by Roger Deakin
During the 1870s and 1880s, when the place was still called Alma-Ata and the city was being planned by the Russians, the city engineer, a German by the name of Baum, stipulated that every citizen must plant five trees in front of his house. The scheme was such a roaring success that there are now some 138 different species of tree in Almaty. Baum is of course ‘tree’ in German. Mr Tree was particularly active in the leafy district of the city known as Kompot, which means ‘fruit salad’, and it was probably Baum’s idea that every street there should be named after a fruit tree. Plum Street, Cherry Lane and Apricot Gardens are no more eccentric than our own Birdcage Walk or Petticoat Lane. Many of the Almaty streets are shaded by ramshackle avenues of magnificent oaks in the prime of life, no doubt once twinklings in the eye of Baum, or acorns in his pocket. There are fine apple orchards all over the city, as well as the wild apple woods on the slopes of the Alatau Mountains that rise like a wall behind it. You can sometimes go up there in winter, apparently, and find apples buried under the snow, perfectly preserved by the layer of autumn leaves beneath.
Outside in the wide expanse of the Republiky Alangy, a wedding party is assembled on the steps of the Monument to Independence in bright sunshine. A little folk-band with an accordion, a two-stringed dombra and a drum like an Irish bodrun plays Kazakh tunes. Some of the wedding guests dance together, while others pose for photographs, all dressed to the nines in suits and ties or bright dresses. Luisa flags down another Lada, and we race to meet the Director of the Almaty Botanical Gardens and distinguished member of the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences, Professor Isa Omarovich Baitulin. Lunching together on borsch and tea, we make plans for a visit the next day to the wild apple forests of the Talgar Valley, some thirty miles to the east of Almaty. After so much preparation and difficulty, I can hardly believe this is happening. Isa cuts a magnificently handsome figure with the oval face, high cheekbones, narrow eyes and olive skin of the Mongol Kazakhs. To our amazement, this fit and agile man turns out to be in his eighties. But he has spent much of his life outdoors, studying the fungi that live in close association with the roots of trees.
Isa speaks little English and I feel ashamed of my small Russian and no Kazakh, but we find we can converse quite happily through Luisa, or in the botanical Latin of the names of trees and plants. Isa says this is a good time to walk in the wild fruit forests because the harvest is not over, and much of the wild fruit will still be on the trees. At the end of May, he says, the whole mountain is white with so much blossom it could be snow. There are wild apricots, blackcurrants, raspberries and mulberries in the fruit forests too, and in the south of Kazakhstan wild woods full of walnuts and pistachios. The wild apples follow the valleys, growing at a height of 3,000–4,000 feet. In Almaty, he says, we are already at 2,800 feet and the Jungar Alatau Mountains behind us rise to 16,000 feet. He talks about the great Soviet scientist Nicolay Vavilov, who was the first to suspect that the original ancestors of all domestic apples lived on the Tien Shan Mountains and in 1936–7 led the first botanical expedition into the wild fruit forests. Vavilov felt sure the domestic apple was descended exclusively from Malus sieversus, the wild apple of the Tien Shan, but without the modern genetic techniques of DNA profiling he was unable to prove his hypothesis, as Barrie Juniper did some sixty years later. By the end of lunch we have all relaxed after our initial formality and arrange that Isa will come with a Russian jeep in the morning and we shall set off for the wild fruit forests.
Five of us pile into Ali Khan’s red Russian jeep in brilliant early sunshine and set off for the Talgar Valley and its wild fruit forests. Our route runs via Talgar, a large village in the hills about forty miles south-east of Almaty. In 1936 Fitzroy Maclean, whose book Eastern Approaches had informed my own journey, travelled exactly the same way on his first excursion out of Almaty, finding a place on a lorry heading out of the city. On reaching Talgar, he set off into the hills on foot, followed by the NKVD secret service agents who tailed him everywhere, but they were local men, and Maclean ended up being entertained to lunch with them in a peasant cottage in the hills.
Ali Khan, our driver, is Isa’s son and a judge, although apparently he’s resting just at the moment, busy trying to start up a tourist agency for visiting scientists. Isa Baitulin has invited Dr Kuralay Karibaia, a jolly, brown-haired woman dressed in jeans and a red-and-black baseball jacket. Kuralay manages a United Nations Global Ecology Fund project to conserve the fruit forests.
Ahead of us are the snowy peaks of the Zaeleiskoe Alatau and the 16,500-foot Mount Talgar. The jeep is a Yaz with a canvas roof and very hard springs. There are no seat belts, only a handle on the dashboard to grip. They all insist on giving me pride of place in the front seat, but in all honesty I would rather be in the back where it is marginally safer, and where Isa, Luisa and Kuralay sit squeezed together. After a mile or two we are all covered in dust. We bump along wide, dusty roads lined with the whitewashed trunks of poplars or oaks, zigzagging to avoid the vast potholes.
Soon we’re in the suburbs, jogging past single-storey cottages with bright wooden windows, pine-boarded or cob walls, shallow-pitched tin or felted roofs, and little balconies and porches raised on wooden stilts. The walls are mostly ochre and the doors and windows bright blue, and all have orchard gardens bursting with lush, fruiting trees, mostly apples and pears but also apricots and walnuts. Along the verges, we see little kitchen tables and chairs set out with jam jars of wild fungi, milk or honey for sale. Others display such curious combinations as a packet of cigarettes, a melon or two and a bottle of lemonade; petrol or motor oil and a clutch of potatoes. A girl squats in the shade of a poplar beside a neat heap of melons. Another sells besoms of bark-bound brushwood. There are bucketfuls of apples and baskets of tomatoes, onions, gourds and pumpkins beside every whitewashed tree.
We are by now on the open steppe, bowling along the very same route taken by Fitzroy Maclean on his first, covert, journey to Almaty in 1936, in the days of the Soviet Empire. Beyond the avenues of roadside trees, Kazakh horsemen are herding their cattle, some of them tiny dots on the distant plains of endless brown grass and dust. Dogs and foals run across the steppe. Lively streams skirt the road on either side, and in the foreground are commercial apple orchards of oft-pruned trees no one has got round to replacing. Isa calls them middle aged. Cattle graze beneath the apples while their cowhands stretch out in the shade and sleep. We pass a man wheeling a slopping milk churn on wheels. A transhumant beekeeper’s caravan full of hives ready to be towed up by tractor into the forest is parked by a barn.
At Talgar, a large village in Maclean’s time and by now almost a little town, we weave through lanes of baked mud surrounded by ochre walls and blue windows, an escort of terriers and mongrels prancing round the jeep. Then we swing in through the high gates of the Forestry Headquarters and find ourselves in a yard full of huge logging trucks and more dogs which rouse themselves from under them to come to meet us. The five old bull-nosed Russian Army lorries are endowed with every conceivable winch, crane and towing device, and their wheels are taller than a man. The two head foresters emerge from the office in suits and ties, and there are formal introductions, watched by an old baboushka in the caretaker’s gatehouse, her bed just visible behind the door. The Chief Forester is introduced as Medeo.
The foresters clamber into their jeep and lead the way out of Talgar, thundering uphill past an open-air bazaar where more lorries are unloading potatoes and onions. Along the dirt road into the foothills, every rubbish heap grows a crop of pale-blue chicory. I am in that bemused state when you no longer comprehend what exactly is going on but quite happily luxuriate in the sheer richness of everything, the sounds of Kazakh and Russian, the rose-capped mountains, the bustling villages, the shadows of poplars, as you would in a dream. We splash through a river bed and pass a lovely old wooden village mosque, like a village hall with a gleaming silver minaret atop its roof. We catch the rich smell of woodsmoke and baking bread as we drive by farms with blackened c
ob ovens in the yards sheltered by stilted tin roofs. We traverse the foothills through orchards, planted by the Soviets, laden with ripe pink apples. We go pitching and rolling over the rounded foothills into the minor valleys of mountain streams, lurching through the fords, charging straight back up the next hill. I notice that the handle I’m clutching on the dashboard is the one part of the well-painted Yaz that is worn completely smooth to the bare steel.
Stopping to admire an orchard, Kuralay jumps up to pull down a branch, and we scrump an apple or two. This is exactly what Maclean did when he passed this way in the thirties. Climbing and winding our way through hamlets and farms, we press on, past a garden shed like a tiny mosque with a roof of beaten tin that was perhaps once an oil drum, past marigolds in every cottage garden and the magnificent bulging torsos of cob-built bread ovens, their skin toasted and fissured, the fresh loaves laid out to cool on their roofs like sleeping cats. The fierce, high fences round every little farmstead, and the dogs chained in the yards to dead hulks of cars that serve as garden sheds and kennels, set me wondering about the intriguing bandits in the hills that people have mentioned now and then. We pass a tractor with a whole family crammed in the tiny cab, a small boy somehow perched above the steering wheel and a beaming farmer behind it.
My ears pop as we climb higher, and the air feels much cooler. We breast the top of a ridge and suddenly there they are before us: the wild apple woods. The whole of the mountainside we are approaching is covered in them, beginning with an open, wild wood pasture that shades by degrees into the dense forest that runs on up the slopes. Curiously, it feels like country I have always known. I feel excited, of course, yet entirely at home and at one with the landscape. I have the odd feeling I have lived here all my life. At first we pass through wild savannah scattered with groups of tall apple trees or single specimens, their complex multiple trunks twisted together like sinews. The trees are all thirty to fifty feet tall, spreading and unpruned, except here and there by animals, still bearing plenty of fruit in a good year. They cast sharp shadows across the dazzling yellow grasses of the meadows. One of the trees is massive, its branches apparently full of fruit, but as I approach closer I realize I am not seeing apples but yellowing autumn leaves caught in glancing sunlight. The bark is worn smooth by the hides of cattle and horses. Wisps of their hair stand out like implants. The wild apples flock more densely around the slight valleys of the hundreds of streams that run off the mountains and irrigate the meadows. We are high up, the sky is very blue, and the air smells very clean and thin. To the south is the wall of the Heavenly Mountains, and if I face the other way all I see for hundreds, even thousands of miles is pale-brown steppe with low, rocky hills in the foreground.
After rattling across several miles of this high savannah we pull up before a mound of wooden beehives, an old Mercedes van and a curvaceous, wood-framed caravan sheathed in sheet steel that could have come straight out of La Strada. I fully expect to see Anthony Quinn ease himself out of it, yawning and stretching in long johns and a buttoned vest after a strenuous night. And I am not disappointed. It is Valery who comes out, looking every inch as good, his eyes slitted against years of steppe and desert sun, shining brown skin stretched over the high cheekbones, his face benevolently lined. He is probably still in his thirties, but so weathered, skinny and obviously tough that I felt he would always look the same. He wears the soft black suede boots of the horseman, skilfully made from a single piece of hide, stretching over his calves, trousers tucked in a touch rakishly, and a black V-neck T-shirt. He keeps a dozen big rabbits grazing in a run, a few goats and a small flock of sheep. Some chickens emerge from under the van as we talk and resume their pecking about. Valery shows us the wild flowers on the meadow that feed his bees. In spring the hills are ablaze with wild tulips, but in the dust of autumn all we see is the pale blue chicory. Valery has sixty-seven hives, each yielding some ten to twelve gallons of honey each year. He says he produces about a ton of honey from every fifty hives. Each colony will have consumed about 265 pounds of honey for itself over the year: the ten or twelve gallons are what is left over. By feeding sugar to the bees, you can take more of their honey, but that is not generally Valery’s way. In the height of summer, there will be over a thousand beehives scattered about these hillsides, the bees feeding off the wild herbs and in the fruit forests.
I wonder if Valery has a wife, and what he does for comforts. He clearly likes the life, and says so. He says the Talgar hills have their own completely different climate. In winter there can be three feet of snow for weeks. In Almaty it can be five below zero and here it may be a warm 20 degrees. We are a bit of a delegation, and it feels wrong to ask him too many personal questions: we’re intruding on a peaceful, almost monastic life in one of the most beautiful places on earth. In spring, says Valery, there’s an explosion of bees and flowers. These saffron meadows burst into flame with tulips, and the hills are a huge snowfield of wild apple, apricot and hawthorn blossom.
I’m sad to leave the solitary Valery, whom I instinctively like. When we shake hands, it is the two-handed lingering double-clasp kind with a deep look into the eye. The look says, ‘We come from vast distances apart on this earth, yet I feel a natural, spontaneous respect for you. It is very moving, that we far-flung people from different tribes are clearly first natural friends, not enemies at all.’ I very nearly catch myself making the little speech, but restrain myself in time. Luisa and I buy a litre jar of Valery’s best wild apple-blossom honey to share. When Valery hands it over, it feels like a blessing – the palpable proof of the goodness and beauty of the place, and the wild apples. I experience the same feeling when I look around the faces of my new friends: the first thing I see in them is their beauty, and I rejoice in the diversity of human genes that made them, as the flower genes seeking each other in the pollen made the honey.
Further on through the woods, we stop by a little clearing and pick sweet hawthorn berries the size of fingertips. Unlike their English counterparts in the same Crataegus family, they are sweet, but you still have to spit out the hard pips. Isa and Kuralay then turn their attention to a dense relict grove of cultivated blackcurrants, a giant variety from China lacking the toothy tartness of our native currant but a welcome addition to our gastronomic wildwood tour.
Our sticky mouths and fingers stained orange and purple, we dip and thread our way through the fruit forest, past a solitary yurt in a wooded glade, then two or three tented settlements or simple farmsteads. Outside a very simple wooden hut, barely more than four or five packing cases slung together, sit a little family with their horses and cattle tethered near by. Two small girls are braiding their mother’s waist-length hair, proudly brushing it for her as it shines in the sun. Climbing a steep holloway past exposed roots of elms, apples and apricots, we come to a cottage and farmstead in the woods. Here, says Isa with a little bow, we are invited by the foresters to lunch.
The cottage is set deep in the fruit forest. Leaves and branches arch together overhead, so the place is cool and dappled. We go in up open steps of pine and through a wooden porch raised to the floor level of the house on stilts. Each of us pauses at the foot of the steps to wash our hands at a little cistern contraption supported on a post driven into the ground, with a basin beneath. I was to become familiar with these elegant, water-saving devices wherever I travelled in the countryside across Central Asia. The steel cylinder, shaped like a miniature samovar, holds two or three litres; you punch a piston plug upwards with the back of one of your hands to let the water down as you wash them. It is like milking a cow. A soap dish and hand towel also hang from the post.
We all step out of our shoes in the porch and leave them there with dozens of others belonging to the household. The custom reminds me of my prep school, where we each had our own shoe bag hanging from a peg in the cloakroom, and changed into ‘house shoes’ for lessons. Padding about in stockinged feet on the fine carpets spread over the wooden floors everywhere feels at once more intimate and i
nformal. A serious-looking woman in a long red skirt and green silk headscarf ushers us into a room at a corner of the house: it contains a bed along the innermost wall, pine-boarded walls and a floor adorned with rugs, some felted in bold, zigzagging Kazakh designs. A large, low table occupies most of the remaining floor space except for a great many cushions and a samovar by the fireplace, tended by the wife and daughter of Medeo, the forester whose house this is. The women silently take turns at squatting beside the samovar and dispensing a continuous supply of chai.
The table is spread with a spectacular array of dishes of all colours: bowls of kymys, the fermented milk of mares, sour milk, bowls of wild mushrooms of two or three kinds, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers. We seat ourselves on the floor, cross-legged with our backs against the wall along two sides, wedged and propped by cushions. Isa sits at the head as the senior man, and I sit at his left hand as the principal guest. Medeo sits to the right of Isa, Luisa next to me, then Kuralay, then all the women of the house and two more foresters. The cottage, we learn, is called Saimasai, meaning ‘Stream in the Little Valley’.
Our lunch begins with a prayer by Isa. It is long and involved and seems rather more than simply grace. We sit with our hands cupped open, as if to receive heavenly food. Then chai is poured, sour milk added, and passed around. Isa proposes we drink vodka, wine or brandy. Luisa and I both choose wine and taste the fruity, full-bodied red Kazakhstanskaya. First we eat lamb shashlik in tender strips with a dried, hard cow cheese and bread, and savoury doughnuts that we dunk in sour milk.
Now come the toasts, proposed by each of us in turn in the true filibustering tradition of an oral nomad culture, Luisa gallantly translating, and abridging, the sentiments so eloquently expressed. Isa goes first, with a rousing speech about the glories of Mother Nature that ends with the sentiment, endorsed by all present, that ‘to work for Nature is a noble endeavour that knows no boundaries. Nor should it, for it is our common purpose to work for the ecology of our world.’ As glasses are refilled all round, Kuralay rises to deliver another long and lyrical paean to Nature, culminating with the assertion that ‘nature’s bounty is very great and we all owe it to her to work ceaselessly on behalf of diversity and its expression in the natural world.’ We could, I feel, all have been sitting round at some Gaia conference at Dartington or Findhorn.