Grand Centaur Station by Larry Frolick

Author:Larry Frolick [Frolick, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55199-517-5
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2004-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Pavhalan Makhmud: Poet, Champion Wrestler,

and Occasional Hat-Maker

Six hundred kilometres west of Tashkent, near the border of Turkmenistan, sits the old slave-market garrison town of Khiva. It’s an infamous place, the subject of numerous Russian Romantic paintings, its khans’ cruel sport with their victims providing graphic detail for mind-boggling tales, most of them true. This is the city of fabled caravans, of lurid and fantastic harems, the heart of a supremely capricious Orient, which captivated the West’s poetic imagination for more than three centuries with its opium images of decay and splendid silks, gibbering madness and high-erotic sheen, the feverish Asia of Thomas De Quincey, Sir Richard Burton, who translated Thousand and One Nights, and the doomed poet Shelley, who must have been thinking of Khiva when he wrote “Ozymandias,” “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone …”

Khiva is a rampart of serrated brown-mud walls, walls originally festooned with the gashed bodies of the week’s unwilling visitors. Khiva is a mad granny’s collection of impossibly tilted, blue turquoise domes reaching for the perfection of the uncaring sky. Khiva is the ancestral home of legendary khans, renowned for their addiction to slave-mongering and idle decapitation over trifles. Khiva is where I sit alone this afternoon, in a blazing courtyard, watching the yellow sun streak through its gates and portals, an uneasy colour, and entirely lightless.

The nineteenth-century Russian painter Sererov built his whole career around the depiction of Khiva’s excesses and fiendish barbarities. In his monumental work, The Count, he shows a group of Khivan deputies tallying a heap of fresh European heads, while the warriors who lopped them off wait patiently for their payment. Three heads for a silk robe, twelve heads for a full broadcoat with gold thread, according to my guide.

The old city within the ramparts is commanding, almost the size of the Kremlin in Moscow, eighteen hectares, and empty but for a handful of souvenir hawkers, who wait in the narrowing shade with their sun-bleached offerings of fur hats and glazed, blurry pottery.

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