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6
At 2300 according to distant Moscow the clouds are parted and the bright moon lights up the flatness outside. The train moves as though guided by moonlight, the rails just a formality. An hour and a half later the guard wakes us with a cheerful Meine Damen und Herren for final toilet visits before the border crossing (last chance for several hours to come). Soon after, we come to a halt, deep into the night and in the brimming moonlight, the land outside somehow even flatter than it was before, the empty horizon sharpened and compelling. Aksarayskaya halt, on the Russian side of the Kazakh border. Aksaray (‘white palace’) is the name of towns and football teams all over the Turkic world, and here it bleeds into the Slavic space. It feels unlikely out here. Saratov is far behind us now; we are in transition to Central Asia in name as well as by feel. Beside us is a long column of vehicles along a road, also awaiting the border crossing. Not much can be seen at this time of night, but no doubt this is a significant entry point with a main road, settlements and human activity all about. The train lies still, all motion squeezed out of it, like a patient on an operating table being examined under bright lights. Outside, inspectors walk up and down, and now they are in our corridor. The first ones check our documents, then others come to inspect our baggage, removing panels in the walls of the carriage at random to check for concealed goods. They take their time. And there is time. The timetable allows two hours and 20 minutes for exiting Russia, plus 90 minutes on the other side to enter Kazakhstan. Tomorrow night it will be 97 minutes to leave Kazakhstan again and three whole hours to enter Uzbekistan. Earlier I’d made some flippant comment to Guzal about border officials, but her response was serious: Eto dlya nashey bezopasnosti – ‘They are there for our security’. The stereotype of a corrupt bureaucrat recedes slightly in my mind as they pass, dignified and polite, to be replaced by another, of an angelic guardian disguised in an earthly uniform, keeping us safe as we cross the unknown in the dead of night. An exaggeration, of course, but comforting at three o’clock in the morning.
After this long stop we race for an hour through the night, discarding one skin for another. Then comes another scraping of the brakes and the disheartening fall in pitch of the wheel sounds as we lose speed once again, shuddering again to silence and submission. Kazakhstan has arrived to us, but we have to stop, to be received properly. More guards, more checks, now in a distinctly Turkic language. I doze in between the checks. By the time they are over, I am awake again – and startled – morning is suddenly here, and already not early. How did the sun get up so quickly? The deep night seemed truncated, high morning spliced onto it before it was over. But in leaving Moscow time for Astana time, escaping one monolith for another, the clock had leapt three hours. No wonder it got dark early last night. No wonder morning had fallen early here, the effect heightened by our hours of waiting and a new country under the wheels.
The sun climbs fast as we wait at the entry point, Ganyushkino. It amuses me that the Kazakh side has a Russian name while the Russian one was Turkic. (Later I discover that had our train turned west here rather than east, we would have quickly arrived in a Tibetan-speaking province, the republic of Kalmykia, lying between the Astrakhan and Volgograd regions and Dagestan. So I may as well abandon once and for all my forlorn attempt to reach the East by travelling eastward.) Ganyushkino, meanwhile, is a sizeable station, where passengers can embark and disembark, and not just a technical halt. There must be a town nearby, though nobody seems to be about. The border guards have the place to themselves as they pace up and down, checking for cracks in the time zones and the passengers. Outside the window a small bird – Guzal tells me it is a dyatel’ or woodpecker – is pecking at a post. Symbolically dismantling the border, I smile to myself. Guzal knows the names of birds, though poor eyesight is making it harder now for her to identify them.
When finally we start again, at last we are heading east. For me this journey was about going east, but unbeknown to me, up to now we have really been travelling south, following the eastern bank of the Volga at a distance almost to its delta behind Astrakhan, and only now turning left into an outpost of Kazakhstan. Now we will trace the Caspian coast eastward, without ever seeing it, until no further obstacle lies between us and Central Asia. We are moving briskly now over a flat steppeland of clay and scrub as far as the horizon, and passing salt pans and what look like small pools. My eyes have to adjust to discern its features. The views to north and south differ only in the position of the sun, with the north view lit from behind us and the south view against the light, giving it a sense of heat.
There are still few people to talk to other than Guzal; the carriage is still largely empty. I gaze out at length, swapping sides of the carriage, refilling my tea glass and musing on the journey. Yesterday, with Saratov and the Volga crossing, feel far behind, as do the sudden darkness and the moonlit border crossing. The train is the same, however: the window, the bunks, the bedding are unchanged, the same guard prattles up and down in German and the rails beneath us connect us back to those moments. So the new day is definitive – until superseded – but our tracks carry the traces of the last. The rails seem to be what, in a train, connect present with past. Could we, I fancy, rewind to yesterday by putting the train into reverse? Nonsense, says common sense – yet something in me wants to try. But no, the answer is no – the river would be different, the moon would be in another phase, the city would not know us. And there’d be hell to pay at the border, of course. And not only do the rails stretch out behind us, they lie ahead as well – I might just as well try to make the future come sooner by accelerating the train. For itself, the train trundles routinely from one end of the line to the other, staying in the present simple, but for us on a given journey, in the moment of now, it marks out future and past, a visible graphic of the passage of time. Maybe time itself requires motion in order to be activated, to set the clocks ticking. And when the train stops, at the long border points, future and past balance out and evaporate, and we are again left with the pure present.
Those are the musings induced in slow long-distance trains. Today is the day without, or between, rivers. The land speaks a subdued language of tracks, dunes, brushwood and the flat steppe under a bowl of sky, the two tenuously linked by wooden poles at intervals, the only vertical element in sight. We watch for slight changes, a shift in the soil colour or vegetation, more salt pools or fewer, a glimpse of a road, a house, a siding leading off to the horizon, poles and wires. And the raw spaciousness that underpins this land. It has the feel of a transition about it. We once crossed this flatland on our way to the Fan Mountains above Dushanbe. And here we are again, rounding the unseen Caspian as if it should change us, suiting us for Asia. Tomorrow will bring us to the river known by its riverains simply as the River – the Amu Darya, the one-time Oxus or Vaksha or Jeyhoun: we will cross it and be in the land of ma wara an-Nahr, ‘what is beyond the River’, or Transoxiana.
7
We are now well into the Caspian Depression, probably below sea level. The train has been stopping at unmarked stops not shown on the timetable; they seem isolated, yet new passengers have been coming aboard, from villages invisible to all but the inhabitants. There is a clutch of shouting young men at the end of the corridor, and mothers and toddlers near the guard’s compartment. Guzal sleeps, meaning peace and quiet for now. She had warned me: teper’ budet gryazno i shumno: things would now get grubby and noisy, as small-town Kazakhs blagged and bribed and barged their way aboard. At least that is how we would see it.
We halt at a passing point for trains, mesto vstrechi poezdov. Is there another train coming the other way down this single track? Did it pass unseen? Guzal wakes up and spots an afgansky skvorets, an Afghan starling – a tough incomer to the region, she says, that has driven away local species and is afraid of nothing. Once under way again I ask her how this land of scrub and solonchak, or salt marsh, sometimes with dried white salt and wide expanses of shallow water, is really solid enough to support a railway line. ‘Just try digging it’, retorts Guzal with the voice of experience. It is immensely heavy earth, and as soon as you dig out a hole, it collapses in again.
To my stranger’s eye the land seems uncultivated, wild, good for nothing. Is there any human activity here? Now and again a horse flees. My map suggests industry, roads – but none of it can be seen. It is flat, featureless but textured and we could be crossing a sea, the rails merely a compass setting, and guided by the sun or the stars. Now and again a distant power line, reinforcing the horizontal. Sometimes a road, but no traffic on it. A few animals, but they are gone in a flash and I can’t get a sense of scale. The colour of the scrub varies, perhaps with the light; here it is pink-purple against the mud. Some large areas of solonchak, reflecting sky blue where there is water, and sandy or white where dry. Now a homestead, with suddenly a clutch of trees, alien to this treeless landscape and clearly hand-planted. A town on the far horizon to port, its buildings set against the sky, and a railway siding strikes off towards it from our line, a line of tankers standing on it in the distance. The siding is rusty and overgrown with grass. Now back to the sweep of the steppe, now dappled by the slow shadows of small fleecy clouds in the early autumn sky. Areas of bare sandy earth with white traces of salt. Sure that I can see and retain the variations and beauty of the shifting texture, I try to capture it with my camera, snapping furiously at every slight variation, every shift in timbre. The result is a hundred similar, blurry images of indistinct ground and a vacant horizon, all of them hallmarked by the greasy glass of the train window and the lights reflected in it.
Again I cross to the other side of the train – now looking south, into the sun. The scene is the same, except for the light. The same amorphous picture – granular, clumped, straggling tracks here and there, a line of piles of earth, distant poles and a horizon that suggests a seascape (and truly cannot be far from the Caspian shore). A trackside house – its solidity shocks me, but it also looks fragile. Three chestnut horses run away as we pass. Sky mirages, blue lowering over the horizon and not clear whether it is sky or water. Salt pans appear and grow in size and the land turns yellower. At one point there is a main road alongside the track. I think back to our journey to Dushanbe in 1992. I remember feeling appalled and oppressed by the bleakness, endlessness and growing heat as we edged southward. It was early August and there were two more days of this, in a crowded third-class platskart, having travelled overnight from Moscow to Volgograd, crossed the Volga there by another immensely long bridge and seemed to leave temperate southern Russia behind at that point. Today’s journey is cool and easy by comparison; from my comfortable position these wide spaces do not feel bleak.
8
By early afternoon (or whatever it is) and a dozen halts, our carriage is teeming. Young men pace up and down the corridor selling small portable things – mostly covers and spare batteries for smartphones. Outside, more human activity is evident. There are more farms now, so the ground must be better. Cotton plantations, so there must be water. The poles and wires multiply and add further layers of horizon. Eventually it erupts into the sprawl of Atyrau. Without warning we are rumbling above a wide river, unannounced. The Ural, just short of its mouth beyond the town, and a Rubicon in our riverless day, being one of the traditional divisions between Europe and Asia and a near half-way mark of my trip on this train. It is brown, smooth, severe. All about are shiny new warehouses, shops, untidy clutches of self-built houses, rusty-coloured ponds, under a bald early-afternoon sun. The buildings sit awkwardly on the land and have a provisional air. They spread away to the subsumed horizon, each mast or warehouse like the letter of a word written on the bottom of the sky. Between there and here hang fluffy clouds, a map of airy roads, letters of a different flowing script, in counterpoint to the fixity on the ground. I would like to be able to paint, if only to capture that hard backlit cloud, suspended over dried yards of clay riddled with blue puddles, the indeterminate yet speaking spaces between each rough concrete shop or workshop, and further out, houses and apartments blocks, the land between them stymied yet still dominant. All these blues, browns, oranges and yellows, the hammer of habitation after a day at sea on the steppe. We pass a builder’s merchant named Shangirak – my one word of Kazakh, meaning ‘sky window’ – and used to name the hole in the roof of a yurt through which the chimney passes, often decorative, that symbolises heaven.
Atyrau, formerly known as Gur’yev, at the northern tip of the Caspian and the only town-sized place we will see today. Our carriage empties again as the villagers get off. There is a half-hour stoyanka or standing time for our train and I get out to stroll the platform, my legs taken aback at the firm ground after 24 hours of rocking motion. Here it is colder, yet the sun stronger, than it had been in Saratov or Voronezh. Soon the passengers have dispersed and I am alone on the platform, walking the length of the train. A chubby young man in uniform from ‘the organ’ cautions me not to photograph the train but lets me take a picture looking away, mostly of metal rooftops. Then he asks me for a gift, giving me a Kazakh 50-tenge coin as a hint. I search for something from the UK and give him a coin. He seems satisfied.
Looking out from the station onto the forecourt, I get a first reflux of a Central Asian townspace. Wide, open, the buildings somehow provisional or temporary, cars parked at random and all over, reminiscent of a bazaar for building materials or car parts. It feels unfinished, unlike the solidity (or decay) of a European town. This is more like an improvised caravanserai, a meeting on the steppe, moveable and never intended to last. It could be dismantled when the gathering ends and the gathering reconvened a hundred miles away. No doubt there is a formal city centre beyond, with official buildings and a pompous civic pride, amenities, habitations. But here is the place for trading, for striking deals, for winning the right to enter. Here is the dynamic, beyond is the static. While, looking more widely, here is a tonality I don’t know, steppe and hidden sea, salty earth, oil, wide skies, long days and unpredictable nights. And this town, Atyrau, that somehow thrives in this unlikely setting.
Back on the train, we pass oil storage tanks and continue into an afternoon as open-ended as the landscape. The human traces fall away. Once more to watching the constantly changing canvas of the steppe, its textures of land and sea reduced to the elemental. Although the colours are rich and varied, and now and again something man-made appears, the recurring message is emptiness. This too varies: sometimes it draws one in, appealing in its spaciousness and promise. Sometimes it appears lifeless and oppressive. Striking is the amount of water that can be seen in some places. We are lurking on the rim of the Caspian, whose seasides seem too indistinct for a discernible coastline, far less something as finite as a beach. The transition to sea must be gradual, ambiguous, mixed, like the east bank of the Volga last night. Here and there, looking south from the starboard side of the train, I seem to feel the sea, but it never comes into view, though the horizon recedes as far as my eyes can follow. There are pools, sometimes lakes, of salty, areas of dried salt, and mirage. Suffered in heat and exhaustion on horseback or foot, over hundreds of miles, all this would be a test of survival and sanity. To cross it seated on a swaying bunk, sipping tea, or gazing from a window, would be the hallucination of anyone tired, losing their way or in need of help. How did people find their way in this harshness all through history, before the blunt instrument of the internal combustion engine?
9
We have two guards now: the cheery Uzbek who was there from the start, who chats to the passengers in Russian, Uzbek and bits of German and English and who wakes us for the night borders. The other is a tall thin man from Andijan, in the Fergana Valley east of Tashkent, with gold teeth and a serene, dignified manner, probably older than he looks and probably quite devout. He invites me into the guard’s compartment and talks keenly, urging me to visit Andijan, a land of plenty in contrast to the barrenness here. He has worked on the railway for thirty years and is pleased to welcome travellers. But there is something he doesn’t understand, and the questions multiply. ‘Why are you travelling alone so far from home? Where is your wife? Why is she not with you? And what about your mother, why aren’t you taking care of her?’ I say I’m not married. This deepens his incredulity further. ‘How come? Why not? You do not know happiness. You cannot be happy if you do not marry. You must have children. You can only be happy if you fulfil your obligations in this life.’ And so on and so on.
Here we go again. I have been here before. Like a train on rails, certain conversations always seem to arise and always run the same way. Having often found myself trapped by them, helpless before the moral certainty of the other, I am always on the lookout for variations, changes, gaps, opportunities to bring some fresh air, if only to my own part in the roleplay.
The guard – he must have told me his name – is smiling and looking at me with pity, probably underestimating my age and sad for the degenerate culture to which I must belong. Nothing I can say honestly to him seems adequate. So I try to plug the gap, muttering something unconvincing about not having found the right girl yet, or wanting to spend more time travelling before settling down. But my attempt to sound casual only winds him up further. I am failing my obligations towards God and man. To have a wife, to have children; to know and honour one’s ancestors; to perpetuate family.
His points are serious and I dig within for real answers. Why can’t I justify myself? Then again, why do I have to? Why is he picking on this point so harshly? Clearly, for him it is of the essence. But I am not equipped to respond, somehow. My purported Western ideals and liberalism seem slight next to the certainty and rootedness of blood relations that he conveys. More than this, as I look about myself, and about him, everything my eye alights on seems to be in agreement with the elder’s words. The blur of scrub and salt passing outside the window seem to back him up, as does the light coming in to our compartment; the bunks and window of the compartment stand by him also, just as his guard’s uniform underlines his person. The truth he is telling me is not a generalism, it is the truth of now, and everything is in agreement with it. He speaks with ease and certainty, and holds me fascinated. That certainty bears truthfulness, beyond the substance of his belief or whether I agree with him. He knows and holds this place, while I am a stranger in it, even though we are here-and-now together. I fumble in myself for my own truthfulness with difficulty, finding it curled into a ball like a frightened hedgehog, as if startled by the light reflecting off the nearby surfaces.
I could have tried to say that being unmarried was my choice. That I am more a sort of pilgrim-journeyman-dervish-artist than a family man. That family, for me, is my chosen tribe of fellow travellers, rather than the literal blood line I am born into and expected to continue. None of this would have held water for him. But thankfully the attempt is interrupted when his ‘boss’ appears – an overweight twentysomething in a T-shirt who comes over as uncouth next to the dignity of the older man. How can this kid be the boss? He flops onto his bunk and waits for me to leave, indifferent to the conversation we were having. I have to trust that the truth is preserved for both the guard and myself, in its respective garbs.
It is late afternoon. Again my mind returns to Dushanbe 1992. There seemed to be more stations (and none were border posts), though perhaps that was further down the line, in what is now northern Turkmenistan. We used to get off to explore, to stretch our legs, knowing that the train was so long and so slow to pick up speed that we could easily run back if it moved off, jumping onto the steps or running boards of the carriages. And we’d sit in the vestibules with the outside door open, relishing the breeze and the sense of motion, our legs dangling out, unless the guard came past, in which case we’d quickly lift them up.
At 18.15 the sun is still high in the sky. What a contrast to yesterday –what proof that clocks only relativise time, they do not monopolise it absolutely. Still sunny by the time we reach Kulsary at 19.40. Now we are going due south again, having rounded the top of the Caspian. Come the next border post, we will turn south-east, away from any sea. Guzal enthuses that by tomorrow morning there will be smoked fish available to eat, as we approach the Amu-Darya. Now meanwhile sellers are pacing the corridor with manty (like giant ravioli containing mince) and piroshky (pasties), Turkic and Russian respectively, food for land-lubbers. I comment to Guzal that the third-class carriage, platskart, is at the very rear of our train. Always the railway engineer, she explains that the tail of the train experiences the most vibration and pitching, so let the cheapest class be there – but on the other hand, that class carries more people, so is heavier and better able to dampen the vibrations. Not sure I’m convinced.
10
Gradually the light has faded and now there is just the afterglow of the sun, reflected from endlessly shifting blue. The steppe turns the colour of straw. Big lakes, presumably salt, some dry, some with water, turn more silver. How far are we actually from the Caspian? Could these be inlets of the sea? Later, with the aid of a map, it turns out that we are a good 50 km inland now, and only the Atyrau section had been close to the shore. Yet the sandy expanses and the lakes get bigger as we pass – this could be a desert or a beach, depending on how hungry you are. Outside a fiery sunset has flared, with an almost complete colour spectrum across the sky. Out of the opposite window, a chalky full moon has cleared the horizon and is rising into a purple heaven. A road runs alongside, without traffic. Occasionally a dwelling. The purples deepen and the moon rises and climbs, up through the rigging of telegraph wires that dip and rise beside the train. Once free of them it is alone and radiant in a dark sky. From straw the steppe turns to gold, then to black. Full moon and practically the equinox: everything in balance. The atmosphere is crystal clear (through the glass darkly of our greasy window). Tiny fleecy horizontals lie on the horizon like hallucinations of mountains, and to north and south high clouds glow red and remind me of the Tien Shan mountains above Almaty. On the other side of the train, the moon continues its ascent in what is now darkness.
Nightfall, like dawn, the in-between time. Bodies take flight. Spirit takes body. Tracks in the sand (or mud) outside, harder now to discern, somehow bigger as the light fades. Camels? Large feet, and not human, sometimes several together. My wonder grows at how unchanging this landscape is at one level, yet within its limits it is endlessly varied. What looks at first like emptiness also seems, in another sense, to be a great richness. Not of fertility or ease of habitation, to be sure, but a space for the mind, for consciousness itself to wander. The first stage of creation’s emanation, from sheer mind, to something resembling ground and sky, with a horizon. From here, form can arise. All in due course and in no hurry. For now, let our own minds feast on the possibilities.
Be_flummoxed 