The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron

Author:Colin Thubron
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062104724
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-08-12T05:40:19+00:00

Chapter 8

Tashkent

A familiar Soviet gloom permeated Samarkand’s railway station. Its gangways clanged to the trudge of labourers, and the air stank with diesel and steam spurting from vents under the platform. Everything was being rebuilt, groaning with old cranes and trucks, but nothing complete. The backs of a women’s road-gang were bent over gravel-heaps in the sidings, and a pair of bare-chested Goliaths, gouging holes along the rail-track, might have muscled out of a Socialist Realist poster. Everything – the grey-faced passengers, the engines blazoned in hammer-and-sickle, the steel bridges rigged with searchlights – conspired in a Stalinist film-set. All that was needed to complete it was a lankhaired waif with a battered suitcase, and the next moment she had arrived, haggardly pretty, her skirt muddied and her head circled in a red hair-band. I never discovered what she was doing in Uzbekistan, although she rested a moment beside me. Her father was a Czech, she said, but she had been born in the Baltic, so there was nowhere left for her now. ‘The Czechs won’t take us back,’ she said, and wandered on down the platform, trailing her one suitcase, and faltering occasionally from some pervasive tiredness.

North to Tashkent my train moved under a mottled sky. Between the punctuation-marks of messy towns and mud hamlets, we pushed across miles of pale earth ploughed for cotton, where farmers scratched the topsoil with hoes, or a lone tractor turned. My carriage was thronged by fattening Uzbek traders with their soft, jewelled wives. In the cubicle opposite, the Russian waif curled under a blanket, reading, and talked of herself in a lacklustre, musical voice. Although she worked as a clerk in a town on the Lower Volga, she said, she had trained as an actress, and an instinctive theatricality stained her cadences and tilted her profile as she said: ‘It is so hard a profession!’ or ‘I have never married.’ She spoke as if any chance of marriage were over, although she was only thirty, and she did not have to act the sadness which crowded behind her tone. Now she was reading Chekhov to perform in the people’s theatre in her home town, where amateur players starred. So for a few hours a week she became somebody else. Next month, she said, they were staging his short story The Fiancée.

I dimly remembered it, and imagined her the heroine.

‘Oh no,’ she laughed, but faintly. ‘I play the old woman.’

Ahead of us brown hills steepened and closed in round the track, then we were thundering through the Gates of Tamerlane, whose slatey cliffs reared to either side, split into mounded cubes and pyramids. Through this breach in the dwindling Pamir, Turkic and Mongol tribes had for centuries descended out of the steppes into the Zerafshan valley; Uzbek khans had battled back and forth and left their sanguinary inscriptions on the rocks, and Tamerlane stamped the cliffs with the record of his five-day forced passage, forbidding anyone to follow without his permit. Among rashes

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