Shadow of the Silk Road (26 page)

At some time in the mid-fourteenth century, Tamerlane, the Conqueror of the World, was born into an obscure Turco-Mongol
clan fifty miles south of Samarkand. In 1362 he was no more than a fugitive sheep-rustler, lame from war wounds. But within forty years, after nearly twenty campaigns of ruthless brilliance, he governed a bloodied empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the frontiers of China. All across Asia the cities that resisted him were marked by towers and pyramids of cemented skulls–old men, women, soldiers, children butchered together. In north India alone he left behind five million dead.

Yet his was a complex barbarism. With ravening curiosity, even on campaign, he plunged into debate with a travelling court of scholars and scientists. He wanted to hunt down truth as he might an enemy. In his private library he gazed entranced at the illuminated manuscripts he could not read. He loved in particular the practical disciplines of mathematics, astronomy and medicine, and deployed his passion for chess over a board of 110 squares, on whose battlefield manoeuvred intricate new pieces–camels, war engines, giraffes.

But his thirst for ascendancy overbore all else. He venerated Islam as a source of power, yet manipulated it cynically to his will. And his paradox was intensified in the refined dynasties he spawned: the Timurids of Herat, the Mogul empire of India. In the courtly miniatures of Bihzad and Mir Sayyid Ali, his painted descendants savour roses or cradle books of verse. They are delicate, even exquisite. But they stir a vague disquiet: the intimation that culture is not always gentling, and not humane. For those dreamy princes perhaps come fresh from murdering a brother or erasing a city, before they settle again to ponder tulips and open a book.

In Samarkand Tamerlane built a capital to his own glory. After each campaign the city overflowed with captured scholars and craftsmen until it bulged south and west of Afrasiab into a walled and gated cosmopolis whose mosques and academies, arsenals and bazaars, were crammed with the skills and goods of empire. Its suburbs were named contemptuously after the great cities Tamerlane had conquered, and ringed with sixteen parks whose faience pavilions glowed heretically with murals celebrating his wars and loves. Yet even when not campaigning, he spent little
time here. With the nomad’s unease in cities, he camped among the outlying gardens in a sea of silk-hung tents. His Samarkand was less a home than a momentous trophy, leached from his conquests.

Near the city’s centre his megalomania reached its zenith in the Bibi Khanum mosque: a monument to God and to himself. It was pegged out with 160-foot minarets and sprouted the tallest of the turquoise domes which were to become a hallmark of his heirs. Returning suddenly from campaign, he executed its architects for building the portals too low, then himself flailed forward its construction, tossing meat and coins to masons who pleased him, while ninety-five elephants lugged its marble into place from Persia and the Caucasus.

But the builders in their terror raised it too quickly, for within the emperor’s lifetime it began to crack apart. By the nineteenth century it had degenerated into a cotton warehouse and a stable for tsarist cavalry. Only in the last few years has it been shored up; and now restoration, little by little, is snuffing out the strange vitality of ruin, and building in its place a shining blandness. The titanic entranceway and colossal
iwan
–the vaulted, open-sided hall–the acres of glazed designs zigzagging blue and green across still vaster acres of beige brick, all have lost their voice. Dwarfed and a little bored by them, I trespassed into the central prayer-chamber, where the restorers had yet to go. Here, where the 130-foot dome leaked down cracks like inverted creepers, splitting the sanctuary walls through and through, the Bibi Khanum completed itself shakily in my imagination, and only the squeak of sparrows nesting in the cupola were not coeval with Tamerlane’s assault on heaven.

At the heart of his city, where six avenues converged from its six fortified gates on to the Registan bazaar, there opens up a square of calm enormousness. Three great religious schools gleam over its empty space. One was built by his grandson, the astronomer-prince Ulug Beg; the others completed more than two centuries later. All have been restored, in recent years, to a serene, sanitised brilliance. On two sides their façades reflect each other in twin splendour, window for window, arcade for arcade. In their deep, 120-foot
iwans
the purple and aquamarine tiles that sprinkle every
surface darken and intensify into panels of pure faience, where a barbed and beautiful Arabic surrounds the doors to inner courts. Beside them the stout minarets, netted in violet and blue, are leaning out of true like warped candles, and ascend to huge corbels supporting nothing.

When I entered the courtyards I found the students’ cells intact, even to their wooden doors. But they had been converted to little shops whose dispirited owners sat chatting or asleep. Tourism had withered ever since 2001. I found myself buying things out of pity or embarrassment. I felt I had wandered backstage. Seen from here, the great
madrasahs
, the religious colleges, resembled awkward theatre-sets. Yet their cells were still sheathed in tiles, and bands of faience script, heaped about by unsold tourist goods, circled the halls with broken scripture.

At the intersection of the Registan avenue and the fountains sloping to Tamerlane’s grave, a giant statue sits. The monster straddles its throne in heavy silks, his hands ready on the hilt of his scimitar. But his features have been transmuted to those of a philosopher-king, and a stream of wedding parties poses for photographs beneath him. Mounting the steps in a flock of fussing relatives, the brides ascend bare-shouldered under a cloud of silk and chiffon, their hair bound in jewelled coils or massed behind a tiara. They never smile. Their grooms climb self-consciously beside them in skewed ties and ill-fitting suits. But to the feet of Tamerlane (which are shod in outsize jester’s boots) they carry their bouquets delicately, and lay them in tribute on the marble ledge below.

Looming above them, the Scourge of God has become the symbol and father of Uzbekistan. His feet, by the day’s end, are drowned in flowers. In late Soviet times he was either ignored or vilified. Now his statues are going up everywhere. Politicians invoke him, academics write encomiums, conferences abound. He appears on banknotes and roadside billboards; streets and schools and state honours are named after him. His example is extolled before the army. Unveiling his equestrian statue in the centre of Tashkent (ousting a bust of Marx), President Karimov hailed him as ‘our great compatriot’, and has even invoked him in the war against terror.

Yet Tamerlane was not an Uzbek at all. He was Turco-Mongol. So were other reconstructed national heroes: his descendant Babur, founder of the Mogul dynasty–whose statue had startled me in Namangan–and the astronomer-emir Ulug Beg, whose broken sextant still curves like a giant escalator under the earth of Samarkand. And the proliferating statues to ‘the father of Uzbek literature’, the poet Alisher Navoi, celebrate a man who mentioned Uzbeks only to disparage them.

It was late in the fifteenth century, in fact, before the Uzbeks arrived from the north, where their name had once attached to a khan of the Golden Horde. The name carried with it no national or ethnic meaning, and the world into which they settled was rich with overlapping identities. Islam nurtured the family and the
umma
, the whole community of the faithful: it preached no country. Nomads sang their lineage back to the seventh generation, and that, with the clan, was their home.

So the tsarists, and the Bolsheviks after them, entered a land without nations, where a state was only the outreach of a ruler. Its heart was not an abstract institution, but a living dynasty. Its frontiers were blurred opinions. Craving order from this multilingual soup, Moscow prescribed labels, tinkered with languages, allotted suitable heroes and carved out countries as best it could. By the time Uzbekistan lurched to independence in 1991, the nation was a full-blown Russian invention. Its rulers, part of the myth themselves, discovered legitimacy in the Soviet fantasy of a pre-existing Uzbekistan, embracing the glory of Tamerlane now, and fading back into an indefinite past.

Once, in the barren spaces behind the Registan, I came upon a marble platform holding the sixteenth-century tombstones of the first true Uzbek dynasty, the Shaybanids, enthroned in 1500. It was, in a sense, the pantheon of the Uzbek nation. Yet it was deserted. Nobody read its faded inscriptions, nor laid flowers. When I questioned passers-by, they knew nothing about it.

For the Shaybanids had arrived too late. Their invasion suggested uncomfortably that something other than Uzbekistan
had existed here before. So the Russians, and the Uzbeks themselves, mislaid them.

I walk between flowerbeds to the tomb of Tamerlane. Beside me a hoarding pairs his image with a photo of Karimov: the grim emperor shadowing the grim president, opportunists both. But past the butterflies shifting among the faded chrysanthemums, the makeup of identity itself grows elusive to me, and in its variousness slips away from state manipulation. I remember how a woman cooks her pilau with quince, as her mother did. How her neighbour arranges the photographs of her grandparents on the carpeted wall, just so. The flutter of her father’s hand to the heart, in greeting. I remember the way laughter separates us, like a private language. How bread is shared, and water splashed from a ewer over the hands. How babies are eased to sleep in the cradle, and what is sung to them.

And now the tomb spreads around me. Its fluted dome, taller than anything nearby, glitters in sudden solitude, and seems–in its aquamarine beauty–the quintessence of all its kind. Inside, the burial chamber is huger, more brilliant than I remember. It is as if the tomb of Attila or Genghis Khan had been discovered, and was strangely exquisite. You catch your breath as barbarism turns into beauty. Beside you the walls are sheathed in green onyx, while just above eye level a frieze of engraved jasper records the emperor’s deeds, pricked out in faded gold. High above the stalactite recesses, the dome sheds down a level fall of gilded leaves. They drop in a net of golden stucco over the bays and spandrels, and fill the chamber with a soft, refracted light. And below, in the centre of the floor, the cenotaphs of the dead are long, carved blocks of marble and alabaster. Here lies Tamerlane’s son Shah Rukh, emir of Herat, and Ulug Beg, his murdered grandson. And in the centre, darkly shocking, the emperor’s stone is a six-foot block of near-black jade, the largest in existence.

He died in the winter steppes in 1415, on his way to attack China, and was brought back here to lie by his favourite grandson, dead of wounds two years before. Embalmed in camphor and
musk, he was sealed in a lead coffin, and interred in the crypt beneath his stone. For months he was heard howling from the earth.

I stand by the crypt door, above its dark descending ramp. The caretaker is old and nervous. As we go down, lit by a naked bulb, I see the emperor’s grave-slab below, more elaborate than the rest. In 1941 Russian anthropologists had opened its coffin and found the skeleton of a big man, lame on his right side, with scraps of ginger beard still clinging to his skull. I smooth my fingertips over the slab’s broken surface. It is carved with a genealogy which Tamerlane never claimed in life. In a dense Arabic script, it traces his line back through Genghis Khan to Adam. And it roots him deep in Islam through Muhammad’s cousin Ali–catalyst of the schism between Sunni and Shia–far back to the virgin Alanquva, who was impregnated by a moonbeam.

They are so few now. Eleven women and two old men, bowed in the incense-laden air. They stand, the Russian Orthodox, in shifting worship, or shuffle along the walls to light a taper. But the spaces between them ache with those who have gone, returned to a Russia they barely knew. In fifteen years the Slavic population of Uzbekistan–once two million–has shrunk to less than half. The congregation barely sings. The little choir outnumbers it. Beside every worshipper is a ghost family of others whom fear of isolation has taken away.

The survivors stumble to their knees and touch their foreheads to the cold floor. Their voices rise trembling and old.
Kyrie eleison…
Upright again, they cross themselves on and on, as if nothing can cleanse them.
O Lord forgive us.
The priest–slight and fair and younger than anyone here–stands like a lost angel at the altar. The liturgy throbs and sings in the long cadences of the Russian rite, whose stanzas fall away like a chanted sigh. A woman wanders toward the icons to kiss the Infant’s cheek, the pierced feet, the candle’s sheen on a painted hand.

Old women–child victims of famine, collectivisation,
bereavement–what is there to forgive? One of them slides down her clenched stick, weeping, to the floor. I want to lift her up. But this grief is not discretely hers, I know. It is diffused, almost impersonal. It is not to be pitied. Suffering is the crucible of redemption. It is sanctioned by Christ’s wounds: fostered, treasured, recreated.

The waves of the liturgy sweep over us. As the congregation bows towards the Host, my mind is drawn back compulsively to Russia’s past, to suffering endured like the nature of things, like descending rain. Sometimes it seems as if in Russian eyes there were no individual guilt: only sin, vast and communal.

But as the priest moves among us, censing the icons banked along the walls and pillars, he might be consecrating a museum. The pale martyrs hold up their swords and books like broken spells.

I want to ask him–we are sitting in the courtyard now–about his people’s past, and conscience, but my Russian fails me, and he only frowns and smiles. It is the beauty of the liturgy, he says, that educates the heart. He ascribes the fatalism and hopelessness of the Gulag years to the numbness of a degraded people. ‘They had lived too long in darkness already. They couldn’t feel anything. That was Satan’s time.’