Shadow of the Silk Road (21 page)

Under the hills the long sheds and pens of the farms lay in ruin. Only horse herds travelled the fields: glossy, long-legged creatures, chestnut and roan. The rough, strong horses and the smooth-running ones–‘Like aeroplanes!’ Chingiz guessed (he’d never flown)–replicated the Uighur horses of Xinjiang. The whole economy seemed to have reverted to its immemorial staple, the horse.

We branched off the road to the ghostly quadrangle of a city built by a Turkish dynasty a thousand years before. Its battlements and towers hovered out of the scrub, enclosing nothing. Chingiz, following me along the broken walls, imagined them Chinese, but pointed far away to where a burial mound heaved beneath the mountains, and cried: ‘That is the tomb of Kochoi, the companion of Manas!’

He had learnt about Manas from infancy. This superhuman founder–enshrined in oral epic–shed on his people their notional identity. Who were the Kyrgyz otherwise? The tsarist Russians had found them in their steep, insulating valleys, split into many clans, with no concept of a nation. They could speak their genealogies far back into the patrilineal mist, and that was their country. (Chingiz could do this even now.) It was Stalin who defined their boundaries in 1924, brutally collectivised them and codified their language, packing it with loan-words to separate them from their Kazakh kin. And now, the Soviet vision ended, they clung to affinity with a half-mythic nation, the creation of a song.

Chingiz longed only for stable times. He wanted a better job. He was laid off half the year. When he stopped at his mother’s cottage, I saw a hovel as poor as any Chinese home, its walls mud, its floors concrete. She was straining yoghurt in the yard. Her shallow nose and eyes were duplicated in her son, and her cheekbones polished
islands in a wrinkled sea. When we left she clambered to her slippered feet like an old woman, groaning; and Chingiz winced. ‘You see how hard our life is?’

To the west, as we went, the hills undulated like frozen sand. But to the east the mountains grew ever steeper as the noon haze dimmed them, until only their disembodied snowfields glittered high up, leaking glaciers and gleams of cloud. At every other hill Chingiz’s forty-year-old Moskvich gasped to a halt, its gear-box failing, its engine wreathed in steam. Already its body was disintegrating, half its dashboard had gone, its radio mercifully dead, and styrofoam belched from its seats. At every slope he would throw open the blackened bonnet and splash cold stream-water over its radiator, and we would lumber miraculously on to Naryn.

‘But the factories there are all shut down,’ he said, ‘and half the people out of work. Old people can barely stay alive. The average pension is eight hundred som a month’–that was less than twenty dollars–‘barely enough for bread. In the villages people grow vegetables and survive, and their children help them. But in the towns it’s hard. Some without families have just died.’

The town was squashed in a vortex of hills. It looked slow and tired. A municipal palace stood in a dusty park, its statue of Lenin still in place, and the roads were lined with Russian trees. ‘But the Russians have left,’ Chingiz said. The men walked the streets in the clothes of a shabby West, their women in ankle-length dresses and headscarves. Only the white Kyrgyz hats made a jaunty commotion along the pavements. Some projected rakish beaks like ships’ prows, while others were fringed with black lamb’s wool or dangled cheery tassels. Still others resembled bells clamped over the head, or rose outlandishly tall, like the hats of dervishes; and occasionally the brim would disappear altogether, to leave a Scythian-looking cone. Chingiz, who lived here, recovered his own hat from his rubbish-strewn car and perched it at a sunny angle, before clasping my hand and vanishing into the bazaar.

‘We’re a poor country. We never looked for independence. It just fell into our hands. We should have had battles and rebellions
against Moscow. But it was all done for us by others–Poles and Baltic people.’

Even seated, Daniar looks tall, thick-chested. A troubled knot flickers between his eyes. He has come up from Bishkek to visit relatives where he was born. The tea-house where we sit is a no-man’s-land between his present and his past, when as a boy he roamed the grasslands among his grandfather’s cattle, slaughtered long ago in the slump after independence. We look out through the glass at people passing. He is waiting for his cousin to join him. ‘She’s only twenty-one. She can barely remember Communism. She’s different.’

‘You mean she has no fear? Or no regret?’

He answers enigmatically: ‘Perhaps at my age it’s too late.’ But he is barely thirty. In the pale moon of his face his mouth makes only small disruptions. ‘My generation is not a happy one. We were brought up to believe in the Soviet dream. We sang those hymns in school, about a bright future, and I believed it all. Then when I was eighteen it fell to bits. Now what are we to believe? Islam? No…’ His eyes dart about him, hunting for something else. ‘That Arabic is not my tongue, it’s not my history, not my desert. We’re mountain people. Pagans, really. And we had seventy years of Soviet rule. We’ve got used to vodka…’ But he sips tea.

Islam had always lain thin here, I knew, a late arrival in the nineteenth century, carried by Sufis.

‘Your parents believed?’

‘My father died by drowning when I was a child, I don’t know how. I don’t remember him. I only have photos and my mother’s stories. And this memory of my grandfather trying to understand. He was already old. He had survived a German concentration camp and then internment in the Gulag. But after my father’s death he tried to read the Koran, in Arabic, on and on, hopelessly. I think he couldn’t understand it at all. And I, too, would listen and try to get it by heart, without understanding.’ The knot trembles between his eyes, clears away. ‘It is in paganism that we pray for the spirits of the dead, to fortify them. Maybe my grandfather was seeking that again. The countryside is still full of paganism. People there talk of Unai Enye, the mother goddess, and remember the cult of
the sky. Sometimes they’ll call on the sky to support them, or cry
Tengri Ursun! May the Sky strike you!
which can carry a terrible authority in the mouth of the old. And it’s the old who keep the past. I remember how my great-grandmother–she died at a hundred and nine–would drum her fist on my chest, my forehead, when I was ill, and wriggle her finger against my breastbone saying:
This is not my finger, this is the finger of the spirit Batma Zura, healing you…’

The old woman believed the boy’s illnesses sprang from anxiety. Sickness, to her, was fear. He had loved her.

‘As for Manas, the true bards died out long ago. It’s said they could see the scenes of battle with their closed eyes, and sang them from the heart, extempore.’ He speaks as of a mysticism. ‘But we have no temples, nothing. Nothing we can touch, except mountains. It’s all inside us.’ He taps his chest, where the old woman must have tapped it. ‘And I think it’s not enough. People don’t experience the
Manas
any more, not as they did. A few years changes everything. Younger people have woken to other things. My cousin is only nine years younger than me, but compared to her I’m asleep.’ He tilts his face in his cupped hands. It is a quaint self-image. ‘My whole generation, asleep!’

And when Elnura arrives, I understand. She is button-bright, with short, streaked hair, and stylish jeans. She works for an NGO in Bishkek, and her husband is in government. Her eyelids are touched with blue.

She sits beside Daniar, but belongs to a different time. She wears her impatience like a badge. She says: ‘Have you noticed about this town? There are no Russians.’ She stares through the window, turns to me. ‘Bishkek is full of Russians.’ She laughs, suddenly girlish–‘Too many!’–and turns back to the window, as if she has never seen her people before. I look out too, but some trick of personality makes me forget that Elnura is one of them. Their heavy heads seem stamped with masks: little mouths, clenched eyes, short noses. She says suddenly: ‘You know, to be Kyrgyz is to have no burden’–she feels her shoulders. ‘Others have a burden of history. But we–nothing! Nothing!’

The same absences that Daniar regrets seem to release her. She
loves only the bland, mongrel city of Bishkek, where she was born.

‘All we have is tribes!’ she says. ‘Mine is a sub-clan called “Five Stomachs”, I don’t know why. You’d think one was enough!’ She glances at her trim belly, and laughs the name away.

But politics, I’d heard, were rife with tribal links, impenetrable to the outsider. The Russians had never fathomed them.

‘No, the Russians never understood,’ Elnura says. ‘And everybody hates them.’

Her energy has assigned Daniar to near-silence, but now he says: ‘I don’t hate them.’ He doesn’t look as if he hates anybody. ‘We are intertwined with them.’ He is closer to them in time than she, more conscious of what they have given. It would be like hating yourself, a little.

But Elnura looks at me, says relentlessly: ‘We feel angry with the Russians for degrading us. For treating us as second-class, for rejecting our language. It’s like a revenge now, against them. Now they must learn our language, as we were forced to learn theirs. I have to say, I hate them. Most of us hate them. You won’t see it on the surface, but it’s everywhere. My sister shivers whenever they pass her in the street. My mother too. She says she’s not a nationalist. “I’m not, I’m not! I just hate the Uzbeks–oh, and the Jews. And I
hate
the Russians. But no, I’m not a nationalist!” ’ Her laughter is like a scythe. ‘But we have cause to hate the Russians.’

Daniar says: ‘My mother told me people here wept at Stalin’s death, just as they did in Moscow.’ His look of trouble returns. ‘But in the end, they left us too little. A poor Islam and a disgraced Communism…’

Elnura sings out: ‘Nothing but the future!’

That evening, walking along the main street, I trip over a broken paving stone, and at once a police car looms alongside. I see a huge, blotched face speckled with stray hairs, and missing teeth. He leans out, the door ajar. ‘Have you been drinking? Drugs? Whisky?’ He jerks his thumb. ‘Get in the back!’

I affect not to understand. His fingers circle my hips, fumble the pockets. ‘Opium?’ He finds my passport, with visas for Afghanistan, Iran. ‘This is Arabic?’ The plainclothes driver sits
dark and quiet. The policeman’s hands discover a wad of my money. Clumsily he folds the notes double under my passport. His fist closes over the dollars, then shoves the passport back at me. ‘You can go!’

I grab his wrist. It’s like seizing a rolling-pin. I shout: ‘They’re mine!’ I am suddenly furious. ‘Who the hell are you?’

He crumbles strangely in surprise, the face emollient. His vast fist releases the money back into mine. But I grow angrier, shout absurdly: ‘Where are your papers? Who are you?’ A rogue policeman, I think, or not one at all. Then the driver accelerates away.

Perhaps this is good for me. I have started to idealise Kyrgyzstan, its placeless beauty. But now that the men are gone, my anger drains, and I am left alone under the street lights, shaking.

Seventy miles north of Naryn, near the little town of Kochkor, a family rented me a spare room in a house among orchards. Its double gate swung on to a whitewashed courtyard, where turkeys scratched among vegetables, and in the thickets nearby a sheep pulled straw from a box, and the trees dropped red and gold apples. I relapsed into peace. In its corridors and rooms the brown-painted Soviet floorboards were silenced by felt rugs, and Uzbek carpets clothed the walls.

Already these homes had grown familiar to me: the privy found in darkness through shrubs by starlight; the double windows sealed against the cold; the photographs of dead elders high on the walls–enduring women in headscarves, men braided with war medals.

I had other reasons for coming here. I had heard of a curious
mazar
in the hills to the south. The family knew nothing of it, but one of the sons owned an old taxi, and in pious curiosity drove me there with his teenage daughter. We crossed a country scattered with the tumuli of early warriors–‘That was our pride, fighting!’–and down a long track we entered a broken massif at evening. In its valley, deepening with shadows, two gnarled orange hills stuck up in isolation.

Long before we reached the prayer-hall beneath, a wild staccato singing skirled across to us. Four women were rocking on their heels beneath its wall, their scarves piled like turbans on their heads. One of them seemed mad, and for minutes after an imam had emerged and the others fallen silent, she let out sharp, involuntary cries, and clawed at her shoulders. ‘They want a miracle,’ the taxi-driver said. He was tall and urbane, his hair receding from a high forehead. ‘This is their holy place.’

The imam led us to the foot of the linked hills. He was stout as a barrel. Under his velvet skull-cap his face spread ruddy and ebullient, innocently proud. The taxi-driver trudged behind us in his tracksuit and trainers. His daughter’s hand slipped into his. She wore a baseball cap labelled ‘Fashion Maker’, and sequined socks glinted through her sandals.

It was almost night. The hills loured above us in knuckles of coagulated rock. Around them the earth smoothed to a shrub-speckled plain, but on all sides the horizon was closed by snow-peaks still pale in the last light. We crouched at the hill’s foot, by a semicircle of charred stones, where sheep were sacrificed, and prayed. ‘You’re a Christian?’ The imam opened his palms. ‘They come here too. Everybody comes.’

A half-moon rose, and the lights of a distant village–it was still named Lenin–glimmered out of the dark. The white buildings of a Soviet collective farm lay abandoned nearby. We followed a path fringed with pebbles, circling the hills anticlockwise in the Muslim way. Others were before us, their lanterns shifting among the rocks, praying in scattered groups. Every spot was holy. From a cave above us, the imam said, a hermit had ascended to heaven, and those who lay on its floor would be cured of epilepsy and madness.

A family had lined up cautiously beneath it. Their prayers quavered and died. One of them–a young girl–was wandering among the rocks. Then an angry shout went up and we saw her elder brother, grasping a whip, bellowing at her to come to heel. She faltered to her place in the line, bewildered, and they prayed again in unison. ‘She has a nervous disorder,’ the imam said, ‘in her head.’