Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  At the camp, the women worked quietly at a makeshift kitchen beneath a tented awning on poles. Rice and walnuts hung in plastic bags from a bush. Rugs, quilts and cushions were laid out for us before the entrance of a felt-walled shelter with a ridged canvas roof, half yurt, half tent, with willow lattice walls inside. The old man placed a kettle on the wood fire and sat down with us. His white goatee contrasted with the deep tan of his lined Mongol features. He wore baggy black breeches, an Uzbek pillbox cap and tall boots of soft black leather. Their long pointed toes gave him the look of a magician, and as the family assembled, squatting in a line beside him, a tiny boy crept up and nestled into the old man’s chest, burying his head shyly in his arms. They had three hundred goats and six hundred sheep, he said, and they milked the sheep. We drank the thick, neat sheep’s milk and sat talking about the history and holiness of the mountain, about winter feed for the goats, about the milking of sheep. The tea never actually appeared: the old man seemed to have forgotten the kettle as it boiled away, and everyone took his or her lead from him, politely ignoring it.

  We climbed higher into a fine alpine meadow of close-cropped herbs and grasses, with here and there a weather-worn Turkestan maple standing hunched and alone among giant boulders, lichened wood and stone looking very much alike. Zakir said the meadow would be a mass of tulips in spring, which comes late up here, in June, or even July. We had reached 9,000 feet when we saw the white streak of a 250-foot waterfall tumbling out of the mountain ahead of us. But a ravine and a wild river defeated all our attempts to ascend to it. We crossed the river, discovered the ravine was all cliff and decided to go down instead. Eventually we had to wade back through the icy torrent to reach the spot on the banks of a gentler, glassy tributary where Gena had nobly ascended bearing lunch, spreading it out in a picnic beneath the shade of apple trees.

  Next morning I rose early, awakened by massed choirs of the Arslanbob cockerels and donkeys. The cows were standing quietly with a calf in the cowshed after gentle overnight rain. Dogs ran through the dark walnut woods that surrounded the farm and rose steeply uphill immediately behind the yard. From inside the privy at its far corner I peered through the cracks in the door between the rough wooden boards at the waking chickens, ducks and other farmyard animals, feeling a bit like one myself. Erissida and her mother were asleep in the hayloft in the roof, having ceded the living quarters on the ground floor to us. At night when we cleaned our teeth at the little tin udder on the post outside the door, they disappeared quietly up a ladder into the gable like birds settling in the eves. Now Erissida made her way across the yard, released the ducks from their shed and settled to milking the two cows. I could just hear the waltz of the milk jetting into the ringing pail and fell in love with Erissida there and then in the impossible way of the traveller far from home. It was her sheer competence, courage and resilience that appealed to me. Added to that, we could only really communicate through smiles and gestures, or through the interpretation of Zamira. And I liked the hippie-ish sloppy Joe pullovers she always wore. It was hopeless and impossible, and anyway she was probably married. I never asked because I didn’t want to know.

  At the top end of the village we picked up Zakir’s colleague Davlet Mamachanov, who probably knows more about walnuts than anyone alive. Davlet has identified 286 distinct varieties of walnut growing naturally in the forests of the Ferghana Valley and spends a lot of his time walking the woods in order to collect nuts to cultivate and study. Making an early start, we drove out along the great silver, dashing, white-water Kara Ungur River on its way north and west to the Aral Sea. We went on dirt roads and along river beds, crossing other rivers and sometimes even driving straight up them in sheets of spray, as I thought people in jeeps only did in television commercials. We also bumped over a lot of rocks and scattered plenty of chickens, turkeys, dogs, sheep and cattle as we dashed through the occasional village. Gena was in heaven, showing off his experience as a tank driver in Belarus with the army. Without his obvious skill, I would have been terrified.

  Things I could have happily sat for hours sketching flashed past: all manner of barns, sheds, privies, summer kitchens, tandurs, verandas and roadside kiosks, all bleached and faded by the sun. Nothing had been painted for twenty years. The poplar frame of poles, infilled with willow wattle and daubed with cob, or walled in cob bricks and plastered in mud, was an infinitely versatile, free-form way of building. Free of any apparent planning laws, the vernacular self-builders were free to express themselves. I saw a little summerhouse on stilts with windows all round an approximate hexagon, with a beaten-tin roof. The butcher’s shop where we paused to buy mutton for our lunch was no more than a hole in a wall, a tiny kiosk with a cavernous, shadowy inside, a big blue-painted set of scales on the counter, and a series of meat hooks along the outside wall like a row of clothes hooks bearing the dismembered components of a sheep or two dangling and drying in the heat, objects of considerable interest to the local flies and wasps.

  The further we sped away from Arslanbob, Erissida, the milking pails and home, the more the nomad instincts in my companions came alive. Gena carried a beautiful Tajik knife, its beaded handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl, undulating like a curled lip. He had the butcher dice up some mutton for a stew and wrap it in newspaper. He was going to cook it in the kazan. Opposite the butcher’s, people were loading up a dusty blue bus with sacks of walnuts on their way to market at Korgon Bazaar. Huge lorries with standing room only in their open backs trundled past, flouring the meat with dust. For a few miles, we gave a lift to a beautiful young woman with gold teeth. Stately turkeys sailed the roads.

  Everywhere old buses and covered trailers left over from the Soviet era were now in use as houses or summer cottages for the walnut harvesters. Transport then, as now, was mostly communal, so we saw few scrap cars. At a road block Zakir and Davlet were instantly recognized and we were waved through, but everyone else was checked for walnuts. Anyone driving in or out of the forest must show a valid licence to gather them and declare their cargo as though it were another country, which indeed it was.

  Reaching the confluence of the Sary Dash and Kurslangur rivers merging into the nascent Kara Ungur, we followed the lively Kurslangur along a track beside it. Walnuts cloaked the steep walls of its humid valley. At the village of Kurslangur, squat tin-roofed houses sheltered under a crumbling sandstone cliff, and walnuts were drying in wire-netting cages. Beyond the village, we left the jeep and began walking up the head of the valley beside the turquoise river, boiling through rocks and waterfalls. Gena found a fire pit for his kazan and began preparing an elaborate stew for lunch.

  The walnuts in the steepest parts of the river gorge were coppiced, and Zakir explained how the coppicing is done naturally by the violence of winter avalanches and rockfalls levelling the old trees, from whose rooted stools fresh coppice shoots then grow. The result was a quite different-looking wood, more like an English bluebell copse of ash: straight, smooth-barked poles growing in profusion from gnarled mushroom-tops of ancient mother wood. Zakir cut walking sticks from some of them for us. We found the chag, a medicinal bracket fungus of the walnut, and swung our way back down to the river from tree to tree. Herbal medicine is still an important part of life in the Ferghana Valley. Everywhere we went Zakir was given bee propolis, or queen substance, which he took home for his convalescent son Muhammad, who was known to suffer from asthma.

  Further up the gorge we had to negotiate a dramatic moraine beneath a cliff and came face to face with a steel plaque commemorating the death of a 21-year-old Russian woman climber, killed at this spot. Her fall haunted me as we climbed up into the old woods among huge walnuts as bent and twisted as the oaks on Dartmoor. We pocketed nuts of all kinds as we went, Davlet running about under the trees like a human squirrel, filling small polythene bags with nuts; he labelled these, often stuffing in elaborate notes too. ‘What is the perfect walnut?’ I asked him. Davlet continued breaking open the shell of a pale walnut, picking out the meat
as he thought about this. ‘Well, it is big, like the one we call Bomba, the bomb, but it must be well filled inside too, and its shell must crack open easily, with a ridge around the middle for strength and a sweet kernel that rattles about in the shell a little, so it is no trouble to extract. The kind of walnut you have to hammer open, or whose kernel can be winkled out only with a pin or the point of your knife, is no good.’ He paused and rummaged in his rucksack, produced a Bomba the size of a squash ball and opened it. ‘These look good and sell well in the market, but the kernel itself nowhere nearly fills the nut. A smaller, better-filled nut with a fairly thin shell, like one we call the Ugyursky, is actually far superior.’ He was right: the Bomba was like the boxes of muesli you see in the supermarket, twice the size of their contents, all talk and no trousers. Davlet had the scientist’s hunger for data: what is the total weight of our English walnut harvest? I had no idea. How many hectares do we have under walnut cultivation? Again, total ignorance on my part. I resolved to do better and send Davlet the information.

  We had climbed to 6,000 feet, passing through a windy canyon and a zone of the woods rich in plums of different kinds. Warm air from below was being drawn up the canyon by the presence of a glacier above. Zakir knew of at least seven species of plum here: yellow, golden, pink, crimson, two shades of violet and black. Prunus sogdiana was the commonest, named after the Sogdians, the earliest inhabitants of the region. It was one of those exotic names with a strangeness I just couldn’t get out of my head, like the aged, sturdy birch trees Betula turkestanica that grew along the mountain rivers, or the beautiful, dense bushes Exochorda tianschanica, whose woody seeds the children threaded into strings of beads. Another was one of the many different wild roses, delicate-leaved and slender-stemmed, Rosa kokaniko. Somehow the names added to the beauty of the plants like the foliate illuminations on the initial letters of medieval manuscripts, or honeysuckle spiralling up a living tree. People’s names, like Beeban Kidron or Atom Egoyan, get stuck in my head the same way, as though the memory, about its daily housework, doesn’t quite know where to put them and ends up carrying them about distractedly.

  We ascended through immense walnuts sixty feet tall to a little square wooden hut framed in the natural arch of an old tree that had bent over like a wooden Durdle Dor just before it. Two fathers and their teenage sons were living in this curious shelter, whose domed roof of hay topped off with polythene they had roped down to eight rough poles sunk in the ground. They all wore old army boots, camouflaged fatigues and woollen tea-cosies, so they could have been the SAS on an exercise, especially as they were smudged all over with walnut juice. Their hands, with which they shook ours heartily several times, were unusually black. Beside the hut lay the cause of their temporary melanism: a huge midden of empty nutshells and a sea of fresh, gleaming kernels laid out to dry. While Davlet, Zakir and Zamira were all absorbed in yet another walnut-tasting, I was invited into the shade of the hut, and noticed our hosts slept under blankets in the four nests they had impressed into a heap of hay. It was a rough life, but they all seemed happy and evidently serious about their nut-gathering. On the way down, we met one of the beekeepers we had encountered earlier bringing a honeycomb and some of the precious queen substance as a gift for Zakir. Like the local nabob he was, he accepted it graciously. Zakir, after all, had in his gift the allocation of the various permits and licences, and the delineation of each woodland territory of nut trees. Considering the extent of his power over the forest, he was miraculously kind and gentle with everyone, always modest and friendly, listening with tolerance and patience as his woodland constituents unburdened themselves of their many hardships and complaints.

  Further down the gorge, the smoke curling up through the trees from Gena’s cooking fire came into sight and quickened the appetite. The kazan was bubbling with a stew of mutton and potato, which we devoured sitting in a circle around it beside the river. Before beginning our meal, Zakir led us in the traditional gesture of thanksgiving to Allah in which the hands are raised and passed over the face, as if washing it in mime. We were entertained by a dipper, the dainty chulduk, flitting from rock to rock in a water ballet. But this peaceful interlude was interrupted by the sudden thunder of a trio of American troop planes flying low across the mountains towards Afghanistan. Gena said they would be ferrying reinforcements from the camp on the airfield at Bishkek into Kabul. When we looked back to the river, there was no longer any sign of our friend the chulduk.

  After lunch we took the jeep up a winding track out of the valley and south-east in the direction of Ortok. Breasting a hilltop scrub orchard of wild apples, we confronted a switchback descent to a water-splash ford across a river. The dirt road eventually brought us to the foot of a storybook land of dramatic red-and-ochre cliffs of vertically stratified rock that I took to be some kind of sandstone conglomerate strongly impregnated with iron. One of the mighty geological contortions for which the southern Tien Shan are famous had dislocated the strata through ninety degrees into the vertical, creating a castle in the air unassailable except on foot, cradling a walnut forest in its plateau. It was a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. People were labouring up and down a narrow path that wound up into the woods, those on the descent carrying sacks of nuts. Those who had been allocated licences to harvest here had certainly drawn the short straw, yet they all seemed content enough.

  After a bout of Gena’s enthusiastic off-road driving, it was good to wander across a nearby hillside through the wild apple trees. The view suddenly opened up: dense golden-green walnut forest covered the hills and valleys everywhere as far as the horizon, unbroken except where the spires of poplars indicated the distant groves of Arslanbob. Gena and I discovered a charming thatched hut with walls of wattle and daub standing in a wild orchard the other side of a stream. We vaulted over the water to reach a fine crop of the red, ripe apples of Malus kirghisorum and filled our pockets. A little deeper into the walnut woods, a family was encamped with all its livestock. A fine chestnut stallion, his front fetlocks hobbled, grazed in a clearing, and in the long, straight shadow of a tall walnut lay an orderly row of two dozen Muscovy ducks, snoozing away the afternoon, shifting position now and again to follow the shade.

  Back in the old Soviet days in 1965, when forestry was taken seriously, the Russian scientist Victor Schevchenko planted an orchard at Yaradar, a forest village in the Dashman Massif not far from Arslanbob. He chose the hardiest, best-fruiting trees from the wild fruit forest and began a long-term experiment to see how they might perform under cultivation. He planted walnuts, apples, pears and cobnuts. The apples had names like Kyrgyzka, Zimnya, Rushida, Guardysky and Dolono, and, out of the ninety-six varieties Schevchenko planted, Zakir and Davlet had decided that eight were worth recommending for the table. Of the seventeen original pears, they selected six. Scions of the choicest walnut trees growing in the forest had been grafted on to vigorous rootstock of black walnut, Juglans nigra, and planted out twenty feet apart in rows of half a dozen or so: Arcterek in the first row, Guardysky, Panfilovsky, Rodina, Bostandiksky, and the finest of them all, Uygursky, from the forest village of Gava. The Uygursky walnut, in the informed opinion of Davlet, comes closest to perfection. He ought to know, having thought long and hard about the 286 wild varieties he has identified. Breaking one open as we wandered the orchard that morning, he revealed the pale, cream kernel, how snugly it fitted the shell and how readily it detached itself. In the market, the pale kernels are considered far superior to the brown ones and fetch a higher price. By contrast, Davlet shook one of the giant nuts from a row of eleven Bomba trees to show how the kernel rattled inside.

  Spring in the Ferghana Valley is often an uncertain time. Cold weather can come just as the trees are flowering and a frost can wither the young nuts on the tree. Some years there is scarcely any walnut harvest at all. Late-blooming varieties of Juglans regia such as the Uygursky naturally stand a better chance of avoiding late-spring frosts, so Davlet and his colleagues have been looking out for su
ch trees and breeding hardier young stock from them in the orchard nursery for planting back into the forest. It was delightful to see Davlet Mamachanov in his element, the proud father of his trees, showing them off. The desk in his office resembled a crowded billiard table: walnuts covered every available square inch of it, and along the shelves were ranged rows of little labelled plastic bags and glass dishes containing more specimens: Bomba, Uygursky, Ostrovershiny, Oshsky, Pioner, Gavinsky, Slad Koyderny, Alal-Buka, Bostandiksky, Panfilovsky, Guardysky, Kazakstansky, Ubileyniv, Rodina, Kistevidniv. A large-scale map of the fruit forest on the wall marked the position of unusually interesting or productive trees.

  Back in Jalal-Abad next day, we walked through the parched remains of what had until recently been a fine orchard of walnuts and other fruit, originally planted by Zakir. Here too were rows of various apples, wild and domestic, and a collection of assorted pistachio nut bushes. Since independence in 1990 the Forestry Department and this eighty-acre garden have been starved of funds. They had been forced to get what money they could by growing sapling walnuts and fruit trees and selling them to the public. The wilting orchard had grown into the image of the nation state: paths that were once gravelled and shaded by lush leafy tunnels were now overgrown with brambles and weeds, the trees struggling to survive, unwatered, in the heat of the town. The orchards had become the refuge of homeless people, and a little village of bivouacs and benders was springing up among the trees. Some enterprising individuals had even cultivated parts of the garden with onion patches, like unofficial allotments. It was desperately ironic that Zakir’s orchards were failing for want of regular watering in a land so rich in wild rivers and streams. By contrast, the walnuts that filled the garden of the Zarimzakov family at home were deep green and well watered.