The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  We wandered on to Tamerlane's Summer Palace. I remembered a Persian verse I had seen quoted: Samarkand seikeli rui zemin est-Samarkand in the centre of the world. That centre of power has been drifting in the course of the centuries across the globe like a wandering magnetic pole, and the historian has discovered its law of movement. But there seems to exist a negative rule that the pole never comes to rest at the same place a second nine. Attempts to bring it back to a previous location have always ended in failure--Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler. Instead of a romantic revival, they produce a parody of the original drama. Will Stalin compare to Timur as Mussolini compares to Caesar?

  Of the great conquerors of history, Timur the Lame seems to me the most fascinating personality--more human and palpable than, say, the shadowy Alexander or the ambiguous Caesar. The sources are wildly contadictory about his character--but that could not be otherwise in the case of a limping warrior-scholar, who must have appeared to his contemporaries as mysterious and unpredictable as intellectuals always do. That he wis a true intellectual becomes evident at once on entering the Turbeti Timur, his burial chapel. In the centre of it there are two marble tombstones side by sidr, one dark-green, the other black. Under the green stone lies Timur the Lame. Under the black stone, which is slightly larger, lies his teacher and spritual guide, Mir Said Berki. To choose one's teacher as one's sole companion for eternity is a gesture unparalleled by any great conqueror of mankind.

  The interior of the chapel is both graceful and austere. It is octagonal in shape, and less than twenty feet in diameter. The walls are of alabaster, with golden arabesques on a turquoise-blue ground; underneath it is a room of the same shape which contains the actual graves. The inscription on Tamerlane's green tombstone consists simply of his name, including his surname (Koeregen), without any title or embellishment.

  Vambery, in his description of the sepulchre, mentions a copy of the Koran, written on the skin of a gazelle, allegedly by Osman, the second Caliph. That relic is no longer there. On the other hand, I saw fixed to the wall in the lower chamber the white tail of a horse--allegedly the tail of Timur's favourite horse; this Vambery does not mention. I wonder whether he overlooked it, or whether the tail is of more recent origin.

  Every monument in Samarkand built by Tamerlane himself bears the imprint of self-restraint and of beauty-in-austerity. The pomp and circumstance only came in with his successors, the Mogul rulers of India. Timur's inner Palace is of modest dimensions, almost unassuming from outside. The inside, the mosaic floors and faienced walls convey even today an image of perfection. It stands on a garden terrace reached by a flight of forty marble steps, and is again named after one of Timur's spiritual guides and companions--Shah Zindeh, alias Kazim Ibn Abas, one of the pioneers of Islam in Central Asia. Timur had Shah Zindeh's tomb placed in the centre of the garden, under the windows of his main reception room.

  His preoccupation with matters spiritual seems to have spread to his household and his immediate successors. One of his wives, a Turkish princess named Bibi Khanum, built the largest medresseh in Samarkand, a seminary able to house a thousand students. She built it after his death, and out of her own pocket. Such enterprise and independence by a woman in Moslem Asia is characteristic of the peculiar atmosphere around Timur. His grandson built the only observatory in Central Asia, which was famous throughout the world. (To be pedantic, there are reports of an earlier Observatory built under Hellagu in Maraga, but there is no trace of it left.)

  We returned once more to the Registan. The Uzbek officer looked up and down the decaying glories of the ancient Centre of the World with a wretched expression. A taciturn man, all he said was: `The Government has granted a hundred and fifty thousand roubles for restoration work.'

  During a year's puritan living in Russia, I spent nearly ten per cent. of that sum.

  `Get up, get up, empty your bowels, do your exercises, do your exercises, ten minutes of physical culture, eat your breakfast, eat your breakfast, and now it is time to go to work.'

  On my first morning in Bokhara I was woken up by a loud-speaker installed in the public square, blaring out these commands. The public loudspeakers have replaced the Muezzin's call. Their mechanised, hypnotising commands sounded like a scene out of Huxley's Brave New World.

  Bokhara the Noble was being sovietised more ruthlessly than any other Asiatic town. The entire Old City was being razed to the ground. The bazaars--once the most famous trading centre of Central Asia--are dead. No more stalls offering carpets, silk, textiles, goldsmiths' and coppersmith's work, Kara-Kul lambskins, rare manuscripts, books and exotic spices. The three hundred and sixty mosques, and the hundred and forty medresseh are also dead. A few were converted into schools. The others were torn down. The famous books and manuscripts, which made Bokhara the centre of Moslem learning, have vanished--burnt, pilfered, dispersed. The Minaret of Kokhumbez, from whose two hundred-feet turret offenders against religion were thrown down, has been demolished. The Citadel has been transformed into a college; its large reception hall into a students' dormitory; the Emir's harem into a lunatic asylum. `Within four years,' the chairman of the Town Planning Committee told us proudly, 'Bokhara will have become a European town.'

  The desolation of Samarkand had been heartbreaking. The destruction of Bokhara was not. For the past three centuries Bokhara had been a nightmare town where the fanatic side of Islam had degenerated into a kind of collective insanity. The cruelty of the last Emirs surpassed even that of the half-crazed Khans of Khiva. In Khiva, Vambery had witnessed the public gouging out of the eyes of some thirty aged prisoners of war. In Bokhara, Offenders were thrown into dried-up wells on the Registan, or hurled down from the top of a mosque, or executed by having their throats cut with a knife in the public square. Every deviation from religious unorthodoxy, sexual misdemeanour, or criticism of the absolute ruler was punished by summary execution. Vambery describes how the Raiz (Guardian of Religion) `with a cat-o-nine-tails in his hand, traverses the streets and public places, examines each passer-by in the principles of Islamism and sends the ignorant, even if they be grey-bearded men of three-score years, to the boys' school. . . .'

  While imposing, by a reign of terror, a rigid puritanism on the populace, the Emir and his court led a fabulous life of debauchery. The only building which, as far as I can remember, the Soviet authorities have kept in relatively good repair, and open to visitors, was the last Emir's palace; it was meant to serve as a reminder of the past. It was built about the turn of the century, and decorated in ludicrously bad taste. The last Emir must have had an obsession about mirrors, for they could be found everywhere, as in certain Paris brothels--on the ceiling over his bed, on portable paravants, on walls And doors, and even in the one small lavatory of the palace (the harem was only equipped with a communal latrine). The reception chamber was a grotesque imitation of the Versailles Gallery of Mirrors, containing a portable throne covered with red plush. In a walled-in part of the garden adjoining the harem, there was a small artificial lake where the women of the harem bathed in the nude while the Emir watched them from a small balcony especially built for that purpose. The whole thing looked exactly like the description of an Oriental despot's pleasure haunt in a cheap novel.

  The last Emir, Ohm Khan, had four official wives, eleven favourites, and altogether some hundred and twenty women and forty boys in his harem--or so I was told. When he fled to Afghanistan in 1920, he only took with him the four official wives and several boys. As over a hundred of the harem-women must have been left behind, I resolved to get hold of one. I went to the City Soviet, which had numerous departments, but none for former harem-women. I went to the Women's Education Department. They sent me to the Press Department. I went to the Press Department. They sent me to Mass Agitation. I went to Mass Agitation. They sent me to Kultprop. Then I got fed up and went to the G.P.U. Twenty-four hours later the G.P.U. produced Rakhat Razikhova.

  Present at the interview were the head of the Kultprop Department, the head of
the Women's Education Department, and a translator. Rakhat Razikhova, former member of the Emir's harem, was now a Trade Union official in the City Soviet. She was a fairly good-looking woman of just over thirty, with a slightly wilted Mongolian face, and neatly parted dark hair with a bun at the back. She was shy, and obviously intimidated by the presence of so many dignitaries. A direct dialogue was impossible; she hardly ever looked at me, and addressed her answers to the woman from the Education Department. So all I got out of her was a rather bloodless synopsis of her life-story. I quote from Red Days:

  Rakhat Razikhova was born in 1900. She was twelve years old when one night she was woken up in her mother's house--her father was dead. Somebody wrapped her into a large overcoat. She cried until a pillow was stuffed into her mouth. Then she was taken away into the harem adjoining the palace. The next night she slept with the Emir--and then never saw him again.

  Only a few among the inmates of the harem were called to the Emir a second time. Except for the wives and favourites, the girls in the harem changed constantly, for after a while the Emir would give them away as a present to one of his courtiers, while his agents were always on the lookout for fresh supplies. The agents were old women, known and dreaded by the whole town. They went from house to house, looking for possible candidates, and when they found a suitable girl or boy, they reported to the Emir. Then, a few nights later, somebody came and took the girl or boy away. The parents were given money.

  Rakhat had no sharp memories of life in the harem. It was a gloomy building with small windows and bare rooms with whitewashed walls. I had seen it, and it had reminded me of a Y.M.C.A. hostel. Twice a day the girls were given bowls of pilaw. The meals and the regular hours of prayer were the main events of the day. It sounded more like a convent than a harem. No visitors were permitted; only when a girl became pregnant was her mother allowed to come and see her. The pregnant women were taken to a special room, and their children brought up at court.

  There was only one hope of escaping from this life of boredom and monotony: to be given away to one of the courtiers. In some cases this happened after a few days, in others it took months or years. Rakhat had to wait five years. When she was married to the former Kushbegi (Chief Officer of the Court), she was seventeen; he was seventy-five. Rakhat became his fourth wife, and bore him a son. Her husband, whose name she has forgotten--she only remembers his first name: Astanaqull--had for some reason been banished by the Emir to the town of Katerzhi. Her married life was as austere, and she was just as much shut off fiom the outside world, as in the Emir's harem.

  In 1922 her husband died, and the world stood suddenly open for Razikhova--a new world, for the old one had perished two years earlier amidst lightning and thunder. The doors of the harems were thrown wide open; the sack-like paranjahs and black veils fell. Asiatic woman was promoted from the rank of a domestic animal to that of a human being.

  Rakhat learnt to read and write. She became a factory worker, then a teacher, finally a Trade Union representative in the Town Soviet. She married a young peasant. She bore him a child--her second--and lived with him for one year. But the marriage did not work, for the peasant was reluctant to learn and laughed at her efforts. So Rakhat Razikhova--one-time member of the Emir of Bokhara's harem, created by God as a slave of men, who could be bought and sold like chattel and was supposed to have no mind and will of her own--Rakhat went to the Registrar's Office and obtained a divorce.

  `It is time for bed, earth your aerial, make sure that your aerial is earthed. Air your room, air your room. Good night.'

  The loudspeakers were silent. The red sickle of the moon hovered over the broken minarets of Bokhara the Noble, which four years later was to cease to exist.

  XIII. Hadji Mir Baba

  BOKHARA, like every other larger town in the Soviet Union, has its Revolutionary Museum where documents, photographs, models of hide-outs, underground printing presses, and other relics are exhibited. One of the exhibits was a pair of photographs which, in the manner of police photographs, portrayed a person from two different angles. One showed him in profile--the profile of a man in his forties with a bony face, prominent nose and dark hawk's eyes. The second photograph showed him not, as usual, from the front but from the back, with a bared torso. It was, however, not so much a torso as a kind of anatomical study of torn flesh, with strips of skin hanging loosely down, showing the bared sinews. The inscription said that these were photographs of Hadji Mir Baba, one of the leaders of the Bokharian Revolution, taken in 1920 by one of the Emir's officers, after Hadji Mir Baba's arrest and torture.

  As I was looking at the photograph, a tall old man with a stoop walked up to me and said in Russian: `That is I'. And so he was. The old man was the custodian of the museum. In spite of his stoop, his bony frame and hawk's face still gave an impression of unbreakable physical strength and will-power. Twenty years later the memory of Hadji Mir Baba served me as a model for old Arin, the Armenian revolutionary, grandfather of the Soviet bureaucrat Fedya, in The Age of Longing.

  We became friends, and during four or five evenings Hadji Mir Baba told me his life story over cups of green tea in my hotel room. This time no translator was needed as he spoke fluent Russian; I took down his narrative word by word. It was a long, sprawling story, full of digressions and stories-within­the-story, in the manner and tradition of the Arabian nights. The following is a textual compression in which the oriental flourishes are left in, and only the stories-within-the-story are left out.

  `The Emir Ohm Khan was preceded on the throne by his father, Abdull'ahat Khan, and he was preceded by his father, Mozaffer Khan. A very cruel ruler was Mozaffer Khan, he offended the people, levied high taxes, and waged great campaigns for plunder, such as the raid on Dekhan where he had two thousand people slaughtered. Out of their heads he built a pyramid on the Registan, and all Bokhara was drowned in stench. But at that time the Russians came from Samarkaand and vanquished the Emir's armies and made him their vassal. A few years later the Emir Mozaffer Khan died. He was followed by the Emir Ahat Khan, and he was even worse than his father.

  `The taxes which he levied were beyond counting, and so was the number of boys and girls whom he had carried off to his harem; and what he did not steal himself his officials stole, and the women whom he did not take himself were taken by his officers. He who read a book other than the Koran had his head cut off; and he who spoke a word that the Mullahs did not like also had his head cut off. The Mullahs pretended that all these barbarities were good for the people and pleasing to God; only we, the revolutionary Djadidi, fought for the rights of the people. I, Hadji Mir Baba, was a Djadid even in my youth, for as a merchant in Kara-Kul furs I had travelled in many foreign lands and had seen that the people were better off there.

  `The Emir Ahat Khan reigned for twenty-seven years, and he was followed by the Emir Ohm Khan, and he was even worse than his father.

  `The people had a very poor time under Ohm Khan for he was a very bad ruler. But one day it happened that the people of Russia deposed their Czar and sent him to the devil, and shortly afterwards our Emir Ohm Khan received a telegram from Petersburg from the new Government which said:

  `"Liberate the brave Bokharian people stop Kerensky."

  `So the Emir invited the representatives of the people to his Palace. And when we arrived at the Palace, twelve of us representing the people of Bokhara, we saw Olim Khan sitting on his red throne, and his golden sword dangled across his belly, for he was as fat as he was lazy. And at his right side sat the Kazi Kalan, who is the supreme judge over the believers, and at his left the Representative of the Russian Government, and all around sat the Bashis [Pashas] and Mullahs, and they looked very angry. The Emir said not a word, but merely pulled a roll of parchment out of his green velvet sachet, and he handed the scroll over to the Kazi Kalan to be read aloud. That was the Manifesto.'

  [It was a manifesto in which, for the first time in the history of Bokhara, constitutional government was granted to the people.
This was in April, 1917. It was soon withdrawn, however, and until the consolidation of Soviet power in Turkestan in 1920, which led to the deposition and flight of the last Emir, the history of Bokhara is a tangle of revolutions, counter-revolutions and civil wars. The Djadidi were a radical group of the new, educated middle-class which had come into being after the Russian conquest in 1868. Hadji Mir Baba, who had travelled far and wide, was one of their leaders.-­I asked him what the Emir had looked like, and got this description of a previous meeting: `He was a fat man, sitting on a fat white horse. He wore a silken turban and a golden sword and he had a little pointed beard and small pig's eyes. He pretended to be a descendant of the great Timur, but he looked like a devil greased with codliver oil.' And now let Hadji Mir Baba continue his story]:

  `Hardly had the Kazi-Kalan finished the reading of the manifesto, when the Mullahs and the Bashis gave out a loud cry. The Mullahs yelled: "This is bad. It is against the Koran." And the Bashis said: "The manifesto has not been written by our mighty Emir but by others, and it only pleases the enemies of our mighty Emir, this one and that one."

  `And the representatives of the people became frightened, and they only said: "Hm, Hm."

  `When the Emir saw that there was such a controversy about the authorship of the manifesto, he said nothing but got up and left the room. For he was as cunning as he was cruel.

  `We, however, took the manifesto, and had it printed in many copies and distributed among the people; and the next day several thousand people gathered in the street. We marched with our flags through the bazaar, and then we held a big meeting. At the meeting three delegates were elected to go to the Emir and to ask him to accept public responsibility for the manifesto, and to liberate the prisoners as it was promised in it. And the three delegates chosen by the people were: Attakhodja Polat Khodjayev, Abdul­rakhim Khan Yussouf Zade, and I, Hadji Mir Baba.