Shadow of the Silk Road (25 page)

In these private courtyards, life unravelled. Young women changed into jeans, and children ran amok. In Soviet times the tight-knit
mahallalar
–clusters of supportive households–had been a quiet bastion of Islam, and now the state was trying to co-opt their elders as an organ of control. But they were self-protective, the girl said, and inward-looking. In the maze-like alleys their compounds became interlocking fortresses. Yet inside, every room was bright with windows and glass-panelled doors, all gazing on their courtyards, for among the family everything, on the surface, was transparent, shared.

We sat out late, dusk gathering. The old man plucked pomegranates from a tree and split them apart for me, while the children of an absent son scavenged under the seats. ‘They are mujahidin,’ he chortled, and slipped away at last to watch television, while his daughter calmed the children and lit a lantern in the trees above us.

Mahmuda puzzled me. At twenty-four, she was unmarried. But as the evening wore on, she talked with growing obsession, as if confiding in a foreigner was like confessing to a far planet, and somehow did not count. Her upper face and eyes were animated and pretty, but the cheeks fell heavy round her mouth in a countervailing weight of tiredness or regret. ‘When I was fourteen I lived for that television,’ she said, ‘but my parents forbade it. As soon as they went out, I’d turn on
Santa Barbara
and soap operas from Mexico.’

‘You thought the West was like that?’

‘I didn’t think anything.’ She laughed. ‘I suddenly lost interest in it all. Instead I wanted to go to the
madrasah
, to religious college. I wanted to know about God. In those days almost all the
madrasahs
were closed, but after I finished high school I discovered one in Tashkent, funded from Saudi Arabia, which worked undercover. I went to the teachers’ homes secretly–that’s how they worked–and prayed alone. I prayed five times a day and
read the Koran in Arabic, one page each day, and the Hadith in Turkish, praying and fasting. I was only sixteen. Then I began to feel strange. I walked under a veil, my whole face covered. And suddenly I began to feel ill.’ She clasped her hands to her face. ‘Whenever I studied the Arabic, something happened in my head. I don’t know what it was. I’ll never know. But whenever I read the Arabic or turned to prayer, these piercing headaches started.’

I wanted to say something comforting, but my mind filled only with clichés about adolescence. I did not understand. I felt instead the irony of her journey. From pious Margilan–where on Fridays the lanes were blocked by the kneeling faithful–she had gone to modern Tashkent, and grown ill with secret prayer there, where women were becoming free.

She said: ‘In the end I felt too weak to pray. My parents came and brought me back to Margilan.’

‘They were right.’

‘So I went to university, to study languages, but after two years my father decided I should marry. That’s the tradition here, in Margilan. Your parents choose.’

I wondered if she had a husband, after all. But there was no sign of him, and she emanated solitude. She stared down at the table. ‘You know, there’s no way for young people to meet here. If you live in a flat, like the Russians, it’s easier. You meet on the stairs, and talk. But here in the
mahallalar
, whenever you leave, the old people are sitting out on their benches, watching…’

‘I’ve seen them.’ And in the streets were only men walking with men, women with women.

‘So my parents prepared this enormous wedding.’ She spread out her ringless hands. ‘The first time I saw my husband was at the registry office. He was skinny and dark and ten years older than me–not handsome at all. I looked at him and thought: I cannot love you. I can never love you.’ She had been barely eighteen, and her experience was
Santa Barbara
. ‘I stayed with him and his family for three months and I couldn’t touch him. He was a good man, he didn’t force me. Then I went out and looked into the canal near his house and thought: I want to die. Just to disappear. And I walked in very deep. I cannot swim. The water was soft, I
remember. I walked in and sank. I don’t know what happened after.’ Her mouth opened, as if for air. Her lips were crimson with pomegranate juice. ‘I was in hospital for weeks. My husband came to see me there.’ She allowed herself another laugh. ‘But after I returned to his family I knew I couldn’t go on being married. I asked for a divorce and went home, and after a year it was done. My parents accepted this, and took me back. They are good people.’

Now she worked to help them. She had studied English and Korean, and taught privately. Many young people wanted to learn, she said. Korea had opened up for work, and her two elder brothers both planned to go. ‘My parents let me do what I like now. Anything. They’re afraid for my mind, I think…’

She looked ashen, exhausted by memory. Her parents might well be afraid. She emitted a sad wildness. Before sleeping, she injected herself with sedative.

She said suddenly, gravely: ‘When I was thirteen I fell in love. We couldn’t talk about it, we were only at school. But we loved one another. Now he’s in Fergana a few miles away–I hear about him sometimes from a classmate. It will soon be seven years since our class graduated, and my friend wants to give a party of reunion. Maybe he will come.’

But then this brightness faded. Most of the boys were married now, she said, and many had children, and were living too far away. Perhaps there would be no party.

In the main room, at breakfast, I sit surrounded by murals–pastel and delicate, in an old Uzbek style–where birds of paradise are perched among flowers. But all their heads, I notice, have been chipped away, leaving blank plaster above falls of harlequin feathers. ‘That happened six years ago,’ Mahmuda says. ‘My brother was very angry. He’s a decorator, and they were his work. But I used to pray here. And the Hadith says that angels will not enter a house where any living creature is portrayed. So I took a knife…I was strange then.’ She seems to be remembering another person.

‘Now I don’t pray any more, and I no longer read the Koran,
because Arabic makes me ill. But I’m afraid. I’m afraid to think about my soul, because of all I have done. I don’t want to think of what will happen to me after I am dead.’

The train to Samarkand was like a refugee camp on the move. Stacked on our bare bunks above aisles of cigarette-ash and sunflower seeds, our picnics stenching the air with mutton fat and onions, we edged west for sixteen hours across the constricted valley. Beyond our windows the land went by unchanging–cotton and horseless pastures where hay was mounded–and mulberry trees fringed the fields in crop-haired ranks, as they did in China. On one side the Pamir mountains were lost in rainclouds; on the other the shadowline of the Tian Shan faltered west.

By nightfall the tortuous borders of Tajikistan were cutting across our track, and we stopped four times while guards bullied along our passageways, hunting for contraband and bribes. First Uzbek soldiers boarded, with hordes of plainclothes customs officials; then the dark green uniform of Tajik police appeared; an hour later the Tajiks boarded again, then the Uzbeks.

In my cubicle an impromptu community coalesced in self-defence. Two women were taking textiles between Fergana and Samarkand, and a young schoolmistress with a baby was selling pillowcases and coverlets. Above them a sallow sweet-seller knelt on his bunk, trying to face Mecca. Every week they suffered the indignities of the officials fingering their wares, looking for trouble. ‘The Uzbeks are the worst,’ they said.

At the last frontier I was ordered into a closed compartment where an inspector demanded why there was no Tajik stamp in my passport. ‘Nothing! Nothing! Why not? They should have registered you at the first border.’

‘They didn’t.’

‘Why are you not registered?’ He scrolled through his computer. ‘You will have to get off here.’ We had stopped at an unlit station, stranded in nowhere. ‘Well?’ He was wanting money, awaiting my acquiescence. I stared at him. ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’

I was growing angry, refusing for the sake of the harassed others. It was easier for me. I was a foreigner, protected. I went on staring. Then he smiled, pushing his cap back on his head. He looked worse when he smiled. The big soldier standing behind me said: ‘Give him money.’

‘No!’

There was silence. Then the inspector said: ‘It was a joke.’ He went back to his computer. ‘Perhaps you were registered.’ He handed back my passport, the soldier stood aside, smirking, and I left.

Back in the open corridor, in the sudden silence of the stopped train, only a diffused breathing sounded, and the whimper of children. The women lay cowled in their scarves, their babies in their arms, and the old men’s boots, sticking out in scuffed pairs, fidgeted and shook as the engine started up again.

Two hours later the stars were fading over Samarkand.

Twelve years ago, in the dawn of Central Asia’s independence from the broken Soviet Union, I had stood on the city’s crumbling plateau and looked down on a sea of biscuit-coloured roofs and turquoise domes–and this image, circled in spring by snow-lit mountains, had printed itself insensibly on my mind. For a few minutes, as I stand here again, the memory persists, pushing nonexistent Russian trucks around the traffic island at my feet, and installing a defunct clock there, while the bazaars spread still ramshackle beyond, with a ghostly flyover beyond that. The valley fills with remembered mud homes, and a dark, restless tide of men is returning from market under the shattered hulk of Bibi Khanum, the cathedral mosque of Tamerlane the Great.

But little by little this city–vivid for an instant in my memory–fades and reshapes into the present, until I grow unsure if it ever existed. It hardens into somewhere more self-conscious and sanitised. A new roundabout is in place below me, stubbled with globular lamps. Under the old clock is an advertisement for Unitel, and the cars are Korean-made. The bazaar has been rebuilt in a prettified Uzbek style, with curved walls of faceted mirrors, and a statue of three girls holding plates. In Soviet years this confection
would have reeked of imperial condescension. But the Uzbeks have built it themselves. Streets have been renamed. Statues of Turkic grandees have arisen. And the Bibi Khanum mosque is no longer a gaping ruin but a thunderous restoration.

Everything is huger than my memory of it. In the modern suburbs, hefty buildings have gone up–colleges, institutes–to join the dour Soviet blocks I remember. I wonder frenetically what I have forgotten, what imagined. I ask people: when was this built? Is that one new? But they rarely know. University students are trickling into the boulevards: girls in jeans or miniskirts, too young to remember Communism. The only veils are worn by beggars at the mosque gates, a Russian woman among them. Yet people say little has changed, except they are poorer now. The same queues are waiting for minibuses outside the bazaar, and unemployed youths loiter round the government drink shops, or at kiosks selling pop cassettes and gangster videos. For hours I wander wide-eyed, while around me the city recomposes itself: the new, the remembered and the forgotten settling at last under the snowless autumn hills.

The oldest Samarkand, named from a mythic giant, has sunk beneath the plateau of Afrasiab in the city’s north-east. Once fortified with eight miles of ramps and iron gates, it is now a fissured wasteland where the shards tinkle underfoot. On the heights of the citadel wrecked by Genghis Khan–a gaunt, rain-smoothed bluff–the trenches of Russian archaeologists are filling with dust. Its crevasses were once gates, its gullies streets. Pavements and plastered walls, stairs and storage pits are sunk colourlessly into the ground. Here and there a trace of auburn pottery shines, iridescent glass, bones.

This was Maracanda, metropolis of the Sogdians, the greatest merchants of the Silk Road. A sophisticated Iranian people–less a nation than a confederation of states–their city was already rich when Alexander the Great entered it in 329
BC
, and it remained beautiful long after the Arab conquest in the eighth century scattered its people.

On the plateau’s edge a small museum has collected Sogdian and
Hellenistic things: cosmetics, carved chessmen, iron swords. The portable hearths of fire worship have come to light, still layered with ash; ossuaries where the bones of the dead were laid after dogs had picked them clean; and terracotta goddesses of earth and water. The Sogdians’ faith was a syncretic mix of Zoroastrian and Mesopotamian beliefs, tinged with Hinduism. Born traders–so the Chinese believed–their mothers fed them sugar in the cradle to honey their voices, and their baby palms were daubed with paste to attract profitable things. Their slow, shaggy camels carried Chinese raw silk even to Byzantium. Xuanzang, passing through Samarkand in
AD
630, described them as skilled in all arts, yet savage soldiers, who met death as salvation. Their armour was supreme in its day–they perfected chain mail–and they took back into China the secrets of fine glass, with horses and Indian precious stones, the skills of wine-making and of underground irrigation. By their heyday in the sixth century
AD
Sogdian was the lingua franca of the Silk Road.

On the frescoed walls of a palace–the museum’s showpiece–ambassadors bring tribute to the gods of Samarkand. Attended by Turkish mercenaries, whose hair streams to their waists, the Chinese carry silk bales and cocoons to the foot of an obliterated throne. On another wall Vakhuman, the king of Samarkand, visits the tomb of his ancestors. Nothing is left above the stride of his outsize horse except the fall of a fantastical coat, embroidered with beasts in faded damson and white, his hanging bow and sword. But around him all is opulence and delicacy, as his court assembles to honour his lineage. Through voids of flaking plaster, above a procession of amputated horses’ legs, the boots of a royal wife survive, riding side-saddle. Two jewelled emissaries–on dromedary and elephant–are parading together in ruined pomp, cradling their wands of office; and a group of courtiers advances to meet the king in Persian silks like his, spangled with dragons; while above them all, defying gravity, a file of geese marches to sacrifice.