As I remember it, the ship is a terrific edifice, as big as an oil tanker; but then I look at my photos, and it’s just a rusted conning tower no roomier than my London flat, stilted on an array of bulkheads corroded to a filigree. The ground around the hulk, if hulk was right, had been eroded and manured by the camels that used its shade, and, it seemed, treated by the farmers as a mausoleum, for the ground was scattered with bones and bundles of wool scarcely identifiable as lambs or camel calves save for a few triskeles of hoofed legs rooted to a blackened bundle of organs. Perhaps it was simply that here, where it was sheltered, the foxes and jackals brought their food. Twenty years ago a flotilla of a dozen ships was foundered on this low bank—these few ruins all that was left of that graveyard (that’s what Serik called it, “the ship graveyard”). The rest had been cut up with acetylene torches and sold to the Chinese for scrap. It was hard to visualise the vessel as it once had been, in its entirety; to fix the bridge I was looking at upon the vanished hull. It was natural to imagine some 1970s seafarer gripping the taffrail that still crowned the wheelhouse, facing off a spumey wind. I was not the first to picture the grounded ship’s onetime crew. Someone had spent a day or more here, but just as nobody in Zalanash knew the ship’s name, nor could they say when the graffiti had appeared; they knew for certain that it was not the work of locals, who had better things to do. It was a landmark, and distant from authority, so naturally we got out our aerosols and markers and defaced it. The bulkheads had been crewed by life-size Russian sailors painted in white emulsion, uniformly dejected-looking and skeletal, as if confined on this grounded vessel for eternity: this one sitting on a crate, his chin propped on a fist; this one slumped in a hammock; another, a vodka bottle grasped in one hand; a fourth, facing away, elbow crooked to suggest masturbation.
On the way back to the car I noticed on the cliff-top, two or three kilometres off, yet another cemetery, a handful of domed tombs whose view must once have been the coming and going of fishing boats and cargo carriers to Zalanash and Aralsk. There were those still living, said Serik when I got back to the car, who had visited the graves since childhood and had watched as, decade by decade, the water below first withdrew, then further withdrew, until the vessels in their obsolescence were abandoned, circumscribed by a shrinking pond and then, as the water vanished, set down in the dry sediment, canted there as if by an ebbed tide that had failed to come back. The slow change from deep water to shallower, to marsh, to puddled silt. And then, over a decade, to this new environment of sand, dust and sagebrush. Everything was someone’s resource. Serik saw the selling-off of the hulks as a new failure. He’d tried to persuade Aralsk’s mayor to preserve by statute those that remained, as a “monument”—where would tourists be taken otherwise? What would Aralsk’s schoolchildren be shown as proof that a sea truly had existed, when even its ghosts were expelled? “The mayor listened to me very carefully,” he said. And? “He was not interested.”
* * *
—
WITH COMMANDER BUTAKOV on his crossing of the Karakum Desert 140 years ago was an erstwhile member of the Third Company of the Russian army. Unlike the other soldiers he carried no rifle, let alone ship components; nor did he wear a uniform. In his diary he wrote: “When I was a child, as far back as I can remember, I showed no interest in soldiers, as is common with children. When I was growing up and grasping the rational order of things, I began to feel an innate irresistible dislike for Christ-loving soldiers.”
I’d seen his picture in Aralsk’s museum, his moustache resembling less a walrus’s whiskers than an eagle shot and mounted: this, said the label, was the Ukrainian poet and artist Taras Shevchenko.
Shevchenko had come to the attention of the Russian authorities in 1847 as a member of the secret Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which promoted the so-called Little Russian language, Ukrainian, and called for the unification of the Slavic nations and the end of serfdom (Shevchenko himself had been born a serf). Following the society’s denunciation, he was arrested and his pro-revolution writings came to light:
Oh wicked tsar, accursed!
Oh crafty, evil, grasping tsar!
…
Inhuman monster vile!
Nicholas I laughed at this depiction of him in Shevchenko’s poem “The Dream.” What he did not laugh at were the lines about the tsarina, Alexandra, with her famous tic:
Every time she steps, her head
Goes jiggling on her neck.
Is this the beauty rare they praise?
Poor thing, you are a wreck!
“I suppose he had reason not to be on terms with me,” he complained, “but what has she done to deserve this?” In a report urging Shevchenko’s exile, the tsar’s aid, Count Orlov, wrote: “Because of his insolence and rebellious spirit, which are boundless, he must be considered as one of the most important criminals.” (It was Orlov, head of the secret police, who would cause Fyodor Dostoevsky to be exiled to Semipalatinsk six years later.) Approving the sentence—recalling his nervy, maligned wife—Nicholas duly inscribed on the report: “Under the strictest surveillance, prohibited from writing or painting.” To the failure of his overseers to uphold that prohibition we owe some of the best descriptions we have of the Aral Sea region as it was before the Soviet era.
On the first day out of Orsk, in May 1848, before the desert proper was encountered, Shevchenko—more accustomed to the fertile plains of the Dnieper—swooned from heat exhaustion. On the second day, crossing terrain as flat and colourless “as if it had been covered with a white table-cloth,” he found himself surrendering “entirely to quiet sorrow and the observation of nature.” It was as evening neared that he saw clouds on the horizon. But not clouds: smoke. An “indescribable, magnificent picture of fire,” according to Shevchenko, the blaze had been kindled by herdsmen to encourage young forage for their sheep. In front of the line of flames appeared a long line of camels, Shevchenko wrote, a vision “which disappeared, like Oriental shadows in the reddish mist.” The scene reminded him of the smiting of Sodom and Gomorrah as depicted by the English painter John Martin.
Shevchenko made a watercolour sketch—one of his most famous works, and the first of some two hundred he would complete during the next eighteen months of exile. It shows the evening camp, scattered yurts, a train of carts and wheel-mounted skiffs; a gowned Kirghiz outlined before a glowing tent; a horseman crossing a shallow salt pond. The following night was spent at the ancient grave mound of the Kirghiz warrior Dustan. Again Shevchenko paused to make a drawing. Nearby, the party found a scene of butchery. This he does not draw:
Since time immemorial,
The desert has hidden from the people,
But we have found it:
We have built fortresses,
And soon there will be graves.
In the sand lay dozens of mutilated and headless corpses, wolf-torn and made leather by the sun, all that remained of a Russian patrol routed by the troops of the rebel khanate of Khiva, south of the Aral Sea. Leaving behind the grey bloodied sand, the party followed the fire to a “light-pink plain”—a dry salt lake whose dust, Shevchenko was warned, caused blindness, and indeed he did lose his sight, as the salt-talc billowed up under the horses’ hooves. Picture Shevchenko, then, far from his motherland, cowering under the sun of the “Kirghiz Sahara,” exhausted and fretful, the heat intensifying, his moustache turned white with salt-dust. Now blind.
When sight returned to him, the convoy had entered a dazzling new place, a plain of sand “marked with a white row of horses” and camels’ skeletons—further casualties of the expedition against Khiva. The way to desert hell, from Xuanzang’s Black Gobi to the migrant trails of Arizona, is verged with bones. Finally there appeared on the horizon “a faint blue line.”
The company regained its cheer after those hundreds of versts of blinding salt flats and sand strewn with the blackened organs of th
eir countrymen. The sea breeze was as salutary as a dose of oxygen to a mountaineer. They camped on the coast and bathed in Sarichaganaku Bay sixty kilometres north of the Syr Darya. The euphoria of cold water on parched skin. On 19 June, more than a month after setting out from Orsk, they reached the Russian fort at Raim.
The shore of the Syr Darya, as painted by Shevchenko in the days before their boats embarked, is a lush idyll, thicketed with reeds and bulrushes, the river itself placid and inviting. In the background of one painting can be seen the Nicolas already bobbing on the unruffled water, and the Konstantin in her cradle, awaiting masts. Six weeks after arriving at Raim the expedition set sail. Butakov appointed Shevchenko, whom he called “comrade and friend,” to the crew of the Konstantin as expedition artist. Apparently he had no qualms about ignoring the tsar’s orders that the exile be prevented from writing or drawing. The delicate sketches and watercolours that resulted are an exquisite visual diary of the Konstantin’s thirty-eight-day voyage: tender, doctorly attention to sparsity (every crack in every rock, every stem of every shrub), intimate regard for bleakness. Like a surveyor’s sketches of a planet assigned for colonisation.
* * *
—
FROM ZALANASH the desert crossing to Tastubek was marked only by a plait of puddled ruts. The plain was olive-brown, and smooth and sticky as the surface of a pudding. We were going to the next village, Tastubek, to stay with Serik’s friends, fishermen. Two kilometres from Zalanash the Land Cruiser lost traction; of course it did. I got out and braced myself in the mud and pushed; the vehicle slewed and jinked. I put my shoulder to it and rocked the car with each acceleration and soon we were moving again, thundering across the clay, and once again I had arrived at that place where the horizon had retreated so far it was evident that the world was only a ball. And not that big. This was the takyr, the poorly drained plains of clay that roll north and west from the Aral Sea’s former shores. As we entered a thin plot of saxaul Serik slowed and drove more circumspectly, skirting the puddles, riding the ridges, but finally bumping to a halt from which the car would not, no matter how he jerked the gas, be jolted. He killed the engine and slumped in his seat and lit a Kent, offering the packet to me, though he knew I didn’t smoke. When he had finished he looked at me, and I got out again, and planted my feet in the morass behind the car. I pushed and he accelerated, and we continued like this for ten minutes. The car moved a little, found some traction, then ceased to move, and I pushed again, pushed so hard that I would feel it for mornings to come, and the wheels as they spun only drove deeper into the mud. Serik turned off the engine; in flooded the silence.
From the boot I took a shovel and two short planks and sliced a trench in front of each back wheel and into each placed a plank, and when Serik accelerated again one of the boards split in two and the other was spat out between my shins and skittered twenty metres across the desert behind me. This went on for an hour and a half, until I was bruise-eyed with tiredness, and golemed to the waist in frigid mud. So much for sunblock. Inside the car Serik was exhausted, too, though perhaps I was more exhausted, and he was lighting another cigarette. It was almost dusk. We were twenty-five kilometres from Zalanash and sixty-five from Tastubek. On a distant island of rocks something glinted in the low sun; some Turkic monument or camel man’s hut. We were here for the night. We had half a bottle of vodka, eight (Serik thumbed through them) Kents, and for dinner a near-empty carton of Smints.
Serik went to sleep almost immediately—like he’d been hit by a sedative dart—though it was barely seven o’clock. I drank some of the vodka, then the rest of it. My boots were wet but it was better to keep them on: the foot wells were ankle-deep in mud. I pushed my seat back as far as it would go, and hunched up on one side using my rucksack as a pillow, cowling my hood low and wrapping my scarf around my face, and there I waited, alert as a great gerbil, while Serik snored gently and night settled upon the plain, settled like a silk scarf dropped from someone’s hand: no sunset afterglow, no celestial unveiling or astonishing moon, merely grey darkening to black. We’d turned the heater off to preserve the battery. A chill began to creep in as the engine ticked. I lay there beside this near-stranger and saw, as if from above, the vehicle stranded in its ruts amid that disc of sparse vegetation, surrounded in turn by the plain’s vastness, perhaps two hundred square kilometres.
I probably dozed off; at any rate I became aware that something had disturbed the blackness beyond the windscreen. There it was again, a pinprick starburst intense as a lighthouse. It was impossible to know how far off it was; but several kilometres, certainly. A solitary light—a motorbike, then, hazarding the journey from Tastubek to Zalanash. Passengers: the word Absalom had used in the Taklamakan.
It was then, as Serik was roused by my shifting, that the light that had maintained a steady level on the black windscreen appeared to rise, before powering first to the right then to the left and finally drifting back to its original level and resuming its journey towards us once more, if indeed it was coming towards us—only to repeat that strange dance, suddenly shooting heavenwards and flitting from side to side, before settling once again. Was it a jet? A helicopter? Some will-o’-the-wisp? I opened a window but only a gentle desert wind was audible. Serik turned the key and flashed the headlights. “They will help us.” The oncoming light continued but did not return our signal. He flashed the lights again, clicking them on and off. The light vanished.
He stared out at the blackness and flashed the lights again. “Strange,” he said finally, lying back in his seat with an executive air.
“What happened to them?”
“They think they will get stuck.”
So it was not the other vehicle that was the lighthouse.
Lights continued to appear intermittently throughout the night, but no sooner would we flash them than they would vanish.
At 6 a.m. I woke to a sky the colour of sacking. Serik started the engine and accelerated. The car rocked back and forth, cradled in its ruts. The idea was that the overnight cold would have hardened the mud enough to give purchase; but the wheels simply spun and spattered. I got out and pushed again. Futile; we knew it would be. Serik locked the Land Cruiser—you couldn’t be too careful, apparently—and we traced the tyres’ tracks from yesterday, back to Zalanash. No one else had been this way.
“Tits!” Serik said, as the twin monticules came into view five hours later. The track hardened, as if a skin had grown on the pudding of the plain, and the verges acquired a camel-grazed fuzz of green. A kilometre away a boy on a red dirtbike was bouncing across our path. As we reached the edge of the village a two-man helicopter reared skywards and thundered over us, heading towards Tastubek. Ten minutes later, to the barking of dogs, we were standing on the broad main street. Stepping across the mud, arms linked, was a party of little girls in puffy yellow dresses. They were old hands—the hems were spotless. They looked at the two fugitives from the mud and tightened their grip on one another. “Where is Tabin Alenov?” Serik demanded.
* * *
—
ALENOV HAD BEEN president of Zalanash’s fishing co-operative. He would be able to arrange for the Land Cruiser to be towed from the mud: what was needed was a GAZ or a tractor. Over the next hour, while we looked for him, Serik stopped three Russian jeeps full of young men and explained our difficulty to the driver, and each time the driver would smile and shake his head before winding up his window and speeding off. A man’s transport was his livelihood. I couldn’t blame them for being reluctant to take the risk. We’d been stupid to attempt the crossing when the plain was so wet, and this was a reasonable penalty, to be cold and hungry and tired for a day or two. And we still hadn’t found Mr. Alenov.
We’d learn that it was a bad day to have got stuck: the helicopter we’d seen was carrying the regional mayor (he went everywhere by helicopter), who’d been attending the opening of the village’s new kindergarten. Most of the adu
lts had already gone to a party at one of the village homes. Serik rang his friend in Tastubek; he wasn’t in. He left a message. They had grown up in Aralsk on the same street, and he had a jeep.
Mr. Alenov was at the party. We found the house and Serik went in while I waited at the wicket gate. A minibus pulled up and ten men in their early twenties got out—smart shoes, suit trousers, white shirts and cufflinks, all of them smoking, queuing up to shake the hand of the stranger as if he were a doorman, before they stepped through the gate. Village boys who’d moved to Aralsk for the factories, back for the afternoon boozing. After ten minutes Serik came out with a tall man in his fifties, black shirt and black tie and immaculate soft black leather shoes polished to brilliance, and with black hair and moustache. This was Mr. Alenov. Like all the men of the fishing villages he had the reach and grip of a prize-fighter. No problem: come, he’d find someone to tow us. We followed him away from the compound. The mud was scattered with camel bones. There was the odd hypodermic needle (livestock inoculation). Hay and firewood were stacked high in fenced compounds. A young camel, eyes tipped wide to the sky, galloped in circles, bucking as if to rid itself of some ghost rider. Mr. Alenov raised a fist as it approached and it shied off, thundering up the street towards the onetime seashore.
There was a tractor parked beside one of the camel pens but the owner was not to be found. A jeep passed by and stopped (you stopped for Mr. Alenov); but no, ruefully, not today, even for Mr. A. Another jeep, overshooting us, skidded to a halt on seeing who it was, and reversed, only to inform us that they could not help, either. Word seemed to have spread. It had barely risen above freezing last night, and I was weak from the cold, made inept by it. I might as well have been on a leash. Mr. Alenov took us to his home. At the threshold he looked at my caked trousers and said wait, returning with a pair of his massive tracksuit bottoms and sending me to the shed to change.
The Immeasurable World Page 20