The Lost Heart of Asia

by Colin Thubron

  It did not seem strange, for some reason, that the Western artifice of ballet should have engulfed a Kazakh girl two generations from nomadism. And her battle to go on stage was typical of any star-struck schoolgirl in the West.

  ‘My father was a war veteran, very strict. He hated the idea of my dancing even when I was little.’ She smacked down the air in a gesture of suppression. ‘He thought the dance flippant, and hoped I’d be a doctor. But by the age of six I was already secretly determined. And in the end he gave way.’ She smiled to herself with the memory of the child’s passion. ‘My husband didn’t understand the dance either. He thought it ridiculous, like my father did.’

  ‘He died?’

  ‘We parted. I didn’t receive children’ – she used the sad Russian expression, as if children came through the post – ‘and he could not bear that. I should have married a Russian.’

  Wasn’t it unusual, I asked, for Kazakh women to marry Russians?

  ‘Not here in Almaty. I know plenty. My sister is married to a Ukrainian, and happy. This is a town where we’re close. I’m glad of independence, I suppose, but I feel myself Soviet. Here in Almaty there are plenty of people like that – and we can’t turn back. Russia opened our eyes, you see. Russian music, Russian dance. We Kazakhs have nothing like that. Russia gave us so much, ah’ – sometimes she ended sentences with a little suffix of emotion. ‘Of course I’m Kazakh too. But when I hear Tchaikovsky, I become Russian in my heart’ – and like a Russian, she talked much about the heart. ‘How couldn’t I? I danced Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. I was the star. It’s in my veins now.’

  As the curtain went up on the second act, I realised how many of her dancers were Kazakh – more than half, she said – and suddenly they seemed astonishing to me, glissading and fish-diving out of their gypsy ancestry, in an art whose origins lay in the courts of Catherine de’ Medici and Louis XIV.

  ‘But our audiences have fallen,’ she said, as we emerged from the theatre into twilight. Our lives are so hard now, everything expensive.’

  I said doubtfully: ‘My ticket cost five roubles.’ That was three pence.

  ‘But still there are those who can’t afford it, and many out of work. And in winter, when it’s dark, people are afraid because of thugs. That’s new with us, but it’s here now, at night.’

  People were growing frightened of violent crime, I knew. As we walked through dusk down the long central avenue of Furmanov, scarcely a car passed. At sunset, the city went dead. I said: ‘But you’re used to cities.’

  ‘Yes, I was brought up in Moscow and Kiev.’ Her feet made an urban clopping beside mine, planted with the ballerina’s open instep. ‘But my father was born in a village, in the country near Dzhamboul, and I sometimes go back there. He’s buried out in the steppes, where the air is pure, and he loved it. When I go back, people play the dombra in our old house, and ask me in for tea, and talk. Yes, I feel the steppe in my heart too, but not like Tchaikovsky, ah It was different for my father. He even knew Arabic, was taught as a child by mullahs in the village. But my place is here.’

  She fell into melancholy silence. I feared for her a little. She seemed to have forfeited all her past to this engulfing Russia, and now it was ebbing away. As her career declined, she said, she was falling into impossible longings – to star again, to study modern dance, to travel to the West. ‘I want to go to Mexico especially. We have a wonderful serial on our television now, Rich Men Also Weep . . . .’

  In the city’s parklands, where the hum of traffic becomes lost in pine and acacia groves, stands a monument to twenty-eight soldiers of the Panfilov division, raised in Almaty, who repelled an armoured assault during the Battle for Moscow in 1941. At the end of the memorial avenue, where Kazakh urchins were kicking a football, I approached a sculptural triptych raging with outsize warriors wielding grenades and bayonets. It was one of those soulful hymns to glory and sorrow which scatter the battlefields of western Russia with a proud melancholy. I stared at it with disquiet. Far from the pain and chaos of real war, these inflated heroes – impossibly grim and muscled — breasted their plinths in a Socialist Realism which stopped reality dead and turned their action unimaginable.

  I lingered here while wedding parties came and went for their photographs. A Kazakh groom in a stick-up collar and scarlet bow-tie showed off his dark bride gleaming with amulets and a pleated silver dress. An embroidered gilet and velvet waistcoat covered her breast with crimson – the ancestral colour of fertility – while a steeple headdress reared from her temples like that of a medieval chatelaine.

  Alongside, a Russian wedding party posed: the bride fair in white, her sergeant groom stiff in green dress uniform. For a moment, as the camera flashed, they and their whole party, replete with medals and lariats, froze into a tableau of wooden prestige while the Kazakhs grinned and chattered. But the brides laid their bouquets of lilies and pink carnations at the same spot near the eternal flame. Then they went away in cars fluttering with the same ribbons, sporting identical dolls on the bonnet.

  The Kazakhs seemed doomed to mimic their conquerors. For days you might hunt here in vain for native artefacts. Even the city’s origins were Russian, founded in 1853 as the wood-built garrison-town of Verny. Squashed among stucco and concrete, a few timber survivors, carved with gables and filigreed eaves, evoked a homely, unceremonious place, like a frontier village. Even the gingerbread cathedral, tossing up spires and domes scaled like fantastical fish, inhabited its parkland with a florid innocence, as if a child were celebrating God. I imagined it built of brick or stone. But when I tapped its walls and pilasters, they gave out a thump of stuccoed wood.

  Nearby, under a towered belfry, stood Verny’s old officers’ club. But now it housed the heart of the culture its officers had conquered: a choice display of Kazakh musical instruments. These rough, wild attendants of wedding and funeral had come to rest in glass cabinets, handsomely displayed. They hung there like caged birds: the fish-shaped dombra lutes and three-stringed violas, many quite plain, played by long-dead masters. Many a kobiz viola had been scooped crudely out of logs, and cabinets trimmed with a barbarian cacophany of wooden horns, zithers, goatskin bagpipes and horse-hoof cymbals.

  Beneath some instruments you could touch a switch and start their recorded music. Under the wooden harps, shaped like antelope horns, trembled a noise like dripping rain, silvery and inconsolable. Then came the scratchy energy of the dombras, the throaty flutes and the meanderings of the kobiz whose mellow phrases made unexpected starts and ends. As I turned more switches, the noises seemed to intertwine sadder and sadder, until the little hall had filled up with a twanging and fluting at once uncannily clear – I could catch each husky uncertainty of the woodwind – yet emotionally remote, as if emanating from a steppeland which had vanished.

  Bards were the keepers of Kazakh culture. They sang heroic sagas yet gave voice to common feelings. Their music pervaded all events – the leaving and return to war or pasture – and conveyed an ancient morality. But their mantle had fallen on nobody. Music and literature paled under Soviet censorship, and I wondered – now that independence had dawned – what had become of the Kazakh drama, once the purveyor of Socialist Realism?

  But Mukhtar Auezov, patron saint of the Communist Kazakh theatre, still sat in bronze outside the playhouse entrance where one of his best-known works was showing that evening. The auditorium was packed and vibrant with the scuttling lisps and gutturals of Kazakh, and everyone seemed young. Only on stage an aged hero relived in dream sequence his rite of passage through the twentieth century. One by one, in a stilted drama of ideas, this protagonist fell foul of Islam (portrayed in flagrant contempt), czarist Russia and Stalinism, then strode into a flag-waving paen to the Marxist future. At one point the actors vaulted into athletic still-life, holding aloft a spotlit hammer and sickle, and the audience broke into spontaneous applause, not for Communism, the woman beside me said – ‘it’s another sort of people who do that’ – but for the theatri
cal beauty of the thing.

  But this evening the play ended differently. A contemporary writer had devised a final scene. As the last act reached its climax, the red banners of the old finale suddenly drooped and the Marxist hymns died away. Demonstrations broke out – recognisable to the audience as those of 1986 – in which the hero’s daughter was killed. Here he broke from his reverie (at the age, I reckoned, of 110), laughing at the tragic foolishness of history, and trailed away with a fallen banner, a little tired. But the banner read ‘The Kazakh earth for the Kazakh people’ and brought the audience to a storm of rhythmic clapping. They were cheering their own nation, I knew, as much as the actors or play – but without aggression or bitterness – then jumped to their feet and overlapped the stage with flowers.

  But as we tumbled out of the theatre, everyone beaming and chattering, I felt a curmudgeonly qualm. Auezov’s play had been corrected as remorselessly as all previous thought had been corrected. It was still a hostage. Only when it was allowed to return to its own thin truth, I supposed, would these people really be free.

  ‘But you’re seeing a renaissance!’ cried a law student as we jostled together at the exit. He was a southern Kazakh, vivid and earnest. His friend and fellow-student came from the north and was silent. ‘Before, this place was nearly empty! It just showed Soviet propaganda, not life at all.’ He gestured at the announcement of future programmes. ‘But now we’re finding ourselves again. There’s a play coming by Makataeb – you haven’t heard of him? He was virtually a dissident, died twelve years ago. His plays have only just begun to be shown . . . and there’s a play about a Kazakh hero who fought against the czars. It was banned before . . .’

  ‘Boring stuff,’ said the northerner.

  ‘I know we can’t go back,’ the southerner rushed on, ‘but we have to rebuild ourselves. What about our city? Do you like it? Is it eastern?’

  It was an odd, naïve question. He wanted it to be eastern. He was hot with rejection of European Russia. I said unkindly: ‘It’s playing with eastern motifs here and there. It’s modern.’

  But he was undeterred, filled by the passion to repossess his origins, as if they would tell him who he was. We were outside the theatre now, looking back at its façade, and could see the circus building opposite, like a deflated Buddhist dagoba, and a tatty wedding palace.

  ‘They were built by the same architect, as an ensemble!’ He talked as if it were the Centre Pompidou or the Lincoln Center. ‘This is our national architecture! I think it’s Kazakh. In the south we’ve kept the knowledge of Kazakh things. In the north, where he comes from’ – he pointed at his friend, who looked darker and coarser than he – ‘in the north, they’ve lost it. Even the language he speaks is poorer than mine.’ The friend grinned and said nothing. ‘In the north they’re swamped by Russians. But in the south we’re in the majority, and we’ve kept our epics and history alive. I know them, but he doesn’t.’ The friend continued grinning, like a comedian’s stooge. ‘He went to Russian school, but I went to Kazakh school.’

  ‘You get on all right with the Russians,’ I began – an old mystery had resurfaced – ‘but I’ve read about what happened in the thirties. Three million dead, people say . . . .’

  ‘But we’ve passed through that. The people who remember and suffered that are few now. You see how young people are!’ They were flowing down the steps all around us: girls confident in their modern prettiness, and groomed youths escorting them.

  The northerner suddenly said: ‘But we’ve been surrounded by Russian culture always. We’ve received a lot from it. The Baltic states reject it wholesale, and Uzbekistan falls back on its past, but we haven’t got a past like that. Almost everything we have comes from Russia.’

  ‘But we’ve been blinded by it!’ said the southerner – they were being tugged away by the crowd. ‘We were told we were part of this great movement forward, and all the time our own past was being buried.’

  ‘But our past isn’t enough . . . .’ began the northerner, then they were swept away in a slipstream of friends, and I was left standing by the statue of Auezov, avuncular and balding in his armchair.

  Back in my hotel – a tomb for tourists, where nothing worked – a group of languid prostitutes, mostly Russian, had bribed their way in off the streets. The concierge on my floor ushered one down the lift in resignation, almost with pity. ‘That’s the only way we can live now,’ she said. ‘Nobody on a salary can survive any more.’

  She looked as if she too had fallen on hard times. She was fifty, perhaps, but the lines dribbled down from her eyes and over her cheeks in a map of long distress. A floor-lady’s wages were pitiful. I asked: ‘How do you manage?’

  ‘I trade things from over the border with China. I buy sports shoes and jackets, and sell them here.’ I could not imagine this, she looked too delicate and enclosed. But the cross-frontier commerce was booming, I knew. Already a railway linked Almaty to Beijing, joining the China Sea to Istanbul – and soon to the Persian Gulf – and one day might unravel the whole of Central Asia. ‘That trade is all I’ve left to live on. My husband’s gone. One trip to the market and my weekly salary’s gone too. Another trip, and my son’s has gone. Another, and my daughter’s. We can’t buy clothes any more.’ She dashed a hand down her thin black dress. ‘All our clothes are old.’ She followed me to my room and stood uncertainly in the doorway. ‘My children are both married now, and happy. But we still all live together in a three-room flat. We’re like that here, collective, and poor. . . . .’

  At first I had thought her Russian but she laughed for the first time when I mentioned it. It was a sad sound. ‘I’m a western Kazakh, from the Sachs tribe. We’re paler there, with quite European faces and big eyes. We’re the original Kazakhs.’

  I looked doubtfully back at her. Perhaps this tribal claiming of fair skin and big eyes was a legacy of Russian colonialism. She said: ‘My friends are many of them Russian. But whether we’ll start to feel differently about one another now, I don’t know. It’s peculiar.’

  Yet she was a little too old deeply to care, I thought. She looked somehow spent. ‘Things will only change slowly,’ I said, not knowing.

  ‘When I saw you,’ she went on, ‘I thought you were one of our Soviet people, you seemed so open.’ Then she said artlessly: ‘I’m looking for a man now. I’d like a companion. Not for a family, but for the heart.’ She plucked at her breast. She must once have been rather beautiful, I thought. Her mouth and cheeks had slackened round fine bones, and an old pride stayed in her manner. ‘Would it be possible for us to meet, do you think, if you’re here longer? Or for me to come to England?’ Her voice had dropped to a sentimental contralto. ‘Sometimes when I see people, I think, I could be happy with him, he’s open and decent. I thought that when I saw you.’

  In the face of this vaulting trust I felt complex, not open or decent at all. Her warmth and directness, even the cloud of her hennaed hair, reminded me of Russian women. She knew nothing at all of England, or of me. She simply swam in the tide of her instincts; and when I told her of a woman in England, she accepted this with a smile as if a chance accident had blocked an open road.

  A few years ago the circus, like the ballet, was a showcase for Soviet culture. No city of the empire was complete without its circular theatre spinning with a galaxy of acrobats, trapeze artists, fire-eaters, conjurors, ventriloquists, bear-tamers, clowns and contortionists.

  That summer a Moscow troupe was visiting Almaty, and the spectators were undiminished. More than a thousand banked up to the theatre’s gallery, where a twelve-piece band sent up a boisterous overture. Children and adults gazed with the same wonder into a spangled, hyperactive world whose vivid physiques and matinée-idol grins exuded an aura of otherworldliness. They gasped at the sleek-haired conjuror whose fingers sprouted spoons, respectfully applauded the performing yak, set up rhythmic clapping at the dancers meshed in twenty-foot pythons, and maintained a pindrop silence while a man with a cowhide whip at twen
ty feet flicked a rose from a girl’s lips.

  High in the apex of the dome, where a cyclorama of stars circled through darkness, a team of trapeze artists in phosphorescent leotards dispersed and reunited. The music stilled to an unearthly trembling. Weight lost its meaning. They swam above us in a night ballet whose noiseless ease turned it to an exchange of ghosts, and grasped and released one another so effortlessly that had they failed, I imagined, the discarnate bodies would scarcely fall to earth.

  Yet already a feel of archaism intruded. Musical references to Swan Lake abounded, and the clowns’ jokes about perestroika seemed coined in another era. Towards the end a shambling brown bear was led into the ring’s centre to play the accordion. It looked drugged and old. It reeled on its podium. The accordion was strapped to its paws like handcuffs, so that a few melancholy notes rose involuntarily as it swayed. It was at once ridiculous and heart-rending. The audience cheered. They were simply seeing a collusive beast, I suppose, pretending to be human. The animal, I think, saw almost nothing. Its eyes were inscrutable beads. Maybe only I, fancifully, was seeing in its tottering bulk the Russian Bear on its last legs.

  In a park near the city’s centre, under an avenue of ash trees, I met a girl named Dilia who dreamed of becoming a conductor. Every other evening she sat with an orchestra following the score in rapt, near-hopeless ambition, and returned at day to her job of accompanying singers on the piano. In her still-young face the classic Kazakh features looked simplified and intense. Her eyes slanted fine and dark under sleek brows, and beneath them the delicate mouth and cheekbones might have been limned on to her face by a miniaturist seeking perfection. But a pair of thick spectacles seemed to repel intrusion, and the score of Brahms’ A German Requiem lay open across her knees on the bench.