Shadow of the Silk Road (23 page)

Voices from the backlit dark called out: ‘How is our Song-kul? How is our beautiful nature?’ Drunkenly I yearned for it. Through one window I could see the moonlit lake moving in iron ripples over its pebbled bed, touching the shore with phosphorescence. After a while I went out and stood on the cold bank, suddenly regretful, my back to the cabin. An icy wind was blowing off the surface. After five minutes I felt my coat settled tenderly over my shoulders, and my cup placed in my hand. ‘You’ll get cold,’ Ruslan said, and he went back inside.

By midnight the feasting was over. Everybody’s hands lifted in unison and swept against flushed faces with a murmured ‘
Bismillah!’
, and we slept at last in quilted heaps against one
another’s shoulders, the woman’s hair flooded loose from her scarf, her child in her arms.

Snow fell overnight, the first of autumn. I went out at dawn into its childhood miracle, half an inch thick under the faded stencil of the moon. The neutral-coloured lakeland of the day before had transformed to the chiaroscuro of winter. Cattle were moving in soundless silhouette over the hills, and the mountains across the water gleamed with the artifice of icing sugar. I could hear nothing. A low wind was pouring off the lake under the young sun, where black-tailed gulls paddled close to shore, and a scatter of rust-coloured birds fidgeted in the short grass.

I borrowed a horse–a docile roan–to wander the lake. In its high pommel the nail-heads were worn to silver, and its girth-strap was rotting. It ambled on automatic holiday, its hoofprints solitary over the snow. We went through an icy stillness. The shadows of powder-puff clouds marbled the water, which lisped alongside in nervous waves. A faint wind tapped in my ears. Yet by noon the snow was thawing, the horse’s hoofs sinking into slush. I dismounted on a spur above the camp, and watched the snowdrifts vanishing one by one below. Close inshore, the shallows made zones of turquoise and peacock blue.

Then I heard the jeep behind me. As it lurched to a halt, Annar and Tochtor tumbled out, with a herdsman cradling a lamb, and Ruslan jubilant. They beckoned me on to a knoll. This was in my honour, they said. We stood in a line facing west–the drivers, Ruslan, the herdsman, the lamb and I–west not to Mecca, Ruslan said, but to the place of sunset–and opened our hands in prayer. Then the herdsman drew a knife across the lamb’s throat. A surprised bleat as the blade sliced through, then a piteous scream which seemed eternal…and the blood gushed from the severed throat, as the man sawed. Then they all invited me to the bivouac below with cries of ‘We’ll eat! Eat!’ and I stifled my nausea, my hypocrisy, and accepted. This was the age-old cry to the guest from an impoverished world, plying him with precious meat, thrusting titbits past his protesting hand and filling his glass again.

An hour later I descended the hill to the tent. The lamb’s
intestines were swimming in a bowl, and its bloodstained pelt curled on the floor. Twenty men had assembled to feast. They settled in a famished circle, squatting or cross-legged in their hefty boots, I in the place of honour. Their mouths gaped black or flashed gold in hard, burnished faces. Soon they were engorging minced lamb in pudding-like fistfuls, scouring their plates with work-blunted hands, while noodles dribbled from their lips like the whiskers of so many cuttlefish. Their cups filled up with tea, then vodka. They wrenched and gnawed on the bones, picked them white, discarded them, and sucked in the last gravy with a noise like emptying bathwater. Then they dispersed without a word, or slept.

It was mid-afternoon before we stirred ourselves for the journey back. I shook a host of unknown hands in parting, embraced strangers. We’d be down in an hour or two, Tochtor said, checking his broken watch. But by seven the sun was settling over Song-kul and we were still circling the eastern shore. Then darkness descended. I felt replete and faintly sick. Two hours later we were still grinding down the mountain, our headlights swerving over a sunken track. We were stopped at a lonely checkpoint. Ruslan vanished, perhaps to bribe our passage, while Annar and Tochtor lugged bottles of vodka from their pockets and drank in a tin canteen moored there like a railway carriage.

I had entered a shadowland. Nobody explained anything. We were prevented from continuing, Tochtor said, by these filthy government people. They were just highwaymen. In the days of the Soviet Union such a thing would never…

Then Ruslan returned. While Annar crossed the checkpoint in the jeep, he guided me on foot up a defile. The stars were bright overhead. He murmured something about stolen permits, but I could unravel nothing. It seemed his lack of papers made him easy prey. Later the jeep caught up with us, stealing over a stone track, but soon we were flagged down at another checkpoint, where Ruslan haggled grimly in a candlelit hut. No one I saw was in uniform. Only by one in the morning had we blundered down to the tarmac road, and made for home.

We sank into our separate silences: Annar driving, Ruslan gloomy and flaccid beside him, I half asleep. Only Tochtor went
on talking. But suddenly the words were slushy and gurgling in his mouth, and a minute later he had collapsed forward in his seat, his head on Ruslan’s neck, where he began to kiss him, mumbling. Annar pushed him away. Our jeep wandered over the empty road. I sat hunched in the back, muffled in a mountain jacket and growing fatalism. The drink was now overrunning Annar too. Twice he swerved into the dust, scattering rocks, while Ruslan shouted at him. He corrected us, giggling in maudlin fits.

Then, on the deserted road, a lorry approached. As if fascinated, mothlike, by those two headlamps, Annar drifted the car across the tarmac towards them. I noticed this and expected him to straighten. But he never did. I yelled at him; so did Ruslan. A few yards further and the lights engulfed us. The lorry loomed mountainously above. We converged on it in ghastly magnetism, sliding alongside once our fronts had passed each other inexplicably, without sound, then out into the vacant road.

We dreamed to a halt. We may have missed it by a finger’s or a hand’s breadth. Now it was gone. Tochtor was still unconscious. I shouted at Ruslan to take the wheel–suddenly furious, spurred into life by my survival–and wrenched Annar across to the passenger seat. He lay arched back over the crumpled shoulders of Tochtor behind.

Ruslan drove angrily on until our petrol gave out, barely ten miles from his village. We waited for another vehicle in the dark. It was four o’clock. The moon emerged from cloud and shone indifferently on our predicament. Tochtor, in the rear seat, was slumped forward; Annar, in the front, had collapsed back, and they lay intertwined like spent lovers. Annar burbled something, then he too passed out. I could see his pale throat in the moonlight. Ruslan banged his head gently, continuously, on the steering wheel before him, saying nothing. Only by sunrise did we reach home, after a passing truck had sold us a litre of diluted petrol, and I fell into bed with no goodnight.

In the black silence, while I lie exhausted without sleep, and there is nothing more to do, the Sogdian trader stirs, closer in times of stress.

What about those you love? What about all you’ve left undone? You could have been killed. Don’t you think about death?

Yes, it’s never far. You, whose lives were shorter than ours, harder, what did you think?

We sacrificed to our gods, and did not think. That’s how we are, humans.
[Pause.]
But we paid our debts.

What do you mean?

I would have slit that throat in the moonlight.

No, he was only drunk. And these people are like those mine once enslaved. Poor people. So there are things we can’t say, can’t do. Our values are imperialist. This is guilt because of our ancestors. You will understand.

You must learn to slit his throat, idiot. Pay him that compliment.
[He fingers his own neck.]
When those lights came for you, weren’t you afraid?

I have to think, then answer:
No, just numb.

Ah yes. Death is like that. I knew a glass-trader from Yarkand who told me death would be momentous, that just before the end, everything would be revealed. He leant over a well in the Rafad caravanserai by night, and fell in. That was his revelation. Water drowns you.

Why do these ironies please you?

Because of you. You want significance; but it doesn’t come. Death is not beautiful. It’s nothing. Death for the dead does not exist.
[Silence.]
And you put yourself at the mercy of a drunk! I’d rather trust a lame donkey.
[Pause.]
But we do what we are born to. I’ve known caravans disappear under the sand. The merchants walk on over them.

[Bitterly:]
Business as usual.

When the trade in sable dried up at Itil, they said the town was finished. But then honey came in from Siberia, and amber…
[His voice starts to fade.]
Did you know that amber embalms? You can see…bees in it…and tigers’ eyes…eternal life…

Next morning Annar could not face me. He sent an apology by Tochtor, then disappeared. Tochtor–ebullient and himself again–offered amends by inviting me to eat. In his yard I found
a dog lapping from a bowl of new blood, and knew that a second lamb had been killed for me. Then he proposed I take his wife for fifty dollars–‘just for you, but only once’–and that was a joke. But Ruslan’s hands trembled over her shoulders. ‘Tochtor’s impotent,’ he said, ‘that’s why he offers her. And he needs the money.’ But the woman clouted them both and answered spiritedly back. She was pretty and able, and Tochtor was out of work.

Someone else drove us back to Kochkor, while Ruslan slumped in the back, unkempt, his face clouded. He said at last: ‘I didn’t sleep last night at all.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I felt ashamed. I said I would find you horses in time, and I failed. And you are my guest. And yesterday, last night…if you had been killed…’

Parting, I took him in my arms–it was like cradling a huge, disconsolate baby–and he held me limply, and did not seem much comforted. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’

It was my anger that chiefly caused his shame, I think. And this anger, as in some Victorian explorer’s narrative, had made things happen. (The car had been almost punctual that morning, and was filled with petrol.) But I recoiled from its memory.

We left each other, half-healed, on a street in Kochkor.

Where the Jumgal valley met the massif of Sussmayr, a painted wall of mountain rose. The cliffs were torn with symmetrical scars, as if by some monstrous animal, and fell to the track in violent slabs of black and apricot. Sometimes its scree was pure coal. Through it the Kekemeren river made a passage of brilliant turquoise, and drew a bloom of willows after it. A few poor homesteads squeezed alongside.

‘These are primitive people. You see their black faces. This is not a good region. I think we’re travelling very dangerously.’ I had met Alik–an ex-policeman–in the Kochkor bazaar, and bargained with him to drive me the two hundred and fifty miles west to Talas.

Now, absurdly, he was afraid. ‘There are no cars here. Why are there no cars? Nobody else? I don’t like this.’

He was barely a hundred miles from his home town, but he felt himself in a foreign country. There was a village which would stone us if we did not buy its wayside vodka, he said, but we passed its hovels without glimpsing a soul. Now we were moving through canyons. They came down in abraded claws of rock, rubbed raw and grassless, dribbling avalanches of black and red stones. It was a region of old volcanic violence. Some mountains poured to the river in a liquid-seeming waste, the colour of sewage, while others shone crimson and incendiary beyond them, already daubed with snow.

Alik became more nervous. Under the dip of his felt hat his face had at first seemed tough and spirited. His sturdy Zhiguli saloon, he said, was only fourteen years old and could easily make the journey. But now it proved like all the superannuated Soviet cars here–the Moskvichs, Ladas and petrol-devouring Volgas, some of them forty-five years old–panting to a near-halt on every slope. They were like terminal patients who should have been released years ago. But Alik blamed his car’s failures on contraband petrol–‘The stations dilute it with diesel and water, the motherfuckers.’

‘Our crimes are getting worse,’ he said. ‘You’d think these places quiet, towns like Kochkor. But we’ve had knifings and rapes in the street–usually drunks–and endless thefts, mostly of people’s sheep. Drugs, they’ve reached us too, but less than in the cities. Heroin, opium, marijuana. There’s a route from Afghanistan through Tajikistan…’

‘I know.’ This trail moved north across the frontiers of Afghanistan and into the Pamirs, converged on Osh to our south, then dispersed its load of misery by varying routes to Moscow and the West. Iran and Pakistan had both been bitterly affected, tightening their borders, and there were already five million addicts in Russia.

Alik said: ‘With so many unemployed, there’s no lack of carriers…and yes, the police are corrupt. We were always paid a pittance. The best way to raise your earnings was to stop cars at
checkpoints. We’d find something illegal about them–it wasn’t hard–and take money. It was part of the job.’

The canyons released us into a wide upland valley, where Alik and his Zhiguli relaxed, and we started across velvet grasslands ringed by mountains. He said contentedly: ‘With you in Europe, everything’s cultivated, isn’t it? With us, nearly nothing. As things were before, so they stay. Yes, it’s beautiful.’

We ate in a truck-driver’s tea-house where he shouted for food, his stocky legs planted apart, his hands clasped behind his back. He became a policeman again. Later we reached an ancient Turkish grave memorial where he prayed, not knowing what it was, pulling from his pocket a handwritten verse from the Koran.

As we crested the last pass, the mountains above the Talas river came rolling out of Kazakhstan, and we descended to its valley through fields of sweetcorn and sunflowers and new-mown hay. We spent the night with an acquaintance of Alik, and I was never sure how welcome we were. He was an old man with enormous carbuncled cheeks. He had fifty-seven grandchildren, some of them walking in his courtyard, cradling children of their own. We sat in a room furnished only by cushions and a television flashing news of a hurricane in the United States. Alik was pleased by this–by scenes of people losing their homes to tornado winds–and my growing distaste for him hardened into dislike. We argued over Stalin–a fine man, he thought–until we both dropped into silence. Later our host spread quilts for us on the floor, where Alik grumbled and burped in crimson underpants, before at last falling asleep.