Shadow of the Silk Road (42 page)

I start irritably: ‘The Chinese were great when…’

‘I don’t understand the Chinese,’ the feminist breaks in. ‘Why are they ahead? We’re an intelligent people, but look at us!’

A moment’s silence yawns. I try to fill it with some understanding, but hear myself only condescending, British. It is the sound of hypocrisy. The fair one, perhaps trying to mend some offence, says: ‘The West is a dream. We don’t know about it. We can’t reach it. You’d have to live lives like us to understand this.’ She adds into the silence: ‘Our land has never been happy.’

I think of the sweetness I have met with in this country. I have told people, at last, that I am going to Turkey, to Antioch. They say I am travelling through too much danger, and they murmur about the Kurds. A man in Qazvin writes me a card in halting English, wishing me a safe passage. Another offers me his wristwatch (mine has broken). Villagers give me rides on their motorbikes, showing off a little. Shopkeeepers add some small item free. Almost
everybody is courteous to the stranger. Occasionally they arrange to meet you again (they do not always turn up). They are old in politesse, you know, and sometimes in duplicity. Do they, in fact, hate you?

The teacher says: no, they may hate the idea of you, your country, what it has done to ours. But not you. In the empty common room, we sit over tea and baklava. His face is polished smooth, like ivory, but its playfulness gone: ‘I think the West is corrupting us. That is what I hate. Pornography comes to us from everywhere, and drugs. You see people just lying in the street now. And anyone can buy porn videos under the counter. They don’t cost a dollar. I plan to get married soon, and it makes me hate this more, much more. Our world has grown sick.’ I listen to him in surprise. I had imagined him urbane, even a little cynical. But he is entering an anxious reverie. ‘What I most regret is that love has been debased here. Women are subjected to violence on our streets all the time. They can’t walk free. My first wish is to buy a car, so she won’t suffer this.’

‘What kind of violence?’

‘Men mutter vulgar things at her, and bystanders join in.’ He winces in recoil, looks away. I am reminded, for some reason, of those idealised Shia posters: Hussein, with a cosmetic sabre-wound on his brow. ‘And sometimes they’ll try to touch her.’

Perhaps this is the price, I say, of a feebly dawning liberalism. Even his female students had favoured the idea of premarital affairs.

‘That’s because they have them already. Of course they do. They’re secret, but they have them.’

‘How do you know?’

He doesn’t answer, but sensing my surprise at his disquiet says: ‘I’ve always been afraid of violence. I came from a violent home. I’d go into the garden as a boy and hide. They say violence begets itself, but not with me. I just got more anxious.’ The common room is filling up with others, but he takes no notice. ‘The trouble was my mother wasn’t a virgin when she married, and my father only discovered this on their wedding night, and never forgave her. She had deceived him, he said. He never trusted her after that, he
thought she was a whore. But I think you can lose your virginity other than by intercourse–an accident, or something. She said that. They were divorced when I was small.

‘In this country the pure feelings have disappeared. Women have become conscious of their bodies, and it’s perverted them. I’ve talked to my fiancée about this, about her friends. We’ve always had male homosexuality here, but not this…women going together. That’s what having no freedom does. After our marriage we plan to go to Turkey. Life is better there.’

His gaze returns to mine, seeking confirmation. I see in his boy’s face his mother’s outraged purity. In Turkey, he imagines, he will recreate some happier time, a little before his memory, before rampant pornography, before his parents’ raging. ‘Love is lost here,’ he says.

The white-blue sheet of Orumiyeh, the largest lake in Iran, averages barely thirty feet deep, and is so briny that only primordial crustaceans and sea-worms inhabit it. Its littoral is deserted. It spreads in a brilliant vacancy of blue, almost to Turkey.

At first I thought waves were breaking on its shores. Then I realised that for six feet up the rocks were crusted with salt. They gleamed through its mist where all else had faded, in a wavering beam of dimming curves and promontories. A few white birds swam alongside, like pieces broken off the shore.

In 1265, somewhere on the island of Shahi, Hulagu was buried in secret. The year before, a comet had warned him of his end, and he was shaken by epileptic fits. He died in winter camp, aged forty-eight, leaving thirty sons, and was followed four months later by his Christian queen. He was the last princely descendant of Genghis Khan to be entombed in the high Mongol manner, immured with gold and slaughtered concubines. The Christians of Asia sent up a paean of grief for their terrible protector; but the Muslim world rejoiced. He was interred, it seems, in the great tower of his own treasury, guarded by a thousand men. But within
a few decades, as the Ilkhanids declined, the tomb was pillaged, and by Tamerlane’s time the whole region was deserted. The site faded from memory.

Now, in the shrinking lake, the island of Shahi had become a mountainous peninsula. I reached it over a long causeway, circling the steep plateau which was once presumed the tomb of Hulagu. But in 1939 an investigating scholar found nothing convincing there. Instead he recorded a local rumour of rock-cut chambers and cisterns on a near-inaccessible mountain above the peninsula’s western shore; but he never came back.

A mystified taxi-driver dropped me off at dawn, and promised to return before night. In the tangled massif before me, one mountain–it looked too precipitous to scale–shouldered across half the horizon. Where its wall steepened, pitted by artificial-looking caves, the milky cliffs seemed to drop sheer at either end. For three hours I followed the stone-littered bed of a river, while the mountain receded and another one barged across my track. Two goatherds, resting by pens cobbled from the river’s boulders, motioned me the way around it, and seemed to be asking me what was beyond. But I had no words to answer, and I did not know. They watched me go, in bafflement.

Then the valley squeezed to a canyon. Above its narrowing corridor the cliffs filled up with caves, shrilling with unseen birds. After an hour a fall of boulders blocked the way, and I climbed painfully out, skirting the intervening mountain, until its giant neighbour overbore the skyline again. Its caves hung clearer now, two of them high and tantalising. Their entrances looked too smooth to be natural, one a perfect arch, and I could make out window embrasures. Under my feet the slopes steepened to igneous lava, scattered with black and rose-coloured rocks, and swept by shoulder-high thistles. Their blown flowers stuck on my clothes and hands. Even high up, the air was deathly still. And in this euphoria, as if the seasons were collapsing, butterflies flickered out of bushes heavy with red-haired caterpillars. Partridges got up under my feet, and once, quite close, a herd of thistle-pale deer turned on their long legs to watch me, gazing through white-circled eyes, before careering up a gully.

But as I neared them, scrambling on all fours, the caves roughened into savagery. Their entrances turned out uncut. Their imagined windows were only the tracks of rainwater. I was three-quarters of the way up the mountain now, my hope fading. An old pain in my knee was starting up again. I sat down among the rocks, my frustration dissipated in the wild magic of the place. Far beneath me, the mountains divided before a triangle of water. Its shores, even its surface, were misted clean away, so that a jetty lay westward over pure whiteness, and a lone boat moved there like a rent in silk. Over this void the suspended tiers of Kurdish snows glistened, one high above the other.

I turned back towards the ridge where the caves were. I wondered whether it was worth climbing on. The scarp beyond them rose sheer before easing to the summit. Then, beneath my hands, something gleamed sky-blue. It was a glazed shard. There were more among the rocks nearby. Chips of turquoise glistened among the thistles, and I saw a chunk of greenish fritware like that of Nishapur. They glinted in the waste, unexplained.

High above the caves, I saw that someone had hammered a chain into the cliffside. So I was not the first. A few minutes later I emerged on to a level shelf and found myself gazing into a plastered cistern. There was another beyond it, and another. Scooped beneath the rock-face, they were settled in walls of black stone, the chisel-marks still sharp across their ceilings. A rock-cut room was nearby, and beyond it opened a deep circular chamber, where a stone stairway dropped broken into the dark. For a fevered instant I imagined this a tomb, then saw that for up to eight feet its walls were plastered, and that a gully for rainwater fed its entrance.

But beyond this again, just before the mountain overswept into a spinning drop, the cliff had been sheered to a height of forty feet, conjuring two sides of a vanished tower. In places it had been gashed to its core, yet I could not tell if this was conglomerate plaster or living rock. But I touched it with tired elation. The shadows in the valley were tilting toward evening. No hewn stone was in sight: only this yawning matrix left by the treasury tomb (if that is what it was) where the plunder of Baghdad and Maimundiz had lain beside human dust.

A salt-encrusted ferry took me west across the lake beside the piers of a wrecked bridge. The salt had bitten into their iron at the water-line, leaving the fallen stanchions crystallised in the shallows, as if locked in ice. I watched the mountains in front of me rising out of Turkey.

A nineteen-year-old student squeezed on to the chair beside me. He had thick glasses and religious stubble. At first he wanted to practise his English, then to convert me to Islam. He knew about Christians, he said. Arab geographers had named this water ‘the Lake of Schismatics’, because of the sects living along its shores, and the town of Orumiyeh, where we were heading, was a last Christian stronghold. All day Hamed clung to me in its streets, following me everywhere. He forgot to convert me. His certainties were fragile and histrionic. He simply wanted to talk, tramping the pavements with hundreds of black-and grey-clad others, exuding as they did an impotent longing for something else.

But he said: ‘For us, religion has failed, you know. Young people may still believe in God, but they practise nothing. I foresee disaster. We all want change. But they’ll only make violence. This whole country is a powder-keg.’ Sometimes his feet slurred to a halt. ‘We must wait for the Mahdi! Things will get worse before he comes. But he will come. And Jesus will be beside him, your Jesus…Then all doors will be open…’

His litany was familiar now: how the West was sucking away the purity of his country. How half the girls at his university were sleeping with men. Like the teacher in Tabriz, he was obsessed by women’s chastity. But this obsession, I began to realise, discoloured everything around him. When police passed us, he muttered: ‘They’re looking for boys and girls walking together. If they’re not brother and sister, they’ll take them away…’ And if any youths went by: ‘They’re looking for escaped girls.’

‘Escaped?’

‘Yes, girls who’ve run away from their families. They sleep in the parks, and the boys get them there. Some of them become prostitutes. My father runs an organisation which recovers them
from the police. He finds them counsellors. If they run away two or three more times, they go to prison.’

We entered his father’s office later, and I found a heavy, gentle man sitting under a cartoon poster of parents being deafened by six chidren, captioned: ‘Two babies is enough!’ His organisation had been founded in the Shah’s time, and distributed food coupons to two hundred of the old or crippled. Sometimes he took heroin addicts off the streets. I wanted to talk longer with him, but Hamed drew me away. ‘He mustn’t smell my breath…My parents don’t know I smoke.’

Hamed was starting to fascinate me. He hated the West, but revelled in its trivia. His jargon betrayed a fixation with movies, and occasionally he broke into half-learnt pop songs. ‘Britney Spears is my favourite. You go to her website and you get everything. And Jennifer Lopez. Did you know she’s just insured her bum for two million dollars?

We were wandering out of the suburbs past citrus and apple orchards. When Hamed took off his glasses I saw a blunter, poorer face. His body was lax and soft. He longed for a girl who sat beside him in his classroom. ‘But it will have to be marriage before…and I don’t want children. All that screaming and having my sons disobey me. I’d prefer a girl. Girls are more loyal. I know this will make trouble for me, but if my wife became pregnant, I’d have her tested for the baby’s sex. If it was a boy, I’d have it aborted.’

‘Isn’t that against Islam?’

‘The mullahs have a ruling on it. There’s a schedule, as to when it has a soul. You can know the sex after five months.’

‘After five months perhaps it has a soul.’

His voice came unperturbed, suave. ‘I wouldn’t care. I’d still have it aborted.’ He gave a short laugh, picked a few fruits from a wild plum tree, and handed me some.

I said: ‘Your wife will want the baby.’

But he did not answer. He was on his knees in the dust, coughing and retching. ‘Shit!’ he cried. ‘The bastard! Excuse me, sir. I forgot, it’s Ramadan!’

He was trying to sick up the plums he had eaten. For five minutes he stayed kneeling in the dust. His glasses fell off. He rasped: ‘If you eat by mistake, it’s not a great sin…not great…You must clean out your mouth…’

I had given up disliking him. I simply listened, mesmerised, for whatever he would say next. A minute later we stopped by a tiny, blue-painted shrine. He leaned shaking against it. ‘This is a Christian village,’ he said. ‘You can tell them by their faces. They have that flushed look. It comes from drinking. I’ve seen it in your movies.’