by Roger Deakin
Now it is my turn. Topping up my glass for courage, I speak of Kazakhstan’s two great gifts to the world: the cultivated apple and the tamed horse. However, I say with a flourish, I have today discovered a third: the best hospitality in the world. And so it goes on, with more toasts, and yet more elaborate and sincere compliments, all expressed in the declamatory tones of a bard reciting an epic poem. Since the Kazakhs are the proud possessors of a great tradition of oral poetry, passed on by the bards, or akyns, in competitive recitals known as aiytis, it is not surprising that oratory seemed to come quite naturally to those present.
After all this high drama, Isa declares an interval, during which we will take the afternoon air outdoors, work up more appetite, dream up more toasts and await the presentation of the next course or two. Kuralay sets off into the woods on horseback and returns like a bee to the hive with saddlebags full of wild apples. I wander up a steep path and sample some sweet feral fruit, slipping the apple pips into my trouser pocket for later planting in Suffolk. Buzzards mew somewhere above the trees, and horses graze, tethered, under the shade of an orchard.
Back at the cottage, I sketch the outdoor summer kitchen, a Central Asian institution I am to encounter everywhere I go. Such places never fail to bring out the untutored architect in me, and I can’t help dreaming of constructing some variation on the theme. Let loose on a personal garden city like Letchworth, Welwyn or Hampstead Garden Suburb, I would end up with something between a shanty town and an allotment. Cooking al fresco in an open-sided kitchen built in the garden close to the vegetables and compost heap, with its own wood-fired ovens, charcoal grill and range of sinks draining straight into an irrigation system growing melons, courgettes and gourds, seems to me a fine idea. Set apart from the house, the summer kitchen keeps all the smoke and cooking smells away from it, and allows the space and ventilation to spit-roast a whole lamb over a glowing, open fire, as the women and girls are busy doing now, or to bake quantities of bread in the splendid clay oven. Smoke billows out of the cob chimney as the women in headscarves and floral skirts and children in embroidered pillbox hats bustle about preparing and cooking the forthcoming courses.
The shallow-ridged tin roof of the summer kitchen covers the cob-built ramifications of oven, bakery and grill, and extends forward over a raised wooden working deck to form a veranda with three elegant arches of coppiced hazel that must have been bent and secured when still green. Balcony rails of hazel also run along the front of the kitchen, with wooden steps to its entrance and a wicket gate to keep the dogs out. I watch humming-bird hawk moths play round the marigolds in a flower bed in front. All the building materials for this little palace except the reused corrugated tin on its roof are local, simply dug up or cut down in coppice woods that will soon grow back again.
Just across the garden from the summer kitchen is the sauna, another half-cob, half-wooden shed, heated by a wood-stove with a water tank perched above it. In its cool, shadowy, whitewashed interior I find a bench on which to sit naked in the steamy heat, a plastic bowl and mug, a large jug and a bunch of leafy oak twigs for the traditional mild self-flagellation. Here again, the drainage pipe runs off conveniently into an irrigation trench in the vegetable garden.
An hour or so later, the lamb is served. It has been slaughtered specially for our visit, as is the custom. At the head of the table, Isa carves the head, deftly dissecting and sharing out the various symbolic organs. First, the ears for the children, ‘that they may listen carefully and hear well in the forest’. Then the tender cheeks for the women, and the eyes for the two most senior foresters, to help keep them watchful for approaching dangers. I wonder what I might get, and am rewarded with a scallop of pinkness from just above the forehead, which they all assure me is the seat of the imagination. As head man, and perhaps as a professor, Isa spoons himself a liberal helping of the brains, then carves us all huge portions of the rest of the beast, including the greatly relished fat from around the tail. Kazakhs have a liking for fat-bottomed sheep, bred for the rump of fat either side of the tail.
We now add to our plates portions of a kind of pasta to make beshbarmak, which roughly translates as ‘five fingers’ because the dish is traditionally eaten by hand. Isa also insists I accept the choice globules of prized fat from around the sheep’s ample bottom. More wine ensues, with a magnificent forest fruit salad, honey, fresh green walnuts, melon, cakes, more chai, and further, supplementary toasts and votes of thanks. Then, abruptly, Isa says grace and the meal is over, with many a double handshake and invitation to return as we all line up outside for a group photograph, then clamber back in the jeep and bounce away downhill in our swarming cloud of dust.
South to the Walnut Forests
I set out early with Luisa and Johnny in the driving-school Lada for the Barakholka, the sprawling flea-market bazaar, and the bus station beyond it in the west of Almaty where the taxis leave for Kyrgyzstan. We were met by a jostling crowd of drivers before a phalanx of cars, all loudly competing to drive me across the border into Kyrgyzstan and Bishkek, its capital. The journey is 150 miles and takes five hours by bus at a fare of £1.50. Taxis cost more but are faster, less crowded, and less prone to delays and breakdowns. Johnny claimed to be a connoisseur of taxi drivers and had kindly offered to help me pick a good car and negotiate a fare. Out of a selection of physically abused cars, Johnny picked out a big, square yellow Mercedes with a massively crazed windscreen with two big holes the size of boulders on the passenger side. Its driver, Nurgazy, was a sharp and streetwise 25-year-old with a close-cropped head of black hair and a round face like an apple behind a natty pair of wrap-around sunglasses. Johnny seemed to think he would be a good bet. An older man was already installed in the car, and Nurgazy said he would take me to Bishkek for 2,000 tenge, if I didn’t mind waiting for a third passenger, or I could pay 3,000 and we could go straight away. I opted for the latter, less than £15, bade farewell to Johnny and Luisa, and jumped in.
Nurgazy was indeed a great driver, if utterly anarchic. The Mercedes had once been luxurious, and I settled into the black Rexine of the deep back seat. I had it to myself and was glad of it. As soon as we were out of town the road deteriorated into a random pattern of craters on a wide, bumpy highway lined with elms and robinia. Nurgazy sped along at a constant 60 miles per hour or more, overtaking everything in sight and nudging other drivers out of his way by dint of the sheer bulk and headlong speed of the Mercedes. He wove between the potholes with the grace and skill of a dancer, simultaneously channel-hopping on the radio, losing patience with anything that wasn’t either house or accordion music, turning it up to full volume. ‘I am the God of House’, obviously number one in the Kazakh house charts, rang out across the steppes as we sped along with the Heavenly Mountains to our left and a huge, flat, treeless horizon to our right.
Soon we were alone on the road. Herds of cattle or horses grazed the dry, brown grasses of the open steppe, with now and again a huge flock of fat-tailed sheep and a solitary shepherd on horseback. Long fissures gaped open in the parched earth. We saw distant yurts closer to the mountains, and the occasional low shed or haystack, but they were the only signs of habitation. Before long even these were left behind, and we were far out at sea in the infinities of the old nomads. My fellow passenger in the front seat, a wizened, olive-skinned man in the pillbox hat of an Uzbek, had lost most of his teeth and kept turning round to address me in Kyrgyz. Somehow I gathered that he was a tobacconist on his return journey to the great Osh Bazaar in Bishkek, where he had a stall. His name was Abit, and when he showed me his passport I was amazed to see that a man I had assumed was in his early seventies was in fact no more than fifty. Looking me confidentially in the eye, Abit delved into his bag and offered me some black seeds in a pear-shaped wooden receptacle plugged with a bundle of tiny sticks lashed together with cotton. He indicated in mime that the seeds would propel me into a heightened state of consciousness. I politely declined, although fascinated by the pear-shaped box and curious ab
out the seeds.
Once in Kyrgyzstan, the road changed dramatically. It halved in width and began winding up through low, grassy hills. We passed a yurt in a grove of wild apples above the road and began to see old snub-nosed Russian lorries laden with straw. We were moving closer towards the wrinkled mountains, climbing steeply through bare crags. In the distance across the steppe, plumes of smoke rose where the dry grass was being burnt to improve its fertility.
As we approached Bishkek, the empty road was suddenly busy and the open steppe landscape altered to one of small fields full of vegetables, melons and little orchards. Cattle and horses stood in tiny paddocks. Cottages, tents, sheds and yurts crowded together in the shanties of the outskirts. Groups of men squatted at the roadsides chatting or just watching the world go by. Warm, dusty air filled the car through the holes in the windscreen. The road was so bad I grew used to Nurgazy swinging the wheel suddenly to avoid big, open manholes. Kamikaze pedestrians came at us from all sides, apparently throwing themselves in our path. It wasn’t the traffic that slowed us to a standstill so much as sheer numbers of people on the streets outside the enormous Osh Bazaar, where we set down Abit, smiling his toothless farewell, his bags of cigarettes tied up with twine, and somewhere about his person the box of black seeds. He disappeared from view almost instantly among the crowds and stalls.
Good as his word, Nurgazy drove me to Togolok Moldo, a street in the centre of Bishkek named after a wandering bard, where I had arranged to meet Zamira, who was to be my interpreter and guide. We had exchanged several dozen emails before I left England, so felt almost like old friends when we met at last. Zamira’s smile would have won me over instantly anyway. Zamira was always smiling, or at least her eyes were, always apparently calm and happy. She never once complained of any of the many discomforts or difficulties of our travels. For a woman in her early twenties, she was amazingly composed, and for one who had never set foot outside Kyrgyzstan in all her life, she spoke astonishingly good English. Zamira’s whole family were linguists, speaking about a dozen different languages between them.
The journey I planned was to the south of Kyrgyzstan, to Jalal-Abad via Osh in the Ferghana Valley, Kyrgyzstan’s second city after Bishkek and an ancient crossroads for the Silk Road caravans. It still boasts a huge market and is the base for mountaineers heading into the Pamir range. With more time, I might have chosen to make the spectacular 435-mile journey south by road, but it takes between twelve and nineteen hours and I wanted to reach Jalal-Abad and the walnut forests while the nut harvest was still in full swing, so decided to go in one of the small planes that fly over the 16,000-foot wall of the Kyrgyz Alatau Mountains that rises straight up behind Bishkek. The planes thread their way south along the glaciers and steep gorges to the Ferghana Valley, where the walnut and wild fruit forests are. Flights sometimes varied according to the availability of petrol, but the airport promised a plane to Osh at six that evening.
Somehow thirty-six of us jammed into the tiny plane. The temperature climbed alarmingly in the steamy cabin as more and more people clambered aboard, laden with cardboard boxes and carrier bags that they calmly stacked to the roof in front of the emergency exit and in the minuscule gangway. Nobody had bothered much about checking the baggage anyway, and I began to wonder whether some of us would end up strap-hanging. We took off and climbed steeply towards the mountains over fields and foothills, long skeins of smoke rising and hanging where farmers were burning off grass far below. Then we were skimming snowy tops that rose to 23,000 feet, lakes and tarns winking up from the purple shadows of valleys and the glistening sinews of glaciers and mountain rivers racing through gorges. A soft mist gathered about the peaks, and, as evening drew on, wave upon wave of the darkening shapes of mountains advanced towards us. It was almost dark as we approached Osh, following the winding mirror of the Ak-Buura River flowing out of the Pamir Alay Mountains.
I was awakened early by the massed cockerels of Osh. There had been heavy rain overnight, and as I lay in bed I could hear the first traffic splashing through deep puddles in the potholed streets. Unfamiliar birdsong floated in, and a thin steam rose off the windowsills. I found myself in a faded hotel suite of two bedrooms, bathroom and huge sitting room full of ancient threadbare sofas draped in rugs. I felt very much at home; even more so when the hotelier brought in a breakfast tray of fresh, hot bread, honey, butter and chai. I even enjoyed the stampede of silverfish that fled the bathroom and the rusty water of the shower. I knew for certain I was going to like Kyrgyzstan.
Zamira was already up and busy arranging a taxi to Jalal-Abad. Everyone was helpful and relaxed, the hotel almost empty. We were soon out of Osh and ambling through a landscape of small fields of maize, cotton and rice, past shepherds and cowherds in the road with flocks of fat-tailed sheep or cattle we always narrowly missed. Gangs of women in headscarves and bright floral frocks picked cotton, dressed, in fact, remarkably like the women you used to see on the covers of Richard and Linda Thompson or Incredible String Band albums, or almost any of the handsome women you would meet in Suffolk at the Barsham Fair in 1970, or at the Hood Fair in Devon about the same era. Everywhere women were hard at work, hanging out washing, harvesting, shelling walnuts, building hayricks or even making mud bricks to bake in the sun while the men stood about chatting languidly in every village or squatted together at the roadside wearing their traditional tall Kyrgyz hats of embroidered felt, the ak kalpak, or the ornate pillbox hats of the Uzbeks. By now the sun was strong and warm, so I could only conclude that the thick felt kalpaks were intended to insulate heat out as well as in, along the same lines as the heavy woollen Berber djeleba of the Sahara. The effect, when a group of men all wearing kalpaks stood about talking, was of a miniature snowy mountain range.
Picket fences of willow sticks surrounded the cottage gardens, and melon-sellers sat beside the road. Each village was an oasis of poplars, the universal building material. The poles are tall, straight, and the wood is easy to work. So long as it is kept dry, poplar will last for years. You even find it in timber-framed houses or barns in Suffolk, often in the roof. Here the barns were all of poplar frame, whole trees forming the floor joists, rafters, and the uprights and diagonals of the walls, which were in-filled with cob bricks. Piles of these bricks, which were simply wet clay, straw and cow dung mixed and rolled together into the size and shape of loaves, lay baking in the sun. The mortar the mostly Uzbek villagers of the Ferghana Valley used was also clay, and the cob wall would eventually be daubed in clay plaster, liberally mixed with cow dung to make it waterproof. Just painting a cob wall with a coat of cow dung is enough to waterproof it.
At Ozgon we stopped to explore the ancient minaret and the mausoleum where the rulers of the Qarakanids, a long-extinct warlike people of Turkish origin, lie buried: just the sort of places Robert Byron, in his Road to Oxiana, sought out so single-mindedly in 1936 from Persia to Afghanistan. The place brought back strong echoes of Byron’s description of another of the great mausoleums, the Gumbad-I-Kabus in Persia, also a symphony in brick where the body of the Kabus, suspended from the roof in a glass coffin after his death in 1007, was said to shine and glint like a lighthouse across the steppes of Central Asia. The giant doors of the Ozgon mausoleum, intricately carved from plane, opened under 900-year-old lintels of cedar. Three enormous domes of red brick floated on brick columns rendered all the more like trees by dense decorative patterns of leaves and fruit. The minaret too was a forest of earthen leaves. Distant groves of poplars punctuated the huge fertile rice-growing plain below Ozgon, and we glimpsed stretches of the rivers that meandered into the great Surdarya River, flowing west through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan into the parched and shrunken bed of what was once the Aral Sea.
Under a beating sun, we climbed out of Ozgon into an arid landscape of yellow hills, red earth and rock. Below us in the valley cattle and horses sought shade among the waving bamboos of the rice fields. We were passing an endless stream of people walking, walking, walking in the dust b
oth ways along the road. Drovers on horseback looked unconcerned as we sped past more cattle, more sheep and big dark brown woolly dogs. A huge steel oil barrel lying on its side by the road had been turned into a cabin with windows set in its walls, a stove-pipe and a front door. A Kyrgyz Diogenes sat outside minding a flock of turkeys in a maize field behind. ‘Too many people here and not enough land or water,’ said Zamira. Three quarters of the villages in the Osh region still have no access to drinking water, and typhoid is on the increase. With a dense rural population of 400 to the square kilometre there is also a desperate shortage of housing. Yet everywhere people were working hard and the cob-and-poplar barns were full of maize. Women in striking patchwork dresses of red, yellow, green and blue picked cotton with young boys, and by a village stream shaded by pollard willows a small girl led an enormous cow on a rope. The swish of willows and the shady stream felt for a moment like home, like Dorset, but then we were off again, slaloming potholes in our cloud of dust, climbing gently all the way to Jalal-Abad.
We headed for the quaintly named district of Sputnik to look for Zakir Zarimsakov at the offices of Jalal-Abad’s Forestry Department. I had first heard about Zakir from Barrie Juniper in Oxford. ‘Quite simply the best botanist you could hope to meet. Knows every tree and plant there is in Kyrgyzstan. You might just be lucky and find he’s in town and willing to help.’ By a small miracle, one of my messages had reached him. They did have telephones at the Forestry Office, and email too, but people would keep stealing the telephone cables for the copper they contain, so they often went incommunicado for days. In Jalal-Abad you always kept your telephone covered with a cloth, not out of modesty or for security but to keep out the dust.