Shadow of the Silk Road (27 page)

I feel harshly impatient with this. Some people, I say remorselessly, found a premonition of the Stalin years in the Orthodox Church itself, in people’s timeless subjection to authority.

The priest is unperturbed. ‘Whenever we sin, we say goodbye to God. He grows distant from us. In those days, in Satan’s time, they thought only of material things, like you in the West, although they did not have them.’ He looks at me too mildly for reproof. Above his young face, I am surprised to see, the fair hair, tied back with an elastic band, is greying.

So Satan had turned the world upside down, spilling out humankind. Blame was displaced on to a phantom. There was nothing more to know, nothing to ask. The Gulag commissars had retired long ago, with medals and pensions. Not one had been arraigned. Russia had turned its back on the past. And I, how could I understand? Since the Holocaust, my world had made a duty of
remembrance. Russia, like China, had chosen forgetfulness. That, said the writer Shalamov, was how people survived. A nation was not built on truth.

The priest goes back slowly to the church. The caretaker’s children are sitting like waifs on the steps. For a while I accompany him in his duties, as if he may hold some secret. This is the power of innocence. Others appear too: a young woman in love with him. Whenever she comes close, he makes the sign of the cross between them, as if to obliterate her. And a little girl follows him about adoringly. They share the same honey skin, blonde ponytail and receding chin. I ask: ‘Is she your child?’

‘She is my child in God.’ He is not married, but lives in a tiny room off the refectory. ‘This church was built a hundred years ago by a childless couple. They said: whoever prays here becomes our child. It’s protected by angels’ wings.’ His green eyes trust me. ‘It will protect you too, who have prayed here. Where are you going now, all alone?’

Usually, in answering this, I curtail my journey. It invites disbelief, even alarm. But now I blurt out: ‘I’m going across Afghanistan…then into Iran…’

Quickly he signs the cross above me. ‘God protect you!’ Then we walk across the sunlit courtyard to the gates. For a moment his hands stay delicate on their padlock, reluctant for me to leave. ‘Be careful. Only here, in this church, is light. I never pass these gates without thinking I am going into darkness.’

Up the eastern ramparts of the old city, a sunken path is lined with tombs where the women and warriors of Tamerlane were buried in chambers of jewelled intimacy. In the early morning a few swallows dip among the plane trees, and the first pilgrims are already arriving: old men and village women glinting in Atlas silks, who haunt the way with the patter of their sticks and prayers. Their goal at the stairway’s end is the grave of the half-legendary Qusam ibn Abbas, cousin of Muhammad, beheaded in the seventh century by Zoroastrian fire-worshippers. From him the necropolis
is named Shah-i-Zinda, ‘the Shrine of the Living King’, who in his immortality underground was perhaps conflated with some pagan demigod.

You climb a stairway of intricate splendour. Its hexagonal stones are mellow underfoot. Here and there a willow brushes the path, or a swallow chirrups from a cupola. On either side the tomb façades converge in waterfalls of pure faience, sometimes only twelve feet apart. Their colours are turquoise and kingfisher blue, often on a dark blue field, tinged by olive or Pompeian red. Half close your eyes and you imagine this a street of the living, lined with mansions of inexplicable richness, their doors open. Sometimes their porches are lined by six or eight vertical bands of glazed terracotta, perforated with a spider’s delicacy, so that the whole building seems to glisten in a skein of blue lace. Over them a gallery of fifteenth-century ornament unfurls: interlocked flowers, a dusting of stars, tears, wheels, a lexicon of scripts. To the illiterate eye, calligraphy and foliage intertwine, words become leaf-stems, creepers blossom into letters.

But walk up the steps of these mansions, and the anterooms are chill. Like the great gateways of contemporary palaces and
madrasahs
, the portals betray their promise. Their inscriptions sound with pure loss. ‘All creation is passing…there is no friendship but in sleep…The tomb is a gate which all must enter…’ You go through the radiant doorways into small chambers faint with fresco, where the grave is a stone cube or plastered mound. Here and there, across their flaking murals, a heretical dragon roams or a crane takes wing. Perhaps some Mongol paganism lingered, dressed in Islamic faience, among the fierce aristocracy interred here. Or the presence of so many women–imperial wives and sisters–lent a more private sorrow. (‘Here a precious pearl is lost’: this above Tamerlane’s niece, dead in her young beauty under a vault faienced with tears.) The pilgrims crouch and murmur with upturned palms. Pigeons nest along the ledges. Only when you reach the precinct of the saint do you read on his porcelain grave that those killed in the path of Allah will never die.

Northward from Samarkand, the last foothills of the Tian Shan fade into the Kizilkum desert. These formless sands, sprinkled with salt flats, spread through deepening wilderness west to the Aral Sea; while to the south the Amu Darya, the early Oxus, starts to curl north-west along the borders of Turkmenistan. The fertile heart of this region–the Arab ‘Land beyond the River’–is the fast-flowing Zerafshan whose waters, flecked with useless gold, come down from the Pamirs to die in the desert beyond Bukhara. From there the central Silk Road went across the Turkmen flats to Merv, but I planned to follow an ancient branch south into Afghanistan, and to push on seven hundred miles towards the frontier of Iran.

Meanwhile the road to Bukhara carried me west. Beside me the Zerafshan no longer nourished the cherry, fig and almond orchards–with the best apricots and nectarines in Asia–extolled by nineteenth-century travellers. Instead gangs of students were harvesting the state cotton fields, whose reddening foliage, salted with blooms, dwindled far into the haze. Cotton, under the Soviets, had been the country’s fatal monoculture. But now its legacy–dried rivers, disease-bearing pesticides, salinated earth–was being belatedly curtailed. Apple, pear and plum plantations were struggling in the wastes, and wheatfields spread a blaze of yellow stubble.

Toward sunset I entered the modern town of Navoi, and the stalled Socialist future. An industrial brainchild conjured from the desert, its Russian workers had abandoned it in droves. Half the high-rise flats gaped empty, while the chimneys of the surviving factories–electrochemical and textile plants–retched out the pollution which had steeped the fields and rivers for decades. A colossal statue of Alisher Navoi, the Turkic poet elevated under Moscow, was stranded in a park of fading flowers

I walked along streets now full of Uzbeks. A few kebab-sellers had appeared, and some beggars. A man’s voice–wheedling, importunate–reached me from the kerbside. His trousers were stained with urine, and blackened toes stuck through his sandals. ‘Can you let me have…’–I stared, shaken, at a European beggar on an Asian street–‘…a tiny dollar?’ He touched me with confusion and vicarious shame. I wanted at once to efface and to
claim him. I could not tell the Russian’s age; but he carried a stick, and his teeth were almost gone. He was on a pension, he said, and alone.

We went into a nearby shop, where I bought him sausage, bread and a little wine, and sat out at a table in the cooling night, where Uzbek girls were selling ice-cream. He eyed me with the obsequious opportunism of the drunk, but was sometimes peremptory too, as pride surfaced. He called out to the Uzbek girls: ‘Daughters! We have a foreign guest here, bring us a cup, get us some water…’ and they giggled and did so. Then he pulled the food from his bag and spread it over the table, as if I were his guest, and by this fiction we tried to forget the Soviet humiliation. But in his filmy eyes I saw, despite myself, an empire and faith faded away; and in the suppressed ridicule of the Uzbek passers-by–they seemed to know him–I felt the gulf deepen between us. I asked: ‘How are these people?’

‘Not like our people.’

Beside his holed socks and frayed jacket, my pullover and crumpled trousers looked suddenly opulent. But we carved the loaf with our penknives and passed each other sausage. He’d lived here for many years, he said, working as a builder. ‘I came here in the Soviet time. You’ve heard of our Lenin?’

We poured wine into our cardboard cups, but did not drink to Lenin. I asked: ‘Where is your family?’

‘My sons are in Moscow.’

‘You could live there?’

He thumped his stick. ‘They haven’t invited me.’

‘Your wife?’

‘She’s dead.’

Suddenly, as if a switch had turned, or the little wine gone to his head, his eyes found their focus and clenched into suspicion. Perhaps I had asked too many questions. He said: ‘Have you your passport?’ Knocking over his wine, not noticing, he fumbled through its pages.

Then I realised he had come here as a convict. A city labour camp (designated Uya-64/29) had supplied building labour to many projects in Navoi, including a secret chemical plant. His
fingers trembled through the passport’s leaves. Who did he think I could be? What secret police would be interested in him now? But he doesn’t think, of course: years of fear are thinking for him. And now he found my photograph in the alien booklet, and ran his thumb under the Uzbek visa. Then he lurched across the table in relief or contrition, and kissed me.

The best days, he said, were those of Stalin. ‘That was the time!’ He got to his feet and dropped the leftover food back into his bag. ‘In those days you either worked or you went to prison. You got work in five minutes!’

Maybe he was speaking of himself. Maybe he was even sincere. And now, straightening, he said: ‘Thank you.’ His stick tapped the pavement. ‘Well, goodbye…’ Moving away, shaking a little, he seemed to have summoned a last dignity, then hesitantly turned. ‘Can you spare something for cigarettes?’ Then: ‘No, no, you’ve given enough…’

So I came next morning to Bukhara, city of old tyranny and holiness, and the last to fall to the Bolsheviks, when in 1920 its dissolute emir fled to Afghanistan. Among its meshed courtyards the alleys wound in a muddy bloodstream that never quite petered out, and flaking plaster walls converged on blackened timbers across the lanes. Cars and even donkeys disappeared. The sounds were all muffled or tiny: a radio playing, a child singing. I walked excluded, without direction. Carved and studded doors pocked the walls like closed mouths.

I emerged into a centre quieter than I remembered. Tea-houses tinkled around a green pool, where old men were gossiping on wooden divans, as if continuing stories left off years before. Their heads nodded under powder-blue turbans or black skull-caps, and some still lounged in multicoloured
chapan
coats. But there were fewer of them now. Everywhere seemed thinner, tidier than my memory. Just to the west, where the mosques and baths of the once-holy city crowded, a desert of restoration spread. Everything was being renewed breakneck in a glaring brick. The air choked
with its dust. The gates of the great religious schools were stranded ajar, but in their courtyards the cells had become nests of shopkeepers, hung with cheap jewellery and carpets, their alcoves broken, their beds gone.

These mighty academies were mostly raised by the Shaybanids in the sixteenth century, when the city flowered into pious glory, supplanting Samarkand, while the Silk Road withered away to either side of it. Then Bukhara ‘the Holy, the Noble’ still burgeoned with crafts and merchandise. Its chimney-tall minarets bristled above two hundred mosques like factories pouring out faith. Even in the nineteenth century a shell of this civilisation remained. Bukhara was the fashion model of a decayed world. Its aristocracy rode horses decked in turquoise and gold, or minced pompously on high heels, and the depleted bazaars were still piled with Turcoman rugs and caressing local silks (worn by women under gowns and horsehair veils) and swarmed with Hindus, Tartars, Jews, Persians, Armenians, even Chinese.

But by then the eight miles of ramparts and gates were a rotting theatre-set. Under its feeble emirs, the city was shutting itself away. Its hundred stagnant pools and open canals, polluted by cattle and dogs, were spreading incurable diseases; pederasty was rife, and a slave market in Persians and even Russians survived. Before the 1870s scarcely a Westerner ventured here, and those who did reported a place of confusions: filthy, proud, steeped in a depraved decorum and piety.

I wandered in fascination. From time to time, through the dust haze, above the cement-brown walls, this older city recomposed itself. It returned in the fretted mosque windows, in the tiles still splashed on college gateways, and sometimes, like a breaking memory, it printed the sky with turquoise domes. At its heart the 155-foot Kalan minaret, spared by an astonished Genghis Khan when he levelled the city in 1220, still thundered above its mosque; while opposite, the blue-green cupolas of the Mir-i-Arab sat gorgeously on their decorated drums above the oldest working
madrasah
.

But Bukhara, its students said, was godless. Perhaps it had lost heart more than a century ago, as the pressure from tsarist Russia
mounted, and its isolation fell apart. Within half a century the once-bigoted populace was reported strangely peaceful: a tolerant, unarmed race who sat about drinking tea.

Zelim Khan lived with his wife and mother in the labyrinth of the Old City, where their house merged anonymously into the alleys. A door in these blind walls might open on to any state: cramped squalor or palatial decay. Beyond Zelim’s was a gaunt, three-tiered courtyard, a feel of passages half inhabited, resonant rooms lined with books.

It was years since we had met here, but their faces surfaced gently into remembrance. Zelim seemed less altered than intensified. A reclusive artist, stooped, fragile, his beard and hair circled his face in frost, and his husky voice came light and detached, as if from far off. His wife Gelia spoke a feisty English. Her hennaed hair had turned blonde and her body thickened. But her Tartar features were still vivid and handsome, the blue eyes (I had remembered them green) brimming with hardy laughter.