Kuraj

KURAJ

SILVIA DI NATALE

Translated from the Italian by

Carol O’Sullivan and Martin Thorn

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Part One: The Great Wind

Part Two: The Soldier’s Story

Part Three: Naja

Epilogue

Glossary

Sources and Acknowledgements

Footnote

A Note on the Translators

A Note on the Author

Imprint

To all those who try to make a life elsewhere

Part One

THE GREAT WIND

1

AT FIRST I used to dream of Mai Ling every night. I know that I dreamed about her and that it was her, it was Mai Ling, with her almond eyes in her pale face, her plait hanging before her as she bent over me, and her smile. Above all it was her smile that I used to see, and her bending over me and talking to me. I would try to answer her; I would search for the right words, flounder about in the dream and yearn to speak but, try as I might, no sound would come from my throat. It was as though something prevented me from speaking. Then she would disappear, her eyes would disappear little by little, and so too would the half-loosened plait hanging before her as she leant forwards, until in the end only her smile remained, just that, a smile without those almond eyes and that pale face bent over me. Then that too dissolved into the darkness. And I would wake up.

It took me a while to realise where I was. My eyes searched instinctively for the brazier in the centre of the yurt, where the dried dung had become a dark powder. During the winter nights, when the cold threatened our warmth, Mai Ling would get up from time to time to add more dung; as she did so the brazier would emit a startling flash of light, the wooden lattice of the yurt seemed to come alive and the crimson of the carpets ignited for an instant, then fell swiftly into shadow again as the flame died down into the bottom of the pan. Then the air filled with that sharp smell I knew well, a mixture of burnt hay and earth, and with the thin smoke which caught in the throats of guests who weren’t used to living as we did and made them cough. I looked for the gleam of the little oil lamp in front of the image of the Padma Sambhava, a glimmer which barely lit the lotus petals of the pedestal, the crossed legs and the fingers brushing the ground, while the torso, arms and ears down to the shoulders could dimly be made out through the darkness, as could the gilt which covered them. The lacquered cabinet in which the women kept their jewels and the few documents we had was itself red and gold, while the rugs draped on the rush walls and the fringed door were a glowing crimson, so that even the shadow inside the yurt seemed to have absorbed the reddish hues. And in the morning, when the first rays settled on the ceremonial saddle hanging on the wall, reflecting off its trim, its brass stirrups and its silk, the whole yurt seemed to fill with gold. In the evenings, lying in the place reserved for the youngest children, my eyes followed the winding of the carpets, the curve of deer horns and the course of a stream woven in a brighter thread. All around, everybody slept on their felt mattresses in their assigned place, the men on the right, on the left my cousins Haysce, Yesügen and Yesü, and my aunt Qada’an with her youngest son, Temüjin, who had not yet been weaned. In the winter, we put a small pen near the entrance of the yurt: the new-born animals slept with us, safe from the cold and the wolves. From time to time I would reach out an arm, slip it between the bars of the pen and touch the soft, silken coat of a new-born lamb. I would stroke the animal’s warm body, feel it rise and fall, uncertain whether or not to trust the hand which fondled it. I was reassured by the breathing of all those bodies. Even though outside the wind blew and the dogs howled restlessly, the shadowy yurt was full of familiar presences and I soon closed my eyes.

Now I found it hard to open them and in the darkness I made out the whiteness of the furniture around me and of the eiderdown weighing down on me. I shook it off and raised my head from the pillow. Across the stiffly starched pillowcase there ran a sloping, embroidered inscription, which read gute Nacht. Every evening I sank my cheek into that embroidered goodnight, without understanding its meaning, because at that time letters were signs which I did not know. I fell into a deep sleep, the sleep of a little girl exhausted by too much emotion. I would wake suddenly in the middle of the night, lost in the mound of feathers, and wonder if I were dead, and if the white material covering me was perhaps the tunic in which my brother Ginchin had descended to the kingdom of Erlig Khan.

I would quickly wriggle out from the cave which I had hollowed out for myself beneath the eiderdown, set my feet on the bedside rug and venture out onto the cold floor. Then I would slip between the wings of the curtains, securely drawn over the window. Even the lace curtains were embroidered with writing. I pushed them warily aside, and found myself facing the freezing glass. I did not dare to open the window, for at that time I was always afraid of making a noise. I wished that I could move without touching anything or, better still, without being seen. I feared that the slightest rustle might cause the anxious eyes of my new mother, or the kindly but irritated eyes of one of the maids, to appear behind me. Their unexpected presence startled me each time, as though they were jinn come down from Mount Kuchi-Kaf at the ends of the earth to do me harm.

I used to gaze out from the corner that was free of the curtain and my breath would make a misty circle on the glass, which I rubbed out with the back of my hand. There were outlines of trees, so many that you could hardly see the sky. The sky was black, only a little lighter than the trees, while at home it shines even at night. It was an overcast sky. It was not only inside that one felt suffocated, in closed rooms where the breeze could not enter and where only from time to time did they allow it in, but it was also hard to breathe under that sky, closed as it was between rings of trees and roofs. I did not know then that the sky over Cologne had never been as open as in those years, or as vast, when there were no buildings to block it out. I did not know how a city was made in this part of the world. I knew just the cities of the oases, where the minarets are the only obstacle in the sky. On the steppes there is nothing to limit or oppose it, so that on foot or on horseback we have the impression that nothing is taller than we are. Here the sky filled me with dismay and the waving trees frightened me. Shivering with cold, I would return to the warmth beneath the eiderdown. Clasping my hands between my knees and drawing my legs up to my chin, I would curl up like a frightened animal and seek refuge from the jinn encircling me. Yet as soon as I closed my eyes I saw the red, gold-flecked glow of the yurt, and felt its warm breath and the bodies asleep beside me.

I have forgotten my own language. They say that it is impossible to forget one’s mother tongue, but it is not true. Even language is lost, when it is linked to a childhood as far away as mine was. While my story appears before me in its entirety, the language which accompanied it is only a collection of shards which I am hard pressed to put together, bits and pieces rather than whole conversations. I have forgotten my own language. I no longer know the words with which we children called each other from one yurt to the next, the words which Mai Ling, who took the place of my mother, spoke to me, and those of my grandfather Bairqan, when he began his story and our story all over again, each time from the beginning: ‘We Tunshan are the true descendants of the Tatars.’ The words have escaped me, and what remain are occasional sounds, the ‘rrrs’ which came sonorously from the throat and the high liquid sounds on which the language occasionally took wing. Or was that the particular accent of Mai Ling, my grandfather’s third wife, who was a Manchurian from Bukhara? I remember the care she took when trying to repeat the words we taught her, and the indecision before every ‘rrr’ facing her, as though the shaping of it caused her inner torment; I remember how, every time she had to pronounce her husband’s name, we could read in her face her efforts to reproduce it with the proper sonority and the anguish of not succeeding, as though her way of liquefying the sounds was an affront to the dignity of the khan.

I seem to hear again the voices and cries of that time, but if I try to translate them into words all that comes out are sounds whose sense I can guess at, without being able to place vowels and consonants in the right order. It is as though I heard people speaking in the next room and I could recognise the voices and from the voices, the people, as though I knew what they were talking about but could not tell the words apart, with only a few emerging clear and whole on the surface of the dialogue. Some words have remained, survivors of the great shipwreck of my mother tongue – but is there anyone who still speaks it? Is it not now a vanished language, like the others which preceded it on either bank of the Amudar’ya?

One of the island-words I have saved from oblivion is kuraj.

I followed this clue, this one ordered and exact sound, wherever it led. I burrowed in dictionaries, letting myself be drawn into a game of circular references, penetrating deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of unfamiliar signs, and alighting on the shores of the most obscure meanings. How was I to retrace kuraj in the sea of language? I knew what it meant at home and I stubbornly searched for some written confirmation, as though I were looking for a buried civilisation, which ceases to be a chimera in the archaeologist’s imagination only in the moment that a piece of wall or a potsherd is brought to light. I searched for the clue which would lead me to kuraj: steppe, plant of the steppes, herb of the steppes, bushes which in the winter lose branches and roots and give themselves up to the wind, thus spreading their seeds, Salsola kali, in Russian perekatipole, ‘running field’. So, this was the clue I was searching for! I skimmed through the damaged pages of an old Russian dictionary, deciphering the characters with some difficulty, until a name emerged, and meaning and phoneme corresponded. The name was perekatipole or, in the language of the Kyrgyz and the other peoples of the steppes, kuraj. It was a kind of revelation, as though suddenly my past had been confirmed and ceased to exist only as the fabrication of memory, perhaps greatly distorted and reworked by my imagination over the years. Now kuraj, that one certain word of my language, was before my eyes, precise and indisputable on the page of the dictionary, and I felt moved and happy, as though I had found among those cramped lines of all-but-unknown signs the name of the clan I belonged to, the name of those who lived in my yurt, my own portrait with the long plait to my knees, the head-dress fastened at the nape of my neck with a long pin, the short felt boots sewn with seed pearls. The word was true and it confirmed my past irrefutably!

We gave the name kuraj to the dry bushes which the afghanetz picks up in spring and sends rolling over the steppes. Throngs of bushes move, and the steppe ‘walks’ or rather runs, enough to frighten the horses and give the impression, to someone looking from a distance, of a band of horsemen approaching at the gallop.

However, kuraj also means ‘flute’ and suggests a crude flute, a nomad shepherd’s flute, made out of a simple reed; by extension, then, it designates also the flute player, and even a performer with a flute, a minstrel, a poet who improvised verses, a re-fashioner of ancient epics, or what you will – in any case a character dear to the peoples of the steppes and familiar also to me. But there is a third meaning, in some way contained within the others: a person without a fixed home and without a will of his own, who lets himself be dragged along by chance. More than a nomad, he is a rootless vagabond, at the mercy of the wind like a Salsola bush, in other words, like the kuraj.

But the word calls up yet another meaning, more mysterious than the others and perhaps only distantly connected to them. ‘Kuraj, kuraj, kuraj’ said the shaman at the end of his incantations, and the word rolled over us, evoking the bushes racing over the steppe. Perhaps the kuraj of the shaman had no link with the other kuraj beyond its sound; perhaps different meanings had fused in time to become that one word which encapsulated them all and which, more than any other, takes me back to our nomadic existence.

2

WE LIVED AT the junction of the roads which have always linked west and east, north and south, the routes of the great caravans. We were, though we did not know it, at the meeting point between the great civilisations and the great religions, where the Greeks encountered Buddha, Zoroaster taught the Persians the worship of fire, Islam took on the colour of Chinese ceramics, and the Turks and the Mongols became one race. Languages and scripts were exchanged, or fed into each other. We ourselves, who claimed descent from the ‘white bones’ of Genghis Khan, were really a mixture of languages and tribes. Not all the Tunshan had, like my grandfather Bairqan, the physical characteristics of our Mongol ancestors: the broad face, the almond eyes, the flat nose of the nomads of the north-eastern steppes. To look at my grandfather in the yurt hearing disputes and meting out justice according to our code, seated on his throne, an armchair of painted wood piled with cushions, behind him the altar with its images of gods and ancestors, his legs folded under him and wearing his head-dress of felt edged with velvet which he never set aside, not even in the summer, he looked as if he had just stepped out of a Moghul miniature. He was the personification of the spirit of our ancestors and the respect he inspired was enough to placate the quarrelsome, to calm the rowdy, to reconcile the head families of the different clans into which the Tunshan were divided. Indeed Bairqan was not only khan, or head of a clan, a position which was handed down from father to son, he was also khagan, the great khan, the elected authority recognised by all those who pitched their yurts in a circle around his own.

Despite their common ancestry the Tunshan did not greatly resemble one another. Even among close kin, even among those who lived in the same village of yurts, some showed very few Mongol characteristics. Many had long thin noses, like our Afghan neighbours, or the brown skin and more rounded eyes of the Turkmens; many showed in their facial features alone the countless crossings that had shaped them, the casual or intended encounters and the forced or carefully arranged unions of which they were the unpredictable result.

There were not many of us: ties of kinship between our two hundred yurts were more or less close, and the men would discuss at length whether a marriage between members of the three clans was permissible or not; marriages within a clan were taboo. So women came from outside: contracted by the heads of the clans, they arrived wrapped in the veils of their tribes and brought with them, besides their dowries of sheep, camels and carpets, and their maidservants – if they came from rich or noble families – the physiognomy of their ethnic group and the words of their language. Little by little they began to say ayil instead of aul, to refer to the village of yurts, while in their turn our pregnant women began to offer bowls of kumiss to Momo, the celestial grandmother, because only when her shadow falls over the womb of a woman in labour will the birth be easy, and only she can keep the terrible Albasty at bay. Our pantheon was enriched by new spirits, our daily rituals by new gestures and our language by new expressions. Thus shape of nose, skin colour and words were intermingled: the language we spoke had ceased years since to be the language of the Mongolian nomads. I wonder if we would still have understood one other, if we had met, or whether we would have suffered the same fate as our Moghul neighbours in the Afghan highlands, also descendants of Genghis Khan, but left behind by the Mongol army at the time of the great race towards Persia: they spoke a Mongol dialect mixed with the Pashto of the Afghanis, a mixed language, which nobody but themselves understood, a language destined to be swallowed up by stronger idioms, like ours too, perhaps.

We lived at the crossroads of languages and ethnic groups: more Turkish than we were prepared to admit, Mongols in the eyes of our Uzbek neighbours, who indeed called us ‘white Tatars’, maybe because more than a century earlier we had come from Kazakhstan, which had been the territory of Genghis Khan’s White Horde. We were different, and set apart for another, still more compelling reason. Out of all the peoples living on the banks of the Amudar’ya we alone were not followers of Mohammed. While our neighbours spread their prayer mats facing Mecca five times a day, and nearby villages resounded five times a day to the muezzin’s voice, round our yurt little white flags fluttered to ward off evil spirits and approaching visitors spun prayer wheels. Each wheel contained six papier mâché cylinders filled with prayers, which multiplied as they turned, endlessly repeating Om mani padme hum, the six syllables of our religion.

We were Lamaists, which did not stop us from venerating local demons of all kinds and the spirits of our ancestors, or from reciting charms to ward off the jinn, after the manner of our Turkmen and Uzbek neighbours. Our faith was not coherent, any more than our appearance and our names were. Perhaps the many Alis and Hammans, as our cousins and neighbours began to call themselves, indicated more or less formal conversions, and represented the price which we paid to the Muslim tribes, together with livestock and sheepskins, in exchange for the women we lacked. We were tolerant, or perhaps merely eclectic: you cannot live at the crossroads of the caravans without absorbing the way of thinking of all those who have been there before you. It was as though in passing they had all left some element of their culture on the existing pile, much as travellers will reverently add a pebble or a bone or some other object in their possession to a cairn of rocks stuck with flags at a crossroads, an obo built in honour of the spirit of the place. We gathered up these legacies without really realising it and, having placed them within the felt walls of our yurts together with our other utensils, used them without thinking overmuch about them.

We were nomads but, unlike the Turkmen tribes, did not cover vast distances. We took down our yurts twice a year, in autumn and in spring, and twice a year we crossed the great river, the Amudar’ya, to return to where we had lived six months previously, to search out the three hearthstones where we knew we had left them and to build our yurts again around them. The river was the condition of our nomadic existence. In April, when the water level was high and the river difficult to ford, it promised the abundance and verdure of the north bank; when at the end of October it ran sluggishly, uncovering the sandbanks in the middle of the channel, it foretold the storms of wind and snow which were a little less violent to the south.

We had a relationship of respect and friendship with the river. This was the river which the Spanish ambassadors who travelled with Clavijo to the court of Tamerlane said was ‘one of the three streams which flow from Paradise’. I do not know if this is true for the other two rivers, but in the case of the Amudar’ya it is altogether true. I thought so even as a child.

‘Where does the big river come from, grandfather Bairqan?’

‘Up there,’ and Bairqan pointed in the direction of the distant and dizzying peaks of the Hindu Kush, ‘there, right in the snow, sits an arang who is bigger than the other arangs. He sits right in the snow and when he gets too cold he blows on it and then the snow melts and comes down the mountain and runs over the plain to us.’

‘And where does the river go then, grandfather Bairqan?’

‘Can’t you see, it goes west, to catch up with the sun and sink into it before going to sleep. But it never does catch up with it.’

Bairqan was clearly wrong, for the Amudar’ya curves around, heads north and flows in the end into the sands of the Aral Sea. Or did Bairqan perhaps know that until the Middle Ages one arm of the river had indeed flowed west, as far as the shores of the Caspian Sea? Bairqan knew the river well, as he knew everything about our history and our homelands. ‘When the arang gets angry, then he blows on the ice more fiercely than ever and the stream on the mountain swells, the water rushes down the mountainside; it runs, bounds, quivers, and when it gets down here it runs at full tilt, like an unbridled horse, and the banks can no longer hold it and it invades the fields around and the villages and then there are no more fords or ferries to cross the Amudar’ya and nobody can contain the river.’

‘What do people do then, grandfather Bairqan?’

‘Then the peoples of the two banks, those who live in felt-covered tents and those who live within walls of dried mud, kill a sheep and pour the blood into the water, so that the arang may be placated and stop blowing on the snow. Then the snow freezes again, the glacier stops melting and the Naga, the spirits of the river, make the water flow back between the banks and let the horses graze there in safety.’

How much history has flowed along the mighty river! And how many peoples has it seen arrive on its banks and cross over it! Armies who laid one side waste and made battlefields of the other, warriors on their way to conquer the lands to the north or south, nomads seeking pasture! We Tunshan knew that the earth, which we sprinkled with kumiss every spring, protected those ancient dead, as it did ours, and that our lives, on each bank of the great river, were adding new stories to theirs.

The Greeks called the river ‘Oxus’, a name which echoed the name given to it by the Turkmens, ‘Oks’. The Turkmens lived at that time on the stretch of river which turned away from the main watercourse and flowed towards the Caspian Sea. The land round the Oxus was very fertile then; the banks on each side were green with grain, vines and gardens, and the houses of the Turkmens so close that a cat could have travelled comfortably from the Aral Sea to the Caspian Sea by jumping from one roof to the next. But one day the perfidious inhabitants of the khanate of Khorezm, who dominated the territory where the river branched off, dammed the left-hand arm of the Amudar’ya and it ran dry. Vines and gardens disappeared; the fields of grain withered; and the Turkmens, with nothing to sustain them, became nomad herdsmen and bandits so terrifying that even in my day they were still spoken of with fear.

On the banks of the Amudar’ya, on the plain of Balkh, Alexander the Great defeated Poros, the Indian king, and settled the borders of his empire. Fifteen hundred years later, in the autumn of 1220, Genghis Khan reached the river in his turn, this time from the north. At that time the stupas of the old Buddhist monasteries still stood outside the city of Termez, while within the walls rose the minarets, the domes of the mosques and the citadel where the sovereign’s palace stood, decorated with alabaster reliefs. Once the city was in sight, Genghis Khan sent messengers ahead to deliver his simple but stark warning to its inhabitants: if you do not surrender, God alone knows what will happen. The city of Termez did not open its gates, and resisted the attackers for nine days, until rocks from the catapults breached the walls. Genghis Khan then ordered the inhabitants to come out – to count them, he said, and the deception too was part of the ritual of conquest – and lined them up on the open ground by the river among the flattened walls of the monasteries, men on one side, women and children on the other. Then officials passed through the silent throng and valued the prisoners one by one, separating the useful booty from the valueless, and at a sign from them the soldiers led away the strongest men and the prettiest girls. When the selection was over, and they had stripped the remaining prisoners of the jewels they wore, the soldiers flung themselves at them and cut them to pieces with axes. The story is told of an old woman, who when she saw her turn coming told the soldier whose weapon was already raised to strike her down: ‘I own a pearl, a huge, magnificent pearl; I will give it to you if you spare my life.’ The soldier looked at her, his arm frozen in mid-air, his eyes narrowed with greed. ‘Give it to me and I won’t kill you.’ The old woman lifted a corner of her veil to her mouth, in the defensive gesture of a girl: ‘I swallowed it,’ she said, and her face twisted in mockery. Then the Mongol brought his axe down across the woman’s belly and split her open. They say other soldiers followed his example and began to rummage through the entrails of the dead, hoping to find riches there, but perhaps it is only a horrible invention, designed to heap yet more sulphur onto the infernal reputation of the horsemen come from Tartary.

Less than two centuries later the empire founded by Genghis Khan no longer existed. Tamerlane, a distant relative of the great Mongol, succeeded, however, in assembling an empire which stretched from north of the Amudar’ya to the Ganges and to the Mediterranean, and was, though not as vast as that of Genghis Khan, not unworthy of the comparison. In the freezing winter of 1404 Tamerlane left his capital of Samarkand to strengthen the borders of his kingdom to the south. He halted at the Oxus. The river was a white expanse along whose edges clumps of reeds protruded like the standards of an army trapped in the ice. Tamerlane summoned his pontoniers and had them test the thickness of the ice in several places; they reported that the ice would take the soldiers’ weight, but that a track would be needed. So the soldiers filled sacks and baskets with stones and earth which they tipped onto the ice, to make an improvised road. The army left a muddy wake in the white river, mirrored in the black trail of crows in the sky overhead. Tamerlane looked at the birds and his face darkened. It struck him that the crows would also be circling around the blue dome of the Gur-e Mir, the mausoleum which he had had built for himself, and that they would follow his funeral procession, over that same river, but proceeding in the opposite direction. He was not entirely mistaken: a year later the soldiers carrying his coffin to Samarkand forded a river, the Syrdar’ya, and it is likely that a trail of crows did follow them, because these birds always follow armies, as seagulls follow ships.

Fifty years later Tamerlane’s grandson Babur Mirza, Emir of the region to the south of the Amudar’ya, stared at the river’s raging waters and twisted the great ring on his index finger. The river had come between him and his enemy, who had occupied Samarkand. Babur Mirza was in a hurry. The river had to be crossed in one way or another, even if they had only one barge on which to do it. There was no time to build bridges or to make rafts of skins to row across. After all, his Mongol ancestors, who knew nothing of boats, had crossed rivers of every size clinging to their horses’ necks! His soldiers would do the same.

Babur Mirza was the first to set foot on the far bank of the Amudar’ya, carried to dry land aboard the only boat. His soldiers, on the other hand, took off their clothes and stuffed them in leather bags which they lashed to their horses’ sides, then one after another they took to the water, like gazelles that blindly follow the leader of the herd and fling themselves after him into the jaws of the waiting crocodiles. From the opposite bank Babur Mirza saw soldiers and horses struggling against the current, the animals barely able to hold their heads above water, the men desperately clutching at their manes. He watched them disappear under the muddy waves. Often only the leather bag reappeared. Those who reached the far bank, men and animals, were soaked through and gasping for breath, their eyes wide with exhaustion and fear. When Babur Mirza regrouped his army it was difficult indeed to persuade them to close ranks and to instil fresh courage in them. Yet he reached Samarkand all the same, and without warning. From the safety of the walls his adversary sued for peace. ‘Do you think that I have travelled all this distance to turn back now?’ he answered. The loot from the rich city was his compensation to the surviving soldiers, but those who had been taken by the water became loot for the dogs, when the river grew weary of dragging them along and laid them down on the sandbanks in shallow water. They say that the fishermen of the Aral Sea were fishing up leather bags for years afterwards, and that they found treasures hidden inside. But it was no more than a legend, because inside there were just rags and rotted boots; Babur’s soldiers, like others before and since, carried with them only their own miserable existence and the little that was needed to make them march and fight.

In my day the Amudar’ya marked the border between the Soviet Union to the north and Afghanistan to the south. But we Tunshan knew nothing of such things; if, when I was a child, someone had told me that there was another state on the other side of the river, I would have looked at them without understanding. Only later did we too start to talk about borders, but simply to say that soon they would be closed and that we had to hurry in order not to be trapped. Nestling against my grandfather’s shoulder I listened to the excited conversations of the men gathered in a circle in the yurt. Moved by the solemn nature of the discussion and by my inclusion in it, I imagined that great gates had suddenly sprung up and that somebody stood ready to close them behind us with heavy iron chains like those of the Ulughbek madrassa in Samarkand. Before then (before, that is, the borders began to close), our one obstacle had been the Amudar’ya, which had to be crossed at the right time, it is true, before the river became a raging torrent of water and sand. Horses and camels crossed the watery border in a riot of splashes and shouts once in autumn and once again, at a ford further to the east, in the spring. To the north the banks were higher and quite steep, but the flat steppe was the same on both sides, only to the south the mountain slopes sheltered us better from the cold and the warm wind came more often to melt the earth in its hard shell. We pitched our yurts south of the river in winter, and in the spring we moved to the north bank. In winter the yurts of the village were pitched closer to each other. We children would clamber up the ancient steps to the caves hollowed out of the limestone and leaning out from our eyrie, we would see clear as day beneath us the geometry of our encampment, which spread over the steppe like a planetary system in space. In the middle was my grandfather Bairqan’s yurt, easily recognisable by its size and whiteness, like a star blazing with light in the centre of other, dimmer heavenly bodies. The yurts of his wives revolved around his, and at greater distances but still gravitating round the centre, were those of his married children and of his servants. This first constellation of yurts, the basic unit of our individual and social lives, was what we called an ayil: for all nomads the ayil, or aul, means at once village and family. It was at once the place and the tie that bound those who lived within the circle of the yurt, protected, however, from the larger circle of the ayil. The other villages gravitated round my grandfather’s ayil like minor planets round the principal star and their distance in space corresponded to their distance in blood. Together they formed a clan whose members were all to some extent related, though the distance in time and the distance from the main family tree made these relationships very difficult to untangle. The other two clans of the Tunshan were encamped a few hours from our villages.

We Tunshan continued to call ourselves ulus, as our most distant ancestors had done, and to display the banner with the eight snakes entwined, even though we had long since been reduced to just three clans. Our villages were no longer as populous as they had been in the days when each yurt was home to up to ten people and, given that the number of yurts in an ayil varied from five to ten, a village, a whole community which lived and worked together and owned tools and livestock in common, might number up to a hundred people. Although we were fewer than we had once been, we clung all the more stubbornly to the established geometries, so that space, which was expanding around us, would be constrained by our order, and remain measurable, as was the finite space surrounding the individual yurts, which were centres and circumferences at the same time. Every yurt was in fact a little planet in itself, around whose central point, the dome, or rather the smokehole, the inhabited space extended. There was then a patch of cleared ground where the household tasks were carried out, occupied only by the hut which contained the stores of dried dung, and by the rails to which we tied the horses, the milking mares and the foals.

Despite their basic similarities, yurts differed from each other. These differences were particularly obvious when seen from above: the yurts of the newly married and those of the rich could be picked out because they were paler than the rest, the former because their felt covers were newer, the latter because their covers were made entirely of white wool and changed more often, while the yurts of the poor were grey or black and often patched. Naturally there were other differences too, but these were invisible from a distance. We children knew them well, because in the summer we were free to enter any yurt, to eat wherever we were offered food and even to sleep where we pleased. In winter, however, distinctions were more sharply drawn, because food was scarcer; then the servants and our poorest neighbours came to our yurt to eat. They had the right to fish with us for the pieces of meat in the pot, though only after everybody else had helped themselves. In winter each of us took our proper place in the yurt and we slept together to keep warm. In summer the distances between the villages and even between the individual yurts were greater; whenever possible, each one was pitched on higher ground, and often separated from the others by a stream. But both in winter and in summer a plume of smoke issued from the smokeholes of the yurts, a sign that the hearth fire was lit inside, and this could never be allowed to go out, at least not by accident. So the fire in the yurt, a symbol of the continuation of our families, crossed the river with us.

At that time there were no bridges over the Amudar’ya. There had been a bridge in the days of the ambassador Clavijo, a wooden bridge which arched over the deepest part of the river, but they could not count on its being there, because Tamerlane had it built when he wished to cross the river and then destroyed after he and his retinue had passed. So that bridge, built and rebuilt as and when the king wished it, did not simplify the river crossing, which anyway was hedged about with bureaucratic difficulties, at least for those who wished to leave the country to the north of the Amudar’ya. Indeed, contrary to what happens today, you only needed to show travel papers if you were leaving the territory, but if you wished to enter it you didn’t need to observe these formalities. That is how it was in the days of Tamerlane. In my day, crossing the Amudar’ya did not present bureaucratic complications. The old fords were there, as were the Afghan ferrymen squatting like pelicans beside their flat barges, with nothing to do but unwind and rewind their turbans. When a client approached, they would first wind the yards of tattered material round their heads, then they would rise calmly and with dignity, secrete the obol for the crossing in roubles or rupees in one of the deep pockets in their tunics and eventually they would sink their poles into the sandy river bed. They did not ask for travel papers, but often, following a sudden whim or their own sure instinct for gauging the depth of the potential client’s purse, they would ask double the price or even more, well aware that they were indispensable. For those without a horse or other long-legged animal, the ferrymen provided the only way of crossing the river dry-shod.

The river was subsequently bridged by Soviet engineers, and then ferries and turbans were replaced by reinforced concrete piers, and by eight hundred metres of ‘friendship’. While it was perhaps not foreseen from the outset that the bridge would be crossed by tanks and armoured divisions, it is certain that they too crossed it in the name of friendship on their way to Kabul. When there was no more talk of friendship, only the name of the bridge was left to recall it, thrown up as if in mockery to link the two banks in sullen enmity. Today the bridge is closed by a barrier with a notice over it in two languages, Russian and English. Anyone wishing to cross must have a special travel permit, and in addition pay a toll of five dollars if on foot, ten if in a car, fifteen if driving a truck. The triple obstacle, barrier, travel permit and toll, means that very few venture onto the eight-hundred-metre stretch of deeply ambiguous friendship. The Amudar’ya has become the bridge’s prisoner, guarded by rows of missiles and panzer tanks, and kept under surveillance by radar and sentries. The mighty river now runs between two armoured banks, virtual fronts in a war suspended above the bridge. Even the tumbled walls of the old Buddhist monasteries and the crumbling stupas have been imprisoned behind barbed wire. In my day, sheep grazed there as their shepherd sat in the shade of a pagoda built of tufa, at the feet of a bodhisattva whose head had been eroded by the wind.

There are no nomads left north of the Amudar’ya. We were among the last; indeed the Tunshan were also the last to cross the last open border to the east, so stubborn were they in their refusal to settle down and become farmers. The other nomad tribes, which had remained within the borders of the Soviet Union, were forced to yield to the inflexible plans of the bureaucrats. They pitched their yurts beside new brick houses and never dismantled them again. These yurts can still be seen scattered across the high ground beyond the cultivated strips of farmland, but now they serve merely as summer pavilions, because they are cooler and airier than houses in the summer.

Perhaps the Tunshan still pitch and strike their tents beyond the Pamir, in Sinkiang, and perhaps there are other rivers for them to ford with their horses and camels. If I have not been able to follow them on their great journey to the East, but have had to take the path to the West alone; if today I no longer bear the name of the Tunshan which was my father’s and my father’s father’s, but that of Berger; if the river I can glimpse from the roof terrace of my house in the city is the Rhine; if all of this is so, it is because during the years of my childhood a more violent wind than the karaburan and the afghanetz together dragged millions of lives along with it, brought them crashing down and entangled them one with the other, like kuraj bushes when the wind rolls them into an inextricable tangle of branches and then abandons them in the vast emptiness of the steppe.

3

IT WAS THE morning of my tenth birthday. In fact at that time I was still ignorant of exact dates; the days unfolded before me with no need of a written calendar, for they were marked by the phases of my nomadic life. Not that we ignored a date as important as that of a birth. On the contrary, the midwives carefully noted the day and the hour of the birth so that the lama could predict the baby’s future. However, they kept secret the place where the placenta had been buried, so that evil spirits could not find it out and harm the child. I remember how, three days after my cousin Temüjin was born, I came upon Qada’an crouched down by the threshold inside the yurt. She had lifted the layers of felt and carpets that made up the floor and was digging a large hole in the bare earth. I looked at her in amazement, unsure whether I should come in. ‘What are you doing, Qada’an?’ As though seized by a sudden doubt, my eyes searched for Temüjin, but the inlaid cradle hung motionless in its usual place over Qada’an’s bed; the baby could just be seen inside, all wrapped up in his coverlet and held down with cords to stop him falling out, but he was certainly asleep. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked again but Qada’an went on digging with the anxious air of someone who fears being caught out in a secret activity. She did not answer, but only gestured towards a little basket on the ground near her containing an object wrapped in felt. She placed the basket carefully in the hole and covered it with earth, then, as she was replacing mats and carpets, she looked round, as though worried that she could be overheard. She said to me, ‘It is part of my baby. I put it in the lap of the earth. May Golumta-eke protect it!’ Golumta-eke, the mother of our hearth, protected the yurt and those who lived in it. Qada’an was entrusting her son to her and I, present by chance at the rite, was let in on a secret intimately connected with the baby’s birth and became in a sense responsible for its protection, more than I already was by virtue of our kinship. I kept the secret and told nobody where Temüjin’s afterbirth was buried. I don’t know on the other hand where the burial place is of the placenta which surrounded me at birth, but it was certainly committed to the earth at our winter campsite, south of the Amudar’ya, where the plain meets the valleys of the Hindu Kush, which roar with melt water in March.

The people in the nearby villages called the place ‘Birbesc’, the five fountains. Indeed, not far from the river, which disappeared in the summer heat, there were five springs of crystal-clear water, which flowed out into five natural basins, white as chalk. In the sunlight they were the colour of the tiles on the mosque of Mazare Sharif, as though its domes had been turned upside down and filled with water. A long time ago someone had dug an opening in the rock and made a channel with crudely piled stones cemented with lime, to catch the water. In summer the place became a drinking trough. The ground all about was trampled and chewed up by thousands of hooves, and resembled the surface of a lake disturbed by a constant breeze. The water which overflowed from the channel disappeared instantly under the layer of dung into which it sank as though on a heath. Not a plant or a bush grew there, for the insatiable hunger of all the passing ruminants had turned the area into a desert. In early March when the green of new growth crept over the steppe the ground around the springs remained bare, except for little plants with tough stems and small yellowish flowers dotted about. I vividly remember Bairqan bending down to break off a stalk to examine it more closely and then shaking his head and turning to Borrak, his youngest son, who was following on foot leading his horse by the reins, and to me, the favourite among all his grandchildren, who was hanging about him as usual: ‘There are more of them every year,’ and he showed us the stalk in confirmation of his words. ‘They come up through the dung and can survive anything,’ Bairqan said, ‘even twenty years ago there were none around here.’ Now it is Borrak who picks up the plant to study it, and throws it away with the same disdainful expression as his father’s. Of all his sons, Borrak was the one who most resembled him, in face, gestures and voice, so much so that he might have been a reincarnation before his time.

‘If animal numbers go on rising we will end up being eaten by the sheep.’ Anybody who has been close to a grazing herd as it approaches will understand how much of a threat lies hidden in the harmless appearance of sheep peacefully at pasture, how much noise is caused by the shuffle of restless hooves and what an indefinable panic can be caused by the buzz of jaws tearing at the grass. My grandfather Bairqan was right; the herds of Karakul were a scourge to us. They spread over both banks of the Amudar’ya like felt mats drying in the sun; they fouled the drinking holes and they took over grazing traditionally reserved for horses. There was bad blood between the shepherds and the breeders of horses like us. In winter, however, the damage caused by all the grazing and trampling was less obvious. The sods of turf kicked up round the drinking trough at Birbesc hardened and the limestone basins blazed clear blue like a mirage in the desert. The surface was often covered with a layer of ice and underneath the bubbles rising to the surface formed kaleidoscopes of currents. We children threw stones as far as we could, and the winner was the one who succeeded in breaking the ice nearest to where the water gushed up into the basin. My cousin Malik was a superb shot and often quarrelled with his younger brother Ali, who would ignore the starting line even though it was clearly visible against the whiteness of the snow. When it was my turn I would concentrate long and hard, calculating the distance, lean in the direction of the basins as far as I could without losing my balance or overstepping the mark on the ground, and then I would throw my stone, but I hardly ever succeeded in hitting even the edge of the basin. Then Malik would laugh, sure of his victory.

I was born at Birbesc on the thirtieth of January 1938.

The yurt was full of steam and smoke. Flames licked at the bottom of the cauldron, and the women around it fed the fire constantly. The smoke flowed sluggishly through the hole in the middle of the yurt, blown back in by the wind outside that lashed furiously at it, and hung in the air inside. The women sweated with the heat and the damp which had built up during the days of continuous waiting; only my mother Börte trembled under her sheepskin covers. Shivers racked her as Mai Ling lifted her head and held the cup of kumiss mixed with the infusion the shaman had made to her lips. My mother managed to swallow a few drops, then fell back on the mattress, racked with fever. ‘There are two of them,’ Ügedelegü had pronounced some time earlier. He was the man with most offices in the three clans: tamer of spirits and doctor at the same time, he was called when a child had the fever or stomach ache and it was feared that jinn were involved, or worse, Albasty; when a birth was expected, to pray for a happy outcome; when some obscure sickness threatened the livestock; when someone became suddenly disturbed and began to speak senselessly; when anybody wanted to go on a journey, to know if there were demons opposed to it; to plan a good marriage. Ügedelegü was always ready to hasten over, to