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14
In other places there were exchanges, words, signs. Here, little was evident. Yet somehow, maybe, this was as no less an encounter, and as close as it was going to get. In the corridor was a tall young Uzbek, his lean face striking and intense. Without giving myself a reason, I went and stood nearby, looking out of the window beside him. What a poor memory I have: what was he wearing? What was his expression, beyond inscrutable? One thing remains however. He was cradling his mobile phone in one hand, while letting it charge from a socket (the only one in this elderly carriage). In his other hand was a whole fish, about two feet long, smoked and pungent. He stood motionless and did not react when I joined him. The two of us stood there, watching the fields and rough houses of the oasis passing by. Again, it is mere convention to insist that the train was moving over a motionless country; for us, it was clearly the reverse. The axis of the world was frozen between the tall young man with the phone and the fish and myself, and the land bled past us outside like a fluid. We still did not speak, nor test out whether we had enough language in common to try. He exuded a strong presence (more than just the reek of the fish, more than just his face, thin, still smooth, compelling, with eyes that comprehended these expanses and their remedies). I was conscious of being in his country – the one rushing past outside, but also the country of his immediate proximity. I wanted to knock and enter, but there was only silence. We were on the same voyage outside, and in some sense we were travelling (or being travelled to) together. What was in the ascendant was our strangeness. Our common humanity was of course there implicit, but what gave it form was our difference. If we spoke, would we understand? What was there to say, anyway, other than salam – greetings, peace? He was immersed in his world; I was peering out of the window of my own, and out of the train window (these became the same thing) and urgently trying to glimpse his.
No doubt he was travelling on routine business, and not engaged. Or he could have been in deep contemplation. Or simply charging his phone. After a dozen minutes it was over: he unplugged the phone, walked off up the corridor, exchanged some words with a couple of traders and disappeared into a compartment.
Nothing passed between us yet his imprint remained. Not just his tall, unfamiliar figure but his whole, unscathed aura and the being he projected, so different to my own and yet so vitally, essentially close. There was something in it I needed or found.
A country boy, a rural life, smoked fish and a mobile phone. A wife and a mother somewhere, no doubt, and some kind of commerce. And tall, willowy, dark, with dark eyes that could do damage if looked at for too long. And not separable from the River.
15
The River is expiring… it no longer reaches its mouth, but is dying somewhere down in its throat. Time was when the rivers at both ends of this journey – the Volga and the Amu-Darya (and its northern twin the Syr-Darya, a branch of which brushes Tashkent) all watered the Caspian, though the two Asian rivers also fed the Aral Sea. Did they thus have two mouths each? Or did they change over time? Did man intervene, even there in the remote Ustyurt and the Caspian Depression? Meanwhile the cause of the death of the river (and thus of the Aral Sea) is well known: unbridled drawing of its waters for irrigation over a thousand miles of steppe and desert, most notably the Karakum Canal that runs along the entire bottom edge of Turkmenistan, stopping just short of the western sea. Climate change and shifts in the snow patterns in the Pamir have surely also contributed.
Maybe geography determines who we are. Where we are from. What we are from. A man can’t come from two different rivers. Or if he does, it is because of two ancestors. Within our lifetimes, geography is fixity – for it to be fluid would require a meltdown, or the passing of geological time. That fixity limits us – and gives us each our story. A river is a story, from source to sea (or for the Amu Darya, to the thirsty desert where it expires). There are still river bends, short isolated sections like sausages, of the former Uzboy in western Turkmenistan, into which the Amu Darya once flowed, carrying remnants of Pamiri snowmelt to the Caspian. That same hidden Caspian that was the lodestone of this journey. The Volga arrives from the north and north-west, the two Daryas did from the east and south-east. Then there is the Ural, which brings water from the Ural Mountains south-west to the same sea. The Caspian, itself really just a giant lake with no outflow, thus receives water from an enormous catchment, a mixing of east and west, with no exit except by evaporation; once the catchment was greater still.
On the approach to Nukus we finally see it with our eyes. Moments before pulling into the station we cross a long bridge over the River itself. The Amu-Darya, which here has a wide bed (perhaps three hundred metres), but the water level is pitifully low. Large areas of sandy mud stand up through the water. Is this because it is nearing its end point in the desert? Or is this a dry time of the year, even by the standards of this desert region? The capacity of the river is immense, should it ever be in spate, yet that feels unlikely here. Whereas for other rivers, the downstream sections carry the highest flow volume and power, here the flow has dwindled again and – seen fleetingly from the train – no current is discernible.
A moment later the River is behind us and the train is slowing for Nukus. The transition is complete; we have come through. The rest of the journey would be domestic, easy. I gather my things and Guzal and I say goodbye in her common-sense fashion. The River is behind us: we are in the land between the Rivers. Transoxiana. Known to the Chinese, the Persians, India, Russia and Europe, and more specifically Khorezm, this north-western part of it. During its Arab heyday one philosopher named al-Khorezmi was the figure from whom the word ‘algorithm’ is derived. And as J.G. Bennett wrote, this was historically a fertile meeting place for the world and a suitable one for the arising of a culture of khwajagan, or Masters who carried a certain global wisdom for a certain period in history. Part of my purpose in coming here was to learn about some of these figures and even visit their tombs. Today – disregarding the nationalist efforts of each republic’s government, and Belt and Roads initiatives proffered by China – the region remains empty, remote, a civilisational equivalent of the Ustyurt, and likewise imprinted with past importance.
16
We tumble off the train, giddy with activity after two days of catnaps and tea drinking. Nukus as seen from the station is a mass of highways and concrete buildings. The station has a showy high-rise building with mirror windows, but it is not open to passengers. We are shepherded out of a side gate into an enormous car park and triaged into car owners, taxi passengers and miscellaneous (a very small group). The train moves off slowly; I am sorry not to be still on it. This place is harshly modern after the long steppe run, though as the eye becomes accustomed, I feel the same sense of it all being provisional that I sensed back in Atyrau. None of it feels intended to last, this is a land of steppe villages, not cities, and all this car culture could fall away at any moment to be replaced by horses again.
Looking back the other way, over the railway line, I feel a pang for Konye-Urgench, or ‘Old Urgench’, the small Turkmen town just some thirty kilometres to our south – an easy bicycle ride – but barred by the impenetrable Turkmen border. It would take months of applications and the expense of hiring a chaperone to be able to spend an hour or two there. But for now I turn back to Nukus. It will be a race to take a taxi into town, find my lodgings and set out for the Savitsky Museum.
Be_flummoxed 