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11
Who were they, the others on this train, passengers, guards? Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Karakalpaks, Russians, perhaps a handful of foreigners. Being alongside for two days heightened my strangeness. Few seemed willing to make conversation except to sell something. Most seemed to be on short business trips to the next town, and got off before the next border. For them the idea of riding from end to end would be a strange one. They had business to do. Not having to monetise my journey made me feel all the more foreign, passive, with my silent gaze out of the window, greedy for landscapes, for stimulus or engagement or input. But Guzal has been a companion – and the Andijan guard, who showed a regard for a mature traveller anxious to learn about his homeland.
And yet here all of us were, together in a sort of kaleidoscope. If the kaleidoscope were rotated, we would all reconfigure and mix and change. The train itself was a world, the world a stage, peopled and in movement, each one a world within it. The whole contraption making its way across an empty land on an old Russian railroad, from one river to the next. For only where there is a river is there a hope of life. Here in this featureless space it felt fragile. And I had my place in the world, on this stage, along with all the others, even if the part I played was that of the stranger. The vicissitudes of this knife-edge position preoccupied me throughout the journey.
Now I saw again the face of the guard, from when we spoke this afternoon. His dignified presence, his kindliness, and the feeling of exposure in front of his moral force. I longed to reach him as he had reached to me. I was less concerned with what we talked about, which arises everywhere, than with the uniqueness of his person and of the encounter. He seemed to draw together and concentrate everything that surrounded us, in ascending degrees. First was the wide steppe outside, limitless within the limits of our eyes and firing the imagination ceaselessly, or else tiring us from staring at near-emptiness until we fell back against the bunk and tried to recall something that had shape and colour. Next was the train, our rolling dormitory that both transported us and sheltered us, and brought us all into close proximity and was the stage on which the guard and I acted out our parts, that had its own distinct personality of compartments, glasses of tea and the kaleidoscope of passengers getting on and off. And finally was himself, this dignified elder. A man who has worked half his life on the railway and is apparently required to answer to a slobbish youth with no manners, while carrying an entire world and offering it. Truly a guard. The land and the light and the train all agreed with his words, though both of us were speaking a foreign language, a lingua franca that itself coloured our exchange with associations and habit.
We had seemed to be on opposite sides of a gulf of incomprehension – between, roughly, the values of a traditional way of life governed by religious observance on the one hand, and on the other, the amorphous, choice-based offerings of the post-religious West, each with their benefits and limitations. But this gulf seemed to soften. While neither of us could have tolerated the life of the other, truth appeared in both. We met in a place of truthfulness amid difference. This was all that mattered, and it is what I was travelling to find. All the other considerations – culture wars, conservative versus progressive, the prerogative of blood relations over all others – fell away here because something had met. His face, though I could no longer picture it in detail, stayed with me as light, and I sat with it now as the night came on.
At 22.59 we come to the Kazakh exit point, Beyneu. This will take an hour and a half. But why do I sound so rushed? Beside us is another train, the first I’ve seen since we left Saratov. It is the Mangyshlak-Aqtobe service. While our train will turn left here, north of the Ustyurt Plateau and towards Uzbekistan, this other train has arrived from the coast, west of here, and will strike north along the track we have just passed, then onward to the north-western corner of the country just across from Orenburg, closer again to the Ural river.
And after this, deep in the night, we will spend three hours motionlessly entering Uzbekistan at its remotest corner, though we will claw one of those hours back by leaving the Astana time zone.
12
Uzbekistan under our wheels and the corridor is a plasma of sellers. Not yet the oasis nor the River, but somehow fish are already being paraded up and down: kopchenaya ryba, smoked river fish, whole ones on sticks, reeking and inimitable. But this isn’t just any old Uzbekistan but its rare north-west, Karakalpakstan, the emptiest part of the country, home to part of the Ustyurt Plateau and part of the now almost dry Aral Sea, and the refuge of the artist Igor Savitsky from Stalin’s purges on modern art, which resulted in the art collection at Nukus and today the improbable and splendid museum there. I go into the corridor to watch the market traders, as if fresh from a Tashkent bazaar. As well as the fish vendor are two enormous women with textiles cascading from their arms and a handful of thin young men with small electronic goods. They ply phones, chargers, currency exchange, salad, blankets, perfume, bread. Guzal assures me that the exchange rate charged here is the normal black market rate, and not inflated, so I buy 2000 Russian roubles’ worth of Uzbek som – a sum of 188,000, in other words 188 worn and sweaty notes of 1000 som each. The exchange lady gets impatient as I clumsily try to count them; locals are adapted to doing it fast.
Last night’s full moon is still there this morning, and sets at 0700. By then it has become a pale disk, blurred behind wispy cloud. The Karakalpak landscape – if that is what this is – is utterly flat, featureless (even after all of yesterday in flat empty landscapes) and with no visible human activity. But we have left the salt behind, and evidently the sea. We are back on scrubland with sand or mud. So is this still the Caspian Depression or has the land risen even slightly? Still the feeling of crossing a landlocked sea. Now and again what looks like water appears, but always on the horizon. It can’t be real. The nearest body of water to starboard is Saragamysh lake, but surely this is too far away? And a similar distance to port, perhaps already behind is, is what remains of the Aral Sea, now merely a few fast-drying lakes. So the horizons must be a mirage, or the light playing with the telephone lines that dip and duck from pole to pole all along this line. Somehow it seems very different to yesterday: the day has started profoundly: there is no trace of yesterday, even in the moon. The sliver of Kazakhstan we traversed yesterday feels far away. And although we are in a hissing, lumbering, clanking conveyance, the silence of the land still pervades. The invasion of this railway, surely a hundred years ago, ruptured the silence and still does daily, yet little else seems to have been added.
The vacantness of this steppe – it works on us, day in and day out. After two days it has worn me down – yet also something has changed. Does it remain the same for hundreds of miles at a time? Or does it subtly change (or indeed significantly)? So much of what we take to be unchanging is in fact constantly in flux, constantly reconfigured, despite all appearances. No two breaths are the same; the water in a river is never the same twice. So it must be with this spread of the earth’s surface.
I am bleary after another long night of border crossings. The Uzbek inspector was handsome enough for me to wake up thoroughly, but then he spoilt the effect by demanding to see the photos on my laptop. He looked at half a dozen and told me to put it away. The inspection was delayed for a while when the locomotive was decoupled and power to the carriages lost, plunging everything into darkness. But that may be normal. By today, though, we move in and out of catnaps by day, while the nights are an exercise in sleep (and toilet) deprivation. For those continuing to Tashkent, they will have a further 24 hours in which to recover, with no more borders. The passengers – now mostly Uzbek, perhaps Karakalpak – have animated, beautiful faces, though Guzal talks of being frequently fleeced in Tashkent because of her pale skin and Russian language. The ethnic remixing and separation following the collapse of the Soviet Union goes on decades afterwards, old assumptions, associations and enmities now clinging on, now falling away.
Far away to starboard now are two buildings, like factories, but they seem to be floating, not lying where they should be on the flat expanse. Something is wrong with the perspective that could be problematic for anybody less than completely sober. I stare for some time before the penny drops. Imperceptibly at first, from the horizon, a low flat plateau is becoming visible. Gradually the train comes closer to it, then I see that the buildings are resting on what first looks like a mirage hovering over the brush and occasional pools below. Chalky, pale coloured patterns, they emerge gradually as a steep rise, almost a cliff – a chink – between the ground we are crossing and the plateau. A height of perhaps thirty metres: but it is difficult to gauge from this distance. So this plateau – it must, surely, at last be the Ustyurt?
As we come nearer, the chinks are not so much cliffs as resembling piles of mud or sand, conical and sloping to the ground, as if the entire plateau had been created by piling the earth up and dropping it from above. Their distinctive face runs all along the edge, as far as I can see to front and rear. Apart from the two factory buildings above, no human traces are visible from the train. Later I realise that we also are on the Ustyurt ourselves, our railway in fact bisects it, and so the chinks and raised area to starboard are a only part of a still wider expanse in which we are included. And therein the answer to this morning’s questions. Yes, we are out of the Caspian Depression. And although the steppe appears oceanic, we are at some notional altitude, if only a few metres above sea level.
Again, somewhere north of here was the Aral Sea, no longer fed by the River and fast evaporating. For a moment, my mind befuddled by disturbed sleep, I fancy that the Aral could have been been dug out by giants and the earth heaped up beside it to form the Ustyurt. The semblance of piles of mud only reinforces this idea. What could not be explained was the haunted feeling of this space. Who were the giants and what happened to them? Did they possess wisdom that we no longer have? Even merely seen from the window of a passing train, to the beat of the corridor bazaar and the rhythm of the tracks, something tugs at me to alight, to go deeper. It would be more telling to cross the Ustyurt on foot, or on an all-terrain bicycle, or a horse. To see that there are in fact inhabitants, however sparse, and a mode of human economy, again, however thin. It feels indeed like a ‘thin place’, as the mystics say, where the veils between earth and heaven are thin. And so also the sense for me of a transition as we leave the Caspian for the central belt of Uzbekistan, crossing this low white massif.
Later today, on arriving at Nukus, I am intending to visit the museum of ‘forbidden art’ once created by Igor Savitsky, who found a safe space in Karakalpakstan from the Stalin-era censors in which he could collect and protect works of art that were too modernist or otherwise failed to conform to the officially mandated Socialist-Realist style. What began as a one-man effort to save important works from the first half of the 20th century has become a world-renowned repository. The passage across the Ustyurt makes for a preparation – the light, the spaces, but also the inward haunting – and no doubt poverty and hunger and harshness aplenty – all of which forge an intense fusion. Guzal tells me it’s a good thing I am visiting now, because the new mood of the Uzbek government, nationalistic in the narrow sense, is likely to close it down. Obtaining funding has been a sore point for a long time and the local authorities have teetered between pride at hosting such a globally significant store of art, and the attendant influx of wealthy visitors, and being required to host a large stock of work that does not fit with the current political mantra of post-independence Uzbekistan (with impoverished Karakalpakstan dragged willy-nilly along with the decisions of faraway Tashkent). I will only have what remains of one afternoon to visit and have high hopes for the day. The museum is frequently talked about these days and is no longer a ‘discovery’, just as international tourism to Uzbekistan has become a commonplace. But most tourists to not arrive at ground level via the Ustyurt.
13
Guzal has a refreshing frankness about her and talks with fascination about nature and its laws. She can explain why the land is as it is, why the ground is bare here, why there are salt pans there, what the vegetation is. Where is there water? What has happened here? If only I could follow her clipped Russian. She speaks fast and in half-sentences. Far from the long cadences of the first day, when we met for the first time and she was in full sail about problems and relatives. After two days in the confined cabin she has grown used to me and talks in familiar mode – but I cannot follow her there.
Now when I look up, the Ustyurt – or at least the bit of it that stood alongside us for an hour with its chinks like petrified heaps of earth – has slipped behind us and we are back in unbroken flatland. But it is beginning to morph into something more, shall we say, anthropomorphic. Divisions are appearing, mud banks or walls, to form small fields, and in them are tall grasses or even, as we go further, crops. The oasis is here, the transition done. In the foreground I see reeds, suggesting irrigation. We cross a channel of greenish water, much too small to be the Amu-Darya, and presumably a canal for irrigation. I check the timetable: yes, we are approaching the first settlement of the day, Kungrad, or rather, Qonirat.
Kungrad – by way of a mnemonic I picture the Arabic imperative kun, the divine affirmation with which a soul, forever known of in the mind of God, is given flesh-and-blood existence in the manifest world. And Kungrad is the first station, the first halt on our emerging from the steppe, the plateau, where little is seen or known, and a first step from silence towards the River and its teeming oasis of life. Melons and smoked fish: this is Khorezm and it is Karakalpakstan (or rather, Qoraqalpog’iston). A blue child’s bicycle on the platform, leant against benches painted in the identical turquoise blue. We are three minutes early. All the traders get off. We have a few minutes here and I get out to stretch and take the air. In fact this place is now called Qonirat, but the railways take decades to update their place names (even St Petersburg continued to be called Leningrad, and Yekaterinburg was still referred to on the railways as Sverdlovsk, for well over a decade after their old names were restored). Continuing my would-be Arabic whimsy, there is a nearby village called Adabiyat, suggesting tactfulness or right conduct. Would an inhabitant recognise the inference? And, switching to Turkic, a homestead further out is called Dzhanalyk, where dzhan is a soul. So all in all, we are coming home. We have been away for too long.
A new counterpoint emerges here, a fabulous mishmash of placenames in Uzbek, Turkmen, Russian and fragmented Arabic. Alongside farms with outdated names like Leninizm and Novy Byt (‘New way of life’) are the burial places of saints, all with Turkic names, along the roadsides or in secluded graveyards, and Uzbek and Turkmen villages. The Turkmenistan border is close by, drawn for miles with a ruler and then left to zigzag wantonly, putting anybody nearby in peril of crossing into the forbidden land, such that the railway was recently diverted from here to avoid its former encroachment into parts of northern Turkmenistan. From my 1992 journey to Dushanbe I recall halts at the likes of Dashoguz and Charzhou. Today the line wanders in rough country to the north so that nobody is obliged to obtain a visa for a few minutes’ crossing a few fields in the wrong land.
We pull out of Qonirat for the last two hours, barely, before I alight at Nukus. All around us the signs of water and life are building. The outskirts of the town are brick walls coated in clay, low poplars, reeds around low dwellings. Cotton. It is the catchment of the Amu-Darya, the Jeytun, the River.
Be_flummoxed 