Shadow of the Silk Road (34 page)

Or perhaps he is waiting. After all, he is used to exile (and he has money stashed abroad, people say). Maybe he already knows that he will gain a post in Karzai’s newly elected government: a shred of uncertain power.

I hand him my friend’s letter, and the name brings a glow of memory to his face. For they had fought together against the Russians in the years when things were simpler, at a time almost of happiness.

Out of the dynastic chaos following the death of Tamerlane in 1405, his youngest son Shah Rukh murdered his way to the head of a shrunken empire. Shah Rukh left his own son, the astronomer-prince Ulug Beg, to govern Samarkand, and for thirty-eight years, from his capital at Herat, he presided over the golden summer of the Timurid realm. He had served his father well, and he was tired of war.

In his court of architects and painters, calligraphers and poets, Mongol vigour and Persian delicacy struck momentary fire. Another son, the talented prince Baisanghur, assembled a forty-strong workshop of illuminators and book-binders–and a unique library–before drinking himself to death at the age of thirty-seven. In Samarkand, meanwhile, two centuries before the invention of the telescope, Ulug Beg was charting the course coordinates of
1,018 stars, and recalculating the stellar year to within seconds of that computed by electronics. At the heart of this renaissance was Shah Rukh’s prodigious queen, Gawhar Shad. These were her children. Her foundations–mosques, palaces, colleges, baths, libraries–spread in lavish patronage all over eastern Persia and Afghanistan. In 1405, with the rare tolerance of a Sunni for a Shia saint, she founded a famous mosque in Meshed, which I longed to see. And for ten years after her husband died she schemed for the succession of her grandson and great-grandson, until she was put to death for conspiracy at the age of eighty.

She was buried at Herat in the heart of her
musallah
: a mosque and college which were the wonder of her age. Every morning I gazed from my balcony at the hundred-foot minarets around it, standing like kiln chimneys in an industrial desert. The track there, which I remembered as a pine-scented path, now went along a fetid canal between refugee hovels. Old men sat out blindly in the failing sun. The children ran away.

The five minarets loomed ever taller over the rooftops as I approached, and at last shattered the sky above me. I remembered them gleaming blue with mosaic tiles, and my heart sank. Now they were the colour of earth. I emerged on the edge of a wasteland heaped with refuse. They rose there in fantastical solitude, consecrated to nothing, leaning this way and that like ancient companions: huge, solitary, unexplained. A road had been driven between them, breaking their ghostly collusion. A lone hawk trembled on the air. On a broken wall some daubed red crosses, scored out by white, declared the site cleared of mines.

I walked in momentary exhilaration over the blemished earth, glad to be here at all; but the pillars were travesties of my memory. In Gawhar Shad’s day a forest of more than twenty minarets bristled above the cupolas of a mosque and
madrasah
, whose walls were dressed from head to foot in faience. Now, from that time, only a single minaret remained, near her badly restored tomb.

The wrecking of this brilliant ensemble is a wretched story. For four centuries the incomparable edifices survived, dilapidated but
intact. Then engineers of the British-Indian army, advising King Abdurahman in 1885 and fearful of a Russian advance on India, blew them up to create an open field of fire. The Russians never came. Nine minarets lasted into the twentieth century, but two were shaken down by earthquake in 1931. Two years later Robert Byron described a pair of the survivors as uniquely fine. But one of them fell in 1951, and in 1979 Soviet gunfire smashed another, leaving a thirty-foot stump where I found a trace of marble panelling.

The last of Gawhar Shad’s minarets leaned perilously over its whole height. A Russian mortar shell had bitten a hole in it. Pigeons were fluttering in and out. For thirty feet its shaft rose bare, where the
madrasah
walls had enclosed it. But above this, for another forty feet, it shone intermittently with lozenges of lapis blue, enclosing Kufic knots and olive-green stalks spraying white flowers. Above these again, the scalloped corbels of two vanished balconies were clotted with cobalt and turquoise. Nothing more was left of Gawhar Shad’s college, except a hoary tale of her state inspection with two hundred ladies-in-waiting. The students had been ordered to leave beforehand, but one overslept and awoke to a ruby-lipped beauty. Her dishevelled dress, when she emerged from the building, betrayed what had happened; but Gawhar Shad–a woman of robust sense–ordered all two hundred ladies to be married to the students, and supplied each one with a salary and a bed.

To the east, the four last minarets belong to a later age–built towards the century’s end by Husain Baiqara, the last Timurid sultan of Herat–and it is easy to read in them an elegiac decline. For forty years before 1507, in a palmy Indian summer, Herat again became the sanctum of painters and historians, of Alisher Navoi and Bihzad, the prince of miniaturists. Babur, looking back from the time of his greatness as the first Mogul emperor of India, remembered the city with awe as the seat of brilliant, dissolute princes, of curious sports and matchless learning. You could not stretch out a leg, said Navoi, without kicking a poet. But within months of Babur’s leaving, the Shaybanid Uzbeks, fresh from seizing Samarkand, descended on Herat and put out its light for ever.

I roamed for a long time under these final minarets, which by some irony had outlived their sturdier cousins. They reared up over a hundred feet, leaning faintly out of true, their summits broken off. The Russian battle-line against Ismail Khan’s mujahidin had run straight between them. They had been chipped and torn by bullets, shaken by artillery. Over their surface, in high relief, the thin white frames for vanished mosaic spread like broken lace. Fancifully they seemed to create a net of stars and Maltese crosses, and occasionally still enclosed ceramic blossoms on a midnight-blue ground. But I walked beneath them softly over a heartbreaking debris of turquoise, black and lapis flakes, which glittered like tears.

There was one last building. The mausoleum of Gawhar Shad–dwarfed, ill-restored and ruined again–pushed up a fat-ribbed dome, now bald of tiles. Beside it a caretaker pointed out the grave of Navoi, then opened the mausoleum door. I caught my breath. Over its void a ceiling of interlocking vaults and fanned pendentives played in faded russets and blues. In the floor’s earth, lined up casually like rubble, were six black tombstones, one a child’s. Baisanghur had been buried here, with Gawhar Shad’s grandson and great-grandson, whom she had fatally cherished; and a stepson, Mohammad Jahi, who had died of mortification (wrote a historian) because she hated him. But I could not read the inscriptions, nor could the caretaker. He invented their dead, and tugged out a torn visitors’ book for me to sign–his only foreigner that year. The body of Shah Rukh, I knew, had been taken back to Samarkand to rest beside his father. But Gawhar Shad was lain under the complex splendour of these vaults, under a stone inscribed ‘the Bilqis of the Age’, likening her to the Queen of Sheba.

Two days later, in a chilly dawn, I found a bus going to the Iranian frontier. Moving away from the raw intensity of this country, with its mixed threat and beauty, I felt flat and emptied. I wanted to stay. But my route, snaking north-west, would meet the main
Silk Road at the shrine city of Meshed, and there it was festival time.

We eased out into semi-desert, under a sky lit by no visible sun. The woman in front of me exchanged her burka for a full-length Iranian chador, leaving her face exposed and pale, and the man next door took off his black-and-white keffiyeh linked to Ismail Khan, and stuffed it in his bag. The border belonged to Kabul now. We moved fast down the road asphalted by Ismail Khan for the customs dues he would no longer see. Outside, the air filled with sand, and the horizon levelled to a dove-grey mist. The villages seemed deserted under their cracked domes.

Then, with a noise like pebbles rattling in a tin, our bus broke down. Patiently the passengers got out and sat along the kerbside, careless of mines. Some walked into a village across the road, as if to meet friends; others slept; while the driver and his henchman sprawled beneath the chassis for the long, accustomed business of repair.

For the last time I follow a track into a village and see again how people live. How a seven-year drought is draining their fields, their crops, their lives. One quarter of their children never reaches the age of five. The average life ends at forty-three. Then all thoughts about brutality and conscience drain away, and the mystery becomes not cruelty, but compassion: why somebody offers a stranger a cigarette, or turns away from killing an enemy’s son.

At the frontier all was pandemonium. Government police had moved in to supervise its hundred-million-dollar annual revenue, and a machine-gun perched on a truck looked down on a mob of customs officials. After an hour our bus crept past a last barrier. The way swarmed with money-changers. The red, green and black of the Afghan flag gave way to the red, green and white of Iran, and the photogenic smile of President Karzai was replaced by the painted scowl of Ayatollah Khomeini and the owlish confusion of Supreme Leader Khamenei. The lorries were banked up five abreast for quarter of a mile, heavy with the shipment containers
of evil memory, and piled with cement, Mitsubishi trucks, steel rods, Nestlé bottled water…

The Iranian police, dapper in bottle green, boarded our bus in twos and threes, glittering with suspicion, hunting for the opium which leaked like bacilli across the border. Iran had over a million addicts, and its frontiers teemed with armed guards. (Many of the Afghan opium-carriers who took to the mule tracks by night never returned.) The policemen’s screwdrivers tapped and rang over dashboard, bulkhead, engine. Our cases and sacks–and my worn-out rucksack–were dragged out, rolled past a scanner, then disembowelled. But my dollars, curled in their bottle of mosquito repellent, stayed undetected.

Then, just as our bus was easing free, it was flagged down again, and the real search started. We were stood against a wall, as if to be shot, with our baggage at our feet. The Afghans looked bitter and depleted. Many of their passports had been signed by the illiterate with a thumbprint. When an officer realised I was a Westerner, I was motioned aside, guiltily exempt, with women and mewling children, while the men were ordered to take off their shoes, then sharply frisked. The bags were emptied again into the dust, spilling out their intimacies: spangled shoes and bras and family photographs. The few goods people were carrying for sale, the small exchanges of the Silk Road–pistachio nuts, woollen coats–were fingered, questioned, valued, then at last, mostly, returned. Two hours later our decrepit bus, nosing through stranded trucks, emerged on to the plains of Khorasan.

Our bus was travelling over a sunken plain. Behind us the Hari river turned north toward the deserts of Turkmenistan to die. Here and there a tractor carved the bleached fields, and women were harvesting onions. I gazed out with new anticipation. But I saw the same smoky Afghan horizon and felt the same breath of a dry, rasping wind which fell away. The mud villages had turned to brick, where the farmers moved in snowy turbans; but the long, dark faces beneath them had not changed.

For the steppes of Khorasan swept behind us without break beyond the Afghan border–decided by the British in 1905–to the true, unmapped frontier where they met the Hindu Kush east of Herat. Khorasan, to medieval geographers, stretched even to Balkh, and its plains had been inhabited by Iranian tribes long before Alexander marched out of the west.

Then, ahead, a white city was shining. After Afghanistan it looked futuristic, outlandishly clinical, afloat with gold and blue domes. An hour later, spilled out among the populace of Meshed, the passengers looked down-at-heel and ruffianly, and we scattered as if ashamed of one another. I found myself walking along smooth footways, barely a paving-slab torn up, past traffic which stopped at red lights, sometimes, on horseless streets. People stared. I went past glass-fronted shops where jewellery and watches were lit up after dark, and neon signs came on. Everything was soft, muted, the people fat and smooth. Sometimes young men went clean-shaven. They wore anoraks and check shirts. Someone was carrying a briefcase. There were
buildings with whole upper storeys intact, and advertisements for beds and water pumps.

As for the women, framed in chadors leaving the face bare, they seemed scandalously exposed. I stared at them rudely as they passed. They had feathery brows and dark, swimming eyes and lashes. Many were softly beautiful. Some wore a brazen hint of lipstick or eye-shadow. They might have been naked.

It was the eve of the birthday of the Twelfth Imam, venerated in Shia tradition as the coming saviour, and the city was choked with pilgrims. Only after a long time did I find a hotel, above a noisy crossroads. In the foyer hung a trio of photographs: the awkward-looking Supreme Leader Khamenei, the mild reformist president Khatami, and in the centre an angry Ayatollah Khomeini, watching them both. I was shown to a cleanish room. In its bedside drawer were a Koran, a folded prayer-mat and a medallion of clay to which the faithful touch their foreheads in prayer.

Meshed enshrines the memory of murder and loss. In 818 the Eighth Imam in the Shia line was poisoned here by the reigning Sunni caliph (say the Shia) with grapes and pomegranate juice. At first he was buried royally beside the great Haroun al-Rashid of ‘The Thousand and One Nights’, father of his murderer, who had died here nine years before. (Even in the last century Shia pilgrims spat on the site of Haroun’s grave.) But the shrine was many times razed and restored. In 1405 Gawhar Shad founded a famous mosque here, and when in the sixteenth century the Safavid shahs–the last great Persian dynasty–turned the country to Shiism, the sanctuary mushroomed into a state Vatican.

The Shia imams shadow in martyred procession the caliphs of Sunni orthodoxy. They descend in twelve generations from Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, and their followers repudiate all caliphs but him. The true succession, they claim, was wrenched from Ali’s son Hussein at the battle of Kerbela in
AD
680 (it was from Kerbela that my clay medallion came), and Hussein’s death became the catalyst for centuries of ritual mourning. All over Iran the battle is recreated during the month of Moharam in fervid passion-plays, from which Hussein emerges like a holy intercessor. He dies, like Jesus, for his
people’s sins; and his mother Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, becomes the Mother of Sorrows.

The imams who followed him lived secluded in Mecca and Medina, watched anxiously by the orthodox caliphs. To the Shia, each imam was the sole guardian of God’s word in a corrupted world. And each one, they say, was secretly poisoned by the Sunnis. Only the last, the Twelfth, whose birthday I would see here, vanished as a small child in 874, and remains in mystic occultation, waiting to return at the Last Day.

So Islam, in this sorrowful tradition, suffered a curious sea-change. The Shia sublimated political failure into pious grief and future promise. And the triumphant Sunni, entrenched in Islamic governance and law, were henceforth haunted by a bitter counter-image of themselves, which repudiated earthly authority, and feasted on historic wrong.

The crowds coursing through Meshed next morning had come on pious festival, to honour the Awaited One, and to buy and sell things. The shops, I noticed–so glamorous the evening before–were mostly homely providers for the poor: of rope, tools, turban cloth, sheepskin jackets. The streets were wide and charmless. No restaurant was in sight this Ramadan; and no portrayal of a human being existed anywhere, unless of a tiny child. All the roads converged in streaming tributaries of cabs and buses on a single point, where the shrine of Imam Reza spread a confusion of courts, mosques,
madrasahs
, libraries, hostels: the greatest concentration of holy places in Islam.

I walked in a crowd of pilgrims. They looked poor, for the most part–people from villages and country towns. But some ancestral grace touched them. There were young men defiantly groomed, and fine-boned women. I remembered how Uzbeks parodied the Iranians as urbane, too sweet. I strained to understand anything in their talk. It was a gently guttural tongue, but fluent and agile. Sometimes I imagined I understood.

At the shrine’s walls, through deep entranceways, a great tide of people was flowing in and out. Amongst them, between black-turbaned
sayyids
and brown-robed mullahs, the whole wider family of Islam swept: Pakistanis, Iraqis, Afghans and Saudi
Arabians, yellow-turbaned Baluchis and white-turbaned Turcomans. But I could not follow them in. Before the inner courtyards, at every entrance, custodians with silver-headed maces stood in ceremonial calm, and only Muslims could pass. Even Gawhar Shad’s mosque, which unbelievers had sometimes entered, was forbidden now.

For a long time I smarted outside, unable to leave. Sometimes, beyond the crowds darkening the gates, framed in the rectangle of a distant door, I glimpsed a vista of mosaic tiles or a flash of gold. These great inner courtyards–the Enqelab and the Azadi–were rumoured exquisite. Years ago a woman friend of mine had entered, concealed in full chador; and Robert Byron in 1933 had penetrated the Gawhar Shad in trembling disguise and euphoria.

At last it became unbearable. I merged with the moving crowd, in a knot of tall, concealing men. My head cringed into my anorak. The man beside me stooped to kiss the guardian’s mace-head. I had no idea, at that moment, how my foreignness blazed out, or went unseen. But the next minute I was in the bright enormousness of the Enqelab court. I waited for a shout, the shock of rough hands. But nothing came. I stood with my back to the gate, gazing. My heartbeat stilled. I was staring into a vast, hushed quadrangle across a moving sea of worshippers. Their carpets unfurled fifty yards deep before the inner sanctuary, and they knelt or stood with cupped hands, intent, some barefoot, all facing where the gold dome budded above the tomb. Some of them, dangling amber beads, held prayerbooks or Korans, but their prayer in that huge expanse was only a hum of bees.

The court enclosed them like a drawing room. On either side its two-tiered and arcaded walls drew a curtain of brilliant tilework for five hundred feet, while two sixty-foot
iwans
–one in pure gold, one in pure faience–echoed each other across it. In the golden cave of the first, hung with stalactite honeycombs, the almost unbearable opulence was broken by a single band of ultramarine blue; while behind the faience
iwan
, drenched in yellow and opal green, sailed a gold minaret.

Gingerly I started to circle the crowds. But the faces that turned to me did not change. They looked mild, separate, as if they had
accepted my presence, then forgotten it. Perhaps the ethnic diversity all around protected me. I might have been invisible. Under my feet the paving was a sheen of grey and pink. I began to imagine myself merged with the others. My face was dark from months of wind and sun.

Then the prayer of an imam sounded from the sanctuary, and the pilgrims broke into a deep, answering roar, so that I shuddered until I saw their rapt faces. Hesitantly I approached a grille above a passage to the tomb-chamber. Its bars were hung with rags and votive padlocks. Women were sobbing against it. Their hands, red with henna, trembled over its iron. I glimpsed nothing beyond. All around it clustered the maimed and sick, their crutches interlocking, their wheelchairs stranded askew. Some lay in blankets, as they had all night, their ankles tied to the tomb’s grille by coloured cords. They stared up at me with clouded eyes.

I moved at will now, lost in the crush of bodies, pushing from court to court. I averted my eyes only from the guards, and oriented myself by the dome above the tomb–a bloated bowl of gold. It was impossible to tell how many thousands were worshipping here. I watched them mesmerised. Walking those blazing courts, in their chadors and drab jackets, they might have strayed into paradise, and they slept or picnicked in its alcoves, while others read the Koran above them. Here the Muslim
umma
was assembled in peace: the community of the faithful, which transcends nation and even sect (there were Sunni Turcomans and Saudis) to become a momentary family united by Arabic prayer, as Latin had once united medieval Europe.

I came into Gawhar Shad’s mosque. It was packed with worshippers at noon. Several times men stood up and let out a harsh entreaty, and a storm of chanting answered them. But the mosque that enshrined this agitation stopped the heart. All its arcades and
iwans
, its open sanctuary, shone in a mist of porcelain tiles. Its minarets were dusted with dark diamonds enclosing white script or blossoms, set in pale brick. Inside the
iwans
, the stalactites clustered in a scalloped density of aquamarine and white. New colours–mustard and rich damson–burned under the vaults. And
over all the spandrels a translucent foliage swarmed into golden blooms or a rain of milky flowers. In the court’s centre, half obscured by pilgrims, a marble pool and fountain stirred. And along the roofline, in a deep, continuous frieze, ran a bramble of magnificent script.

By noon the mosque and all its passageways were suffocated in worshippers, kneeling or prostrate through court after court, their hands lifted to the sanctuary, until it was impossible to walk. Here on a throne screened by a banner, the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, would return in the chaos and terror of the Last Day, attended by Jesus. The time of his coming is as clouded as the Maitreya Buddha’s, whose statue had smiled above me at Labrang, in what seemed another life. But beside me, as then, an old woman crawled on her stomach, pouring dust lovingly over her head on and on, awaiting the moment when the wicked would perish, and time and space be rolled up.

In the outer courtyards new construction was going forward, not in the dead toil of Uzbekistan, I sensed, but with a more loved and careful craft. I was walking here, sated, happy, when a man approached me speaking English. He was curious about what I was doing. The Westerners had all left, he said. Was I, by any chance, a Muslim? Under his woollen cap Hussein’s eyes were amber and warm. His English was very old, he laughed softly, he had chosen it at school.

In front of us, outside the Azadi gate, a circle of some hundred men were smiting their chests in rhythm, shouting, ‘
Ah Ali! Yah Ali!’
, bandying the cries between them in a broken martial dirge. Hussein saw my face. ‘They love Ali,’ he said, ‘and they are expecting the Mahdi.’ We walked beyond them, and found an alcove under a wall. ‘He may come at any time. People are awaiting him now, especially on his birthday…’

I met his gaze, tried to smile. In the Anglican tradition of my childhood, the Messiah had been postponed indefinitely. Perhaps there was something weary in my voice when I said: ‘And then there will be judgement…’

Hussein nodded: it might happen soon. ‘Our scriptures are like
yours. We believe in the same prophets.’ He touched my arm. ‘I think good Christians go to heaven. We are the same people.’

Some tension in me leaked away, so that I wondered what the last years had done to my sense of his faith. There were many Islams, as there were many Christianities. Hussein’s required that I join him in heaven. His smile spread in a beard fringed with white, then flickered out. ‘But your scriptures…are imperfect. Sometimes even they are a blasphemy to the Creator.’ There were things that were unbearable. His shoulders straightened with urgency. ‘Listen. Your Bible says Adam and Eve were naked in the garden, and God did not see them at first because they hid. How can that be? God sees everything. In your scriptures God tells Adam and Eve that if they eat of the fruit of the tree they will die. The serpent says they will not. And the serpent is right. The Bible says that Jacob wrestled with God, and won. That is absurd…’

A hundred more literalisms, I could tell, were banking up in his head. I answered wanly that the Bible was not the verbatim word of God, like the Koran, but a record of sacred history. Yet I felt vulnerable, as if I were talking across centuries. His eyes, very focused and grave, never left my face. Sometimes I flinched from them. His piety was active: he had abandoned teaching to help in the upkeep of the shrine. Doubt would have shocked him silent. To him the patriarchs and prophets–Abraham, Noah, Moses–were not actors in a complex human chronicle, but the flawless messengers of God. The Koran was the purification of Jewish and Christian scripture, the last revelation. It absolved the prophets from the human mire of history. Jesus above all, said Hussein. Islam did not repudiate Jesus but the biblical version of him. How could a God be crucified?

Out of my faded faith I said: ‘He was human among humans.’ But a gulf yawned between us, and seemed to widen.