Shadow of the Silk Road (29 page)

‘Those prayers,’ the old woman says, ‘what’s the point of them?’

She would die as she had lived. There would be no false consolations, no belated attention to her soul, whatever (she wondered) that was. This was her Stalingrad. I took her hand in parting. It was heavy and still. I felt a great warmth for her.

Zelim was holding little glasses, and we toasted one another. ‘Write about us again,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see yourself as others see you. We’ll laugh together!’

I walk back to my hotel in the night, as I did once years ago, passing the parade ground with its vacant pedestal for Lenin, and the war memorial where the old woman’s family had once owned a dacha. The names of the war dead are still clear in their thousands on the marble, but the carved Russian soldier–and all the Soviet insignia–have gone. I stand shivering in the moonlight. The meaning of the dead is changing. Under my feet the painted lines for the May Day parade have faded into the tarmac, and Lenin’s torso lies toppled unnoticed in the grass of a nearby institute, his pedestal still empty.

I reached the Afghan frontier in mid-October. All along the Uzbek side, above the flood of the Amu Darya, stretched a triple rampart of barbed wire and minefields, laid to immunise the country against the Islamic insurgency and civil war that had raged for twenty-five years to the south. For two hours I threaded the guard-posts in chilling quiet. It was Friday, and nothing was entering or leaving. Soldiers and Russian officials checked my documents with remote consternation. Foreigners did not cross here. Twice my identity was radioed back to a nervous foreign ministry in Tashkent, while I waited in the sharpening wind, wondering still if they would let me go. To either side the electrified wire and insulators gleamed intact; the watch-towers were all manned.

At last, an hour before dusk, the enormous central gates bandaged in razor-wire rasped ajar, and I went out on to the empty span of the Friendship Bridge. For over half a mile its white cantilever hung above the river. The sun was dipping. I was walking across an aerial no-man’s-land, with nothing clear in front except the tapered highway of the bridge, and the river coiled below. My footsteps made a distant scraping in the stillness. Behind me the river port of Termez lay invisible beyond a fringe of reeds. I started, self-steeling, to sing. The asphalt underfoot was spotted with oil and divided by a Russian railtrack long abandoned. Here, in December 1979, the Soviet tanks had poured into Afghanistan; and ten years later it was across this bridge that the last Russian soldier on Afghan soil, the diminutive General Gromov, had walked back into a crumbling Soviet Union.

The shores were low and shelving, marking no change in the plain to north or south, where the river wound like an accident: a meandering, mud-coloured sea, glistening with sandbanks. I saw it with dreamlike excitement. This ancient Oxus, the immemorial divide between the Persian and Turkic worlds, had already plunged down half its length out of the Pamirs, and would wander another seven hundred miles north-west over the Turkmen desert to trickle at last into the dying Aral Sea. Over this branch of the Silk Road monks and merchants had travelled to the Afghan kingdom of Bactria, and piously on to India, while Buddhism, long before, had percolated north the other way.

As I neared the Afghan lines, I felt an odd lightness: a curiosity about what was going to happen, as if it would happen to someone else. On the shore just ahead, the village of Hairatan appeared to be in ruins. Then a barrier crossed my way, lounging with soldiers. They were swathed in cavalier headscarves and lambskin hats, and they were grinning. One cried in Russian: ‘Welcome Afghanistan!’ A courteous old man led me to a broken-down office, where he stamped my passport without looking at it, and logged me in under an unrecognisable name. A list of candidates for the past presidential election dangled on the crumbling wall. Outside, photographs of the Uzbek general Dostum, the region’s favourite warlord, were plastered on the customs-house gates. But Hairatan seemed a village of refugees. In the days of the Soviet occupation it had been a busy border crossing. Now leftover tin and wood were cobbled into makeshift dwellings, where patriarchs in loose-flowing trousers and careless turbans were striding through rubble.

The old man found a driver to take me the fifty miles south to Mazar-e-Sharif. It was nearly night. We entered a desert of yellow-grey dunes pricked with camel-thorn. We had no language between us. The man was swarthy and young, swathed stormily in cloaks and turban; but soon, as if unwrapping a monstrous parcel, he unwound his shawls and there emerged a delicate face with girlish skin and Tajik features. We drove in silence. The road was narrow and deserted. Often the dunes overlapped it in hillocks of ash-blond dust. We passed a lone satellite dish where a shepherd
was lighting a campfire. The sand hardened under a glaze of grey stones. Once the rocks were daubed red in warning of mines, and a burnt-out personnel-carrier lay blown upside down. By now the sun was lowering in a blurred disc through dead seams of cloud, touching the horizon. At lonely checkpoints soldiers emerged from their beds in beached shipment containers to stare at us, wearing no uniform, muffled against the wind. It was blowing cold and hard in the darkness as we entered the outskirts of Mazar.

I found a hotel on the main square. In its gaunt five storeys I was the only guest. The locks of all its rooms were smashed, but there was water in the communal bathroom. The hotelier sent out his son to bring me shashlik from the bazaar: it was dangerous at night, he said. For a long time I stood looking down from my window on the still city, which seemed to be glimmering under water. I felt a light expectancy. This, I thought idly, was how people died: by mistake, imagining themselves bodiless. I took this uncomfortable notion to bed with me, after wedging my door shut with a chair, and lay awake a long time, the bedsprings raking my back. Outside, the few street-lamps flickered out, until only the twin domes of the Hazrat Ali shrine–legendary tomb of the caliph Ali–went on shining in a necklace of amber lights.

I woke to streaming sunlight. Beyond my balcony, around the square, Mazar-e-Sharif spread in multicoloured arcades and awnings dangled over splintered pavements. Already the bazaars were stirring, and hand-carts and horse-carts and old Russian taxis were about, with turbaned men on bicycles, who went very upright, as if riding horses. Beyond this reviving heart, the suburbs stretched in a lake of mud and whitewash, and the Hindu Kush hung a blurred curtain to the south.

I went out into the markets round the shrine gardens. They covered the paths with second-hand garments, cheap penknives, cigarettes. Cobblers, fortune-tellers and street masseurs were at work, with vendors of turquoise jewellery and overripe bananas. Chinese radios blared out the music once forbidden by the Taliban, and youths were peddling cassettes of Indian pop singers and pirated DVDs of a Sylvester Stallone movie.

Bargaining with abrupt courtesy, striding quick from stall to stall, the men went in shin-length
chapans
and baggy trousers, their heads heaped with turbans–one end flying free–and debonair shawls tossed about their shoulders. This lordly costume, familiar from years of mujahidin news footage, lend them a frisson of threat and glamour. They looked like starved hawks. Sometimes their bearded faces carried a shock of ginger hair or grey eyes. But the women, draped to their ankles under thin-pleated blue or white burkas, walked in fluttering voids.

Nobody stared at me. I might have been indistinguishable from others, or immaterial. There was no other foreigner here, yet men looked clean through me. I feared they thought me Russian. Only when I met their eyes did they flash back smiles–ferociously genial–or spoke something. If I made no overture, I returned to anonymity. Then I felt that lifting of the heart which early travellers recorded, of moving among a fiercely separate people. Despite a million dead and half the population displaced, despite the beggars lining the shrine gates–mine-victims thrusting their prosthetic legs in front of them–I sensed some heritage inviolate in these people, refusing pity. They seemed in sharper focus than their northern kin: faces more mercurial, angry, courteous, austere. It was as if some great lamp had been turned up. These were the natives of Samarkand and Bukhara writ large: Tajik and Uzbek mingled. To their south the Hindu Kush sealed them off from the peoples of the Afghan centre. But to the north their plains overlap the Amu Darya uninterrupted deep into Central Asia.

They survived from a time of fluid borders. Uzbeks had flooded over the great river early in the sixteenth century, mixing with Tajiks settled long before. Centuries later they had held up a wild mirror-image to the Soviet republics to their north. At the start of the 1979 invasion Moscow had sent in conscripts chosen for their kinship with the Afghans. But the affinities proved fatally strong. Almost half a million Uzbek and Tajik refugees had crossed the Amu in the 1920s, and soon the invaders were discovering relatives among the mujahidin. The Soviet divisions began to unravel.

Now the legacy of that war crowded the shrine entrance, calling for alms. I changed a few dollars for a wad of soiled afghanis, and
went into a courtyard of empty peace. Over its grey marble the figures of women were drifting among clouds of white pigeons. Beyond them the sanctuary spread like a windowless palace, frothed with turrets and balustrades and sheathed in nineteenth-century tiles–aquamarine and hazy yellow–which shone unscathed in glassy, bland perfection. Inside, as I gazed down a gauntlet of seated elders to the tomb, Islam seemed natural and alive again. The grave was the city’s
raison d’être
. Mazar-e-Sharif, ‘Tomb of the Noble’, is built on the legend that the fourth caliph Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was interred here after his murder in 658. In tradition his followers, fearing that his enemies would desecrate his corpse, bound it to a white she-camel which wandered east, and he was buried at the place where she fell. The great Seljuk sultan Sanjar ordered the first shrine built in 1136, but Genghis Khan destroyed it, and for centuries the tomb survived as a lonely site of pilgrimage, overshadowed by the mighty metropolis of Balkh nearby. Only in the nineteenth century, after its rival lay in malarial ruins, did Mazar flower into a city.

I roamed its dusty rose gardens under the pines. Lesser graves sheltered in domed chambers around the walls, graves that belonged to Afghanistan’s infant nationhood: relatives of Dost Mohammad, the country’s long-lived nineteenth-century king, and his son Akbar Khan, whose forces annihilated a 16,500-strong British-Indian army on its retreat from Kabul in 1842. Their graves were piled with electrical fittings and old brooms. But the domes were white with pigeons. Pigeons misted the whole sanctuary like a snowdrift. Their ancestors, it is said, were brought here in the fifteenth century from the true grave of Ali near Baghdad, as if in acknowledgement that at the heart of Mazar’s tomb lies only a transposed desire. The birds are gentled in myth. In times of hardship they leave the shrine for havens of their own, and their return is a pledge of peace. Should a grey pigeon join them, it turns white within forty days. And every seventh bird is a spirit.

During the years of Soviet occupation, Mazar-e-Sharif never saw the devastation visited on other cities, and far into the 1990s the region’s brutal Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose posters still plastered the walls, maintained the independence of his six northern provinces, using and betraying every faction in the country. As refugees poured in from the south, Mazar became the last liberal outpost in Afghanistan, and centre of a brisk smuggling trade. Its bazaars were full of vodka and French perfumes. Women students walked its campus in high heels.

But in May 1997, with the Taliban closing in, Dostum was betrayed by one of his own generals, and fled north over the Amu to Uzbekistan, then on to Turkey. For two or three days the Taliban occupied the city alongside his renegade soldiers and their allied Hazara militia. Then fighting broke out. The Hazara especially–Shias distrustful of the fiercely Sunni Taliban–turned on the invaders in a wholesale massacre. The Taliban were mown down in streets they did not know. Some two thousand were taken west into the desert at Dasht-e-Laili, where they were thrown down wells, or asphyxiated in shipment containers. Even those sheltering in the Hazrat Ali shrine where I walked were taken out and shot.

But the next year, in August, the Taliban returned. They drove their jeeps into the city, machine-gunning shopkeepers, women, old men, children, even donkeys and dogs. Then they hunted down the Hazaras, house by house, killing the men with three shots, to the head, chest and testicles. Their leaders broadcast from the mosques that the Hazara were pagans, and so licensed their death. As refugees streamed from the city, Taliban aircraft strafed them at will. And soon the terrible truck containers were rolling again, some to Dasht-e-Laili in vengeful imitation of the year before. For five days the bodies lay in Mazar’s street, mauled by dogs.

A few miles to the north, the Hazara village of Qezelabad was visited by the Taliban even before they sacked Mazar. I could induce no car to take me there, but found a contact in the city, a young Tajik who had worked for the BBC. People shunned Qezelabad, Tahir said–it was rumoured a place of bandits, he’d never been–but soon our taxi was nosing between fields
smoothing to dust. Beyond the mound of its crumbled fortress, a mud village crouched under the white sky. We drove into silence and ruined streets. They wound off one another past breached rooms, where sometimes the paint was still bright on the walls–green and blue–and courtyards spread derelict. We trod them gingerly, as if trespassing. The cone of a rusted mortar bomb lay in a crashed basement.

Yet people had returned. A rivulet snuffled between the walls, and women were washing clothes there, unveiled, squatted in the silt. The shell of a hovel was labelled ‘National Solidarity’ in Arabic, where a charity had come and gone. Only the mosque had been rebuilt, it seemed, where a group of men ushered us in with the harrowing grace of the poor.

They motioned me to a pile of cushions, and crouched or sat cross-legged around me, their beards twitching in their hands, their faces haggard, courteous, a little distrustful. Some showed high, polished cheekbones under crescent eyes–for the Hazara, it is thought, descend from the Mongols of Genghis Khan.

When the Taliban came, they said, they had escaped into the mountains, and at last to their fellow believers in Shia Iran. But their old people were left behind, with those who could not flee. They had been shot or stabbed to death. None were left.

‘People came from the outside to bury our dead,’ a man said. ‘They were lying in the streets, they told us, and in the houses. Old people, harmless. They were our elders. It was four years before we could return, after the Taliban left. And nobody knew their graves.’

‘There were once three hundred families living here,’ said another man. ‘Now there are barely a hundred. They killed thirteen people from my family.’

And another, a youth with a round, tight-skinned face: ‘My father stayed behind to protect our home. My mother took the children into the mountains. We did not see him again.’