Shadow of the Silk Road (28 page)

Only Zelim’s mother, once massive and formidable, had dwindled from my memory of her. She was pushing a zimmer-frame along the veranda, and perhaps did not notice me. Behind her outsize spectacles spread a powerful, mannish face, lapped by short grey locks. Even in the mélange of Bukhara, her eyes and chalky skin were strange. Her grandmother had been Chinese–sold in the city’s slave market–and her buyer had fallen in love with his purchase, and married her. The old woman’s father had fought for the early Bolsheviks, but had died in a Siberian camp for the crime of being rich. And she herself had married a Chechen writer, Zelim’s father, who vanished into the Gulag a year later. Yet she remained a fervent Stalinist. She had served as a radio operator in the war–a plaque over the door still honoured her as ‘a Veteran of the Great Patriotic War’–and no contradiction stirred in that heavy, crippled body.

I was nervous of meeting her. Years ago I had written harshly of her. She was angry with me, Gelia said. I wondered aloud what in
my account had most offended her: her possessiveness of Zelim, or the grotesqueness of her loving Stalin–killer of her father and husband? ‘Oh no!’ Gelia laughed. ‘You wrote that she had bandaged knees. She hated that. Why did he have to say I had bandaged knees? she asked.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

Zelim said: ‘But now she’s fallen and broken her hip, and there’s nobody here able to do that operation. Her sister has been bedridden six years with the same thing.’

The Russians were still leaving, Gelia said: surgeons, technicians, teachers. And of the once-rich Jewish community, who kept the secrets of dyeing silk, barely a hundred families remained. She herself had taught in the main Russian school, which Uzbeks had once clamoured to enter. ‘Now these schools are fading. They’ll disappear in the end. The teachers are so ill-paid they have to find extra work. I resigned, to teach English privately. All the young want to learn English now…’

We sat over a meal of mutton and vodka, while the old woman stayed scowling on her veranda and occasionally let out a mewing bark for help: that a television be switched on, or a cushion brought. Sometimes, listening to Gelia’s light, warm English, and Zelim’s faraway Russian, I had the illusion that nothing here had changed.

Gelia said: ‘But after independence, I began to feel afraid. I sensed people’s enmity when I went to the markets–something I’d never met before. Sometimes, when I realised I was the only blonde woman on a bus among all those others, I wondered if something was going to happen…’

‘The mosques suddenly filled up with worshippers,’ Zelim said. ‘Everyone was praying. Maybe it was fear. Nobody knew what the future was. Then it all fell away. Just like that. Maybe they realised that God was not going to answer them.’

Gelia said: ‘And that resentment has gone too. Now they are poor, they respect us. They remember the Soviet expertise. Some of them even want us back. You see, the chains that bound them to the past are broken. Soviet rule broke them. We can see this now. They might return to Islam if they had pride in their own culture.
But they’ve lost even their old courtesies. They no longer create. They sit in the market all day and sell nothing.’

She slipped away to take the old lady tea, returned. ‘Everyone is just trying to stay alive.’ It was she, by her teaching, who sustained this fractured household. Zelim lived in the dream-world of his painting, while the old woman stayed in the past, reading Soviet histories and war memoirs. Gelia fed and bathed her. But the power balance in the family had changed with the advent of a pretty Tartar daughter-in-law, whom Gelia loved and the old woman hated–because she said what she thought of her. Soon a black-eyed grandchild was racing underfoot, chanting English nursery rhymes, and only calmed when Zelim gathered her in his arms.

‘Children trust him,’ Gelia said. ‘As for his mother, she’ll talk to you in the end. She gets angry, but she forgives. So come back to us.’

If God existed–and it was inconceivable that He did not–then the duty of the faithful was to approach Him, to seek self-annihilation, even to become Him. In the eastern reaches of the Arab empire, two centuries after Muhammad’s death, this near-heresy was already taking root, and in time the corridor of Central Asia gave birth to a medley of mystical sects which echoed orthodox Islam like a fervent internal music.

Of these, the Naqshbandi, originating in the twelfth century, became the most powerful and widespread. They took their name from the adept who shaped their uniquely silent prayer, and whose tomb here is the lodestar of pilgrims. Their influence pervaded the councils of central Asia’s khans, and entranced the great poets of the age, even Alisher Navoi. They spread into India and Anatolia, converted the Kyrgyz in the nineteenth century, and fought the tsarist Russians almost to a standstill in the Caucasus. Even their quieter eastern brotherhoods stirred into revolt against the Bolsheviks, and they haunted decades of Soviet rulers with the nightmare of a secret renaissance. Keeping only a loose hierarchy,
practising silent rituals, and engaging seamlessly in everyday life, they were impossible to identify. The KGB never infiltrated them. But when independence came, they proved strangely peaceful. Their sheikhs turned out scattered and few. The lines of inherited learning were broken. Even the Bukhara adepts had disappeared.

But the humbler faithful did not forget. Through the Soviet decades, when the Naqshbandi shrine served as a museum of atheism, they came at night, vaulting the perimeter fence, to circle the tomb and kiss its stones. And now the Karimov government, sensing in this mysticism a counterweight to radical Islam, had proclaimed it a national glory.

A few miles east of Bukhara, the once-silent shrine is stifled in dust and clamour. Labourers clamber over its rooftops and swarm through the stripped chambers with trestles of cement and clanking wheelbarrows. The air shakes with the ding and clash of hammers. Even the saint’s tomb–a platform of grey stone, polished by devout lips and hands–is heaped with earth and ripped-up paving. Already a vast guesthouse has gone up, with a bazaar and offices, and a kitchen with twenty hearths for the slaughter of sacrificial sheep. A whole Naqshbandi city is stirring, complete with park gardens, and the once-derelict cemetery is a suburb of marble and granite mausoleums, whose lanterned roofs loom eerily above the ground.

The pilgrims come and go through the dust. They dress as if for carnival, the women brilliant in silk pantaloons, their hair coiled up or gorgeously released. They pray where they can, then unfold their picnics under the trees. The shrine is rife with magic. Women wanting children crawl beneath the trunk of a fallen mulberry tree, said to have been planted by the saint; then rub themselves over it and leave petitions in its crevices. Others visit the tomb of the saint’s mother and aunts, of whom one, Lady Tuesday, is powerful once a week. But I search in vain for any members of the sect. The mullahs and imams who preside here are merely caretakers of the tradition; they do not belong. Only towards evening does somebody point me to ‘a man with knowledge’.

He sits with me beneath a portico. There are few Naqshbandi left in Uzbekistan, he says. It is in Turkey and Pakistan that they
are strong. He is swarthy and animated. He is only a pupil, a
murshid,
he says, and every
murshid
was fixed on his teacher. This was the real, the living link, which Soviet rule had snapped. ‘Our truest leader now is a sheikh from Kokand. Twice I’ve seen him come here, when his followers arrive from all over Uzbekistan–nearly four hundred–and three camels are killed to feed us…’

‘And your prayer?’

‘Our prayer is voiceless. The saint prescribed a silent ritual. Allah knows what is in the heart, he said, so you need not utter it.’

For the advanced adept, I had read, life became a permanent prayer. The saint had respected work–he himself had toiled as a road-mender–but had taught the cultivation of an inner solitude. Even when the hands were busy, the heart should rest with God.

I circle, as delicately as I can, around the nature of this prayer, and at last the man says: ‘We believe there are five points in the body, special points–we call them
latoif
.’ His fingers touch his chest and trickle across it, right to left. ‘It is from these places that prayer proceeds when we touch them. The first’–he drills into his ribcage–‘is named from Moses, the next from Abraham, then Jesus, then Joseph, and at last–just where the heart is!–Muhammad. And at each place we think the name of Allah five thousand times–to speak His greatness–until twenty-five thousand times in all. Then, the saint said, it will no longer be the worshipper who thinks the words, but his heart as it beats will be uttering the name of Allah. His soul is lifted above, while his body remains here.’ He draws his hand across his slackened shoulders, down his chest. He is no longer, I sense, seeing me. ‘If a man is truly good, the name of Allah is written on his heart.’

The consciousness of breathing is vital, it seems, and the hypnotic power of repetition–the reiterated
Allah, Allah
, on and on, until the name submerged the senses, and yes…perhaps engraved the heart.

The man focuses me again, smiling. ‘The saint said you may cut off the hand of the man who is with God, and he will not know it.’

Zelim’s people were born ill. They stare from his canvases in haunted fragments, isolated even from themselves. Often his couples and families are reduced to two tones in watercolour: disconnected, unpitying. Others are scarcely mantled in flesh; the bones press beneath their skin like the heavy, complicated skeletons of cattle. There are fantasies of Bukhara too, as if Zelim were turning momentarily from an inner distress to the outer world. Fantastical demons have broken from the earth, and roost on the city domes. Men have turned monstrous, monsters grown humanoid.

He pulls them from their stacks with a look of tired abstraction, trailing a naked bulb from a point in the basement wall. But he chooses and places them fastidiously for my view, and once or twice his pale eyes sparkle and he breaks into sweet, self-deprecating laughter: a child gazing on a broken universe.

Once Gelia asks him quaintly: ‘Are you happy?’

He answers simply: ‘No.’

She laughs without hurt. He has just been offered an exhibition in Tashkent, and wants to share it with the artist friends of his youth. ‘They were like a movement,’ Gelia says. ‘They were poor and existed only for their art. High art! They were impossible to live with. They quarrelled continually with their wives, who were trying to bring up their children.’

Zelim has named the exhibition ‘Bukhara Underground’, which alarmed the authorities at first, although it was not political. But his friends have drifted apart long ago. One has gone to Israel, another to America, another to drink. The rest have sold out to commerce. He is starting to regret sharing with them. It is turning into the exhibition of a betrayed past.

We climb up into the light, while Zelim stays below. Gelia says: ‘He’s the only one who’s held his course. Nothing has ever deflected him. People sometimes ask: how can you live with such a man? Because he is so silent. And he makes no concessions. All his life he has been looked after like a baby, first by his mother, then by me. But with me he talks. He’s kind and utterly honest. And his friends stay true to him.

‘Do you know, we got married after the third time we met?’ She
sits at her kitchen table, toying with tomatoes. ‘The first time was in a dark street, and we barely spoke. I imagined him a foreigner. He had shoulder-length chestnut hair and a full beard. The second time I was giving a talk–I was just a student–and he simply walked in and handed me a rolled-up paper. It was a picture of horses, very lovely. The third time…I was living in a student dormitory, and at midnight there was banging on my door. I opened it in my pyjamas, and it was him. He had climbed over the roof of a four-storey building to get to me. His jacket was in shreds. I had to let him in, and he sat on my bed in the dormitory and asked me when we were going to get married.’ She laughs with the astonishment of it, sweeps back her hair. ‘The next day, in the registry office, I didn’t even know his name. I didn’t even know he was a Chechen. I remember peering down as he was signing the register, to see who he was.’

She describes this not as some student mischief, but as a romantic need which immediately foundered. ‘Because then I asked him to shave off his beard. And when he turned round in the barber’s chair and looked at me, I got the fright of my life. He looked like a silly boy. I’d expected to be protected in life, but now I realised it would be I protecting him. I had married one man but was going to spend my life with another. I cried for a month. And after that I thought: if a better man comes along, I’ll go with him.’ I remember before how she says devastating things in this buoyant voice. ‘Later many men wanted to marry me. But none was better than him. So I’ve stayed…’

Into the silence comes the bark of the old woman from her veranda, and Gelia gets up to go to her. I too cross the porch to say goodbye. Once or twice I have glimpsed her through the door, staring at me balefully, remembering (I suppose) her bandaged knees. But Gelia is right: now she seems to have forgiven me, and she asks me courteously what I am writing, where I am going.

‘To Afghanistan?’ I cannot read her expression. The word spells Soviet death. ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’

I say: ‘I don’t know yet.’ But I seem suddenly foolhardy to myself. I am going out of interest, where her people died.

‘That is not a place to go.’ Her hands fumble her book. It is an
old Soviet warhorse, Ostrovsky’s
How the Steel was Tempered
. She says: ‘Yes, that’s what I’m reading. And Zhukov’s war memoirs. I was a veteran in Czechkoslovakia and Germany, you know…so that’s what I read.’ I gaze for a moment into the broad, pale face. It seems stoically at peace. Yet everything she values has deserted her. What does it mean now to hold the Order of Lenin?

Gelia says: ‘Friends come to her and ask, “Why aren’t you thinking of your soul? Why are you still thinking about the Communist Party?” And they offer her prayers to read. She says she can’t read Arabic, so they find them in Uzbek. But she looks at them for a while, then goes back to war memoirs and works praising the Komsomol.’