The Lost Heart of Asia (2 page)

I found a telephone that worked, and rang a number given me in England. It belonged to a Turcoman writer. He had been a secret dissident, a friend had told me, and had only been published after
perestroika.
And that was all I knew.

In fact his whole people were elusive to me. They had emerged into known history only in the fourteenth century – a Caucasoid race tinged with Mongol blood – and their country, along with all Central Asia, had been almost impenetrable until 150 years ago. Then, for a brief half-century before the Bolshevik turmoil, European travellers had brought back contradictory tales of them. The Turcomans were wild and depraved, they said: a proud, ignorant and inhospitable people, robed outlandishly in scarlet gowns and topped off by monstrous sheepswool hats. They could ride for eighty miles a day and survive on nothing but bruised wheat and sour milk. They were at once gluttonous, austere, affable, thieving, immodest, anarchic and frank. For a pittance they would slip a knife into you.

So when Oraz appeared in my hotel, a cloud of mirages trembled and evaporated. He had a regular, handsome face with high, furrowed cheeks and a trim physique. He looked smart, dapper even, yet not quite comfortable, as if this status – or whatever it was – had been awkwardly won. He was nearing fifty, but there was something boyish in him. It was an odd mixture, a little disconcerting.

‘You don't know our city? Then we'll walk it together!'

Little by little, beneath his acquired suavity, I watched a raw Turcoman emerging. The rumoured coarseness and danger had gone, but he walked for hours with a hardy lightness, and talked in fluent, stressless Russian, with an innocent pride in his borrowed city. For twelve years he had worked as a civil servant in the prime minister's office, he said – and pointed out a nondescript building. ‘I wrote my first novel there.'

‘Actually in the prime minister's . . .?'

‘Yes, I began it when Brezhnev was still alive. It took me six years. It was about corruption in government, and it was obvious where my material came from. I made a study of it.'

It had been a precarious, near-foolhardy undertaking. Perhaps it explained the animal alertness in him. I said: ‘But what did you expect of the future?'

‘I didn't imagine the book would ever see the light of day.' He smiled. Those years seemed far away now. ‘I remember thinking the manuscript would be passed round among my friends. But no, I wasn't really frightened, not for myself. Just for my children.'

Yet he had gone on with that secret, apparently futureless labour, year after year, and I could not tell whether he had done so out of disgust with his surroundings – in self-cleansing – or from a writer's fascination with his material. ‘But even in the middle of the Brezhnev years and all the hypocrisy,' he said, ‘I didn't believe people could go on for ever living lies. Not for ever. It had to end.'

For a man born in the Stalin era, it was a high hope. But his was an instinctive and obscurely irrepressible faith, grown out of the surety that indoctrination must falter in the end, because every generation was born innocent. ‘At the moment every-thing's in chaos, and everyone's bitter,' he said. ‘Our lives have become too expensive, ever since
perestroika.
But it had to happen. It may be hard now, but it will get better . . . .'
Perestroika,
after all, had transformed his life. He had to believe in it, in the freer future. He was, in a sense, its symbol and harbinger.

He was walking in a nervous, high-strung stride. He seemed at once buoyant and vulnerable. His novel had sold an astonishing sixty thousand copies in Turkmenistan. ‘It was the first thing of its kind allowed here,' he said, ‘a scandal.'

But I questioned aloud how his nation would extract itself from the Soviet shadow. Of all the people in the old Union, these were the least prepared for independence. For seventy years Communist models and propaganda, collectives and institutes, had overlain all Central Asian. Then, overnight, as in some schoolchild's fantasy, the teachers had gone away, leaving behind the message that the lesson was wrong.

‘But we were never close to the Russians,' Oraz said. ‘We Turcomans have an utterly different character. Have you heard of Turcoman
chilik
? It's something like our essence. It means independence, even idleness, and hospitality and courage. It's a kind of pride. The Russians chose to flout it. If a woman touches a man in public, for instance, that is against
chilik.
Modesty between the sexes goes deep with us. Even in marriage, we never kiss in front of our children. All that is private.'
Chilik
seemed to express a sober, Turkic dignity. It eschewed passions, or any violent self-seeking. ‘But of course since the Russians came, all that has been diluted. Even the idea of dictatorship is alien to us. We were always free . . . .'

A moment later we passed the newly opened Iranian embassy – a drab tenement riddled with nesting pigeons – and he looked at it with distaste. ‘Our temper is different from the Iranians' too. That fundamentalism won't come here. We're a sane people.'

He was describing an old north-south watershed: the divide between an effervescent Persia and the more slow-tempered Turk. He spoke as if there was something unmanly in extremism. Besides, the Iranians were Shia, and barely a century ago the Sunni Turcomans had enslaved them as worse than unbelievers.

‘Our people aren't interested in dogma. We don't persecute anyone for his beliefs. Some of the Russians may be leaving – those not born here – but most will stay. They're welcome to stay – but not as rulers. This is our land, and it will be a good place.' He laughed a blithe, confident laugh.

His patriotism was guileless, often naïve. He believed in his people's inherent righteousness, as the Russians had once believed in theirs. The Turcomans were naturally peaceable, he said. It was a myth of Soviet historians that they had ever warred among themselves. We passed a statue of Stalin's henchman Kalinin, which would soon be replaced by a monument to Turmenistan's first prime minister, shot for his patriotism in 1941. ‘Nobody knows where he's buried, but he'll have a memorial here.' As we tramped across a cenotaph to the Second World War dead, Oraz said: ‘This, at least, we share with the Russians. The victory over Fascism!'

It was one of those overblown yet harrowing monuments that cover the old Soviet Union: a statue of motherhood towering opposite an eternal flame shut in by blood-red marble pillars. The dead were still remembered in mounds of chrysanthemums and gladioli. But the eternal flame had gone out. Its broken gas-vent hissed faintly. I did not have the heart to tell Oraz that many thousands of Central Asia's soldiers, embittered by Stalin, had deserted to the Germans.

Yet he seemed, for the moment, immune to disillusion. He was bright with an imagined future. I feared for him. I wondered if anyone of his generation had believed in Communism at all.

‘Maybe one per cent.' He laughed harshly.

‘The very poor?'

‘No! The others. The officials.' We had entered a park where a statue of Lenin survived. It hovered angrily above us. ‘And now they don't know what to believe.'

Lenin stood on a ziggurat brilliant with Turcoman tilework, and lifted a declamatory arm towards Iran. Beneath, an inscription promised liberation to the peoples of the East.

‘There are fifty-six Lenin monuments in the city,' Oraz said. ‘This one will stay and the rest will go.' He was striding round the dried fountains which circled the monument, suave in his suit and tie, while above him the baggy-trousered Lenin crumpled his cloth cap in his hand. ‘Maybe in time this one will go too. But not now.'

I felt perversely glad that it would remain: a gesture of moderation, and a fragile acknowledgement of the past. A group of visiting farmers was posing beneath it for a snapshot. The photographer – a dour youth in a T-shirt blazoned ‘USA: Nice Club' – arranged them in a crescent of interlaced arms and cheerless faces. I thought: so people still come to be photographed here, out of habit, or some tenuous loyalty.

But as the youth adjusted his tripod, I peered through the lens and saw that his clients were framed against the plinth of oriental ceramic, which rose to the top of the photograph and amputated Lenin somewhere in the sky. ‘We don't include him any more,' the youth said. ‘He's out of fashion.'

But what, I wondered, could replace him? As Oraz and I trudged around the state exhibition hall that evening, I felt the Turcoman culture slipping irretrievably away. The modern paintings regaling the walls celebrated it only in synthetic images – tribespeople plucking lutes or riding through misted mountains in a swirl of antiquated robes. The artists were tourists in their own past. At the end of the hall a sixty-foot-long Turcoman rug, rumoured the largest in the world, hung in a crimson waterfall of patterned symbols.

‘I wish I could read these for you,' Oraz said, pointing out emblematic horses and birds' eyes. ‘They would tell you half our history.' He shook his head. ‘But I can't.' Even the classic art of poetry, he said, was dying.

‘Does nobody write it any longer?'

‘Oh yes. Everybody
writes
it. But nobody reads it.'

That night, wandering the emptied streets alone, I came upon the marble podium where the Turcoman president and his ministers had once saluted May Day parades. Until a few months before, it had been the city's political heart. Now it glimmered derelict beyond the street-lamps. As I climbed on to its rostrum, the marble and limestone carapace of its walls was cracking under my hands. The crowning statue of Lenin had gone – as if an enormous bird had flown from its roost – but the pedestal, torn in its removal, had been boarded round by wood painted to resemble stone, as if the wreckage of those stupendous foot-prints was still too painful to expose.

I stared down on the avenue beneath, thickened to seven lanes for the passage of parades. A wind stirred dead leaves over the steps. I remembered what Oraz had said about the people's disbelief in Communism. Yet that night I fancied that it still pervaded the sleeping city – in the slogans which nobody had dared wipe from the walls, in the jargon on people's lips, even in Lenin's statue lingering in the park nearby, warning that his ghost be not provoked.

Korvus was an old man now. Beneath a burst of white hair his face shone heavy and crumpled, and his eyes watered behind their spectacles. Thirty years ago he had been Turkmenistan's minister of culture, and a celebrated poet; and he was a war-hero in his country. Authority still tinged his stout figure as he greeted me. He wore an expensive Finnish suit and a gold ring set with a carnelian. Yet a Turcoman earthiness undermined this prestige a little, and a loitering humour.

He seemed to live in schizophrenia. His public life had been spent in Soviet government, but his house nested in a Turcoman suburb sewn with family courtyards, vine-shadowed, where the hot water ran in fat pipes on struts above the lanes, and people shed their shoes before entering the homes, in the Islamic way.

He ushered me indoors. He looked gentle, preoccupied. He lived with the family of his eldest son – the hallway was scattered with toys and shoes – and as I entered the sitting-room I stopped in astonishment. I had stepped into an engulfing jungle of Turcoman artefacts. It was as if I had dropped through the floor of the bland Soviet world into an ancient substratum of his people's consciousness. Phylacteries in beaten silver set with semi-precious stones, horsewhips and quivers and camel-bells, the tasselled door-frame of a yurt tent still darkly brilliant in vegetable dyes – they covered the walls with a barbarian intricacy.

‘My son and his wife collect them,' the old man said. He looked vaguely unhappy.

‘They're magnificent.'

He sat beside me on a divan. I could not tell what he was thinking. His whole life had been directed towards a Soviet future, in which national differences would disappear. Yet for years, piece by piece, his son had been harvesting his people's past and pouring it over the walls in a lavish, speechless celebration. It hung before the old man now like an indictment. It was the history he had abandoned.

But after a while he said sombrely: ‘I think it is right that this has happened, and that we have our freedom. It is right that the old Union is split up.' He spoke as if he had fought against each sentence before it had conquered him. He did not look at me. ‘Although the war seemed to unite us.'

The war: he had returned from it with a chestful of medals – ‘like Brezhnev,' he laughed. He had survived the ferocious tank-battle of Kursk, and fought through the terrible winter of 1942-3, when the thrust of the whole war changed and the world was lost to Hitler. His face ignited as he spoke of it. He relaxed into its simplicity. Things had been easier then. Somewhere in the fields of south Ukraine, he said, he had attacked a German tank single-handed and been hit by shell splinters. ‘I regained consciousness in the snow, covered in blood.' Humorously he patted his chest and back, wriggling his short arms around his body. ‘I didn't know if I was alive. How were my legs? They were still there. My head? That was on. But my back and side were ripped, and my hand a mass of ligaments. So I packed snow round my wounds, and the German fire missed me and I crawled away. Later one of our officers – a hooligan type with a motorcycle – charged up and filled me with vodka and drove me off. I was operated on in a field hospital under gas, and woke like this.' He held up his hand. I saw that two fingers were gone, their stubs welded in a wrinkled trunk. He grinned at it.

In the bleak, triumphant years after the war, he had gone to Moscow to study. Perhaps he had believed in the Soviet unity then. He had married a Russian orphan, and returned to Ashkhabad a hero. He chuckled and drew his maimed hand across his chest to conjure ranks of medals. Later he had written poems about the war, and love lyrics. He had become head of the Turkmenia Writers' Union, then its Minister of Culture in the sixties.