecca. In the Kruschev years it had been closed down and ringed with barbed wire, but now stood lavishly restored.

  I approached a forbidding entrance. Its arch was flanked by rounded, Babylonish towers over a hundred feet high. Close behind, its cupola surged up in a glow of turquoise, and beyond it the ribbed dome over the tomb-chamber – more private and exquisite — rested on a stalk of lapis blue.

  I might have been entering a fortress. It lay, after all, on the fringe of the steppe. Sufism here seemed to remember itself less as a mystical path than as a militant brotherhood which had carried the sword against the Mongols and czarist Russia. I stepped ant-like under the porch. Originally this whole façade must have been awaiting the glazed bricks that decorated the other walls. Then Tamerlane died. A later restoration faltered. Looking up, I saw the half-petrified beams of old scaffolding bristling high under the archway, and the towers still pocked with holes where the workmen had laid down their tools half a millennium before.

  I crossed from dazzling sunlight into dimness. I bought a ticket to the central prayer-hall. I was amazed. I had entered a museum. Beneath the dome, whitewashed to a deconsecrated spectre, the walls were lined by display cabinets showing old photographs and a few charts. In other rooms hung prayer-rugs and armour, and here and there the engraved tombstones of Kazakh khans and sultans were duly labelled, and displaced from their dead. In one recess a dusty pyramid of Marco Polo rams’ skulls – each weighing up to thirty-five pounds – lay heaped in a tumult of upcurled horns.

  I sat here until past the hour when Rich Men Also Weep would end, and watched people straggling past the cabinets: urban Kazakhs in jeans and summer frocks, a woman in a denim dress labelled ‘US Army’. But among them were others – farmers and some black-faced gypsies – who ignored the exhibits but touched their brows to the walls between, praying, and caressed the obliterating whitewash. I had the sensation of standing at a watershed, where sanctity was slipping into history; or perhaps history, instead, was resurrecting, and the cabinets would soon be gone and the muezzin calling. I could not be sure.

  Beneath the apex of the dome stood the prime exhibit: a twotonne water stoop hammered out of bronze, gold and zinc by Persian craftsmen, the gift of Tamerlane. The Russians had carried it off to the Hermitage in 1935 (dark legends accumulated about the premature deaths of the perpetrators: it was God’s will) and it had returned triumphantly in 1989, hauled through the main doors by tractor. Now a rumpus of old women tucked their admission tickets into their stockings and mounted the steps to embrace it, while a line of urbanites photographed one another below.

  I peered into the tomb chamber. It was surrounded by a ceramic frieze in opaline green, but was otherwise bare. A few pigeons perched like stuffed exhibits round the nephrite cenotaph. After a while a party of old Uzbeks arrived like a gust from the fields, swathed in azure turbans. They were listening to a female guide with ferocious attention, and sometimes mewed in astonishment. It was curious. These village elders were being taught by a dressy young woman in high heels. Only one man – a loud-voiced ancient with a stick – occasionally interrupted her, but she would cut him off with a confident ‘Zhokl’ – No! – and they all fell silent.

  Later, after the men had gone, I drifted into talk with her. I had thought her Russian – a plait of fair hair coiled down one shoulder – but no, she said proudly, she was pure Kazakh. ‘I come from a tribe of the Middle Horde, the Arghan. Lots of us are fair, and our eyes pale and rounder even than the Uzbeks’!’

  But her own eyes were black and sharp in an ivory face, where blushes came and went. Only her blonde hair and her long red dress, belted at the waist, had deluded me. She had the bud-like steppeland mouth, and her cheeks were high and broad. She said defensively: ‘We’ve been too much Russified. In Almaty many Kazakhs can’t even speak our language any more, just bad Russian.’ She hissed in contempt. ‘But it’ll all come back, our traditions.’

  ‘And the veil?’

  ‘No. Among us, women were always free.’ She looked so too, open and natural. Her smile exposed a pair of buck teeth, which were perversely attractive. ‘We Kazakhs never wore the veil, and never will. Our women were bards and warriors and even wrestled with our men.’ We were walking among the labelled tomb-stones now. ‘See how long-lived we were! We have good air and good soil. And our mares’ milk has every vitamin! I drink it all the time!’

  Among the tombstones of Kazakh khans and law-makers, she stopped at a block of grey-veined marble. It was eloquent with a shallow-carved inscription. Once, she said, it had covered the body of one of her ancestors, a sixteenth-century chief who had travelled as an envoy to St Petersburg. She touched the stone, as she would a charm. She was about to study Arabic and Turkish herself, she said, because she too planned to become a diplomat. Her tribe was the tribe of ambassadors, she boasted, they had always been intelligent. She already had an uncle in the fledgling foreign service at Almaty, and it was this man who had become her model and beacon, together with the one in the tomb.

  We circled into a prayer-hall where the Sufis had once chanted. It was filled by a crouching host of white-clad women. In the dom
e’s honeycombed acoustic, their prayers whined like gnats. Some wore plumed clasps like those of Moghul princes, which sprouted enigmatically from their scarved heads. One held a carrier-bag labelled ‘Christian Dior’.

  Had the girl ever seen Sufis here, I wondered?

  ‘They’re very few. But yes, I did once see a ceremony. About thirty of them came and prayed and chanted in the darkness. I never saw it again.’ She went on almost fiercely: ‘We can act without darkness now!’ She looked bright with determination. ‘It’s our future. The Russians and Tartars and the rest won’t count here in the end.’

  I looked at her keen face and firm figure. ‘No,’ I answered, I gave them little chance.

  For a day and a night my train curled north-east through grasslands towards Almaty, the Kazakh capital. Now and again the land moistened to meadows where egrets paced, or smoothed into giant fields. An enervating heat descended. The passengers fanned themselves uselessly and fell into torpor. One by one the card games and conversations died, and the picnics of yoghourt and cherries were abandoned. A noon hush set in. Opposite me two policemen sat in silence together. But the moment either left our cubicle the other would agitate: ‘How much do police earn in England? What’s their life like? Do they carry guns? How much . . .?’ until silenced by his companion’s return.

  Slowly, as we laboured east, the land heaved itself out of its sleep, tossing shallow ridges at the horizon. Sun and wind had stripped all life from it. We went through old Silk Road towns, levelled by Mongol invasion. They had revived into a polluted industrial life: the bungaloid cotton centre of Chimkent, the grimy chemical plants of Dzhamboul. Then evening came down with its gentleness over enormous wheat-fields, more like feats of nature than of men, and the westernmost ranges of the Tienshan reared from the skyline in cloudy snows and down-land green with woods.

  Rambling along the carriages to keep awake before night, I came upon Malik propped in the corridor and gazing on to the steppes. He was still young, but his thinning hair swept back from delicate, melancholy features. He was a visitor here like me, he said, and this displacement may have eased him into talk. His father had been Kazakh but his mother Russian, and there was no knowing which had bequeathed him the lemony skin which lent his face its epicene polish, or the sad brown eyes behind their spectacles.

  ‘Those mixed marriages can be hard,’ he said. ‘Our nations are too different. My Kazakh grandfather, for instance, became engaged to my grandmother by throwing her on to his horse and galloping off with her. That was the way then. And it’s not always so different now. My sister was kidnapped by her husband and driven away in a truck from Almaty to Bishkek. Then he telephoned to tell my father.’

  These customs died harder around marriage, I knew. Communist propaganda had fulminated against the traditional price paid to the bride’s family: it often far outstripped the dowry. Fifteen thousand roubles, I’d heard, was normal for an urban bride. ‘Was your father angry?’

  ‘Yes, furious. He even telephoned me, but I was a law student in Moscow at the time, and what could I do? Anyway, he couldn’t get his daughter back – she’d already “put on the scarf’, as we say. She’d become engaged. So they settled down to negotiate the bride-price.’ He was smiling a little cynically. I did not ask how his sister had been valued. ‘I think my father had forgotten his own youth. His mother slammed the door in his face when he arrived with a Russian fiancée, even though the Koran permits marriage to Christians. She couldn’t bear him marrying outside her people. She only opened the door to them a year later, when I was born. A grandson solves everything!’

  But he gazed out at the desert plain as if he had solved nothing. There was something fastidiously self-protective about him. The sun had impaled itself on the mountains, and gone.

  ‘So you’re a lawyer?’

  ‘I live in Moscow. I prefer it.’

  ‘I’ve heard it’s hell.’

  ‘It’s better than here.’

  ‘Why?’

  But he avoided direct questions. ‘I’m still interested in my people. I became quite passionate about Islam when I was at school, about Iran and Afghanistan, everything . . . . I wanted to study it as a career, perhaps to teach.’

  Sometimes his expression did not look natural to him. I kept wondering what he had been like before, as a youth. I said: ‘But you gave it up.’

  ‘I did service in Afghanistan, between 1984 and 1986.’ He looked suddenly abject. ‘I was an interpreter, liaising between the Soviet and Afghan airforces near Kabul. I’d have been jailed if I’d refused to go.’ His voice whispered above the train-wheels. ‘I dressed in Afghan army uniform, with no stripes. In some areas where I worked the mujahedin and the Afghan army occupied different parts of the same town, and simply agreed not to fight. So in that uniform I wasn’t fired on. I came and went among them, like a traitor . . . .’

  ‘You killed a man?’

  ‘I was responsible for men being killed.’ He looked away from me, through the smeared window, at his darkening home-land. ‘You could say I betrayed my own people, fellow-Moslems.’

  I said: ‘You’re half Russian.’

  But he only went on: ‘So I lost my love of that part of the world. It wasn’t to do with Afghanistan itself, but with my role there. It was like being soiled.’ He lifted his glasses fussily to wipe them, disclosing tiny, homesick eyes. ‘That is only why I say Moscow is better.’

  It is strange. You arrive in a city by night, and staring down from a hotel balcony on its light-glazed streets, looking more secret and seductive than they will by day, you wonder how you will ever decipher it. But within a morning the puzzle unravels with desanctifying speed. A few hours’ walk locates the main avenues, elicits a conversation or two, uncovers a mood, and you return to a hotel no longer swimming among mapless lights and possibilities, but anchored, grey and unlovely, on the corner of Gogol and Krasin streets.

  Yet from my balcony in Almaty there was no sign that I was in a city at all. I looked across parklands where the spires of a cathedral hoisted gold crosses against the mountains. Its people numbered over a million – more than half of them Russian – but its grid of streets, mounting southward to the Tienshan foothills, ran half-empty through hosts of oaks and poplars. Sometimes, so dense were these trees, I imagined I was walking along tarmac tracks through a forest. Behind them the chunky Russian offices and flat-blocks spread anonymous for mile after mile. The air blew up sharp and pure from the mountains. It was like a suburb to a heart that was missing.

  It was the Russians, of course, who had raised and nourished it. All its institutes and monuments were theirs, from the fountained boulevard of Gorky Street (now renamed Silk Road Street) to the soulless hotels and war memorials. But now the city belonged to nobody. Communism, Marx and Lenin streets might be renamed after spectral khans who had ruled the steppes a century or two ago, and ministry façades be veneered with pseudo-Turkic motifs; but the Kazakh culture had no true urban expression. Less than three generations ago virtually the whole nation was split into a haze of migratory villages. Its early rulers were lost, most of them, even to saga; and its modern heroes had been selected by Soviet propaganda – secular poets and thinkers, whose statues adorned the boulevards unloved. For decades the Kazakhs had been a minority in their own country. And now this alien city had floated into their hands. They were curiously unencumbered, even by Islam: a tabula rasa for the future to write upon.

  I made my way south-eastward through the city, and reached the gardens where parliament buildings loomed up in Stalin’s perverted classicism. It was very quiet. The scent of syringa sickened the still air. A few hoardings still read ‘Glory to the Soviet People!’, and nobody had chipped away the Red stars splashing the pseudo-Ionic capitals, nor the Lenin in the rose garden. These, after all, were the symbols by which the present leadership had climbed into place. It did not do to disturb them. In front of the presidential palace, which stood enormous against the mountains under its blue banner, a block of sto
ne commemorated those who had stood against what was warily inscribed ‘the dictatorship of the centre’. The stone was scattered with withered bouquets. Here, in December 1986, a demonstration had protested at Gorbachev’s replacement of the long-standing Kazakh First Secretary Kunaev by a native Russian. The uncontrolled riots and violent deaths that followed sent tremors all through Central Asia.

  Now Kazakhs and Russians moved together in the streets. The Mongoloid faces looked softened and pale. Their women walked in modest dresses. Their hair tumbled at their shoulders or was tied at the nape in gaudy clasps. Among them the Russians lumbered in a seedy ebb-tide of colonialism: tired civil servants, mini-skirted secretaries, pensioners with drink-dulled eyes. They inhabited streets which a newly liberated economy was hanging with advertisements.

  In Shaggie’s fast food restaurant (which a Korean entrepreneur had modelled on McDonald’s) the sons and daughters of the élite – Kazakh and Russian together – were busy being Western, lounging in T-shirts blazoned with US baseball team logos, their ears clamped in headphones, munching cheese-burgers. Beyond, a broken funicular had once scaled the hill where restaurants and a guesthouse had been a haunt of the privileged in Brezhnev’s time. Now stairways lurched up only to garish ruins, filled with splintered mosaics and refuse, and covered by graffiti.

  Towards evening I strayed into the opera house, where a shrunken audience was watching a dance drama based on Madam Butterfly. Selection or training had endowed the Kazakh ballerinas with the long, flexible backs and legs of their Russian companions, so that they pirouetted and bourréed through the turgid choreography in a seamless corps. In the auditorium’s dark, awash with confected Puccini music, I was seated beside a woman with the ballet-dancer’s heart-shaped face and look of extended youth. She had suffered a knee injury dancing, she said in the interval, and had become a teacher.