Shadow of the Silk Road (17 page)

‘Illness?’ But I have already guessed.

‘Two years ago they found this lump.’ She touches her breast. ‘If it had spread, I’d be dead now. Instead I had seven courses of chemotherapy.’ Perhaps it is for this that she shakes free her long hair. ‘But my company refused to pay. The director changed the rules fast and got out of it. So we had to pay ourselves. My husband earns just a policeman’s salary, but we did it. Soon afterwards the director was paralysed by a stroke, which may have been God’s judgement on him.’ She laughs implacably. ‘He ate too many kebabs. And now he can’t speak or walk…’

Yet she is preoccupied not by her lost job, nor by her perhaps indifferent marriage, nor even by her cancer. Without prompting, a starker obsession breaks surface. It is the power of another woman. This tyrannical beauty, her husband’s sister–I see her only through Gul’s eyes–walks in silks and jangles with bracelets of solid gold. Her will and intelligence are frightening. She has married the mayor of Khotan, and become his chief against corruption.

‘The only thing she couldn’t have was a daughter,’ Gul says. ‘If I’d given birth to one, she’d have taken her. Each time I went into hospital to have a baby, she’d be hovering on the telephone, waiting. Is it a girl, is it a girl? But I only had sons.’

‘Did she imagine you’d give it to her?’

‘No. She thought she’d take it.’ Gul’s gaze drops from mine. ‘I don’t think I could have stopped her. She was very powerful, very rich. We’re poor.’

‘She sounds a monster.’

‘No, not exactly. It’s odd. When I had my cancer operation she worried that I’d die and my little son be left without a mother. She said that if anything happened to me, she’d bring him up…He’s handsome, like she was.’

‘Was?’

‘Yes. Last October she promised me a job in the municipality. It would have changed my life. A salaried job instead of this precariousness…A month later she was dead.’

‘How?’ I was starting to be affected by this woman too.

‘On the trans-desert highway. She took the wheel from her driver–she liked doing that. She must have fallen asleep. She died at a hundred and fifty k.p.h.’ Gul turns away to where the donkey-carts are trotting in the night. ‘My life changed then. She was beautiful, always wore gorgeous dresses. But they brought her back from the desert that morning and within two hours she was buried in a cotton shroud costing sixty kwai. That’s our Muslim way. Ten metres of hand-woven white cloth, stitched together. Then laid in the earth.’

Gul looks haggard, as if her own life were draining. She says: ‘Even in death she was powerful. Her husband bought a tract of land for her grave, and all her relatives–my husband and I too–will be buried round her.’

The shock is still palpable, as if there were those to whom death cannot happen. ‘And now I don’t think much about my career any more, or about money. Nothing is very important. Is it?’

The only purpose in the silk moth’s life is to reproduce itself. During its two-week existence it never eats and cannot fly. Instead this beautiful
Bombyx mori
lays eggs from which larvae as thin as hairs are born: offspring so light that an ounce of eggs yields forty thousand caterpillars.

At once they start to gorge ravenously. Their only food is the white mulberry, whose pollarded skeletons line the fields of Khotan. Peasant families exhaust days and nights in feeding them, with an ancient care which no machinery can match. Sightless, almost immobile, the silkworm has been reduced by millennia of cultivation to a helpless dependence on humans. The caterpillars are like neurotic babies. They thrive only on fresh leaves, gathered after the dew has evaporated, and served to them, at best, every half-hour. Ideally the age of the mulberry shoots should coincide with their own.

In five weeks of frenzied feasting they consume thirty thousand times their weight at birth. The munching of their jaws makes a noise like rain falling. Centuries ago the Chinese noted that the colour of their forelegs anticipated the tint of the silk they would spin. Abrupt changes of temperature or lapses in hygiene, any sudden noise or smell wreaks havoc with their nerves, and they may die. But after a month each silkworm has multiplied its initial weight four thousandfold, and has swollen to a bloated grub, its skin tight as a drum, with a tiny head.

Then suddenly–when moulted to creamy transparency–the caterpillar stops eating. For three days the future silk flows from its salivary glands in two colourless threads which instantly unite, and it spins these about its body with quaint, figure-of-eight weavings of its head. Even after its has sealed itself from sight inside its shroud, it may sometimes be heard, faintly spinning.

Then comes ‘the great awakening’, as the Chinese say. Within twelve days, locked in an inner chrysalis, the wings and legs of the future moth lie folded on its breast. Then it stirs and bursts with dreamy brilliance into the sun.

But to the silk farmer, and the rustic factories scattered through the oasis, the broken carapace is useless, its threads snapped. So instead, a few days after the caterpillars shroud themselves away, the harvest is steamed, and they die in the cocoon.

In the little factory where I go, these cocoons rattle light and intact in my hands. They are off-white and furry. A woman sits barefoot on a coal-burning stove, and immerses them in a steaming cauldron. She stirs the cocoons as they soften, then hooks them
upward in a golden mesh, like a fishing-net stuck with winkles. The individual threads are almost invisible. They feel like thin, sticky rain. Beside her the cauldron is afloat with the pathetic detritus of what appear to be shelled and blackened walnuts: the dead pupas of the
Bombyx mori
.

She offers me one in reddened hands. I finger it in wonder. From this kernel comes a filament of such strength that a silk rope is stronger than a steel cable of the same diameter, a fabric which endures pristine in graves where all else has disintegrated. The thread may unravel from a single cocoon for over a mile. An older woman draws these fibres through an eyelet, pinching some twenty into a single strand, then reels them on to an iron wheel.

I walk down a brick-floored hall between the looms. The raw silk hangs from the loom-ends in bundles, weighted by stones which drop into holes dug in the floor. The weavers are all men or youths. There is no sound but a muffled clanking, and the thump of pedals attached to their frames by strings. The looms look absurdly delicate: scaffolds of matchstick, cord and stones. I am walking through hanging dust. Nothing seems changed from how it always was. Only an old woman spins the weft with the help of two bicycle wheels.

It was from Khotan, perhaps, not from the Chinese heartland, that the jealously guarded secrets of sericulture spread. Old legends tell of their betrayal. A spoilt Chinese princess, it is said–betrothed to the king of Khotan–smuggled the mulberry seeds and silkworms over the frontier in her headdresses, and the convent where she established them was still there in Xuanzang’s time. More than a century after her, in about
AD
552, silkworm eggs reached Constantinople concealed in the staffs of two Nestorian monks, travelling, it seems, from Khotan. And China’s age-old monopoly was broken.

For more than half the year the sky above the town was opaque muslin, dense with unseen sand, and the sun only a white coin discarded there. From the invisible Kun Lun mountains, the twin Black and White Jade rivers came winding out of mist between banks of silt and pebbles, flowing through the oasis to the desert.

The Kun Lun seem to retreat forever into a cold elusiveness. Here, in the Chinese mind, bloomed the orchards of immortality and the white land of death, where the Queen Mother of the West ruled from her jade mountain at the gate of heaven.

So jade, swept down by the twin rivers, was the chance detritus of another world. In the third millennium
BC
, before any official Silk Road existed, a Jade Road foreshadowed the same path, carrying the stone westward to Mesopotamia and eastward to China, whose emperors all but worshipped it. In autumn, after the mountain floods have abated, people still wade along the river with linked arms, feeling for the jade with their toes. Women are most gifted at this–they attract the male
yang
in the stone–and often used to comb the waters by the full moon. Jade, some said, was crystallised moonlight.

I waded into the White Jade river with Osman, an old taxi-driver who had once found a jade bigger than his fist, he said. A few families straggled across the gravel shoals, digging with little spades. I had seen stones being traded on the Khotan streets–one the size of a football–but these days, Osman said, people found fewer and fewer. He chanted Allah, Allah as he threaded the shallows, and sometimes told his beads. Each time you chanted Allah, he said, you prolonged your life. His eyes were tired and soft above a waterfall of beard. He should have retired long ago, but he had four old relatives at home to support.

Several times I imagined I had discovered a piece, and so did he. The stones gleamed translucent and olive-green in the water; but once dry in our pockets, they faded to common rock, and we tossed them disconsolately back. I realised I did not know what I was looking for. The colour of the nephrite jade which has so haunted China ranged from black through spinach green and reddish tints to the treasured milky ‘mutton-fat’. Half the stones shimmering underwater could persuade you they were jade.

Then, paddling in the shallows, my toes encountered a pebble smoother than the rest. It shone moss-green against my feet, and was a little oily to the fingers, as nephrite is. I slipped it into my pocket, at once smug and guilty that Osman, with Allah’s help, had found nothing. The fragment seemed a key or talisman. I had
China in my pocket. No stone has ever fascinated a people more. To Confucius jade exemplified the virtues of the perfect man: strong as intelligence, moist and smooth like benevolence, loyal, humble (it hung down in beads), righteous. It elicited a nervous awe. Only the emperor, the Son of Heaven, could use the pure white kind, and the princes and mandarins below him carried ministerial tablets of minutely graded jade and dignity. At the winter solstice jade was sacrificed in fire, and the beasts slaughtered and laid in jade dishes were the colour of the emperor’s nephrite wand. His authority itself rested on six ancestral seals–with a seventh, secret one–of incised white jade.

There were those to whom the stone became a madness. The eighteenth-century emperor Qianlong penned eight hundred poems to it, and would sleep only in a jade bed. Vital to astrology and divination, it turned people invisible and made them fly. It was sculpted into statuettes (even of Xuanzong’s dancing horses) and all the vessels of state ceremony; it adorned swords and girdles–aesthete-courtiers tinkled as they walked–and became hairpins and bells and flutes. Hung in frames, it emitted celestial music.

Above all, it promised immortality. The rich sometimes swallowed powdered jade, or drank it with rice and dew. In death, they imagined, it would preserve them from decay and hasten resurrection. Jade amulets covered the corpse’s eyes, tongue and lips, stopped up its orifices and sheathed its penis. Princes were buried like gorgeous reptiles plated from head to foot in jade, stitched with gold thread.

I fingered the stone like an amulet in my pocket. Its symbolism cropped up everywhere. In Chinese literature the sleek luminosity of jade became a metaphor for the purity of a woman’s skin, and old handbooks of sexuality exalted the jade stalk entering the jade garden until jade fountains overflowed. At the other end of time, ancient emperors commanded jade to abate storms and floods, and imbibed it as an aphrodisiac.

I walked a little way downriver to examine my fragment alone. But when I unclasped it in my hands, I saw only a pebble of coarse gneiss. I searched my other pockets, disappointment dawning. There was nothing else. There would be no flying, no immortality.
Like all the others, it had dulled to matt rock. And soon Osman was coming towards me with his hands dangling empty, chuckling, and wanting to go home.

I sit at a restaurant table beside an empty chair. The room is blue with smoke. Solitude is lonelier in public places.
Suoman
noodles in a sea of fried tomatoes, flat bread and spiced
laghman
: their smells drowse in the air.

Then a man sits down beside me. He is heavy and restless, and starts to talk about nothing in particular. I sense I’m being tested. Under his flat cap the face is coffee-brown, simmering. After a while he says: ‘You are Russian.’

‘I’m English. You’re Uighur?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Yes, I’m Uighur. But I’ve just got Kazakh nationality.’ He flashes his new passport at me. ‘My wife is Kazakh.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m not here. My family is all in Kazakhstan now. And I’m leaving tomorrow.’ Then there breaks from him a headlong anger. There are feelings he has to speak to someone, anyone, before it is too late. He glares about us, then slides into Russian. ‘Getting out of this filthy society. These Chinese motherfuckers. Do you know how many are settling in my homeland every day?’

Seven thousand, I had heard: a silent, demographic genocide. In 1949, at the dawn of Communist power, there were fewer than three hundred thousand Chinese in the province. Now, in purposeful, ever-mounting waves, they outnumbered the eight million Uighur.

The man says: ‘This is a military occupation. It’s like Tibet. It’s like Kosovo. It’s like…’ He runs out of parallels, then seizes my fork and clasps it to his chest. ‘Could I take this and say it’s mine? No! But that’s what they’re doing.’ He drops it on the table. ‘This Chinese…shit…they will…they will get out of our country.’

I say mercilessly: ‘It won’t happen. Your country’s too rich.’ Its vast gas fields and recently discovered oil were already feeding the
industries of the Pacific coast. The mineral resources here were greater than in all the rest of China.

The man tears his cap from a massive, balding head. ‘Yes, my country’s rich, and they’re destroying it. They live in their filthy high-rises and make cities of smog. And they loved Stalin, the Chinese did.’ He clasps his two hands in accord. ‘I think they have no souls. In middle school Chinese teachers told us we were descended from monkeys. Monkeys! And the Chinese
eat
monkeys. They eat their ancestors…’