Shadow of the Silk Road (20 page)

‘The Party has no morality now,’ she says. ‘I’m a member myself, so I know. Sometimes our leaders make excuses to hold a banquet, and afterwards they go to a foot-washing parlour–they’re really brothels–and they get drunk and go with the dancing girls. Sometimes they even give these women as gifts. One leader will present another with a prostitute for the night, and after that the donor “has him by the tail”, because of their secret.’ The lines are massed across her forehead now, and there is no more laughter. ‘Last week my husband went off to one of these banquets and didn’t come home. When I rang him he answered that he was going to the foot-washing place, and I said, You come home now. He was already drunk. But he came. That night he was furious and kept saying: “You’re not a leader’s daughter, why am I afraid of you?” ’

In front of us the hillside opens out on to a high sea of tawny graves under the tomb of Kashgari. The only person in sight is an old woman murmuring to a tangle of willows by a sunken pool. The saint, she tells us, with little upheavals of her hands, had conjured its spring from the ground.

The woman beside me stops on the scorching hill. She says: ‘Most of our Party members are secret Muslims. I’m a believer myself. My father didn’t care about Islam, but my mother taught me the prayers in Arabic, even though she didn’t know what they meant. Hardly anyone here understands Arabic, so when they chant it, they don’t understand.’

This does not trouble her. The prayers take on an incantatory magic, singing beyond knowledge.

She says: ‘We are taught them as children, so by the time the Party machine gets hold of us, it’s too late. I pray in my home where I can’t be seen. Women do that.’

‘And you never veil?’ Even here she goes bareheaded.

‘I’m still a Party member. If I suddenly covered my head, people would start to wonder…’ Then her anger returns. ‘But above all I’m a mother. I want to bring up my children to trust. God is what my people have. They are very poor. I am not surprised we have turned back to God. I think that is happening, even among people in the cities. Our life is too hard. And the Party offers us nothing beyond.’

By the time we return down the hill, the old woman is asleep by the holy spring. She lies where the tree-roots come swarming out of the water, her head rested on the gnarled trunk.

The Apak Hoja mausoleum is the closest to a royal necropolis that Kashgar knows. A wide dome overspreads its cenotaphs in a garden of poplars and roses, where I walk idly with Ahmadjan. Its dead are eighteenth-century holy men, mostly forgotten, and it is gently dilapidated. Its green-tiled façade glares with blank spaces, like erased history.

In one courtyard Ahmadjan points out where the bark of every tree has been abraded to its core. ‘Donkeys!’ he says. ‘This place was so popular in festival times that a donkey was tied to every tree!’ He hesitates. ‘Then it was decided that to pray to the dead was wrong. You should pray only to God. So the festival was stopped.’

‘Who stopped it?’

‘The people themselves. They decided.’

He does not look at me. Does he believe this fiction? But he is living in a world of selective truth.

And here, I say, is another blank space. The grave of Yacub Beg, who ruled an independent Chinese Turkestan for twelve years until 1877, was dug up in these gardens by the resurgent Chinese and his bones scattered. Where was the grave? Ahmadjan looks at me in bewilderment. He does not know. He has never heard of it.

This shadow-history goes untaught. China claimed a two-thousand-year sovereignty over Xinjiang, but even in the early twentieth century its grip was feeble. During the turmoil of the 1930s Kashgar became the capital of the ‘Turkish Islamic Republic
of East Turkestan’, which for three months flew its own flag and printed a handsome currency on blue and red dyed cotton. In 1944 the region rose again, securing quasi-independence, and only succumbed to Communist power five years later. But self-rule remained an inveterate dream. In 1997 protesting Uighur students were gunned down in Gulja waving the flags of an Eastern Turkestan. Thousands disappeared into prison or labour camps, to join those vanished every year before.

The camps too are absences. The Production and Construction Corps, which ruthlessly manages them, hovers behind bland pseudonyms: innocently named farms and factories. Created in 1954 from disbanded Nationalist soldiers and officials, bolstered over the years by criminals and excess urban labour from the east, the Corps has metamorphosed into a paramilitary regime of the semi-free, controlling irrigation and railways, mines and even hotels. Gradually its old prison camps have filled with so-called criminal Uighurs, many on the desert fringes, whose numbers are unknown.

I say to Ahmadjan: ‘I won’t ask what you think about the labour camps,’ which is a way of asking, of course. He smiles into silence.

But that evening, in western Kashgar, across a distant building site, I notice a line of men in blue uniforms, digging a trench under armed guard. When I approach, a soldier raises his arm and waves me away. It is the gesture of somebody wiping a pane of glass. It washes the air clear of anything I have witnessed. This does not exist, it says, this you will not remember.

Now that I’m leaving, I wonder if I have become too used to this land, deadened to its surprise: to the donkey-carts streaming frail-wheeled into market under their harness plumed with artificial flowers, to the women–some of them beautiful–perched behind in silk, to the strangeness of golden eyes and rosy skin.

So I go on Friday to the Id Kah mosque, the largest in China, to feel this vibrancy again, and watch two thousand sashed and booted men pour through the gates in a tumult of green skull-caps
and snowy turbans and high, fur-trimmed hats. All through the Old City the alleys are clogged with the overflow of mosques: dense ranks of men and boys kneeling on the cobblestones. When worshippers emerge from the Id Kah an hour later, its porch is lined by veiled women holding out loaves and open kettles. The old men breathe on these to sanctify them, their windpipes fluting through thin beards. Then the women carry the food and drink home to the sick. On the mosque doors hangs a government warning about SARS. And outside, the beggars assemble: a woman with no legs, a bare-chested man without arms. And no Chinese is to be seen.

But today a crowd has gathered in silence round a new hoarding, where a computerised image hangs. It shows the Id Kah square as it will soon be. Instead of today’s rumbustious forum, fringed by bazaars along the mosque wall, a huge space radiates out from the sanitised mosque to empty parkland. In this future there is no squalor, no disorder, no intimacy. The faces around me look darkly perplexed. I cannot tell what they are murmuring. But after a minute someone edges beside me. His voice rasps in English:

‘In two years there’ll be nothing left of the Old City, just a sample town for tourists. Ten thousand people have already been moved out, and paid rubbish for their homes.’

At once I wonder if he is an informer. But I stare into a zany, reckless face, alert as a chipmunk, dancing with irony. ‘Look at those…’ He points out the miniature domes and orientalist arcades of the Chinese future. ‘They think this is Uighur style! Even in building they want to dilute us…’

We move away–now I am steering him protectively out of others’ earshot–and sit at the pavement table of a sleepy restaurant. ‘They even plan to move our cemeteries.’ His bitterness is fighting disbelief. ‘There’s an old one near the Apak Hoja–tens of thousands of graves going back hundreds of years. And they’re planning to move it into the next-door valley! The imams of the cemetery were summoned to discuss it, but they couldn’t even open their mouths, they were so aghast.’ He opens his mouth in ghoulish parody. A cynical hoot leaves it. ‘First the Chinese plan to drive a
road through. Then
of course
they’ll need buildings to line the road. Then the cemetery will have to go…’

He closes his eyes, as if he wants to lock out reality. I say: ‘You want to leave?’ It is I now who am provoking him.

His eyes stay closed, as though he is seeing a vision. But it is a vision of blood. ‘We need to fight them. Even ten years ago, we did. Better to be free and die with our culture intact.’ He stops, so that I wonder in surprise if he has fallen asleep, if his chipmunk vitality needs instant rest. Then he says: ‘But I think the spirit is going out of us. I think our people have changed. We’ve stopped being angry. We’re getting polluted. Even our women. In the past they were very pure. But now they sleep with different men. Not many, but it’s beginning. At a country marriage the groom still has to show a bloodstained cloth after the first night. But now Chinese surgeons are advertising they can restore a woman’s virginity! A cosmetic job, I don’t know what, probably just something to make her feel better. But you can’t restore her heart.’

Kashgar’s reputation has not always been so pure, I know. In the nineteenth century its women were famously lax with travellers. But the man goes on to castigate the Chinese brothels–‘All you pay is ten kwai and it’s still not worth it!’–and a new casualness in women’s dress. I listen in vague bafflement. His distaste, I later feel, is a recoil from his own past, for three years ago he had fallen in love with an Uzbek woman in Andijan, and lived with her there, and last year he had brought her back to Kashgar to marry her.

‘The preparations were almost finished when her mother wrote to say her father was very ill, dying. So she went home, and then I heard nothing. When I reached her by telephone she said her mother had taken away her passport. There was nothing wrong with her father at all. It had been a trick.’ His lips writhe. ‘She couldn’t return to me.’

I hear my voice, very Western, say: ‘Could the mother do that?’

‘Yes. And my woman is the only daughter in a family of men. There was nothing I could do.’ His eyes close again. ‘I want to marry now. But it’s very hard. I keep thinking of her, I still love her. How do you get over that? I’m thirty-four now, and I’m alone.’

I ask: ‘Why did they stop the marriage?’ Sometimes he looks deranged.

His eyes shoot open. ‘Because I’m a Uighur.’ He is laughing, cynically, at my simplicity. ‘Uighurs don’t have a nation as the Uzbeks do. We’re just a persecuted minority. Nobody wants to marry a Uighur. That’s what they’ve done to us.’

The mountains shining in my hotel window, inaccessible beyond closed borders, marked an ancient divide between the desert and high grasslands. Here the ranges of the Tian Shan and the Kun Lun melded at last into the bleak Pamirs, and the silk roads which had converged on Kashgar divided again and climbed north and west into a starkly different country. These passes have always been sensitive. In Soviet times they were all but closed, and I waited uncertainly, aware that even in summer, freak snowdrifts or an unpredictable officialdom could slam them shut.

But by August the SARS epidemic was receding, and I hired a Land-Rover whose silent driver took me north through frail-wheeled of yellow hills toward the Torugart pass. Kyrgyzstan had opened its borders. In the echoing halls of the Chinese customs house, a sleepy soldiery stared through my passport and sifted my rucksack, trying to make sense of things. With barren diligence they thumbed through crumpled language manuals, minimal clothes, notes in an indecipherable hand. Lack of a camera bemused them, eased suspicion. And my money was concealed in a gutted bottle of mosquito repellent. After two hours, with mandarin ceremony, an official stamped my passport, and the last I remember of Xinjiang was a roadside billboard advertising a future duty-free zone called the ‘Everlasting Commodities Fair’. The final Chinese heaven.

Above us the naked hills glared and steepened. For seventy miles, through this bitter no-man’s-land, we followed a dust-blinded track. As the hills lurched into mountains, their flanks
burned with mauve strata or a dull, charred black, and dribbled purple scree. Beside us, out of the gravel-bed of the Ushmurvan river, a few strands of malty water meandered to their end far away in the Taklamakan. Then the track entered a procession of canyons. They opened on to mountain-flanks splashed tangerine or marble-white, and sometimes a far slope was still felted with summer green. But the road was deserted. Twenty-one Chinese traders had been found slaughtered that spring in a burnt-out bus–nobody knew by whom. The only traffic was a few Kyrgyz lorries heaped with scrap-iron on their way to Kashgar.

Then the canyons released us into wind-torn uplands. Half-abandoned villages appeared, the colour of the mountains, and the sky was fleet with clouds. We were still nominally in China, but the villagers were short-legged, barrel-chested mountaineers, Kyrgyz herdsmen shaggy under their white felt hats. Seven hundred years ago their ancestors–Turkic clans on the banks of Siberia’s upper Yenisei–had been pressed from their homeland by the Mongols, and filtered south to mingle with the tribes of the Tian Shan. Only early in the twentieth century did the Russians name their scattered peoples a nation, and fixed their borders, until the collapse of the Soviet Union released them into startled independence.

Before us, where the Torugart pass loomed twelve thousand feet, we broke into grasslands adrift with horse herds, and snow-peaks littered the horizon. Then the road stopped dead at the Kyrgyz frontier. A huge, shaky gate, wreathed in barbed wire, was shouldered apart by heavily armed soldiers, and the Land-Rover’s journey ended. I tramped through flagstoned rooms created for crowds who never came. The only others here were a pair of Uighur traders transporting sacks of vegetables out of the Kashgar oasis. My passport was barely scrutinised. Beyond the open door a truck was waiting for me–a condition of my coming–and I walked out into Kyrgyzstan.

The wind rose dry and cold. In front of me the disintegrated road descended grandly into the dimming light. My truck-driver, once beyond the militarised zone, made for the lonely caravanserai of Tash Rabat, where I had asked to go, while beside us, for many miles, ran a grim Soviet leftover: a double electric fence stretched
on concrete posts, divided by the raked earth of mines. At intervals, watch-towers stood like paranoids above–all empty–until their line diverged from ours and disappeared over the mountains.

The frontiers were now patrolled by Kyrgyz and Russian troops together. Tens of thousands of Chinese were said to have migrated illegally over the border, buying property and even marrying Kyrgyz. Yet the enemy was no longer China, but a haunting terrorism. There were fifty thousand Uighurs in Kyrgyzstan, angry for their homeland, and Beijing was offering aid in exchange for their control. China had even held joint military exercises with Kyrgyzstan. While to the north, near the capital of Bishkek, three thousand US servicemen and a fleet of jet fighters stood ready in the air base at Manas.

So Russians, Chinese and Americans were joined in unique concord. But the deeper frontier lay unmarked, of course, far to the east on the road by which I had come. Its shadow-line fell where the Chinese world elided with the Turkic–where Uighur dreams simmered, and domes appeared, and people started to talk about God.

We left the road at dusk, and followed a track into a quiet valley. A cold stream clattered alongside. The heights were quilted in yellowing grass, their folds untouched by rock, and slid in long fingers to the valley floor. Yaks and cows were grazing intermingled, and sleek ponies cantering in the valley. Tarmac, telegraph poles, even the wind had gone. Above the river a spray of birds hung–birds I did not know, still nameless as on their day of Creation. The Kyrgyz homes were only nomad yurts on hillside pastures, where blue smoke drifted. Far away a herd of horses was moving in silence across the mountains.

Then the caravanserai came muscling out of the valley side. It was dark-stoned with rounded towers. Nobody knew its age, but it straddled a site a thousand years old. In its lea some yurts were scattered, and a cottage, and as I approached a crowd of jovial Kyrgyz were climbing into two battered cars. They had killed a sheep the evening before, they said, and had feasted and then prayed all night with their mullah in the caravanserai by
candlelight. Boisterous with farewells, they clattered away in a blur of dust, and my truck went with them: a rustic Sufi brotherhood, travelling to wherever they thought holy.

Under the caravanserai’s high gate, down a vaulted corridor of uneven stones, I walked alone into its central chamber. From its bare corbels rose a low octagonal drum breached by rough windows, which leaked in an ashen light. A ghost of old plaster clung to its squinches, and above this twilit cavern a cold dome hung. I pushed in half-darkness down other passages, the walls clammy to my touch, and entered sleeping-chambers domed like old beehives. Beyond them stretched long, platformed rooms lit above by tiny windows where stars were shining. Their stones were laid in dark slabs, like stacked-up leather books. Nothing broke the immured silence. I could feel the beating of my heart, spurred by the high altitude. Before the stone platforms around me, horses and Bactrian camels had dozed in restless line, while the merchants lay among piled goods, huddled in sleep above the hot stench of the animals. Men coming westward suffered in the sudden mountains. Bewildered by altitude sickness, they labelled the high defiles ‘big headache’ and ‘small headache’ passes (the Chinese thought the sickness rose from wild onions), and often they traded in their horses for mules, their camels for yaks. Sometimes snowstorms buried whole caravans.

But in this obscure valley, just off the mainstream, the place may have served humbler traffic. For the nervous system of the Silk Road radiated into the poorest extremities. It traversed minor ecological divides as well as empires. Its exchanges were wheat and sheepskins, grease and horse hides. Wherever the steppe abutted farmland, or mountains dropped to forest, this trade intensified, deep out of prehistory.

But by now my own transport had gone, and it was night. A padlock was rattling in the outer gate, where a caretaker was laughing that she would lock me in. I emerged to see a young woman robust in baggy jacket and trousers. A wool hat was pulled close over her wind-flayed cheeks, and her hair sprouted in two black side-tufts bound with blue ribbons. She had a spare yurt for the night, she said, and would make me supper.

Nazira’s cottage was circled by a crew of savage dogs and donkeys. She lived alone with her white cat. The wallpaper bulged from the damp partitions of her room. She did not mind. When she tugged off her hat I saw a broad face with warm, overcast eyes. She was happy here, she said, because of the pure air and solitude. In this valley she was alone half the year. Sometimes her parents drove up with food from the little town of At-Bashy fifty miles away, and brought news of her two brothers who were training for the law. I wondered if she were being sacrificed to their ambitions, as she catered to stray travellers by the empty caravanserai.

But no, she said. Even the small town of Naryn gave her claustrophobia; and she had never been to Bishkek, the capital. In summer she rode her glossy horses, crossing the mountains to Chatyr lake. In winter she loved the sudden whiteness, which could pile up a metre high, closing her in. Sometimes she would go down the track to her neighbours–sheep and cattle farmers–and they would drive their horse-carts across the snow, singing in the sunlight–and that was happiness.

I was glad to be talking Russian again: its soft consonants came more intimately to me than a half-forgotten Mandarin. She crouched opposite me, one hand drifted over her bent knee, like the mysterious statue at Da Qin three thousand miles away where I had started. Her intermittent smile lit her with girlish charm.

‘Of course it’s hard here. It becomes very cold. But it’s beautiful. The cat and me and the donkeys, in the silence. Just me–and now you too!’ she added innocently. I could not tell what age she was. She laughed a lot. When she pulled off her jacket, I sensed a girl’s nubile body. On the walls hung an ornate silvery clock, careless of time, and a print of the Taj Mahal. She laid out supper on a quilt, where we squatted to eat by lamplight: roundels of bread, yak butter, mutton stew. Often she sat with her girl’s eyes downcast, heavy, thinking something. And the mountain air made my head light.

‘This Tash Rabat is not a caravanserai at all.’ She gazed at me with her grave innocence. ‘It is the fortress of King Rabat, a hero older than Manas even. My grandfather told me. This was his house. He knew.’ She nodded to one wall, where his photograph
hung: a whimsical ancient covered in Soviet medals and crowned by a Kyrgyz hat. His words had descended to her in a garbled scripture. She believed in a secret passage and dungeons under the caravanserai, where the forty warriors of Manas–the Kyrgyz national hero–had been buried in some legendary time; and she had named her favourite dog Kumayik after the champion’s hunting-hound. ‘And even before King Rabat, there was a prince who was building this place for his old father, until he was lured away by a beautiful demon…’ She frowned. ‘But that may not be true.’

I wondered who she ever met here. Didn’t she want to marry? Would her parents choose somebody for her?

‘No. If they did, I wouldn’t agree. I’ll marry the one of my choice.’

He lived two miles down the valley and his people owned six hundred sheep. Soon he would be passing this way to visit his flocks on the Chatyr lake. He would linger here then, to talk. She was twenty-one, she said, which was late for a Kyrgyz girl to marry. And he was only twenty. ‘He studied in school in the same class as my younger brother. That embarrasses me. Do you think it matters?’

‘Not at all.’ It was he, I supposed, who took her singing over the horse-trampled snow in winter.

‘We ride everything together. Horses, donkeys, yaks…But there is one bad thing about him.’

‘How bad?’ I imagined alcoholism, disfigurement. ‘What thing?’

‘Well…He has to get up before dawn to milk his cattle–there are scores of them. Scores!’ She tugged at aerial udders with a grimace of boredom. ‘Yaks!’

Later, in the sharp night air, I lay under quilts in the nearby yurt, and trailed my torchlight over it before sleep. It was a nest of colour. Its crimson skeleton of willow boughs converged on the apex of its dome in a carnival blaze. No surface escaped ornament. Across its tasselled felt hangings the chunky designs marched to and fro like a forgotten script.

The thin air made for a febrile sleep. Musings about Nazira shelved into thoughts of home, and other eyes, other voices. Nameless insects were dropping into my hair, and I smelt the musty odour of felt. Hours later I was woken by a calf cropping the grass round the yurt, and I went out into the cold. Moonlight flooded the sky. The gateway to the caravanserai yawned like a cave in the hill, and its towers were frosted columns. Nazira’s donkeys stamped and coughed together.

I listened to the river, and felt the traveller’s old excitement. The early Silk Road seemed to enter Central Asia as into somewhere wild and opaque. The great empires to east and west–China, Persia, Rome–petered out in its silence. The illusion was of a dark transition. But in fact this black hole in Asia’s heart nursed a delicate interdependence of nomad and settler. A distant disturbance at one end of the road trembled along its length like an electric current, so that the pressure of pastoral tribes along the Great Wall, in a relentless chain reaction, might unleash the Huns over Europe. A disaster could not occur in Asia, wrote Cicero, that did not shake the Roman economy to its foundations.

After the dawn light had slid down the hills, and Nazira’s silhouette, anonymous in her jacket and wool hat, waved farewell from the river, I walked back down the silent track, and hitched a lift with a builder driving along the corridor to Naryn. To the east the mountains broke like a rough sea into the valley, while beneath them a distant tributary of the Syr Darya, the ancient Jaxartes, began its thousand-mile journey to the Aral Sea in a trickle of blue.

The villages were scattered and few: mud cottages with corrugated-iron roofs and broken Russian fences. Their courtyards were piled with hay, and here and there a car stood in the dust, as blistered and old as ours. Often the graveyards looked more substantial than the houses of the living. They clustered along the ridges and rivers in dreamy settlements, their castellated turrets and wrought-iron domes sprouting Islamic moons and Communist stars.

‘They say we live like paupers and die like kings!’ Chingiz the builder laughed, too young to care. He had the physique and
features of his people, heavier and more Mongoloid than the Uighur: his face a genial mask. ‘Things were better in the Soviet time.’ He gestured at the empty pastures–tousled swamps and plains of swaying grasses. ‘These fields were covered in sheep then–thousands of them!–and at this time of year they were full of hay. In the collective farms people had to work. But now some do, some don’t, and they’ve collapsed. Look how it is!’