The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron Page B

can’t find it in Russian.’ He added in faint reproof: ‘People should learn the holy languages. You can learn one in a few months if your will is strong enough, and if your heart is right.’ He massaged his heart with a tiny fist. ‘Look.’ He rummaged among his tools and from a carefully beribboned cloth picked out a Koran in Arabic. ‘People should read this!’
    Yet his own eyes twinkled over it unseeing; he could no more read it than I could. It was a talisman only. In the Stalin years a whole generation of educated Turcomans, the Arabic speakers, had been despatched into oblivion.
    I took it from him and turned the sacred pages. ‘Where did you get it?’
    â€˜From Iran. Sometimes they come here, those people, and from Afghanistan.’
    â€˜You favour that system, that . . .’ – the word whispered like a secret – ‘fundamentalism?’
    For a moment he went on chipping at the ivory in his hands. Suddenly I realised how I hung on his reply. Here, if anywhere, among the poor and pious, must be the breeding-ground for an Islamic resurgence.
    But he answered simply, finally: ‘No. We don’t need that here.’ He jerked his chin to the south. ‘That’s for people over there.’
    It was strange, I thought. Superficially the soil for fundamentalism was perfect here: the deepening poverty and sense of historical wrong, the damaged pride. But in fact the old man’s response was typical of his people. The idea of religion as a doctrinaire moulder of society seemed shallow-rooted among them, and their faith to thrive somewhere different, somewhere more sensory and pagan.
    â€˜All those laws and customs . . . .’ The old man resettled his grimy skull-cap. ‘They don’t matter. What matters is underneath this!’ – he plucked at his jacket – ‘What matters is the heart!’
    He laid down his gouge and tried to activate a blackened gas-ring. The old woman came in and circled round him, while he gestured her on little errands just beyond his reach – to collect a teacup here, remove a slipper there. She had lost her strangeness now. She moved about him with a slow, desanctified tread. ‘She’s deaf,’ he said. But his voice was too weak to shout at her. It fluted. His thin legs stuck out unnaturally in front of him.
    â€˜Our country’s had enough of other people’s interference,’ he said. ‘Our whole world is committing suicide.’ He sliced his hand across his throat in ghostly sacrifice. ‘All these trains, aero-planes and cars, when what we need is food! Our soil can give us three crops a year, but what do we usually get? One! All we plant is cotton, but you can’t eat cotton. You just sell it for roubles. That’s what our country’s done. And you can’t eat money either.’ He picked up a rouble note and munched it in phantom frustration. ‘Nobody works now. People have to work. Then, God willing, everything will bear fruit . . . .’
    His talk was a goulash of Islamic custom and Marxist work ethic. But his own work was almost done, he said. Two years ago he had been restoring the nearby mosque arches, when he fell and severed his spinal cord. From his hips down, he was paralysed. Yet he mentioned this with the same goblin brightness as he described everything else, illustrating his fall with the crash of his little fist on to the quilt. I remembered the scaffolding outside from which he must have toppled, and realised now why his legs were so thin, thrust in front of him. He moved them about with his hands. ‘Nothing!’ He touched the base of his spine. ‘Nothing!’ Then he pointed to the door. ‘I go about on that now. I made it myself.’ My gaze followed his finger, and alighted on one of those heartrending trolleys which cripples ride in India and Iran – wheeled boards, which they propel over the tarmac with