Читать книгу In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads - Stanley Stewart - Страница 10

In Volgograd the lobby of the hotel was steeped in gloom. A clock ticked somewhere. Blades of blue light from the street lamps outside cut across the Caucasian carpets and struck the faces of the marble pillars. A grand staircase ascended into vaults of darkness. In the square a car passed and the sweep of headlamps illuminated statues of naked figures like startled guests caught unawares between the old sofas and the potted palms. It was only ten o’clock in the evening, but the hotel was so quiet it might have been abandoned.

When I rang the bell at the reception desk, a woman I had not seen lifted her head. She had been asleep. A mark creased her cheek where it had been pressed against a ledger. She gazed at me in silence for a long moment as she disentangled herself from her dreams.

‘Passport?’ she whispered hoarsely, as if that might hold a useful clue to where she was.

My room was on the fifth floor. I was struggling with the gates of the antique lift when an ancient attendant appeared silently from a side doorway. He wore a pair of enormous carpet slippers and a silk scarf which bound his trousers like a belt. From a vast bunch of keys, he unlocked the lift and together we rose through the empty hotel, to the slow clicking of wheels and pulleys, arriving on the fifth floor with a series of violent shudders. When I stepped out into a dark hall, the gates of the lift clanged behind me, and the ghoulish operator floated slowly downwards again in a tiny halo of light, past my feet and out of sight. I stood for a moment listening to the sighs and creaks and mysterious exhalations of the hotel, and wondered if I was the only guest.

My room had once been grand. You could have ridden a horse through the doorway. The ceiling mouldings, twenty feet above my head, were weighted with baroque swags of fruit. The plumbing was baronial. The furnishings, however, appeared to have come from a car-boot sale in Minsk. There was a Formica coffee table with a broken leg and a chest of drawers painted in khaki camouflage. The bed was made of chipboard and chintz; when I sat tentatively on the edge, it swayed alarmingly. A vast refrigerator, standing between the windows, roared like an aeroplane waiting for takeoff.

I was tired, and in want of a bath. There appeared to be no plug but by some miracle of lateral thinking I discovered that the metal weight attached to the room key doubled as the bath plug. As I turned on the water, there was a loud knock at the door.

Outside in the passage stood a stout woman in a low-cut dress, a pair of fishnet stockings, and a tall precarious hairdo. But for her apparel she might have been one of those Russian tractor drivers of the 1960s, a heroine of the collective farm, muscular, square-jawed, willing to lay down her life for a good harvest. In her hand, where one might have expected a spanner, she carried only a dainty white handbag.

She smiled. Her teeth were smeared with lipstick.

‘You want massage?’ she said in English. ‘Sex? Very good.’

Prostitution is the only room service that most Russian hotels provide, and the speed with which it arrives at your door, unsolicited, is startling in a nation where so many essential services involve queuing. There was some lesson here about market forces.

The woman smiled and nodded. I smiled back and shook my head.

‘No thank you,’ I said.

But Olga didn’t get where she was by taking no for an answer. ‘Massage very good. I come back later. I bring other girls.’ She was taking a mobile telephone out of her bag. ‘What you want? Blondes? I have very nice blondes. How many blondes you want?’ She had begun to dial a number, presumably the Blonde Hot Line. I had a vision of fair-haired tractor drivers marching towards us from the four corners of Volgograd.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘No, thank you. No massage. No sex. No blondes.’

I was closing the door. The woman’s bright commercial manner had slipped like a bad wig. In the gloom of the passage she suddenly looked old and defeated. I felt sorry for her, and for Russia, reduced to selling blondes to cash-rich foreigners.

‘Good luck,’ I said. ‘I hope you find someone else to massage.’

‘Old soldiers.’ She shrugged. ‘Only war veterans come here. It’s not good for business. They are too old for blondes. And they are always with the wives.’

I commiserated with her about this unseemly outbreak of marital fidelity.

‘Where you from?’ she asked. She brightened at the mention of London.

‘Charles Dickens,’ she cried. Her face suddenly shed years. Dickens, with his portrayals of London’s poor, had been a part of every child’s education in Russia under the old regime. ‘David Copperfield. Oliver Twiski, Nikolai Nickelovitch. I am in love with Charles Dickens. Do you know Malinki Nell. Ooooh. So sad.’

Suddenly I heard the sound of the bath-water. I rushed into the bathroom and closed the taps just as the water was reaching the rim.

‘What is your name?’ Olga was inside the vestibule. She seemed disappointed with an unDickensian Stanley. ‘You should be David. David Copperfield. In Russia they make a film of David Copperfield. He look like you. Tall, a little hungry, and the same trouble with the hair.’

‘What’s wrong with my hair?’ I asked.

‘No. Very nice hair. But you should comb.’ She was looking over my shoulder at the room. ‘They give you room with no balcony. Next door, the same price, a better room with balcony. They are lazy. Hotel is empty. What does it matter?’

When I turned to glance at the room myself, she teetered past me on her high heels and sat on the only chair. She seemed relieved to have the weight off her feet.

I stood in the doorway for a moment then decided I didn’t have the heart to throw her out. Dickens had already made us comrades.

‘Have a glass of vodka,’ I said.

I unpacked my food from the train and she took charge of it, pushing aside my Swiss army knife and fetching a switchblade out of her bag. She kicked off her shoes and carved the sausage, the dark bread, and the cheese, peeled the oranges and the hard-boiled eggs and poured out two small glasses of vodka.

We talked about Dickens and Russia. For seventy years Russians had read Dickens as a portrait of the evils of Western capitalism. Now that they had capitalism themselves, the kind of raw nineteenth-century capitalism that the revolution had interrupted, Dickens had come to Russia. The country was awash with urchins, impostors, fast-talking charlatans, scar-faced criminals, rapacious lawyers, deaf judges, browbeaten clerks, ageing prostitutes, impoverished kind-hearted gentility, people with no past, and people with too much past.

‘Russia is a broken country,’ Olga sighed, failing to see the Dickensian ingredients of a sprawling Victorian pot-boiler all about her.

Her mobile rang. She grunted into the mouthpiece a few times then put it away again. ‘Business,’ she said, squeezing her feet back into her scuffed stilettos. She begin to pack up our picnic.

‘Don’t leave the cheese out,’ she said.

She let out a long sigh as she hoisted herself to her feet. ‘I am tired,’ she said, straightening her dress.

‘Goodbye Master Stanley. If there is something you are needing, you see me okay. Ask at reception. They all know me.’

Then she teetered away up the hall into the dark recesses of the hotel.

Russia’s tragedies are on a different scale from other nations’, as if disaster has found room to expand in its vast distances. Of total losses in World War Two, some fifty million people, over half were Russians. One sixth of the population are said to have perished in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. Volgograd, under its old name of Stalingrad, was the scene of one of the most horrific battles. In 1942 the German Sixth Army laid siege to the city for four months, bombarding it relentlessly, reducing the city to rubble and its population to cannibalism. In a campaign that speaks more about sheer determination than military sophistication, the Russians turned the Germans and drove them back across the Don. But the cost was staggering. A million Russian soldiers were casualties in the defence of Stalingrad, more than twice the population of the city, and more than all the American casualties in the whole of the Second World War. Their memorial is almost as colossal as their tragedy.

I took the tram to Mother Russia. Her statue overlooks the Volga on the northern outskirts of the city. Long before I reached her, I could see her sword raised above a block of tenements. It vanished for a time then her vast head came floating into view beyond the smokestacks of a derelict factory. Her size confused my sense of distance and scale, and I got down from the tram three stops too soon.

Long slow steps climbed through a succession of stone terraces framed by stone reliefs of grieving citizens. On the last, where a granite soldier with a sub-machine-gun symbolizes the defence of the city, sounds of battle are piped between the trees and a remnant of ruined city wall. To one side stands a rotunda where 7200 names, picked at random from the lists of dead, are inscribed in gold on curving walls of red marble. A tape-loop plays Schumann’s Traümerei; the choice is meant to indicate that Russians held no grudge against ordinary Germans.

On the hill above, Mother Russia bestrides the sky. As tall as Nelson’s Column, and weighing 8000 tonnes, the statue depicts a young woman, a Russian version of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, striding into a new world, in too much of a hurry to notice she was still in her nightdress. Her upraised sword is the length of a tennis court. Her feet are the size of a London bus. She is striding eastward, across the Volga, glancing over her shoulder to check that Russia is following.

I reclined on her big toe, warm in the afternoon sun, and gazed across the Volga at an empty lion-coloured prairie beneath a fathomless sky. The city stretches for some 40 miles along the western bank without ever daring to cross the river, as if recognizing that the far bank was another country. There are no bridges. If the Black Sea was the nomadic frontier to the Greeks in antiquity, in modern times in Russia the focus for that uneasy boundary has been the Volga. Within its long embrace lies Mother Russia; beyond was the Wild East, the untamed land of the Tartars. Volgograd was founded in the sixteenth century as a fortress, built to protect Russians settlers from their nomadic incursions. If the Volga is the quintessential Russian river, it is due in part to its character as a frontier, poised between the national contradictions of West and East, of Slav and Tartar.

Scratch a Russian, the old proverb goes, and you will find a Tartar. Over the centuries the Mongol Golden Horde which dominated the Russian princes from their tented capitals here on the Volga became absorbed into Russia’s complex ethnicities. The Tatar Autonomous Region lies north along the Volga around its capital Kazan. The Kalmyks, a Mongolian people, have their own region to the south. The Cossacks, another Tartar band, are part of Russian folklore. In these parts every Russian town has its Tartar district where the lanes become narrower, the people louder and life less ordered. Beneath the feet of Mother Russia, brandishing her sword at the eastern steppes, is a Tartar tomb, the Mamaev Kurgan, centuries older than the city.

From Mother Russia’s big toe, one is reminded of the political context of the ambivalent relationship between Russian and Tartar. The statue striding towards the Volga is a symbol of the reverse of a historic tide. By the eighteenth century the balance of power had tilted irrevocably away from the peoples who had migrated from Central Asia and who had sapped Russia for centuries with their demands for tribute. By the age of Peter the Great, Russia was coming to dominate the nomadic hordes of the steppes, and had embarked upon an eastward expansion that would eventually reach even distant Mongolia. They built towns, roads, schools and factories; they sought to bring settled civilization to the regions beyond the Volga. Only by controlling these turbulent regions could they feel secure. Marching toward eastern horizons, the colossal statue seeks to mask the scale of Russian anxieties. Their imperial ambitions were a plea for order, for the safe predictability of sedentary life.

Friar William reached the Volga in the middle of August. The problem with his mission was that no one knew what to do with him. Mongol princes to whom he presented himself invariably resorted to handing him on to their superiors. In the Crimea he had been given an audience at the camp of the Mongol governor, Scacatai. When asked what message he brought to the Mongols William replied simply, ‘Words of Christian faith.’ The governor ‘remained silent, but wagged his head’, then said he had better speak to Sartaq, a senior figure, camped beyond the River Don.

While William waited on arrangements for his onward travel he had a brief breakthrough on the evangelical front when he persuaded a resident Muslim to convert to Christianity. Apparently the fellow was much taken with the idea of the cleansing of his sins and William’s promise of Resurrection from the Dead. The scheme came unstuck at the last moment however when the man insisted on first speaking to his wife who informed him that Christians were not allowed to drink koumiss, the fermented mare’s milk that is the chief tipple in nomad tents. In spite of William’s assurances that this was not the case, the fellow decided he wouldn’t risk it.

Sadly the belief, then current in the West, that Sartaq was a Christian turned out to be an ill-founded rumour. He was happy to receive gifts from Christian envoys, William reports on reaching his camp, but when the Muslims turned up with better gifts, they were immediately given precedence. ‘In fact,’ William confesses, ‘my impression is that he makes sport of Christians.’ Unsure how to deal with his visitors, Sartaq sent the friars on to his father, Batu, who was encamped on the Volga.

Batu was already migrating toward his winter pastures in the steppes to the east of the Volga, when the friars caught up with him. ‘I was struck with awe,’ William wrote on seeing his encampment. The vast sea of tents had ‘the appearance of a large city … with inhabitants scattered around in every direction for a distance of three or four leagues.’ At its heart stood the great pavilion of Batu, its tent flaps open to the sunny and auspicious south.

William’s first audience with Batu proved an interesting moment in east-west relations. When they were led inside the tent by their escort they found the grandson of Genghis Khan seated on a broad couch, inlaid with gold, amidst an assembly of attendants and wives. For a moment no one spoke. The friars stood, slightly intimidated by the grandeur of the pavilion, while the Mongols stared. Here were the envoys of the King of the Franks: two fat monks, barefoot, bareheaded, clothed in dusty robes. Itinerant peddlers would have presented a more respectable appearance.

William was not in the best of moods. This was his third Mongol audience in less than three months; each was as inconclusive as the one before. Further irritated by being obliged to kneel before Batu, he waded straight in with the hell and damnation. He would pray for his host, the friar said, but there was really little he could do for him. They were heathens, unbaptized in the Christian Church, and God would condemn them to everlasting fire.

When William had finished his introduction, you could presumably have heard a pin drop. At this point the friar carefully edits his own account and does not record Batu’s response. But the reply of the barbarian khan, the harbinger of chaos and darkness, has passed into folklore. We find it in the records of one Giacomo d’Iseo, another Franciscan, who relates the story of the encounter as described by the King of Armenia. It was a lesson to the westerners in a civilized discourse.

Surprised by William’s aggressive manner, Batu replied with a parable. ‘The nurse,’ he said, ‘begins first to let drops of milk fall into the infant’s mouth, so that the sweet taste may encourage the child to suck; only next does she offer him the nipple. Thus you should first persuade us in simple and reasonable fashion, as (your) teaching seems to us to be altogether foreign. Instead you threaten us at once with everlasting punishment.’ His words were greeted with a slow hand-clap by the assembled Mongols.

Despite Batu’s disapproval, he invited William to sit by him and served him with a bowl of mare’s milk. He wished the friars well and would be happy for them to remain in Mongol territories, he declared, but unfortunately he could not give them the necessary permissions. For this they would have to travel to the court of Mongke Khan, Lord of all the Mongols, who resided at the capital Qaraqorum in Mongolia itself, almost three thousand miles to the east. William’s journey had only just begun.

A month later a guide arrived to escort them eastward. He seemed a trifle tetchy about being assigned two fat foreigners, and was obviously worried that they would not be able to keep up. ‘It is a four months journey,’ the guide warned them. ‘The cold there is so intense that rocks and trees split apart with the frost … If you prove unable to bear it I will abandon you on the way.’

By day some life returned to the lobby of the Hotel Volgograd. The receptionist was awake and the ancient lift operator loitered by the door. All they lacked were guests.

The Intourist office located just off the lobby exuded the solid respectability and feminine good sense of a Women’s Institute, circa 1957. It was staffed by a phalanx of charming middle-aged matrons, dressed in twinsets and pearls. I dropped by in time for afternoon tea.

In the past most tourists to the city came from the former Communist countries of eastern Europe as well as from West Germany where former Panzer officers were curiously keen to revisit the scene of one of their more spectacular defeats. Few of the former could afford the trip now, and the latter were dying off. In the absence of other tourists, travel information had rather dried up. The planetarium, boat trips on the Volga, Kazakh visas, all were a mystery to the women of Intourist. I asked about train tickets; I had spent much of the morning in the railway station trying to purchase a ticket to Kazakhstan. Offering me a scone, Svetlana, the English speaker, admitted that train travel was beyond their remit. In the genteel atmosphere of the tourist office, beneath posters of Volgograd’s factories, my enquiries began to seem impolite, and the conversation turned to a series of Tchaikovsky concerts to which the office had subscribed.

Into this civilized circle Olga descended like a one-woman barbarian horde. I heard my name, a head-turning shriek from the lobby, and suddenly there she was pushing through the glass doors of the office and limping towards us, still in the heels and hooker’s uniform of the previous evening.

‘Master Stanley,’ she called, waving and smiling with the excitement of a fond reunion. Looking up from their tea, the Intourist women gazed at this advancing apparition with horror. Then, as one, they turned their shocked expressions to me. I felt myself blushing, compounding the impression of guilt. There was a moment of dreadful silence as the irrepressible Olga stood before us.

‘Hellooo,’ I said feebly.

‘Master Stanley, I am looking everywhere for you,’ Olga said. ‘You are not in your room.’

The wide eyes of the Intourist women narrowed as they swung back from my red face to a closer inspection, from the feet up, of Olga – the torn fishnets, the bulging figure in the cheap tight dress, the fat cleavage, the heavy erratic make-up. Then they turned their gaze to one another, a circle of smug disapproval framed by raised eyebrows and pursed lips.

Amidst their condescending censure some instinct for civility finally surfaced in me, and I rose to offer Olga my seat. She did not take it. A change in the set of her shoulders signalled her recognition of the women’s disdain.

In the lobby Olga said, ‘You want train tickets?’ The hotel grapevine had already informed her of my visit to the railway station.

‘I am trying to get a ticket on the Kazakhstan Express,’ I said.

‘I can get for you,’ she announced. ‘No problem. Don’t waste time with Intourist peoples.’ She made a face towards the glass doors. She didn’t seem to like the company I kept.

Volgograd was the unlikely setting for an international festival of contemporary dance which coincided with my visit, and in the evening I went along to a performance by the Be Van Vark Kollektivtanz from Berlin. The principal piece, Orgon II + III, was based on the work of Willem Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst, whose guiding principle was that mental health depended upon the frequency of sexual congress. He went so far as to recommend the abolition of the nuclear family which he identified as a deterrent to regular orgasms.

The Berlin avant-garde held no surprises for me since the evening I had taken my mother to a performance of a Handel opera at the Riverside Studios in London. My mother was very fond of Handel and I had booked seats in the front row which at the Riverside meant that you were more or less part of the action. I had not registered that the visiting company came from the cutting edge of German performance art. It was Handel all right, but not as we knew it. When the cast fluttered onto the stage after a lilting overture I was startled to see that they wore nothing more than one or two strategic fig leaves. The performance was in the Reichian mode and for the next two hours and forty-three minutes, unrelieved by anything so old-fashioned as an interval, the cast members cavorted carnally and orgasmically in our laps. I remember it as one of the worst evenings of my life, and cursed myself for balking at the ticket prices at Covent Garden. My mother however was delighted, and never tired of telling people about the production. ‘Such energetic performances,’ she would say.

The soundtrack of Orgon II + III, so far as one could tell, was of frogs mating. The dance itself was a frenzied affair with some brilliant and very physical performances. The dancers kept their clothes on and the orgasms, if there were any, were difficult to distinguish from the triple pirouettes. The audience however seemed rather stunned. Presumably Orgon II + III was a bit much for people emerging from seventy years of social realism, when culture was devoted to happy peasants striding into a golden future of social justice, international peace and good harvests.

I walked back to the hotel through a park where orgasmically dysfunctional families were sharing ice-creams. Young people loitered around the ubiquitous kiosks which sold beer and snacks, and shoals of drunks floated between the park benches. Someone suggested after the war that the smouldering ruins of Stalingrad should be left as a monument to the defeat of Fascism. But Stalin understandably did not like the idea of his name being associated with a pile of rubble, so large sums were diverted to the city’s reconstruction. The results are pleasant if uninspiring. The town is given to wide avenues interrupted by parks and war memorials. There are red sandstone apartments with balustraded balconies, built in the fifties as a reconstruction of the past, which look like they will last for ever, and yellow concrete tenements with damp stains, built in the sixties as a vision of the future, which look like they might not see the weekend.

I went for dinner in the grandiose restaurant in the hotel. In Stalin’s day it had presumably hosted power lunches of the Party hierarchy. These days it is as spectacular and as empty as a mausoleum. I sat by a tall window overlooking the square. The service left plenty of time to admire the marble columns, the gilt chandeliers, the vast ornate mirrors, and the tables laid with silver and fine linen. The waiter appeared to be the lift operator’s elder brother. It took him five minutes to cross the vast hardwood floor with a glass of rust-coloured water on a silver tray. He was deaf and I had to write the order in large letters on a napkin. He scrutinized this for some time, then, turning away without a word, embarked on the long journey towards the kitchen.

I was savouring the pleasure of dining alone when Olga appeared from beyond a fat pillar and sank into the seat opposite.

‘I have ticket,’ she said, lifting the precious article from her bag. ‘You go Saratov on the morning train, then changing for Almaty train.’

I thanked her enthusiastically but she waved her hand.

‘I wish I was going with you,’ she said, propping her elbows on the table and searching her molars, with a toothpick, for some remnant of her dinner.

‘To Kazakhstan?’ I asked. It was not a destination beloved of many Russians.

‘To Saratov. My village is there. On the other side of the river.’

I had not thought of her as coming from elsewhere, especially a village. She seemed so ingrained in this city with its opportunities for compromise and anonymity.

‘What is it like, your village?’ I asked.

‘Krasivoje,’ she said. ‘Beautiful. The apple trees have the flowers now. There is the Volga. It is like a …’ she searched for the word, pointing at the ceiling.

‘A chandelier?’ I suggested.

She shook her head impatiently.

‘A tobacco-stained ceiling?’

She frowned. ‘No, no.’ She flipped her hand to indicate something further.

‘The sky? Ah-ha. Paradise.’

‘Like paradise,’ she said. Her face had softened. ‘My son is there, with his babushka.’

She looked at me and I realized I had been promoted. A son was not an admission for potential clients.

‘How old is he? I asked.

‘Eight,’ she said. ‘I send money. But I will not bring him to Volgograd. Never to this city.’ She shook her head emphatically as if it was the city and not the human heart that was responsible for her downfall.

The advance notices for the Kazakhstan Express had not been encouraging. Everything I had heard or read about this train described it as a nightmare. The Intourist women in the Hotel Volgograd politely changed the subject when I mentioned it. The guidebook to Russian railways pleaded with readers to avoid it altogether. Even Olga was uneasy about the Kazakhstan Express.

Prostitutes, pimps, drug-pushers and thieves were said to have all the best seats; the sixty-hour journey to Almaty was standing room only for those without underworld connections. The passengers were described as drunk and belligerent, and the conductors locked themselves in the guard vans to avoid the knife fights. Robbery apparently was more common than ticket collecting. Passengers, it was said, were regularly gassed in their sleep and stripped of their possessions. Reports of the Mongol hordes in thirteenth-century Europe could hardly compete with the reputation of the Kazakhstan Express.

Arriving from Moscow, the Kazakhstan Express crept into Saratov station a couple of hours late, a shabby exhausted-looking train with windows too grimy to allow any view of the interior. The reassuring women attendants of Russian trains clocked off at the end of their shift and were replaced by Kazakh conductors, short stocky men with tattoos and pencil moustaches.

First impressions were encouraging: I boarded and passed down the corridor without a single confrontation with a knife-wielding thug. Predictably my bunk was already occupied by someone else who had paid a bribe to the conductor but after some negotiation I managed to secure a place in another compartment at the end of the carriage. It had the air of a bordello. Scarves had been hung over the windows flooding the place with a subdued reddish light. Women’s undergarments were strewn about like decoration. There was a heavy odour of cheap scent and the table was crowded with hairpins, combs, make-up, cigarettes and two empty bottles of Georgian wine. Amidst the debris three women lay on the bunks, slumbering odalisques, snoring gently in the sprawling postures of sleep.

I climbed onto one of the upper bunks and set about secreting my valuables about my person. The limited banking facilities on the journey ahead meant that I was carrying bundles of cash. I lashed thick wedges of roubles around my midriff and filled my boxer shorts with American dollars. The reputation of the train and the atmosphere of the compartment reminded me of a story that I had heard recently about the Trans-Siberian Express. A friend had been obliged to share his compartment with a demure-looking woman who was a librarian by day and a hooker by night. From Moscow to Vladivostok, she had entertained a succession of clients on the upper bunk. I peered over the edge of my bunk at my travelling companions. With their scarlet lipstick and false eyelashes, they had obviously dispensed with the librarian disguise. I wondered briefly if Russia was turning me into a deranged puritan, seeing debauchery at every turn.

We rattled across the Volga and rode away into the late afternoon through an endless plain of wild flowers. Lines of telegraph poles shrank to nothing where dirt roads tipped over the edge of the flat horizons. Villages marooned in all this space were shambolic entities. Everything looked home-made. The houses were made from scavenged planks while the tractors appeared to be assembled from wheelbarrows and old sewing machines. A town hove into view, announced by box cars and grain silos. Ancient cars lumbered through its streets, raising slow clouds of dust between concrete tenements and vacant lots. A row of smashed street lamps dangled entrails of loose wires. In these regions public utilities had a short life. Drunks used street lamps for target practice, and young entrepreneurs stole the glass and the bulbs for the black market. Then we were in the country again, turning through bedraggled meadows where brown and white cows lifted their sad heads as the train passed.

The women awoke together at six o’clock as if a bell had rung. Nodding in my direction, they lit cigarettes and set about filing their nails. Precedence among them was denoted by the number of their gold teeth. I wondered if it was the reputation of the train which had persuaded them to deposit their savings in dentistry. The eldest, a butch blonde, had a mouthful while the youngest, a pretty woman in satin trousers and sunglasses, relied on a single gold incisor to ensure her financial security. They settled down to read the Russian tabloids. Devoted to everyday tales of corruption, sex and violence, the gory covers displayed montages of corpses, American dollars, blazing guns, and a man with tattoos thumping a half-naked woman. I glanced over one of their shoulders at an inside page dominated by a photograph of a man’s naked bottom with a spear planted deep in the right buttock. Mercifully this was in blurry black and white.

With evening the Kazakhstan Express settled into a swaying domesticity, the antithesis of the dark criminality that the train was rumoured to represent. Up and down our carriage the compartments had been colonized by their passengers. Bags were unpacked, blankets unrolled, shoes stowed beneath the seats, and food, newspapers and general clutter spread over the tables and the seats. The handrail in the corridor had been commandeered as a communal clothes line for towels and flannels. People changed into slippers and old sweaters, lit pipes and opened brown bottles of beer. Reclining on the lower bunks, unbuttoned and unconcerned, they might have been installed on familiar divans in their own homes. An old-fashioned neighbourliness took hold of the carriage with people popping in and out of one another’s compartments to share stories and sausages, or standing outside in the passageway like villagers at their front gates, gossiping, admiring the view, sharing cups of tea from the samovar.

Reports of barbarism invariably tend to exaggeration. The evil reputation of the Kazakhstan Express dated from the dark years of 1992 and 1993 when crime in the former Soviet Union surged into the vacuum created by the collapse of government authority. But a railway police force and the stubborn resistance of the ordinary passengers, who had set upon thieves like lynch mobs, had brought an end to this lawless period. Though it still has its problems, I can report that the Kazakhstan Express was a good train of decent people. The three women in my compartment were not prostitutes but traders transporting dresses to Almaty. In the evening they arranged a small fashion show for our immediate neighbours who applauded the latest Moscow fashions with innocent enthusiasm.

Night fell and the lamps came on in the compartments. Somewhere in the past hour or two we had crossed into Kazakhstan untroubled by border inspection. I stood by an open window in the passage and watched the moon sailing in and out of view as the train curved back and forth. A scarf of smoke from the engine flapped away over a great silver emptiness.

The village street of the carriage passageway was almost deserted now. Two windows along an elderly gentleman in heavy cotton pyjamas and slippers was reading a book by one of the carriage lights. He was a tall ramshackle figure with a bony face and unruly thatch of hair. He looked like the village eccentric. In the dim light he pressed his face so close to the page, he might have been smelling the print. He looked up and saw me watching him.

‘Pushkin,’ he murmured. His nose was a beak, and his hair falling over his brow gave his face a startled appearance.

‘Do you know Eugene Onegin?’ he asked in French.

I said I did, then went on to tell him that I had named my cat Pushkin. The old man’s face darkened at this frivolity, and his long hands encircled the book protectively.

‘Russia’s Shakespeare,’ he said under his breath, as some reprimand to my cat.

‘Onegin was a traveller,’ the man went on. His voice held some note of accusation. He peered at me as if I too was indistinct print he was trying to decipher. There was something strange about his eyes. They looked at me individually, first one then the other. ‘He was never satisfied,’ the man said. ‘He needed always a new horizon.’ The clatter of the rails crescendoed as we passed over a stretch of bad track. The train bucked and we swayed in unison against the windows. Over the noise words surfaced like pieces of wreckage – ‘Un romantique … unable to form attachments … a nomad … emotional dilettante … only wanted what he had lost …’ – until the roar of the wheels overwhelmed us completely and the man drifted away, still mouthing complaints about the lovelorn Onegin.

I retired to my bunk. The women were already asleep. All night the long whistle of the train echoed through my dreams, a mournful solitary note, a traveller’s complaint, trailing uneasy notions of movement and displacement.

The morning brought further emptiness. The landscape had been reduced to cruel simplicities – a white sky and a flat scaly plain over which clouds and their shadows sailed without distraction. In places the tough hide of the desert was softened by a spring glaze of green, a brief interlude between the twin extremities of winter and summer. The only buildings seemed to be government projects which appeared occasionally in the distance, a cluster of tin-roofed cement barns, a collection of silos, yards of antiquated tractors, a ploughed field as big as Wiltshire, then nothing again. How the Mongols must have loved these regions. Riding towards Europe, they could do a thousand miles out here without having to cross a ditch, or deal with the impediment of cities. Friar William was less happy. It took him almost seven weeks to cross the deserts of Kazakhstan.

‘The most severe trial,’ William reports. ‘There was no counting the times we were famished, thirsty, frozen and exhausted.’ What little habitation they encountered belonged to Mongols newly arrived in this recently conquered wilderness. All were keen to know about the sheep, cattle and horses in France and whether the Pope was really five hundred years old.

In the next compartment was a Russian family of three lumbering ursine figures – Father Bear, Mother Bear and Little Bear, a girl of eight. Father Bear was a colonel in the army. He took an interest in me, and emerged every time he saw me in the corridor to tell me things in passable English. He told me about the workings of drilling equipment on distant oil wells, about camel breeding, about the navigational systems of space craft, about the train schedules on our line. You name it, Father Bear was an expert on it. Through the open door of the compartment I could hear him droning on to his wife. Marriage to Father Bear had made the long-suffering Mother Bear a professional listener. She listened for hours at a stretch to his interminable discourses as we drifted through this flat emptiness, including a good hour and a half on the subject of baling equipment.

They invited me for lunch. The main course was a three-foot dried fish which they kept beneath one of the seats. Father Bear was telling me about Russian motorcars, of which he had an unaccountably high opinion. We passed a vast factory, one of the government projects abandoned in this bleak place. The empty buildings showed windows of sky.

‘Look,’ Father Bear said. ‘Perestroika. Gorbachev’s restructuring.’ And he launched into a lengthy rant about the last Communist leader. The intense hatred for Gorbachev in Russia is a puzzle to most Westerners, particularly in the light of the directionless governments which succeeded him. Having abandoned dictatorship Russians seem to have gone straight for the basest features of democracy. Yeltsin’s appeal was based on his image as the man in the street. He reflected the Russian character with all its virtues and faults – tenacious, romantic, put-upon, alcoholic. He was prostonarodny, a difficult Russian term to translate, which means earthy or folksy. Gorbachev by contrast was a pedagogue, never happier than when he was lecturing the nation about its shortcomings. Most curious was the universal loathing for Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa. Father Bear believed that she was personally to blame for the country’s decline. She had dismantled Communism, he said, in order to buy her hats in Paris.

We rattled on across the flat unrelenting steppe. The grass was thinning, revealing patches of earth like pale raw-looking skin. Beyond Celkar the sand started to take over, and the grass was reduced to tufts in the drifting dunes. Bactrian camels strayed listlessly into the middle distance, their humps still sagging after the long winter. Crusted eddies of salt now wound across the baked sand, and the air seemed to have acquired a bitter acrid taste.

‘Salt from the Aral Sea,’ Father Bear announced, tasting his lips. ‘It is dying.’

At midday we passed through Aralsk, once an important fishing port on the Aral Sea. We gazed out at an emaciated town. Many of its bleaker buildings were boarded up and whole districts were abandoned. In the drifts of sand at the far end of empty streets we could see the rusting hulks of fishing boats tipped on their sides beneath the skeletal forms of cranes where the docks had once been.

A monument to the folly of centralized planning, the death of the Aral Sea is one of the great ecological disasters of our age. Like so many Soviet tragedies, it began with Stalin who decreed in the 1920s that the Soviet Union must become self-sufficient in cotton. The vast spaces of Central Asia were to be the arena for this grand project, and in particular the basins of the two great rivers which fed the landlocked Aral Sea, the Amu Dariya and the Syr Dariya, the ancient Oxus and Jaxartes. Vast irrigation networks, constructed to feed King Cotton, bled the rivers into the surrounding desert, and the level of the Aral Sea, the fourth largest lake in the world, began to fall. The problem was compounded as the population of Central Asia grew and the thirst for water increased with modern facilities. The Karakum Canal was constructed, carrying off almost a fifth of the waters of the Amu Dariya, so that southern Turkmenistan could be brought into the cotton belt.

By the 1980s the inflow into the Aral was one tenth of the rate of the 1950s; by 1993 the sea had shrunk to half its original size. It largest port, Muynak in Uzbekistan, was now almost sixty miles from the shore, and the dunes around the town, like those at Aralsk, are littered with the carcasses of dead ships. By 2020, a sea the size of Ireland may have disappeared altogether.

The dying sea has blighted the entire region. The fish stocks have disappeared and an industry that once supported 60,000 people is now dead. The climate of the area has changed dramatically with rainless days multiplying four-fold. Winds have carried the thick salt deposits left on the dry lake-bed hundreds of miles into the surrounding country, devastating agriculture and causing a litany of health problems from respiratory illness to throat cancers. The irrigation methods in the cotton fields, with high levels of evaporation, have led to further salination, while the chemical fertilizers used on the fields have been washed back into the two rivers, the chief source of drinking water for the region.

For millennia the Kazakhs were a nomadic people, moving with their flocks according to the waxing and waning of the thin pastures of their vast land, following a lifestyle perfectly suited to its marginal vegetation and arid climate. The arrival of the Russians spelt the end of pastoralism. The railway brought hordes of settlers, towns were built, and farms disrupted the pasture lands and the delicate patterns of migration. Gradually the Kazakhs abandoned the nomadic life for the lure of cash incomes and permanent houses. The grandsons of herders became employees on state farms, and the proud world of the Kazakh Hordes withered to an unnecessary eccentricity. The ecological disaster of the Aral Sea has been the vengeance of nature on a system of sedentary agriculture that ignored geographical realities.

But Father Bear didn’t see it that way. To him the death of the Aral Sea was simply the fault of the Communists. When I mentioned the nomadic traditions of these regions he frowned, and misunderstood my comment as another example of the difficulties Kazakhstan had endured.

‘Nomads,’ he shrugged. ‘People without education. They cannot plan for the future.’

‘Perhaps they are satisfied with the present,’ I said.

‘Where are they now?’ he asked, gazing out at the empty prairie, as if the lack of horsemen and sheep out the train window was an argument in itself.

I mentioned Mongolia and the fact that the most of the population there still adhered to a nomadic lifestyle.

‘Mongolia,’ he snorted. ‘Why speak of barbarians?’