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THE TRAIN FROM Almaty to the port town of Aralsk, 1,300 kilometres west, shadowed the Syr Darya River and took almost twenty-four hours. For most of the time I was sharing my compartment with a group of four—three teenage sisters and their grandmother, who was swaddled in layer upon layer of richly coloured velvet and wore a black lace headscarf. They were going to a funeral in the city of Kyzylorda; they seemed to be looking forward to it. Every few minutes they would hand me sweets or pastries or tiny cucumbers and, sitting in a line, watch me eat, occasionally exchanging smiling remarks with one another, as if pleased at a new dog’s obedience. Having stuffed my face obligingly, I fell asleep. I imagine I snored. Seldom had I met such attentive strangers. I woke when the train stopped at Kyzylorda, and said goodbye to my velveteen family and their bags full of pastries. They left seven small cucumbers for me lined up on the fold-down table below the window. The train continued east through Baikonur, which serves the Soviet-built cosmodrome nearby, from which men continue to be sent into space.
Two hundred kilometres from Aralsk, we moved from steppe to desert-steppe to semi-arid desert. There were no longer the distant spinneys of elms that had scattered the steppe west of Turkestan; the few railside villages, too, were bereft of trees, the roofs of the houses whitewashed against the sun; and where cattle and sheep had been the livestock until Kyzylorda, as the train neared the Aral Sea there were no sheep, and the cattle were outnumbered by camels. The cows, when the train passed, did not look up; but the camels—dark, double-humped Bactrians, shorter-legged than the dromedary—turned their heads as one, switching their tails eagerly. The train halted for a few minutes beside one sparse township. No human beings, but in a backyard white with dust was a black goat; and standing on a black road nearby, a white dog.
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IN 1552 Ivan the Terrible commissioned his subjects, if commissioned is the word, to “measure the terrain and make a drawing of the state”: the resulting description, not published until 1627, includes a discrete body of water named Sinee More: the Blue Sea. A hand-drawn map made during Peter I’s march to Persia in 1772 shows the sea as a circular blob labelled “Oralsky Lake that loses its waters, while the shores are filled with cane. The water is fresh, but in the middle of the lake the water is saline and bitter.” It was salty because the Aral Basin in which the sea sat is endorheic, a closed hydrological system like Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin or America’s Great Basin, having no outflow to external bodies of water. The Aral Sea’s waters, in other words, are regulated by evaporation alone. The first of its two feeder rivers finds its way three thousand kilometres from the Tienshan: known to Alexander the Great as the Jaxartes, today it is called the Syr Darya. The second river, born to the south, in the Pamirs of Tajikistan, is the Greeks’ famed Oxus, today’s Amu Darya.
If Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, blasting off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in 1961, had been able to look down on the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic diminishing beneath him, what would he have seen? Two hundred kilometres west of the launch pad, a body of water, a jagged oval in outline, measuring some five hundred kilometres from south coast to north, and set largely amidst sandy desert. Aral means “island,” and from above it would be obvious: of course, an island of water within a sea of desert.
From the sea’s northern shore, the Aral Karakum Desert extends northwards, gradually merging with the colder steppe of southern Siberia; between the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya is the Kyzylkum, the “Red Sands”; while south of the sea, extending into Uzbekistan, are the dunes of another “black” desert, the Karakum. Finally Gagarin might (let us allow him some downtime) observe the hairline of a railway, shadowing the Syr Darya across the Kyzylkum and terminating at the water’s north-eastern corner. A cluster of buildings. A port, ships coming and going.
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SNOW HAD FALLEN the day before—the moonlit steppe was aglow with it—but when we reached Aralsk at 3 a.m. only a rind survived in the gutters. After the ravishing heat of the train, the air, barely above freezing, was a shock. In the waiting-hall, lit by a single yellow light, was a mosaic celebrating Aralsk’s donation of fish to famine-struck Mother Russia in 1921. In front of a sea of blue and green, the monumental fishermen hauling nets and sealing barrels; the railwaymen and the proudly smiling boys; a solitary woman watching, hands on broad hips. All the dynamism of labour gladly given, and each gazing towards the local functionary, who is holding in outstretched arms a sheet of paper as big as The Times—a letter from Lenin, whose disembodied head, like a head on a coin, floats behind him. “The only hope of the starving of Kazan, Ufa, Samara and Astrakhan lies in the great proletariat solidarity of toiling men, like themselves, with toil-hardened hands,” he wrote on 7 October 1921. “So please set aside part of your catch for the old men and women bloated by starvation.” It is surprisingly importuning in tone, and not concise. The famine, which mainly affected the Volga and Ural regions, was caused partly by drought, but it was also a result of Lenin’s policy of prodrazvyorstka, the confiscation of grain from rural peasants at a fixed price and its allocation to the urban poor. As with most famines, it was as much a question of distribution as supply. After a year an estimated six million people were dead. The fishermen obliged with fourteen wagonloads of salted fish. (Twenty years later they would send thousands of cans of carp to the German front.)
Aralsk would be my base for the next week. As I looked out from the station forecourt, there was a sense of great darkness beyond the lit town. Mirrored in a puddle were three billboards in a line, lit by a streetlight, memorialising the president’s opening of the new freshwater works ten years earlier. Until then the people had made do with a pump in each street. The flag-waving women of the fish-processing factory; the president clasping his hands before banner-wielding crowds; and, the centrepiece, grave-faced, cyan-eyed President Nazarbayev cupping water from a gushing standpipe, and, Photoshopped behind him in such a way that the president seems to be emerging from the blue waters, the reborn Aral Sea. In preparation for Nazarbayev’s visit, apparently, two live carp to be tagged and released by the president were transported by chartered helicopter and Mercedes from the more plentiful waters of the Caspian.
The other passenger who’d disembarked, a waddling faun engulfed in furs, ducked into a Lada and was driven away, and I listened as the car descended into the town. A bank of traffic lights silently maintained its cycle. Across the forecourt was a white steel sculpture of a sailboat set down on an arch. After ten minutes a Land Cruiser pulled out of the night and blinked its lights. The driver, Serik, lived in the centre of Aralsk, near the marketplace, with his mother, his brothers and their wives, and his wife and two children. Over his day-clothes he wore hooded hunting overalls in a camouflage of crisscross rushes. On his phone he showed me a photo of his friend lifting the head of a stag by its antlers. He’d been employed by a Danish NGO that, among other things, promoted the fishing of flounder—a saltwater flatfish that had been introduced into the Aral Sea as salinity increased and freshwater species ceased to reproduce. The local fishermen, unaccustomed to bottom-feeders, required retraining and suitable nets; the townspeople needed to be convinced that such strange-looking creatures—a kind of pallid flatbread with both eyes on top—were edible, let alone palatable. They had never been entirely won over, he said. The Danish NGO was defunct, but Serik was now employed by its locally established successor, which co-ordinated World Bank grants to pay for infrastructure, equipment, legal aid and training in the region’s struggling fishing villages. There was a kind of wary avuncularity about him that I liked; he was hospitable, but he knew he owed me nothing beyond what I was paying for: driving, introductions, interpretation. Aralsk was not a healthy town, but he was glowing. He had a wide, straight, puppetlike mouth, soft skin and glossy, thick hair. If he had an occasional air of distraction it was because his mind was on his h
ome, his family, and his baby daughter. In the days ahead, each time we returned to the town, and then his street, and then his house, he invariably grew progressively more at ease and talkative. Home, it seemed, was the only place he ever really wanted to be.
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IN ARALSK there were no birds, not even gulls. On sunny days, children emerged, and young women arm in arm; but the town I remember is as male as a barracks. Even the dogs were all male. The ground they were sniffing had been dust in summer but was mud now, in early November, and would remain mud till May. Only the new streets around the station and the squares were asphalted; when rain fell, the town’s unsurfaced roads or those surfaced only with gravel (the roads people lived on) became oily wallows impassable to all but the GAZ utility trucks, giant Soviet six-wheelers, forty years old but still running faultlessly long after the Russians had left. The trick, for those in ordinary trucks, was to drive on the firm ground on either side of the road—until day by day the wallows broadened to subsume those strips and then the ones beyond them, until there was no solid ground between the buildings, only canals of mud, and an alternative way to your destination had to be found. The residential blocks, with their blue-fenced compounds, became islands. The Central Asian desert in November, the drylands: the constant towing and cleaning of your vehicle, the scraping of mud from your boots, the relief of returning to the dry car or home.
As we progressed through the town and the crouching mud villages over the coming days, Serik would every few seconds have to raise his hand or stop and wind down his window to greet someone, usually a friend of his late father’s. With me he was watchful, at least to start with; unforthcoming. He could sit out an hour in easy silence. But whomever we met in the streets or in shops or village homes greeted him with joy. He was from an old Aralsk family; his father, whose picture adorned the reception room in his home, had been well loved and the family still suffered from his loss. It was partly the pleasure Serik’s presence manifested in others that made me warm to him. Like all Kazakh men, he smoked at every hiatus and every encounter and was munificent with his Kents. Not to smoke in this world of smokers—it was a sign of infirmity or a failing, like childlessness or bachelorhood in this country of giant families. He dropped me at a guesthouse where silently in a near-dark dining room a woman served me tinned ham and a fried egg and hard bread with tea whose syrupy sweetness I associate, looking back, with her careful laying down of each piece of crockery before me, and the kindness of her smile. In the pebbled pane of a closed door the flicker of a TV played. I slept, and when I woke it was late morning. Watery light was flooding in through a gauze curtain.
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“THE CAPITALIST CLASS has always used the toiling man’s hunger to enslave him. They now want to make use of our famine to destroy the freedom we have won at the price of our blood…Dear comrades, fishermen and workers of the Aral Sea, I urge you to give with a generous hand!”
I found the copy of Lenin’s 1921 letter the following day in the museum, a corrugated-iron structure on the outskirts of the town. Inside, on a table by the door, was a relief map showing the Aral Sea as it was when the museum was founded in 1988. It was not intended for the purpose of comparison—no “now” map stood alongside this “then”—it was just that it had not been updated since the museum was opened. And yet the blue had been refreshed. Indeed the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which crosses the sea horizontally, had carelessly been painted over, and was visible only where it crossed islands, and as a pale line below the surface. You wouldn’t know you were in an ecological disaster zone. It was just another Kazakh provincial museum with its odious taxidermy that billowed dust when patted, its sharks’ teeth and ammonites and ill-lit dioramas, its corner of reconstructed yurt, and its hall dedicated to Kazakh independence.
The museum was low-ceilinged, windowless and subaqueously murky; from a far room desultory conversation was audible. A young woman appeared with a blonde girl of seven or eight. In silence the woman went ahead from room to room, switching on the lights; as I moved to the next room, guided by the light, her daughter would reach up and switch off the light in the room I was leaving, skipping past me to catch up with her mother. Beyond a kapok-leaking badger that surely had never contained a beating heart, and a fish cart once owned by a Hero of Socialist Labour, was the section of the museum concerning the recent history of the Aral Sea. Here was the before-and-after, painted by schoolchildren (perhaps by the light-switch girl), even if the sea’s current shore had receded further still since the two paintings were done. The boundary of the sea in each was identical, but one was coloured in blue to the edges, while the other was yellow with only a blue disc floating in its centre; this, the yellow, was the new desert. They called it Aralkum, kum in Turkic meaning “sands.”
On the floor of the museum, lining the skirting, were a dozen demijohns and cuboid glass vats. Drum-skinned across their mouths were squares of greaseproof paper, like seals on jars of jam. The vessels were backlit by floor-level spotlights, so that the gone-off formaldehyde within glowed medicinal yellow, revealing each one’s horrible occupant: specimens of the former fish of the Aral Sea. Aral barbel, bastard sturgeon, shovel-nosed sturgeon, bream, roach, carp, snakehead, pike perch, and a hulking whiskered catfish, its tail dislocated to fit, like a corpse wedged into a too-small coffin. Each fish hung nose-down in its bottle, gazing at the floor with a semblance of alarm. On the lid of one jar, containing a flaking sturgeon, was a label: “Currently efforts are being made to reintroduce this species.” It didn’t seem hopeful. Before the 1960s the Aral Sea supplied fifty thousand tonnes of fish per year. By 1975 the figure was three thousand. Commercial fishing ceased in 1980 and had only been revived, tentatively, in the past ten years. On the corridor wall was a line of blanched squares where paintings by local artists had hung; most of them were on loan to the museum in Kyzylorda. Only one was left—overlooked or rejected—a bright gouache of a busy harbour: cranes discharging ships, trawlers at anchor, a timber landing-stage, and—pretty detail—sculling in the calm ultramarine water, a young couple in a rowboat, the man in a white open-necked shirt, the woman facing him holding a pale-blue parasol. It might be any municipal boating lake. The sun is out—the tender sun of May. It had been painted recently: the harbour of Aralsk envisaged as it once had been, and yet there was no regret in the depiction, no darkness daubed on the horizon: this is how things were; now they are different.
The girl turned off the last of the lights, and walked me to the door. She stood and watched me with her head tipped to one side, then seeing Serik waiting said in English, “Good afternoon!” And Serik, whom she knew, replied in kind, and she ran back into the museum hollering with delight. Whenever we were outdoors Serik wore his hunting overalls. I could imagine him stalking prey—his quietness seemed born of calculation rather than subdual. His movements, too, had something of the hunter about them. As we walked, he had a tendency to watch the ground immediately ahead of him, as one might to avoid stepping on a twig whose snapping would spook the deer or boar. It was sensible to watch your feet, of course, in a place where the pavements and streets were rutted and potholed.
At the harbour, five minutes’ drive from the museum, two trawlers of the Aral Fish Industries fleet, the Toktarev and the Alimbetov, had been repainted and set in dockside cradles, at once monuments and, one of them, a viewing platform. Serik waited while I clambered up an iron companionway and stood on the booming drum of its wheelhouse roof and looked out. Until the railway between Orenburg and Tashkent was built and the station opened in 1905, Aralsk was only a fishing village around a few wells. With the railway came men; fishing co-operatives were established and factories founded. From Ushsai and Muynak on the Aral Sea’s southern coast, five hundred kilometres away, the Central Asian State Shipping Company transported fish, canned goods, watermelons and cotton, while in turn timber, grain and fertiliser were s
hipped back from Aralsk. A sea, after all, is more than a larder or a well; it is also a road.
A few of the wooden and concrete wharf buildings—the town’s own cannery, the refrigeration plant, warehouses—were still intact and two giant cargo cranes, the cranes from the painting, languished with their arms swung out over the basin. But the cranes were rusted and immobile. Aralsk’s harbour had been accessed from the sea by a broad channel. Where its water had once been deep enough for ships of five metres’ draught, now there was only a gaping dry recess scattered with retarded saxaul and an infinity of dumped waste. It was becoming a landfill. Lining the far bank were more derelict warehouses; others in the midst of being knocked down. To the south the empty channel, broad as a glaciated valley, receded to the horizon. You stood here for a while, you had your photo taken; for this (this absence) was the town’s main attraction. Its emptiness was as starkly alarming as a socket deprived of its eye. “Some people in Aralsk, even adults, have never seen the sea,” Serik had told me.
You could say it started as long ago as 1882, with the words of A. I. Voeikov, the esteemed Russian geographer and climatologist: “The existence of the Aral Sea within its present limits is evidence of our backwardness and our inability to make use of such amounts of flowing water and fertile silt which the Amu and Syr rivers carry.” The Aral Sea was “a mistake of nature.” I thought of vanished Lop Nor and all the cotton-drained lakes of Xinjiang. Where Chinese Confucianism had advocated tianrenyii, “harmony between the heavens and mankind,” the Maoist apothegm had been ren ding sheng tian, “man must conquer nature.” It was a Chinese adaptation of another slogan, Lenin’s “We cannot expect charity from nature, we must tear it from her!” How did Yuri Gagarin describe his trip into space, on returning to Baikonur? “An unprecedented duel with nature.”
The Immeasurable World Page 18