I said: ‘Yes. I think the Bible says “Wait.”’
‘Wait,’ he repeated wanly. Something familiar and bitter was clouding him. ‘Ah yes.’
The eastern end of Issyk-kul is haunted by tales of drowned cities. Early maps located a thirteenth-century Nestorian monastery here enshrining the corpse of St Matthew, and a century ago Russian expeditions glimpsed brick foundations under the surface, where the waves cast up shards and human bones. Dim memories circled a creek near the village of Koysary, and Pasha drove there next morning in tired fatalism. While I had found a dormitory in a bleak hotel that night, he had slept in his car to prevent it being stolen. ‘Fear of the law fades out here,’ he said.
We crossed fields of young wheat. A heron clattered into the sky like a broken umbrella and descended ungainly at the lagoon’s mouth. Then our track ended at a gateway between high turrets, and a secretive huddle of buildings in barbed wire. It was an armed naval base. It looked run-down and its watch-tower hung empty. But we had blundered almost to its gates, and I glimpsed a sentry’s blond, nonplussed face, before Pasha swerved aside down a track along the inlet.
I joked: ‘The Soviets are still here!’
‘That’s our army too,’ Pasha said. ‘The Commonwealth of Independent States . . . .’ He seemed to be trying out the idea. ‘There are our men in it.’
I had heard of a secret Soviet installation on the lake years before, built for the testing of torpedoes. Inhabitants of Bishkek had been mystified by naval uniforms appearing in the streets of a city fifteen hundred miles from any ocean. Now Pasha stopped the car among trees and I walked alone along the shore. There was no sign that the lake-level had ever receded. Instead its banks plunged to lapis-blue inlets glazed with water-insects, then eased into momentary rock-shelves and sank out of sight. I looked in vain for any drowned building. Only an abandoned flour-mill hovered above a cove among fir trees raucous with crows. Farther out, the lake was smeared with tracks like the wake of vanished ships.
I squeezed between the locked gates of the mill. On its jetty the wheels and hoists were rusting away, and the shadow of a barge lay ghostly and aslant beneath the water, under a sparkling rain of gnats. Nearby, a few blocks of granite shone on a spur, as if some citadel had been half absorbed into the earth.
I loitered here in faint bemusement. For a long time nothing moved or sounded except the wheeling crows. Then I heard something stir behind the gutted mill, and I remembered that I was trespassing, perhaps in a military area. If I were a soldier from the naval base, I thought, and discovered an Englishman with an air navigation chart of his region and a journal full of indecipherable notes, I would demand an explanation more convincing than some tale of an underwater city. I padded to the mill’s perimeter and squirmed under the wire. A sand-coloured hare skittered into the trees. Covered in dust, I prowled round the outer wall and found myself face to face with an old woman.
Her red fist was closed round a walking-stave, and her body heaved in its threadbare coat. We stopped a foot from one another. I looked into a primordial Slavic face, its nose a retroussé stub. But in it I saw a maternal and eccentric benevolence. She was beaming. I had encountered this face, I thought, a thousand times in the vanished Soviet Union. It looked old yet benignly half-formed: the gross, fleshy protoplast of Mother Russia.
I began chattering, trying to explain my presence. It was a beautiful shore, I said, but it looked so derelict now. I thought of the half-abandoned naval base. Everything seemed in retreat, I said. My gaze floundered over her frayed jacket and dress. Life had become so hard . . . .
But she cut me off. ‘No! Everything’s fine, it’s wonderful!’ Her jaw set. ‘When people say how terrible everything is, I ask Why? What does everybody want?’ She planted her trousered legs apart. They descended to woollen socks and split boots. She seemed instantly to have forgotten the oddness of meeting a gap-toothed foreigner coated in dust. ‘Why can’t people be content? I have a little garden over there’ – she waved at the skyline – ‘where I grow cherries and nuts, and there’s a plot of land for pensioners where we plant potatoes. I’ve got everything I need. My teacher’s pension is just nine hundred and five roubles a month but it’s all right. The sun’s good, the earth’s good and the winters are mild here!’
I grinned back at her. Her comfortable face dispelled all anxiety. Where had she come from then?
‘I arrived from Siberia thirty years ago. Everything was good up there too. Hard, but good. We had three cows, and that was enough. Milk, cheese, butter! Everything’s fine, and it always was.’ She rooted her stave between her feet. Our Gorbachev did the right thing.’
It was the first time I had heard anybody here praise him. ‘Yes, in the West we admire him. I know he made mistakes
‘Who doesn’t make mistakes? Nobody is walking on this earth who hasn’t made mistakes. But it’s a good thing the old Union has split up. It was finished anyway. And now these small countries will have to stand on their own feet. They’ll have to grow up! They’ll have to work!’ She thumped the dust with her stave. ‘Let every nation own its own earth, and every person own a little bit of it! Then they’ll feel responsible.’
Only once her expression of gritty contentment buckled into displeasure. ‘But I was ashamed,’ she began, ‘yes, ashamed, when Gorbachev said his pension was insufficient, and when Yeltsin asked the West for charity. Ask for credit, yes, but not for charity!’ Her voice darkened with disgust. ‘And our Gorbachev! When he complained about his pension, I wrote him a letter offering him two hundred roubles out of mine! I told him I could manage on seven hundred and five, even if he couldn’t get by on four thousand.’
I stared at her in astonishment. She dashed back the white hair drifting from her scarf. Her quilted coat gushed wool stuffing out of every seam. I said: ‘Did he reply?’
‘No, of course not,’ she answered. ‘He was too busy lecturing in America, making money.’
Then she laughed stoically, and marched away.
Pasha and I left the lake behind us in a fading afternoon. For a while we followed the Tiup river through valleys awash with lucerne. The water ran golden between green banks below us. We were travelling along the last salient of Central Asia eastward before its mountains unravelled into China. In the villages the Russians had vanished. Red stars disappeared from the cemeteries; Islamic crescents multiplied. Burly men clasping whips and booted on their horses followed their sheep-flocks across the hills, and women stood up in the meadows to watch us pass. Hunters of gazelle with the goshawk and the falcon, these tough herdspeople were nourishers of handsome cross-bred horses and astrakhan wool. With every few miles their villages became wilder and more Mongoloid. Their black eyes were slit almost to biindness; wispy moustaches and Mandarin beards trickled from their nostrils and chins.
Abruptly the valley narrowed. Pastures lacquered in creamy flowers swept against the road as we ascended, and fir trees gathered on the hills. Beyond them on either side, the unchanging snow-peaks kept pace with us, channelling us to China.
Once, from a roadside watch-post, three policemen flagged us down and ordered us out of the car. They had harsh, ignorant faces, and fingered revolvers. ‘Are these maps secret?’ They turned on Pasha. ‘Is he a spy?’
‘No,’ said Pasha matter-of-factly. ‘He’s a historian.’
They scrutinised my passport and noticed old Chinese visas. The road to China was closed, they said. The only pass open lay through Torugart, far to the south. We were not travelling to China, I said, and they sent us away.
Our road turned to stone. Around it the hills crowded in velvet spurs, shutting out the mountains. The river spun below. In this sudden emptiness, at once verdant and sombre, only a few glossy and masterless herds of horses wandered. For miles the hills folded about us like lightly covered bones, then their rocks burst through the grass and littered the valley-sides. We passed another police-post, abandoned. For the first time Pasha became nervous. The sun set, but in the cleft o
f the pass ahead its after-glow illumined a surge of glacial mountains, the last barrier before Xinjiang.
Here, at the end of the world, on the rim of a bare valley, we came upon a monstrous kurgan, a grave-mound of rocks sprawled in a grim tumult fifty feet high: the sepulchre of some Scythian or Turkic chief. I reached it over a grassland light with buttercups and harebells. But a cold wind sprang up down the valley, and the mountains were waning in the last light. Around the excavated crater of the grave, an arc of shrubs shivered with votive rags. But no one was there. They might as well have been tied by a pilgrimage of ghosts. I peered down into the pit of the tomb. It was two thousand years old or more, and violated long ago.
Beside it reared the hill of stones. Steel-grey, russet or pink, and silvered with lichen, they might have numbered fifty thou-sand: it was impossible to compute. They had been raised in awed memory of a single man; but a legend had accrued to them. It was said that Tamerlane, passing east with his army, ordered every soldier to gather up one rock and pile it in the pass. Years later, on his return, each man took away his stone to Samarkand, and those that remained became a cenotaph to the fallen.
As I climbed them in the silence, they rattled and clashed against one another. Each was the size that a man might carry. Under that twilit sky, circled by mountains, they became a nameless commotion of dead: a monument raised by the wasted to themselves. A few were blood-red or marmoreal white. They clattered like skulls under my feet and rolled down on one another.
Then I heard Pasha calling me to return. It was late and dark, he said, and this was not our country.
Index
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Abiderya village 294
Achaemenian empire 113
Adylov, Akhmadzhan 215
Afghan people 278, 355
Afghanistan 266, 297
and Russia 354-5
Afrasiab, king of Turan 155
Ahmad Yassawi, Sheikh 317
Ak Metchet village 122-4
Alai mountains 266
Alatau mountains 341, 352, 355
Alexander the Great 28, 51, 59, 155
Ali, Mahomet’s cousin 243,244-5, 247
Almaty (Alma-Ata), capital of Kazakhstan 320, 322-36
theatre 324-6
war monument 326-7
origins as Verny 327-8
circus in 332-3
Alp Arslan, sultan 38
Amanullah, king of Afghanistan 293
Amu Dariya, river (Oxus) 23, 53-4, 109, 113, 121, 122, 125, 128, 266, 297.
see also Oxus
Andijan people 235
town 259
Angren town 225-8
Ankara, battle 1402 161
Anti-Semitism 100-1
Arabs, conquerors of Samarkand 155
Aral Sea 52, 109, 113, 138
Armenia 121
Ashkhabad, capital of Turkmenistan 4-7
author’s meeting with mother of two girls 5-6
Askiya (badinage) 233, 234
Astronomy, in Samarkand 180
Attila, death 159
Auezov, Mukhtar 328-9
Avars 159
Avicenna 72
Babur, emperor 179, 236, 259
Bachtiar, Uzbek boxer and dealer 212-1 6
Bairam (son of Korvus) 15-16, 21, 25
Balasagun city 356-7 Balbali (stone effigies) 356-7
Balikchi town 358 Basmachi movement 230, 244, 293
see also Enver Pasha
Bazaars Bukhara 64
Samarkand 149
Bekovich, prince 113, 115
Beyazid, sultan 161
al-Biruni, polymath 72
Bishkek, capital of Kirghizstan 342-55
history museum 346-7
Korean Christians 347-50
Black market 144, 213-15
Brezhnev, Leonid 58, 145, 215
Bukhara 56-107
journey to 51-6
history 63, 71-2, 81-5, 96-8
Samanid tomb in 71
the Ark 81-4
gold mine 82-3
Sufi sanctuary 92-6
summer palace 96
synagogue 98-9
necropolis 103-4
Abdul Aziz Khan medreseh 62
Kalan mosque 60, 77-80
Mir-i-Arab medreseh 77
Bukhariot Sufis 62
Bukhariots 39, 63
Caspian Sea 4, 52, 239
Chak village 268 Chalas se a 103
Chardzhou town 53 Chilik (essence) 10
China and Fergana valley 260
peoples in 239
and Tamerlane 163
trade in Tashkent 202
Chirchik river 228
Christians see Korean Christians;
Orthodox Church
Chu river 1, 357, 358, 360
Cimmerian hordes 2
Clavijo, Ruy Gonzalez de 162
Cleitus, death 155
Commonwealth of Independent States, and Turkmenistan 27
Communism camp in Ak Metchet 124
and Islam 91, 98
and Turcomans 11, 13
see also Russia
Conolly, Captain 83-4
Cotton 144-5
Crassus, defeat of 37
Daniel, prophet, tomb 156
Darvat Kurgan village 267-8
Denau town 295
Dervishes 91, 92, 232
Dev Kesken fortress-city 130, 133, 134-5
Dilia, girl in Almaty 333-6
Dungan people 78, 313, 361
Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan 274-92
mosque 283
Dutah (lute) 48-50, 102, 139
Dzerzhinsky, Felix 301, 343
Earthquake 1966 199, 261, 279
Enver Pasha 293-7
Erk (political party) 118
Fandariya river 304, 306
Fedchenko, explorer 267-8
Fergana town 237-9
valley 236, 238
Firdausi, poet 166
Frunze, General Mikhail 97,350-1
Fundamentalism, Islamic Bukhara 70-1, 75, 106
Namangan 251-2
Turcoman 10, 41-2
Genghiz Khan 38, 159–60, 165
sacks Bukhara 60, 77
sacks Urgench 127
sacks Maracanda (Samarkand) 155
Geok-Tepe town 20-1, 22-3, 26, 29-32
German colony in Angren 226-8
Gerasimov, Soviet scientist 166
Gorbachev, Mikhail 67, 215, 365 “The Great Game’ 83, 84
Gypsies, in Bukhara 92
Hakim (in Namangan) 249-57
cousin Fatima 249, 250
Haroun er Rashid 247
Hindu Kush 51, 161
Horses Argamak 33
Fergana 260
Huns 3, 159
libare, sultan of Khorezm 135
India, and Tamerlane 161
Inflation 298
Iranians 239, 252, 284
and Tajikistan 270
Islam see Moslems Ismail Samani 72
Issyk-kul lake 52, 355, 357-60, 362
meeting with old lady 364-5
Istanbul 118
Jassur, apparatchik in Tashkent 202-5
Jaxartes river 1 see also Syr Dariya
Jehangir, mausoleum of 188
Jenkinson, Anthony 127-8, 135
Jews 87, 98-103
synagogue in Bukhara 98-9
anti-Semitism 100-1
Jura, actor 233-6, 248
Kadyr, writer in Bishkek 345–6
Kagan (Bukhara station) 55
Kakajan 130-41
family 136-41
Kalinin, Mikhail I. 11
Karaganda city 336-7, 338-40
Karakalpak people 140, 239
Karakhanid rulers 263-4, 356
Karakol town 360-2
Karakum canal 4, 33
Karakum desert 2, 51, 109
Kaufmann, General 51, 113, 199
Kazakh people 4, 239, 312, 313-14, 315-16, 318-19, 327, 329-32
and Bukhara 82
music 328
woman guide 318-20
dancer 324-6
concierge 331-2
Kazakhstan 3, 311-14
journey to 311
ethnic groups 312
Kazyade, astronomer 179
Kelims, Turcoman 15
KGB and successors 26, 86, 250
Khamza Niyazi, poet 239-40, 242-3, 246-7
Khiva city 82, 113, 114-17
Khodja Nasreddin, statue 57-8
Khomeini, Ayatollah 284
Khorezm, kingdom 113, 127
Khorezmian oasis 109, 112, 238
Khrushchev, Nikita 317, 337
Khudayar Khan 231
Kirghiz people 342, 343, 346-7
riots with Uzbeks 260-1
student 77-80
builder 352-3
Kirghizstan 3, 78, 79, 238, 239, 341-55
Kizilkum (Red Sands) 109, 229
Kizylsu (Red River) 266
Kokand town 82, 229-31
mausoleum 232-3
royal palace 231-2
Kopet Dagh (Dry Mountains) 3-4, 7, 23, 27, 33, 51
Koran, ancient 210-12
Korean Christians 347-50
Korvus, poet and administrator 13-17
Koysary village 363
Krist, Gustav 294, 295
Kulyab people 296
town 275
Kunaev, Kazakh administrator 324
Kunia Urgench 113, 129, 135
mullah in 129-30 Kurgan (burial place) 33, 366-7
Kurgan Tube 294
Kussam ibn-Abbas 177
Lenin, V.l.
books by 277
and Enver Pasha 293
and Kokand 229
monuments to Almaty 323
Ashkhabad 11-12
Bishkek 342, 344
Bukhara 101
Namangan 257
Samarkand 146
Tashkent 201
Ludmilla (in Tashkent) 206-9
Mafia see Black market
Magyars 159
Mahomet Alim, emir 96-8