Shadow of the Silk Road (32 page)

We drove on into evening. Beside us, beyond the violent green banks of the Shirin river, the earth turned to powder within a few steps against a parapet of ash-white hills. The Toyota filled with blown dust as we went. Fortified villages straggled along the cliffs, or crumbled into wadis. They might have been ruined a century or a day ago. Two lorries passed us, carrying oil and rocks.

Up this valley, in July 1998, the last Taliban offensive against the Northern Alliance had thrust to Shebergan. Wrecked tanks littered the road, toppled and stripped, their gun turrets buried in the cliffs or severed on the ground. An armoured car had foundered into a canal and become a footbridge.

As we approached Maimana, we did not know what would greet us. The town had seen violence for the past three years. Dostum’s militia had overrun it six months before, ousting the
governor, but the fledgling national soldiers had moved in afterwards, to maintain a fragile peace, and it was they who flagged us down as we entered, then let us through. Mobin located the walled government guesthouse, and fell into an exhausted sleep; the old man disappeared into the suburbs, and I was left to walk the town alone.

In the eighteenth century Maimana had been the capital of an Uzbek khanate, and the tatters of urban grace still clung about it. Along the streets of whitewashed brick the flurry of surprise as I passed composed itself at once into dignified reserve. Merchants, who never solicited–theirs was an old market in lambskins, leather, barley–returned my smile and touched their hands to their hearts. The melon and grape harvests were in, and horse-drawn droshkies jingled in the alleys. The mound of a vanished fort had become a park, where women walked. But above the cave-like shops, spilling out their wares on to the pavements, all the upper storeys gaped derelict, their window-frames crashed in.

Mobin and I ate supper in a
chaikhana
packed with men released by sunset from the Ramadan fast. Fasting was good, Mobin said. You remembered poverty, you remembered your past. Midway through our meal, as we scooped up fistfuls of rice and mutton bones, the mullah beside us got to his feet and invited everyone to pray. The tables were thrust aside. The men banked up four abreast, six deep, facing Mecca and the kitchen. Then, fervent and larger-than-life in the cramped room, they knelt, prostrated, knelt again, their turbaned heads hitting the carpeted floor, Mobin among them, a stranger now, while I sat to one side–a solitary heathen–my heart and pilau growing cold, until I realised that not a man was even seeing me, but facing his God.

Back in the guarded courtyard of the guesthouse, Mobin and I said goodbye. He planned to start back to Mazar before dawn, while I would continue west to Herat. But the road ahead through Badghis was scarcely travelled now, I knew. The last aid personnel in the region, five workers for Médecins Sans Frontières, had been killed there five months before. It was already two weeks since I had seen another foreigner. Nobody would take me farther.

We embraced warmly. Mobin reminded me that there was an
airstrip beyond the town, used by soldiers and repatriated refugees. I could reach Herat by air.

Herat! Thirty years ago, in a time of peace, I had walked euphorically under its pines and minarets. And beyond it the road moved through Khorasan to the holy city of Meshed. I emptied my rucksack contentedly into my cell-like room. Its bulb was dimmer than the starlight. It had an iron bed and an Afghan rug, which for the moment were enough.

Every year, in an underground palace on an island of the Hari Rud river, the warring leaders of Afghanistan meet to exchange their differences. As in the ancient festival of Olympia, this conference marks an interval of wary peace. They all come. The old king Zahir Shah, shadowed by unsavoury relatives, flies in from Rome to host the meeting with President Karzai. Ismail Khan is there, and the loathsomely charming Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, fresh from ambushing US soldiers near the Pakistan border. Mullah Omar arrives on his motorbike. Then the ex-wrestler Dostum lumbers in with ten bodyguards, followed by his rival Mohammed Ata in a woolly ski-cap. All is precarious peace. Omar embraces Karzai, Dostum kisses Ata.

I had been invited to this extraordinary summit and was preparing to go when I was startled awake by a lonely gunshot. For a full thirty seconds, between sleep and wakefulness, I wondered how I would attend, before realising that such a conference, of course, had existed only in my dream.

In the night another shot echoed. It was clear and solitary, like a signal. I lay listening for more, but none came. I tried to sleep (still hoping to attend the conference), but could not. Outside my window the stars were glittering above the pines, still alive in a sky blanched by a half-moon. I walked down the passageway to the compound door, which stood ajar. A soldier was lying on a palliasse in the moonlight, his Kalashnikov propped against the wall. He leant on one elbow, and coughed in warning.

I went back to my room and lay in the darkness. Perhaps it was the mid-point of the night, the hour of dark thoughts, which stopped me sleeping. As if a cold draught had blown in, I
wondered at my coming here. On the telephone to my partner I had sensed her startle, like a deer pricking up its ears, wondering what there was to fear. Outside there was no sound but the scraping of the pine trees in the wind. Danger was cumulative, of course, it crept up step by step half-noticed as your journey took you deeper, farther. Until you woke up at night in a place beyond help.

Why do you travel this way?
It is the Sogdian merchant again.
Will your book tell how many days’ journey between trading towns and what markets are to be found there?

No, my markets are not yours. People create their own countries.

So it is. When I took to trading copper and indigo, all cities turned to copper and indigo.
[Waits.]
Only when you become old, and no longer move, the countries do not change. They sit in your head like artefacts…

[Irritably]:
It may not be like that.

…Then, looking back, you will see the cities become a long procession leading to nothing. This is beautiful in its way, and was once enough to make you travel. Would you want this for ever?

I want to sleep…

Then there comes a time when you have nothing more to sell. You become very tired…Perhaps also you have witnessed too much. You have seen too many gods, heard too many people swear by them. That way you lose your judgement, even your sanctities, and other travellers notice, and become afraid of you. In the end, you lose your way. So you must know when to stop. Otherwise nothing will have more value than any other thing. And cities will bar their gates to you…

[Scowling]:
So you would give up!…Sometimes you see tracks disappearing into the sand. The nomads say they are the tracks of those who have lost their souls. So you need to return home…

Home?

As for your failed merchandise, it will not matter, or not very much. The bazaars are still there, and the tracks between them.

Others will be buying and selling. And the goods, too, will change with time. There is a new stone found in Bactria, I’ve heard: translucent, like a very pale flame. New merchants will grow up to serve it. Is that not still exciting?

[Grumpily]:
No.

And the Chinese have invented ways of preserving paper. That might be good for you.

[Cheering up]:
Yes!

But in the end, with luck, you will remember. There is a man back home who has sat all his life by the village well. He is happy, and mad. But you have heard the water falling in the gardens of Kashmir, and tasted the sweet Kumul melons, and walked through the tulips that stain the Mountains of Heaven. Isn’t that enough?

Beside the Maimana airstrip a village of serried tents waited for a new batch of returning refugees: Pashtun victims of recent drought and war, and families from exile in Iran. The runway’s control tower was an old man with a microphone. He sat in a concrete room and chatted into it, while an imbecile goatherd mimicked him through the window. Outside, a heavily armed soldier emptied my rucksack into the sand, and tenderly repacked it.

A few minutes later a jeep stopped on the airstrip, and I saw fair-haired soldiers. Norwegians and Finns, they were part of the tiny NATO assistance force which was at last reaching beyond Kabul. They looked scrubbed and innocent. But they had just come back from Dostum’s disbanded 200th Division, and had overseen the demolition of its armour. Most of this was useless anyway, they said: broken-down Russian tanks with no spare parts. Beneath Maimana’s quiet, the warlord’s power was still waiting.

A twin-engine Antonov appeared out of the sky, and screeched down the tarmac. Its pilot was Russian, but the passengers were all Afghans except me, and filled the cabin with a phantasmagoria of turbans and veils and pillbox hats. They were returning from Kabul, and from the refugee camps in Pakistan. As the plane
shuddered into the air again, their hands lifted to their faces in blessing, sweeping over cavernous cheeks and jungled beards. We might have been a planeload of terrorists. Only I, in my drab anorak, looked suspiciously different.

I gazed down on the wilderness I was missing. It was the colour of dull brass. Seven years of drought glared up from the valleys. Hills like monstrous dunes bumped and interlocked beneath us. For miles there was no new colour, no movement: only once or twice a mud village by a vanished river, unimaginable unless abandoned. Northward this desolation flattened to haze where the Oxus went unseen across a lilac-grey horizon. Southward the steepening walls of the Hindu Kush battered towards us out of blended cloud and snow. Our shadow wrinkled over the dunes like a spectral dragonfly.

We were crossing a divide more profound, in this fractured nation, than the Oxus or the Karakoram. Somewhere in the invisible settlements below us, the Uzbeks were being displaced by Tajiks and Persian-speakers. Enclaves of Pashtun and Aimaq nomads created momentary confusion; but little by little, across this wavering border marked on no map, the Turkic world–stretching 2,000 miles behind me across Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan, deep into Uighur China–was giving way to the Iranian.

The Antonov shook and roared. Within half an hour the mountains–the last gasp of the whole Himalayan massif westwards–were stumbling into isolated scarps and hummocks of rock. Then the dunes themselves grew troubled, like the ebb-tide of a great sea. Their valleys elongated, raked into an illusion of terraces, brindled suddenly with trees. Strange colours disturbed the earth: powdery greens and terracottas and heather-purple scree. Then fields appeared, and out of the last mountains the Hari river came coiling toward the pines and courtyards of Herat.

Thirty years of memory had reduced the city to a few lantern-slides: a pony-trap pawing the ground outside my small hotel; sunbeams hanging in dust through the pines by the minarets of Gawhar Shad. But now a quarter-century of war had intervened. In March 1979, during the pro-Communist regime of Hafezullah
Amin, a hundred Russian advisers and their families were hacked to death by militant Muslims and a mutinous garrison led by a young officer, Ismail Khan. A week later Soviet tanks and helicopter gunships pulverised the city, killing unknown thousands. Only after ten years of guerrilla resistance, and the exhausted withdrawal of the Russians, did Ismail Khan come back as the self-styled Emir of the West, to be ousted by the Taliban in 1995. But over this most cultivated of Afghan cities, the Taliban had hovered like a foreign occupation, despised for their ignorance, feared for their fanaticism. With the US-led campaign of 2001, Ismail Khan returned as warlord to a chastened city.

No memory surfaced from the place I had known. My hotel had gone. The streets laid out by the modernising king Amanullah in the 1920s, once jingling with pony-carts, now converged in a ramshackle cavalcade of trucks, motor-scooters, horses and cabs. Diesel fumes stank in the air I remembered pure. National militia patrolled the pavements–Ismail Khan had been deposed a few weeks before–or signalled hopelessly on traffic islands.

But beneath this clamour an old suavity and grace survived. Cut off from Kabul by five hundred miles of mountains, Herat belonged to the Iranian plateaux flowing in from the west. Its people looked sleek and fine-boned. Their spoken Dari was purer than Persian. Compared to the striding ruffians of Mazar-e-Sharif, they touched the streets with an urbane ease. Here the fantastically wound turbans belonged only to the villages and suburbs. Most Heratis went bare-headed. Their watches rattled like bracelets at their wrists. Among them bobbed the glittering skull-caps of Kandahar, and occasionally the face of a passing woman, framed only in the black Iranian chador–a returned immigrant, perhaps–sent out a brazen shock-wave.

I settled into a hotel near the Old City. Time–even Afghan time–had run away from it. Its porters stared at me indifferently from a wooden cubicle, drowsing over stacked ledgers and a Bakelite telephone. Plastic sunflowers gathered dust along the stairs under loosening stucco friezes. My room overhung a swirling crossroads, where the Taliban had once hanged their victims on makeshift gallows.

But from its window, to the north, the isolated minarets of my memory reared up in golden pillars against a blurred sky, while to the west the fifteenth-century citadel perched like a fat toy over the inner city. By ten o’clock at night, when Mazar was a place of howling dogs, Herat still clattered with traffic and voices under my balcony. After the midnight curfew, I would be woken by the shouts of militiamen as they flagged down trucks on the haunted crossroads.

Herodotus called this region the breadbasket of Asia, and its vulnerability and richness have seen it perpetually conquered and reviving, even from the obliteration of Genghis Khan. In the twelfth century Herat’s population exceeded that of Paris or Rome. It knew a golden age under the descendants of Tamerlane. Then its markets were still glutted from the Silk Road, and embassies arrived from as far as China and Constantinople, with gifts of tigers and thoroughbred horses. Babur, who went on to found the Mogul empire, visited its refined and debauched court the year before it fell to the Uzbeks, and loved the city.