Shadow of the Silk Road (43 page)

I squeezed into the shrine. Portraits of a synthetic Christ were propped on a shelf yellow with candle-wax. On a picture of Jesus healing a blind man somebody had written: ‘I am a Muslim, but I was born on your birthday, and I have faith in you. Help me.’

Hamed translated equably. He knew where the Christian churches in Orumiyeh were, he said, and I used him shamelessly as an interpreter. There was no one else to hand. For more than a century the town’s Christians had dwindled. Periodically the Kurds had devastated it, and during the First World War more than half the region’s Nestorians died in flight from the Turks. We found the Armenian church locked up, and the Protestant congregation–converted by American missionaries after 1830–shrunk to six hundred. They were converts from Nestorianism. Occasionally, a priest said, they still celebrated the liturgy in Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ, ‘and it is very sweet to us’.

Some four hundred years ago the Nestorians, the guardians of this threatened tongue, had started to divide. Many had defected to Rome to form the Chaldean Church–their leader styled ‘the Patriarch of Babylon’–and in Orumiyeh a lonely French priest, who had arrived from Brest thirty-five years before, was still at work among them. But there were scarcely two and a half thousand left, he said, and perhaps three thousand orthodox Nestorians. In outlying villages they had thinned to three families
here, six there. They had fled to North America, Australia. And their liturgy was no longer held in Aramaic, except for a brief reading before Vespers.

In an obscure outpost of this tongue–a village north of Damascus–I had once heard someone declaim the Lord’s Prayer, as Jesus might have spoken it. When I repeated the words to the priest, he wistfully recognised them. ‘But Christ’s language,
monsieur,
is fading from our world…’

Hamed disliked all this. He sat stooped with his arms between his knees, his head down, and the priests, I think, distrusted him. These Christians, he said later, with their drink-flushed faces, were probably traitors. So were the Kurds. ‘These are a barbarous people, come down from the mountains. They’re swamping us. Fifty per cent of the town must be Kurdish now [it wasn’t].’ From time to time he went back to clearing his throat of plum juice with nervous retches. As for the Jews, who had all left, he said: ‘Their old people were mostly sorcerers. They dealt with captured djinns. If you stick iron into a djinn–prick its arm, say–you’ve got it captive.’

‘You believe this stuff?’

The suave voice went on: ‘Of course. Djinns aren’t about so much now, but in the past there were many. They used to live in stables. My mother told me. They are a bit smaller than humans, and their faces covered in hair. Some are women. Others have only half a body. The Jews used them to make people divorce…’

The only religion Hamed tolerated, beyond his own confused Islam, was the leftover faith of Zoroaster, whose celebratory fires before the vernal equinox still stained the walls of the richer suburbs where we walked. Zoroaster, he imagined, had been born in Orumiyeh, and once a year, he said, young people leapt through bonfires at night, the youths’ faces painted green, the girls’ red.

But later that evening, in parting, when I offered Hamed money for his interpreting, he refused. Instead he said suddenly: ‘I just want to tell you that if I find Salman Rushdie, I will kill him.’

The absurdity of this muffled its shock. I asked: ‘Would you do whatever your government told you to do?’ He was silent. ‘Would you kill me?’

‘No,’ he continued awkwardly. ‘I would listen to my conscience.’

‘What is that?’

‘It’s an angel. We call it an angel. It tells you.’

We shook hands limply in farewell, as if sealing some grotesque pact. Then he started down the half-lit street, turning once to wave, and took away his fears and confusions into the night.

The courtyard stirred with dust. It might have been made for a huge concourse that had gone. The church alongside was white and plaster-smooth, high-steepled, like a playground cathedral. Inside it was blazoned ‘The First Church of the East’–the home of the Nestorian orthodox–but the clutter of the ancient rite had purified to bare pews and a simple altar. Even the name Nestorian had been superseded a century ago by a notion that the sect’s adherents were leftover Assyrians.

A burly caretaker in sandals and a bloated jacket wondered why I was there. His greying temples were bound by a piratical black headband and dangled spectacles from a black string. Grudgingly he took me to a door in a low building raised on worn stones, all that remained of the older church above its crypt.

We descended into whitewashed vaults. In the harsh-lit closeness lay the graves of four priests. An altar was crowded with fake flowers and devotional pictures. A pained Christ gazed from its candlelight. The caretaker softened. He spoke a little Russian. He was called Artur Mikhail Masihi, he said, and the French first name, with the Russian second and the Arabic third (it meant ‘Christian’) betrayed his complex Assyrian allegiances.

‘My father wanted me to be a priest. He called me Mikhail from the Russian. The Russians were here in the Second World War, and he served in their submarines.’ He stood to attention and saluted, then launched into a bearish jeremiad. He had come here from Hamadan when young, he said, but his wife had betrayed him. He had no children to gentle his old age. He’d wanted to go to America–his mother and sister had gone–and he had travelled as far as Rome before he was refused a visa. ‘So I’m looking after things here.’

‘And how is it here?’

‘Here it is hard.’ But he baked the holy bread with his own hands, he said, and pulled the great bell for worship, and administered the wine alongside the Assyrian priest.

For a while he left me, crouched by the graves, scrutinising their inscriptions. None was old. In the crypt’s silence theirs was the only voice, and I could not read it. There was a stench of dying candles. I wondered how many centuries ago this place was sanctified. I thought of the great Nestorian stele at Xian, celebrating the arrival of the priest Aloban, who ‘came on azure clouds bearing the true scriptures’, and remembered the pagoda of Da Qin leaning in the mist against the green hills of China. But while the eastern Nestorians had become suborned by the culture around them–their saints turned into Bodhisattvas, their scriptures into sutras–in Persia and Syria they became merchants and scholars, and helped translate into Syriac and Arabic the learning of classical Greece, which would pass back after long centuries to Europe.

‘Now we Assyrians are come to very little,’ the caretaker said, returning; there were a few thousand more in Syria and Turkey, and the rest scattered.

But propped against one grave, I found a notice giving the history of where we were. It went like this: more than two thousand years ago Zoroastrians had built a shrine here. Their priests, three Magi, journeyed to Bethlehem at the birth of Jesus, then returned and died here under the protection of a Chinese princess.

The origins of this story, I knew, lay long ago. Iran was rife with legends of the three Magi, and at least one of them had long been rumoured buried here. The Xian stele has them travelling to Bethlehem from Persia, and the earliest Christian images dress them in the Parthian way, in peaked caps and baggy trousers. According to New Testament apocrypha they were following a prophecy of Zoroaster. Returning with one of Jesus’s swaddling clothes, a gift of the Virgin Mary, they burnt it reverently in their sacred fire–the garment remained unscathed–and were entombed with it at last in an unknown church.

In later tradition these three Wise Men spanned different ages
and races–Persian, Ethiopian, Indian–as if all humanity had knelt at the manger. Their bodies, it is said, were gathered up by St Helena, the mother of Constantine, and found rest at last in Cologne cathedral. The cloth which drapes their relics probably belongs to third-century Syria, and contains threads of Chinese silk.

But historians–and the Assyrian caretaker–dismiss these claims. Scholars point out that the account of Jesus’s birth–the tale of the Magi with their star and gifts, of Herod’s massacre, even of Mary’s virginity–was told only in the later Gospels, Matthew and Luke, anxious to fulfil a prophecy of Isaiah. The caretaker says the bodies of the Magi never left his crypt, but he does not know when their graves vanished.

‘I wasn’t here then.’

‘And the Chinese princess?’ She echoes like a memory-trace from the far end of the Silk Road.

The caretaker rattles his keys, eager to leave now. ‘I think the Magi died in Jerusalem,’ he says, ‘and she brought their bodies back.’ But he knows nothing more.

The Turkish frontier was muted in its own disquiet. For four years the crossing had been safe, but now, after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Kurds were in arms again. I was travelling an unacknowledged country of thirty million, whose peoples thronged the marches of west Iran and south-east Turkey, and had just gained near-autonomy in north Iraq. In all these lands this veteran Kurdish nation, famed for its stubborn valour, had been bitterly persecuted. A fifteen-year war in Turkey had abated only in 1999, leaving thirty thousand dead. In Iran the Kurds were repressed after the 1979 revolution and throughout the war against Iraq. In Iraq itself, rising in the aftermath of the Gulf War, they were ruthlessly bombed and gassed.

Now the frontier seemed all but closed. In its empty customs house three Kurdish farmers were waiting, ignored, by their sacks of rice and peppers. A few soldiers loitered outside. But nobody searched me. A single, urbane official questioned why I had come this way. Then I walked out beneath the painted glower of Ayatollah Khomeini, through iron gates into the secular gaze of Ataturk.

A
dolmus
taxi, stuffed with exuberant Kurds, welcomed me on board. They were the first people, in all my months of travelling, to applaud the invasion of Iraq. They clapped my shoulders and shook my guilty hands. They ejected the Iranian mullahs in gobs of spittle through the windows, and stamped on the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Then they unfurled my map to point out the proper reaches of their country, grabbing outsize chunks of Syria and Iran.
The man behind me angrily crossed his wrists in symbol of their Turkish captivity. Since the establishment of a Kurdish state in Iraq, several thousand guerrillas, dormant since 1999, were roaming the country in front of us.

Outside, the valleys steepened and new-fallen snow came lapping against the road. In the villages, still bathed in apple orchards, the rounded minarets of Iran had sharpened to Ottoman daggers, and the women went unveiled among roistering children. Along our road the Latin alphabet gave a spurious sense of homecoming. After an hour we twisted south-west into the gorges winding to Hakkari. For mile after mile the limestone cliffs came crashing down a thousand feet to the river, while the road writhed around them, and the froth of sepia water rushed south toward the Tigris.

In Hakkari my taxi stopped. Beyond, where the road shadowed the Iraqi border, martial law came down. No buses were going; but a crowd of Kurdish drivers vied to take me farther. The most fervent persuaded me into his derelict Mercedes, which carried me clamorously on. Abdullah was riding high on his people’s new hopes. He looked barely eighteen. He drove like a hysteric. His radio blasted out Kurdish songs from Kirkuk, and once he veered off the road to find a depot of contraband Iraqi petrol, where a grinning villager filled our tank. ‘Saddam Hussein gas!’

As the police and military barriers thickened along the border, Abdullah only grew more truculent. Their officers noted my passport details with barely a word, but checked his papers grimly, over and over. Then they peppered him with questions, while he stood with arms akimbo or swung his radio provocatively at his side. From each encounter he would return uncowed, drilling his fingers into his temples. ‘Turks! Stupid!’

Then to our south the faltering massif of the Tanintanin mountains parted intermittently on the misty hills of Iraq. The road became a pot-holed track. Nothing passed us. For more than fifty miles the checkpoints turned to redoubts of sandbags and stone, where helmeted heads shifted, and tanks and armoured personnel-carriers waited behind uneasy sentries.

Somewhere near Sirnak the police got Abdullah. They flagged us down, dragged him from the car and fined him for reckless driving. He sobered up, and we went on in silence. By nightfall, still far within Kurdish lands, we crossed the wide, shallow flood of the Tigris at Cizre, and here he left me. By now he had declined into querulous self-pity: not the Kurdish freedom-fighter of my ideal at all, but an incompetent boy, hoping I would pay his fine.

For a while I walked the town’s long, desolate main road. Its hotels were grimmer than those over the border: gaunt piles enclosing rooms with flaking walls, and clogged lavatories. But I slept in exhausted contentment.

I was going to Antioch.

All next day a relay-race of buses thundered west. For a hundred miles beyond Cizre the Syrian frontier was stretched across the plain, sealed by Turkish barbed wire and raked earth, and nailed with watch-towers every four hundred yards. Beyond the barbed wire to our south the land dropped imperceptibly, under a thinning skin of stone, toward the villages and fields of Syria.

Slowly, beyond Mardin, the Kurds dwindled. We were travelling a sea of umber hills. A weak sun came out in an overclouded sky. Cotton plantations were dotted with working children. Kiziltepe, Sanliurfa, Gaziantep: for three hundred miles we laboured to the Mediterranean, while the villages grew sprucer, and horse-carts disappeared from their lanes. At Birecik, the lake-wide flood of the Euphrates was shining beneath us, and three hours later, through driving rain, we had turned south into the night.

From my hotel window the banked lights glimmer like a city behind gauze. The Orontes river flows sunken through the rain-filled dark beneath me. I imagine I can smell the Mediterranean.

In the murk of Antioch I have blundered into my grandest hotel in eight months. It is empty. Tourism, ever since the Iraq invasion, has thinned away. I sit alone in the dining room, watched by waiters. It is strange. Back in my bedroom the lavatory flushes, and when I turn a tap, hot water comes out. A voluptuous woman is
hosting a chat-show on my television. No dead mosquitoes smear the walls.

My clothes, in these corridors, are suddenly uncouth. I try to conceal the holes in my pullover–it’s hopeless–and button my anorak against my neck, to hide a torn collar. I feel like a stray animal. The face in the mirror belongs somewhere else. For a sad instant I mistake it for my father’s. But it seems startlingly solid now: not the refinement of eyes and ears I had imagined on my journey. I see features harsher than mine, or his. A wind-tan has darkened them since China. The eyes are hung with tired crescents. One tooth is chipped, so that smiling is a qualified event. And my fingernails are still jagged from climbing Maimundiz. As I fall asleep between white sheets, I feel surprised that anyone ever talked to me, belatedly grateful.

The Orontes river, running deep in its stone-lined bed, divides the old town from the new. Greek Antioch has become Turkish Antakya, annexed from Syria in 1938, and in its streets you still hear Arabic spoken. On the west bank, apartment blocks crowd like a waiting army. On the east, the Old Town is massed against Mount Sipylus, the last thrust of the Taurus mountains as they descend toward desert.

I followed alleys winding to the mountain. I had a dreamy sense of coming home. A motley of walls diverted and funnelled me on: walls of plastered stone sheltering old courtyards, under vine trellises raised for summer rest, and pencil minarets. Once or twice I passed an Ottoman fountain or a mosque porch laden with orange trees. I felt a pang of excitement. Far underfoot, I knew–as deep as thirty feet in places–the ancient town lay in limestone rubble: a skeleton of colonnaded streets, the curve of theatre and circus, palace floors.

This great city, where the Silk Road ended–or began–became second only to Rome and Alexandria. Yet it was a late intruder in these immemorial lands, a Hellenistic island in a Semitic sea. Seleucus I, successor to Alexander’s empire in Asia, planned it as
his western capital in 300
BC
, delineating its streets by lines of planted wheat, and staking out its towers with tethered elephants.

By then the austere glory of Athens was long over, and for centuries nothing dimmed the sybaritic splendour of its self-appointed successor. In the games celebrated by King Antiochus IV, inaugurated by thousands of gold-crowned youths, by elephant-drawn chariots and tableaux of manifold gods, you sense what will happen when the Romans reach the city, and how in time it will suborn them. Soon the Silk Roads–some threading the Euphrates and Palmyra–were flowing alongside the Arabian Incense Road to a Roman metropolis which controlled both the traffic east and the merchant fleets west. The laden camels were led like brides through its gates. Its populace mushroomed to half a million. Its avenues were orientated to catch the summer breeze and the winter sun, and were lit brilliantly all night. But the people were notoriously sensual and turbulent, and cynical of their rulers. Their festivals were laced with modish revelry and ribald songs. Their theatre was erotic ballet. Juvenal complained that the lasciviousness of the Orontes was spilling into the Roman Tiber.

In the groves of Daphne, five miles to the city’s north, this licence flowered among a coterie of sumptuous villas and temples. Around a forested ravine high above the Orontes, it rustled with half-hidden springs and waterfalls. Here the nymph Daphne, pursued by Apollo, was turned benignly into a laurel tree, and I found its trunks still crowding the gorge in sombre profusion, where Seleucus had built a temple to the god.

The December earth was cold and damp underfoot. Makeshift cafés had been built down the slopes as far as they could go, hung with awnings blazoned for Tuborg and Efes beer. They were all deserted. A few Roman columns lay in the thickets. I found myself walking softly, as if I might waken something. Around me the ravine burgeoned with cypress and chestnut trees, while the waters splashed or contracted through icy tunnels to open on sudden vistas of the once-enchanted valley.

The palatial villas long ago fell to ruins, but in their mosaic floors, spread in the town museum, Antioch swarms back to life. In the delicacy of their minutely graded stones–dusky green and
Pompeian red, light brown and champagne yellow–Orpheus charms the beasts again, Iphigenia departs to her death, and the Psyches set sail on butterfly wings over a wrinkled sky. Narcissus is a favourite, of course, lounging above his pool in a sun-hat. And satyrs abound. And the sea, which lay barely twenty miles away, stirs into mythic life. The god Oceanus, horned with lobster claws, bathes in a fishy ocean, while his consort Thalassa emerges from her cupid-infested waters under a weed-green aureole of hair, brandishing a rudder. In the imagined halls of Daphne, the faces dream unsmiling under their garlands. The mosaic borders are lush with blossom, the cornucopias are all full. Hands touch under rouged and jewelled faces. A buffet table is laden with boiled eggs and salted pigs’ feet. And everywhere are personified desires: Joy, Wealth, Life, Friendship, Salvation…

This was the Antioch that clothed itself in Chinese silks, and sent them westward. Yet its people did not know silk’s origins. It grew like a pale floss–the Romans thought–on the forests of a people called the Seres, who lived at the eastern limits of the world and sometimes combed it from their multicoloured flowers. Only in the second century did they hear tales of the Seres tending eight-legged spiders, which rolled silken webs about their feet.

Yet eight years after the silk banners of the Parthians panicked the Roman legions at Carrhae, Julius Caesar was unfurling them above the astonished spectators at his processional triumph. At first silk was so rare in Rome that it was sewn on to togas only in precious patches or strips, sometimes stained with brilliant Phoenician purple and scarlet dyes. Yet within a few years its costly import was ruining the economy of the empire, so that in
AD
14 the Senate declared its use dishonourable, and banned it to men. The philosopher Seneca still complained that silk-clad women walked as good as naked, and the more dissolute emperors fell in sickly love with it. Fruitlessly, in
AD
273 the emperor Aurelian warned: ‘Let us not exchange Roman gold for spiders’ webs.’ By the fourth century silk was being worn even by poorer classes, and was contributing again to Rome’s decline.

A magic clung about it always. The earliest silk–the Indians called it ‘woven wind’–was sometimes sheer as gauze. Lucan
described Cleopatra shining before Caesar in transparent lawn silk, and even in later ages a mystique hovered about the finest fabrics, which might be sent abroad only as state gifts, like the precious cope sent by Haroun al-Rashid to Charlemagne. In Baghdad a gold-threaded tunic costing a thousand gold dinars was spun regularly for the caliph alone. In the West, silk was believed woven by fairies, and was sovereign against lightning and rats.

But it was in China still that the most delicate cloth was spun–often for the emperor alone–and sometimes it reached the West only as hearsay. There were silks that reproduced the veins of seashells or the skin of minute fish, and others interwoven with the feathers of tiny birds, which the Romans knew as
opus plumarium
. The mythic ‘ice silkworm’, covered in frost and snow, exuded a translucent yarn that was watertight and fireproof. You might imagine the Chinese despised transparency–they preferred jade to jewels, porcelain to glass–but this was denied by their dress. An Arab merchant in the ninth century was astonished to observe the mole on an imperial eunuch’s chest through five layers of gossamer silk.

As I climbed higher up Mount Sipylus, the suburbs petered into rocks. Above me, a Crusader façade of honey-coloured stone, pierced with star-shaped windows, enclosed a big cavern, which was echoing with prayers in my own tongue. Beneath the rough-hewn vault a semicircle of evangelical Christians was singing. They had come here from Utah, they said, to find the wellspring of their faith. Some murals had left a dull rose smear over the rock, and fourth-century mosaic floors spread underfoot in monochrome tatters. I felt vaguely unsettled, as if this Christianity, the faith of my inheritance, had been transmuted by the long road behind me.

The church had been a secret place of worship. St Peter had preached here, in tradition, for he worked in Antioch between
AD
47 and 54, when he became the first bishop in Christendom. The city’s Jewish population, partly Hellenised, proved fertile ground for conversion. St Paul and St Barnabas preached in its streets, and sailed from the port on their first missionary journey.
It was in Antioch that their followers were first named Christians, and here the momentous decision was taken to baptise Gentiles.