The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  `Aguten Tog.'

  They should have said: `Einenguten Tag'. I glanced at the teacher, and had to take a hard bite at my tongue. He was a gentle, young Byelo-Russian Jew from Minsk. The future intelligentsia of the oasis Merv, near the cradle of the Aryan race, thought that they were learning German--but they were in fact learning Yiddish.

  Next, we assisted at the History lesson of a lower form, and witnessed the following dialogue (in Russian) between teacher and pupil, which I quote from Red Days:

  The teacher is a girl of about fifteen, who comes from the cotton district and who, five years ago, was herself still illiterate. The child is a littlegirl from the same region. It has huge doll's eyes in its little Tartar face, and a dripping nose, in spite of it being constantly rubbed with its shirt.

  Teacher (adjusting her scarf in honour of the Heroic Brigade): Well, children, what occasion are we soon going to celebrate?

  Child (pulls tip of index finger out of nose, holds it up in the air).

  Teacher: Well, Ashar, you know what it is?

  Ashar: We are going to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Fifth Year Plan.

  Teacher (mortified): No, Ashar, you mean the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution.

  Ashar: Yes, the Revolution.

  Teacher: So--when did the Revolution happen?

  Ashar: A long, long time ago.

  Teacher: Well, fifteen years ago. Because we are celebrating its fifteenth

  anniversary.

  Ashar: The Revolution was fifteen years ago.

  Teacher: So--who is older? You or the Revolution?

  Ashar (thinks hard): The Revolution.

  Teacher (beaming): And what was before the Revolution?

  Ashar (promptly): The burchuys.

  Teacher: So--the bourgeois lorded over us, and the workers and the peasants

  and the shepherds were very poor--yes?

  Ashar (nods).

  Visitor (butting in): What is a burchuy?

  Ashar: You are a burchuy.

  Visitor (nettled): Why am I a burchuy?

  Ashar (picks her nose, laughs).

  Teacher (goes red as a sunset over the steppes).

  Voice from the rear: I know what a burchuy is.

  Teacher (doubtfully): Well?

  Voice: A burchuy is a Kaiptalist.

  Visitor (stubbornly): And what is a Capitalist?

  Ashar: A Kaiptalist was a Bey ...

  Voice (with gathering speed): The Kaiptqlist Beys had swollen bellies because they were eating everything and the workers were all hungry. Then there were Mullahs. The Mullahs invented Allah. In the Kaiptalist countries which have no Revolution there still are Kaiptalist Beys and Mullahs.

  Teacher (recovering): So--who owned the factories before the Revolution? Chorus: The bur-chuys.

  Teacher: And who owned the land?

  Chorus: The bur-chuys.

  Teacher: And who owned the canals and the herds?

  Chorus: The bur-chuys.

  Teacher: And to whom does everything belong now?

  Chorus: To the Soy-salist Fa-therland.

  The most out-of-the-world place to which I have ever been is a village near the Soviet-Afghan frontier, called Permetyab. It is inhabited by Afghani and Baluchi tribesmen, compared to whom the Turkomans are a nation of sophisticated intellectuals. I have never seen Permetyab mentioned on any map. It lies some fifty miles south-east of Merv, across the desert.

  We went there in the old Ford, equipped with three spare tyres, spades, and a goodly provision of melons and lepioshkas. There was no recognisable road or track; the driver had to navigate by doubtful landmarks, guided by the District-Kultprop (Party official responsible for disseminating culture and propaganda). The Kultprop was an energetic Russian Orientalist who spoke fluent Turkoman and knew every kibitka of his district. We got repeatedly stuck in axle-deep sand, and had one tyre after another punctured by the thorny thistles in which camels delight. (Camel tongue is considered a local delicatesse, but it requires strong teeth to bite through the varicose veins between the furuncular taste-buds.)

  Then we came to a canal, some six or seven feet wide, with no bridge anywhere in sight. But at a distance of about half a mile we saw a kibitka. An old Turkoman sat in it, smoking. Next to it stood a second, half-finished kibitka. Directed by the Kultprop, we all fell to dismantling it. We pulled out the tent-poles, carried them to the canal, threw them across the watercourse and dug the ends into the two banks. Then we took the mats of artfully­woven reeds, which decorated the inner walls and floor of the kibitka, and laid them over the poles. Then we solidified the structure with clay, put some more reeds on top, tested the resistance of our bridge, and it fell into the canal. We started again, and at the second attempt, got across. The old Turkoman had watched the destruction of the kibitka, which was perhaps his son's, without a word or a gesture.

  We came to a second, narrower canal which we filled up with sand, and when we got across, we dug it open again. We passed an old caravanserai half in ruins, which now served as a cotton storage depot. Camels were unloading huge bales of raw cotton in the courtyard. The walls of the building were covered with the familiar posters: portraits of the leaders, slogans ,against religion, against illiteracy, against imperialist wars, and drawings illustrating how to fight malaria, trachoma and syphilis. The Russian director at the depot confided to us that it had surpassed its Plan by ten per cent.

  In the end, we reached Permetyab. It was a scattered village of black tents interspersed with clay huts. At first view there seemed to be no life in it, except for a few slinking pariah dogs who circled the car from a distance, like hyenas. Nobody came to greet us as we scrambled out of the car. Led by the Kultprop, we all flocked to one of the tents. At the entrance of it squatted a huge, savage-looking, bearded figure in a striped caftan, with a large dirty turban on his head. He was smoking a hookah made out of a hollowed marrow. In the dim interior of the tent we could see the shape of a woman clad in rags, her face averted, arms and ankles hung with brass bangles. On the floor crawled two dirty children with open sores on their faces. Another hollow marrow served as a water jug, and a mat as furniture. The other tents were exactly alike. At each tent the head of the family greeted us with a few murmured words, then went on smoking. The Auldren stared at us in fear, and the women turned their heads away.

  At last the Kultprop found the man he was looking for: a youngish man, without beard, who looked a little less fierce than the rest. He was the translator, the only man in the village who spoke some Turkoman (nobody knew any Russian). With his help, a kind of conversation got under way: he translated into Turkoman, then Kikiloff or the Kultprop translated into Russian and I translated into English for Hughes. When the villagers saw that a palaver was on, they came sauntering over one by one, until we were surrounded by a dense ring of staring men. To break the ice, the Kultprop told Hughes and me to show them our watches and fountain pens. These objects wandered from hand to hand, and were duly admired. Then Hughes's cigarette case, Kikiloff's Trade Union badge, and even my leather belt made the rounds. Not even among the Arab Bedouins had I seen such ignorance, dirt and primitiveness. Most of the men had sores and eye diseases; it seemed as if nearly half of them were one-eyed. The children were little wild animals. Some were sitting in the dust, de-lousing each other like monkeys.

  Owing to the hazards of chain-translation, and the oriental habit of answering leading questions with enthusiastic affirmations, it was practically impossible to extract any concrete information from them. As far as we could make out, the villagers all came from Afghanistan, Baluchistan and Persia. Some of the families seemed to have immigrated as long as two or three generations ago. But `immigrated' is a misleading expression: they were wandering nomads who had simply drifted with their cattle and tents across the invisible frontier-line somewhere between the Caspian and the Amu Darya, without realising that they had passed from the sovereign rule of some Habibullah to that of some Nicholas or Alexande
r. Then, at some undefinable date, they had all been rounded up and concentrated in this village, a kind of desert ghetto. Did they like it here? They liked it very much, thank God. Did the Soviet Government treat them well? It treated them very well, thank God. It built them beautiful houses, thank God, and it sent all the children to school, thank God, and it provided modem hygiene. At which stage of the translation-process all these blessings had slipped in, we could not tell. The words had no relation whatever to the visible facts before us, but this disturbed nobody. This was not a Potemkin village. It was something more curious. Hughes and Kikiloff and the Kultprop and I were the victims of a kind of verbal self-hypnosis. It was a triumph of words over reality. Had they fulfilled their Plan? Thanks to their unceasing labours and the heroic efforts of their Shock-Brigaders, and the wise guidance of the Soviet Government, they had over-fulfilled their Production Plan by twenty-two and a half per cent. What exactly were they producing? Oh, this and that. Cotton? Yes, much cotton was grown in the neighbourhood. Where? Some miles away, here and there. But what did the village itself produce? Many things, for the benefit of the villagers and of the Government. And so on.

  We learnt that there were really two Permetyabs: a village and a kolkhoz. This was the village, not yet collectivised. The kolkhoz was a mile or so further on. We got back into the car and drove on to the kolkhoz. Some of the savage turbaned figures waved us goodbye; then they were swallowed up by the dust. The Kultprop asked us how we had liked the village. We said we had liked it very much, thank God.

  At first sight, the kolkhoz looked only slightly different from the village. There were a few more mud houses than tents (the house, however primitive, is the symbol of progress from the nomadic to a settled agricultural existence; hence Soviet propaganda in Asia leads an intensive campaign in favour of houses and against tents). Some of the younger women did not run away at the sight of strangers. Some of the men had exchanged the turban for the cloth-cap, and some of them no longer wore beards. There was a field with a few people actually working in it, and there was even a tractor to be seen, though in a broken-down state. Compared to the dreamlike stupor of the village, the kolkhoz gave the impression of a certain will to activity. We learnt that all the inhabitants of the kolkhoz were new immigrants from the neighbouring countries who, unlike the villagers, had come after the Revolution.

  We gathered in the only brick building of the kolkhoz, which served as a school, medical centre and administrative office for the community of a hundred and fifty souls. There was a Russian doctor--again a woman, as in Aitakov, and of the same admirably tough, determined type. She told us matter-of-factly about her `difficulties'. Syphilis was endemic among the tribesmen. Very little could be done about it. She concentrated as far as possible on the eye diseases. When she had arrived two years ago, nine out of ten children had suffered from trachoma or conjunctivitis. Now it was a little better; though infant mortality was still around fifty per cent. The usual practice was for the mother to bite off the new-born's umbilical cord with her teeth. Only a few of the `politically conscious elements' were beginning to call her in as a midwife.... The dead were washed in hot water (the one and only hot bath a person ever had) and buried upright, without coffin, in an earth-shaft. Were the men embarrassed to come to a woman for treatment? No. That kind of shame was unknown to them.

  There were some twenty of us squatting on the rugs. We distributed the melons and lepioshkas we had brought, and also some tobacco. There was an atmosphere of genuine friendliness. Again our watches and fountain pens were admired and passed around. The members of the kolkhoz were as primitive as the inhabitants of the village; they came from the same tribes. But there was an unmistakable difference in the selection of the human material. The villagers were the driftwood of the deserts of Asia, who had at one time drifted across the frontier and did not care where they were or what befell them. These men in the kolkhoz had come recently, of their own , choice. Through this conscious act of will they had shaken off the fetters of Oriental fatalism. They were true revolutionaries, in the original Promethean sense of the word.

  After a while, a tall old man was led into the room. Everybody seemed to have been waiting for him. He looked part savage, part Biblical patriarch. He was led to a place of honour and squatted down, and only then did we realise that he was blind. He was, apparently, the bard, storyteller and philosopher of the community. Even the Kultprop seemed to be impressed by him. He prodded him at first with a few questions asked in a respectfully hushed manner; then the old man went on talking on his own, in a hoarse, guttural voice, while the translator from the village repeated every phrase in whispered Turkoman and Kikiloff followed in whispered Russian. My notes, of which an extract follows, were based on this third-hand information. The old man's words had no doubt been embellished--or banalised--in the process; but I nevertheless had the feeling that I got the gist of what he said.

  ... What I think of the tractor? I was blind many suns before it arrived. But I have seen it with my hands. It is a beautiful and wise machine of the size of a young camel.

  ... Yes: I know of other machines. Sometimes a carriage comes here. It collects the bones of sheep and camel from the carcass heap. The carriage takes the bones to the Government. They put the bones into a machine. The machine makes paper out of them for printing the Koran. That machine must be even wiser and larger than a full-grown camel.

  ... When we came here? That is several suns back. Ali could walk but he had not yet learnt to run. We came at the time when the Emir Amanullah, the son of Emir Habibullah, fled the country and there was war among the Pashtu. After that came the famine, and at that time we were told that in Russia Lenin was chasing away the Beys, and giving the herds to the shepherds to own, and the lands to the poor; and that the land ploughed itself with machines.

  At, first we would not believe this. But each time the smugglers came, or merchants, or a caravan, they told this same story. They also told us that there were many Pashtu and Farsi and Baluchi living here in a village called Permetyab, and that they were in good health and had plenty of land and water and cattle. But we were suffering from the famine and the children died of hunger in their mothers' wombs and were dead before they were born.

  Then many spoke up and said: we must go over there into the country with this new religion. And others spoke and said: Allah will punish you in his anger as he punishes all who go after new things. And many spoke and answered: Allah is already angry enough as the famine shows, and he can't get more angry anyway--so let us go over into the land where the herds belong to the shepherds and the earth is for the poor. There were many who talked this way, but few did come in the end. Forgreat is the laziness of men, comrades, until they have learnt the ways of Socialism.

  ... Do we all come from the same place? No, we do not all come from the same place. We come from many places and many tribes, and one did not know of the other who was coming. Some are from the Chilchigi and some from the Afridi and some are from other tribes. We did not know of each other, but of the new religion and of the chasing away of the Beys and the Mullahs everybody knew in Afghanistan. .`'Some say it is a good thing, some say it is a bad thing, but they all speak about it although it.is forbidden.

  ... No, I could not read, even when I had my eyes. But I took much thought when I heard about this new religion--for I had much time to think during the famine, although it is forbidden to think about these sacred matters. And now I will tell you the result of my thinking:

  A fertile womb is better than the loveliest lips.

  A well in the desert is better than a cloud over the desert.

  A religion that helps is better than a religion that promises.

  And this secret which I fonnd will spread over there where we come from, and more and more will understand it and follow our way. But others will stay where rirey are and embrace the new religion and preach it to the ignorant ...

  We were driving back toward Merv. The sun was setting, and as it touched th
e rim of the desert, it set it aflame. It started in the West, but soon thee South in the direction of the Persian and Afghan frontiers was on fire, too. It was a wonderful feeling to drive head-on into this great conflagration.

  XII. Bokhara and Samarleand

  THESE two towns were the hidden jewels of Central Asia during the Middle Ages. Samarkand was the residence of Tamerlane and his successors; Bokhara, Islam's most famous centre of learning. Since my schoolboy days, when I had devoured Vambery, the two names had retained a magic ring in my ears. I had never hoped that I would have the lucky chance to visit them during the one short period in their history when they were accessible with relative ease to Europeans. Yet all that remains in my memory are some fragments of beauty inextricably mixed with squalor and decay, and a mood of infinite sadness. The Russians have trampled over these two fabulous towns as mercilessly as the Golden Horde of Jenghiz Khan.

  I remember wandering over the desolate Registan of Samarkand, accompanied by an Uzbek officer of the Red Army. He reminded me of Anvar Umorzakov, for he was equally reserved, gentle and polite. But he happened to be a native of Samarkand and, in spite of his thorough indoctrination, he loved his city and its past as an Athenean or Roman loves his own. The Registan of Samarkand must once have been the most imposing, and at the same time the loveliest monument of Islam. It is a large symmetrical square, laid out like a piazza, walled in by the three famous medresseh, the medixval universities of Tillikari, Shirdar and Ullugbeg. Its impact is still both graceful and awe-inspiring. The facades are broken up by the infinitely complicated filigree work of carved and laced and enamelled columns and arches. The enamel tiling is a mosaic of turquoise-blue, gold, pink and green--a firework frozen into eternity. I knew the blue-and-golden mosques of Jerusalem, Bagdad and Damascus, and was later to know Granada and Seville; but here the genius of the lame warrior and his successors had achieved a synthesis of Arab, Persian and Far Eastern architecture so unique and moving that one wanted just to sit down in the shade of the decaying turquoise columns and cry. For the arches were crumbling, the tiles peeling off, and broken fragments were strewn among the rubble smelling of dogs' urine.