Читать книгу In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey Among Nomads - Stanley Stewart - Страница 9

At the docks my fellow passengers, a queue of burly figures beneath amorphous sacks, were making their up the gangway of the Mikhail Lomonosov like newsreel refugees.

Below in the cabin the resident onions had been cleared away leaving a faint astringent odour and a litter of red skins. The accommodation master appeared with my cabin-mate, a fifteen-year-old boy from Sevastopol. Kolya had been visiting his mother who was working in Istanbul. He was a thin boy with a mutinous complexion and an agitated manner. His gangly limbs jerked and rattled with adolescent impatience.

Kolya and I conversed in a bizarre amalgam of English, Turkish and Russian, prompted by various phrase books and a vocabulary of gestures and mime. It made for surprisingly lucid conversation. At first I tried to chat to him about kid’s stuff – his age, his school, his mother, ice-hockey – but he brushed these dull enquiries aside. He was keen to know the legal age limit for smoking and drinking in England, what kind of guns the police carried in London, and if the Queen was still in the business of beheading. His Istanbul had been somewhat different from mine. He had never heard of Haghia Sophia but he knew where to buy imitation Rolex watches and could quote the prices in three currencies. Like everyone else on this ship, he was a small trader, bringing home goods to sell in Sevastopol. He showed me his wares, – T-shirts, switchblades, pornographic magazines.

He sat on the edge of his bunk, drumming his legs in a nervous rhythm, blowing smoke rings towards the porthole. Kolya was in a hurry to grow up, to find the fast-track to the adult world of hard currency, illegal trading, and women. I was more than he could have hoped for as a cabin-mate, a representative of the glamorous and decadent West, that happy land of rap stars and Playstations. Hoping to cement our relationship, he looked for a way to make himself useful to me. I was a lone foreigner on a ship of Ukrainians and Russians, and he began to cast himself as my protector.

His mother appeared at the door of the cabin to say goodbye. A tall blonde Venus in a fur-collared coat, she was an exotic dancer making a Ukrainian fortune in one of Istanbul’s nightclubs. In the narrow passage Kolya was momentarily tearful – a boy like any other saying goodbye to his mother – but once she was gone he was quick to shake off this unwelcome vulnerability. He began to count the fistful of dollars that she had tucked into his pocket. Then he bolted out the door as if he had another ship to catch. Fifteen minutes later he was back, carrying a shopping bag from the free-port facilities on the quayside. Inside was a hard plastic case. Opening it, he lifted out an automatic pistol.

‘A hundred dollars,’ he said, breaking the seal on the box of ammunition.

‘What is it for?’ I asked, ducking as he swung the gun round the cabin.

‘Protection,’ the boy said. His eyes shone.

He had bought a shoulder-holster as well, and sought my help in buckling it round his thin shoulders. Then he slipped the gun into the new leather, and put on his jacket to hide the weapon. Smiling, the child stood before me, armed and dangerous, ready for the voyage home.

We sailed at nine. Below in the cabin, I felt a series of shudders run through the ship, and went out on deck to find us slipping away from our berth. Swinging about in the entrance to the Golden Horn, where a stream of cars was crossing the Galata Bridge, we turned up the Bosphorus away from the old city. The world’s most splendid skyline, that exquisite silhouette of minarets and domes, was darkening on a lemon-coloured sky. Haghia Sophia, round-shouldered above the trees of Gülhane, was the colour of a shell, a delicate shading of pinks and greys. Swaying in the wash of currents, ferries pushed out from the docks at Eminönü, bound for Üsküdar where the lights were coming on along the Asian shore. On the foredeck, I made my way through the cables and the piled crates to stand in the prow of the ship as we slipped northward through the heart of the city.

The austere face of the Dolmabahçe Palace, the nineteenth-century successor to the Topkapi, rose on our left. Its restrained façade belies a kitsch interior, a confection of operatic furnishings too ghastly to detail. It was here that the last Sultans watched their enfeebled empire slither to an ignominious end in the early years of the twentieth century. Much of the palace was given over to the harem, whose membership seemed to grow as the number of imperial provinces declined. Sex, presumably, was some consolation for political impotency.

The Bosphorus is a pilot’s nightmare. In the twisting straits ships veer back and forth between the two continents, dodging the powerful currents and each other. We passed so close to the mosque at Ortaköy on the European side that I was able to look down through grilled windows to see a row of neatly synchronized bottoms, upturned in prayer. Half a mile on I could see what was on television in the stylish rooms of the old renovated Ottoman houses on the Asian shore. Accidents are not uncommon, and people tell amusing anecdotes about residents of the waterside villas being awoken in the middle of a foggy winter night to find a Russian freighter parked in the living room. Since the late seventies no less than twelve listed yalis or Ottoman houses have been run down by ships, invariably captained by tipsy Russians.

A spring wind had blown up, the Kozkavuran Firtinasi, the Wind of the Roasting Walnuts, which comes down to the Bosphorus from the hills of Anatolia. On the Asian shore we passed the twin-spired façade of the Ottoman cavalry school where cadets were taught some shadow of the horsemanship that had brought their ancestors from Central Asia. Beyond I could make out the ragged outline of Rumeli Hisari, its crenellated walls breasting the European hills. On the slopes below is the oldest Turkish cemetery in Istanbul. Both here and at the cemetery at Eyüp, there is a marvellous literature of death, ironic and light-hearted. I had been reading translations of them at breakfast. They are a fine lesson in how to say farewell.

‘A pity to good-hearted Ismail Efendi,’ reads one epitaph, ‘whose death caused great sadness among his friends. Having caught the illness of love at the age of seventy, he took the bit between his teeth and dashed full gallop to paradise.’ On another tombstone a relief shows three trees, an almond, a cypress, and a peach; peaches are a Turkish metaphor for a woman’s breasts. ‘I’ve planted these trees so that people may know my fate. I loved an almond-eyed, cypress-tall maiden, and bade farewell to this world without savouring her peaches.’ As we passed, the cemetery showed only as an area of darkness.

Soon the city was slipping astern. The tiered lights fell away on both shores and Europe and Asia drifted apart as the straits widened. I stood in the bow until we passed Rumeli Feneri and Anadolu Feneri, the lighthouses on the two continents flanking the northern entrance to the Bosphorus, blinking with different rhythms.

In antiquity the Black Sea was a watery frontier. When the Ionian Greeks crossed its wind-driven reaches in search of fish and wheat, they came upon a people on the far shores who might have stepped from one of their own mythologies. The Scythians were a diverse collection of nomadic tribes with a passion for gold and horses. To the Greeks they were barbarians, the repository of their anxieties and their prejudice.

Herodotus gives us a compelling account of them. His descriptions show remarkable similarities with Friar William’s account of the Mongols two thousand years later, a reminder if one was needed of the static nature of nomadic society and the pervading anxieties they aroused in settled populations. They were a people without towns or crops, Herodotus tells us, clearly unnerved. They lived on the produce of their herds of cattle and sheep and horses, migrating seasonally in search of fresh pasture. They slaughtered their sheep without spilling blood, drank fermented mare’s milk and smoked hemp which made them howl with pleasure. They were shamans who worshipped the elements and the graves of their ancestors. In battle they formed battalions of mounted archers. Their equestrian skills were unrivalled, and they sought the trophies of their enemies’ skulls for drinking-cups.

The ship lifted on the sea’s swell, its bow rising to the dark void ahead. A new wind was blowing, the Meltemi. It was a north-easterly blowing from the Pontic steppe across 500 miles of sea. In Istanbul they say the Meltemi is a cleansing wind, dispelling foul airs and bad feelings.

Historically, the people of cities have had an ambivalent response to the unsettled landscapes of the steppe which seem to harbour ideas both of Arcadia and of chaos. Settled peoples were forever torn between the notions that nomads were barbarian monsters who threatened civilized order, and intuitive innocents who retained some elemental virtue that had been lost to them. ‘Nomads are closer to the created world of God,’ wrote the fourteenth-century Arab historian and philosopher, Ibn Khaldun, ‘and removed from the blameworthy customs that have infected the hearts of settlers.’ He believed that they alone could escape the cycles of decadence that infected all civilization. Only regular blasts of their cleansing winds allowed civilization to sustain its own virtues.

Kolya came to fetch me from my post in the ship’s bow, motioning for me to follow him as if he had something urgent to show me. Downstairs in our cabin he produced a bottle of champagne and four plastic cups. Then he disappeared and returned a moment later with two women.

Anna and Olga were the occupants of the neighbouring cabin. They were a dramatic illustration of the way that Slavic women seem unable to find any middle ground between slim grace and stout coarseness. Anna was a striking figure in tight jeans and a short sleeveless top. Olga, in cardigan and heavy shoes, wouldn’t have stood out among a party of dockers. Kolya, already a slave to female beauty, had only invited her to make up the numbers.

He was an energetic host, a fifteen-year-old playing at cocktail party. He poured the champagne, produced packets of American cigarettes and a bag of pistachio nuts, and chatted to everyone, the life of the party. I felt like a debutante being launched into the ship’s society. When the women asked about me Kolya explained I was going to visit the Tartars, and that I was a good friend of a priest called William who had been to visit them already.

Olga was silent and morose while Anna did all the talking. She had spent three weeks in Istanbul and was now travelling home to Sevastopol. The purpose of her visit was unclear. She tried to make it sound like a holiday but her cabin, like all the cabins on this boat, was so crowded with canvas sacks and cardboard boxes tied with string she could barely get the door open. The collapse of Communism had made everyone a salesman. But Anna, I suspected, had been trading more than tinned sardines. The Black Sea routes carried a heavy traffic of young women bound for the red-light districts of Istanbul. Many were part-timers making three or four trips a year to boost the family income.

We drank the champagne and when it was finished Kolya fetched another bottle, which I tried in vain to pay for. The boy was our host, magnanimous and expansive. He made toasts, he told dirty jokes that made the girls laugh, he kept his jacket on, buttoned up to conceal the gun. Olga soon drifted away to shift some crates and Anna now basked alone in our attention. She had become flirtatious. With the boy she already enjoyed a maternal familiarity, alternately hugging him and slapping him in mock remonstration, and now she extended the same attentions to me, pinching my shoulder and propping her elbows on my knees.

Kolya was showing off his collection of T-shirts adorned with American slogans. ‘California is a State of Mind’, one announced. ‘Better Dead than in Philadelphia’, another said. When he presented one to Anna, she leapt up to try it on. Standing with her back to us in the cramped cabin she removed her top. The boy gazed at her naked back and her bare breasts swelling into view as she stooped to pick up the T-shirt, then he shot a hot questioning glance at me. She swung round to model the gift. It seemed a trifle small. Her nipples pressed through the thin fabric just below a caption that read ‘Flying Fuck: the Mile High Club’.

When we had finished the second bottle Kolya took us off to the nightclub. I had not suspected the Lomonosov of harbouring a nightclub but Kolya was obviously a veteran clubber on the Black Sea routes. We descended a narrow stairway to a windowless dungeon in the bowels of the ship. Coloured lights in putrid hues of pink and blue glazed the shabby velvet sofas and plastic tables gathered round a small dance floor. The room smelt of stale beer and bilge water. Disco Muzak was leaking out of tinny speakers. Kolya ordered and paid for a round of drinks with umbrellas in them. I had given up trying to restrain him.

Throwing back her cocktails, Anna was now in full party mode. A tall bearded Russian, billed as Rasputin, had taken to the tiny stage with a synthesizer that replicated every instrument known to lounge lizards. She insisted I dance with her, tugging me by the arm out onto the empty dance floor. She had two basic steps, neither related to the music. The first was licentious: she ground her hips provocatively against me, insinuating one of her legs between mine. The other was a cross between the Moulin Rouge chorus line and a kung-fu exercise with a series of high kicks and spectacular twirls. It was a nerve-wracking business. The transition from simulated sex to the martial arts was so drunkenly abrupt that I was in real danger of having my head kicked in between romantic clinches.

All the following day at sea, Kolya followed me around the ship like a pint-sized bodyguard, his jacket bulging. Below in the cabin he spent most of his time loading and unloading the pistol. I tried to keep myself out of the line of fire.

In the dining hall Kolya, Anna and I ate together at a corner table. Meals on the Mikhail Lomonosov were dour occasions. Breakfast was an ancient sausage and a sweet cake. Lunch and dinner were indistinguishable – borscht, grey meat, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs. The passengers ate in silence, large pasty figures earnestly shovelling food in a room where the only sound was the awkward undertone of cutlery.

At breakfast we sat together like a dysfunctional family, bickering over cups of tea. We drifted into a curious relationship in which I was cast in the role of the grumpy and distracted pater. My failure to respond to Anna’s advances had upset them both. She behaved as if I was a shiftless husband who had humiliated her. In a filthy mood, Anna cut short the boy’s mediating advances by scolding him for his table manners, for his swearing, for his untucked shirt, for his lack of attention to her. Then she scolded me for not exercising more control over him. I retreated monosyllabically behind newspapers. It hardly seemed credible that we had met only twelve hours before. We chaffed at the confinement of our respective roles as if we had inhabited them for a lifetime.

Though he had conceived some loyalty to me as cabin-mate and foreigner, I was a disappointment to the boy. I knew nothing about rap stars, I lacked the flash accessories he associated with the West, and I took a firm and decidedly negative line about his chief pleasure of the moment: the revolver. With Anna he had a tempestuous and ambivalent relationship, alternately straining at her maternal leash and embracing her bursts of affection. Argument seemed to strengthen some perverse bond between them. When they made up, Kolya brought her bottles of Georgian champagne and fake Rolexes, then snuggled into her lap amid the sacks of cargo in her cabin in some uneasy limbo between a childish cuddle and a lover’s embrace.

He took the fact that I had not slept with Anna as a personal slight. When we were alone he would try to convince me that I should have sex with her. His pleas were both an injured innocence and a sordid knowledge beyond his years. At one moment he might have been the whining child of divorced parents, hoping for a reconciliation. At another, he was an underage pimp trying to drum up business.

In spite of Kolya’s disapproval of fraternizing with the staff, I had accepted an invitation from Dimitri, the second mate. He inhabited a small cabin on the port side of the ship where he had laid out afternoon tea: slabs of jellied meat, salted herrings, hard-boiled eggs, black bread, and glasses of vodka. Despite his long tenure on the Lomonosov the cabin had an anonymous air. There was a hold-all on the bed, two nylon shirts on hangers, and an officer’s jacket hanging on the back of the door. He might have been a passenger, uncharacteristically travelling light. His mood had not improved since the first evening I met him when the ship was docked in Istanbul.

‘In the Ukraine, in Russia, shipping has no future,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘There are no opportunities. When I first went to sea, the Soviet Union was a great naval power. Its ships sailed the world. It is unbelievable what has happened to us. You will see in Sevastopol. The great Black Sea Fleet. The naval docks look like a scrap yard.’

He poured the vodka and sank his teeth into a boiled egg.

‘Do you know what this ship was?’ he asked.

I shook my head. The eggs, like rubber, made speech difficult.

‘It was a research vessel,’ he said emphatically as if I might contradict him. ‘I have been seventeen years on this boat. Before 1990 we used to sail all over the world – the Indian Ocean, South America, Africa. We carried scientists – intelligent people, interesting people, engaged in important research. Professors from Leningrad, from Moscow, from Kiev. You cannot imagine the conversations in the dining room. Philosophy. Genetics. Hydrography. Meteorology. You couldn’t pass the door without learning something. And nice people.’ His voice softened at the memory of the nice professors. ‘Very nice people. Polite. People with manners.’

He crammed a salted herring between small rows of teeth. His expression seemed like an accusation of culpability, as if perhaps I was taking up space that might have been allocated to a wise professorial figure with interesting conversation and good table manners.

‘Look what has become of us. Carrying vegetables and what else back and forth across the Black Sea like a tramp boat. It is difficult to believe.’

I didn’t ask how this had happened. I knew he was going to tell me anyway.

‘Money,’ he exploded. ‘The country is bankrupt. Oh yes we all wanted freedom. We all wanted the end of Communism. But no one mentioned it would bankrupt the country. There is no money for research any more. There is no money for anything. So here we are.’

His rage subsided long enough for him to refill our glasses. ‘I have not been paid in five months,’ he said quietly.

I asked how he managed.

‘I have a kiosk, in Sevastopol.’ His voice had dropped; he was mumbling. He seemed ashamed of this descent into commerce as if it was not worthy of him, a ship’s officer. ‘We sell whisky and vodka, sweets, tobacco. I bring them from Turkey. Otherwise we would starve.’

In the Ukraine, as in the rest of the constituent parts of the old Union, the quest for a living has become everything. From education to the nuclear defence industry, all the great public institutions are obliged to hustle for things to sell like pensioners flogging the remnants of their attics on street corners in Moscow. For Dimitri any hope of advancement had shrunk with the maritime fleet. He had been second mate on the Lomonosov for the last twelve of his seventeen years of service, and still the first mate showed no signs of departure or death.

Economic pressures and the tedium of their endless passages had made the Mikhail Lomonosov a ship of malcontents, riven by jealousies and intrigues. The officers all hated one another. Dimitri hated the cargo master, the cargo master hated the chief engineer, the chief engineer hated the first mate, who hated him right back. Everyone hated the captain whose position allowed him access to the lucrative world of corruption.

Dimitri piled more sausage onto my plate. His anger had been spent, and he seemed apologetic about drawing me into his troubles, as if they were a family matter, unseemly to parade before a foreigner.

‘Do you know who Mikhail Lomonosov was?’ he asked.

I confessed I didn’t. I had seen his portrait hanging in the dining hall, an eighteenth-century figure in a powdered wig and a lace shirt.

‘You are not a Russian. How would you know? But the passengers on this ship. None of them know who Lomonosov was.’ He was beginning to grow agitated again, in spite of himself, chopping the air with his hand. ‘He was a great Russian, a scientist, a writer. He founded Moscow University. He set up the first laboratory in Russia. He was also a poet, a very great poet. He wrote about language and science and history. The scientists who travelled on the ship all knew his work. They discussed him. But these people, these traders, they are ignorant. They do not know their own history. They can tell you the price of every grade of vodka but they know nothing about Mikhail Lomonosov. No one cares about these things any more, about science, about poetry. Only about money, and prices in Istanbul.’

In the evening I went to visit him on the bridge during his watch. He was alone. The hushed solitude of the place and the instruments of his profession – charts, radar screens, compasses – had lightened his mood. On the chart table the Black Sea was neatly parcelled by lines of longitude and latitude. Near the bottom Istanbul straddled the Bosphorus. At the top Sevastopol was tucked carefully round a corner on the western shores of the Crimea. A thick smudged pencil line joined the two. Overdrawn countless times, it marked the single unvarying line to which his life had been reduced: 43° NE.

Below in the nightclub Rasputin was singing a Russian version of My Way. Despairing of me, Anna had transferred her attentions rather theatrically to the singer, and was now gyrating suggestively in front of the tiny stage. The purple lighting did Rasputin no favours. His eyes and cheeks were malevolent pockets of darkness.

I found Kolya alone at a corner table nursing a double brandy.

‘Anna seems to be enjoying herself,’ I said taking a seat.

He looked at me without speaking then turned his eyes back to the dance floor and the figure of Rasputin in its purple haze.

‘He is not exactly Sinatra,’ I said.

‘He is a shit,’ Kolya said.

The boy seemed to have diminished on his stool, sinking deeper into himself. He simmered with resentment. He felt Rasputin was displacing him in Anna’s affections, that the arbitrary tides of the adult world had shifted without any reference to him. He glowered at the singer from his corner table like a child gangster.

I retired and when Kolya arrived later in the cabin, he was sullen and uncommunicative. We played cards in a difficult silence. Half an hour later, Anna arrived with Rasputin, trailing all the forced merriment of the nightclub. She seemed to need to show off her acquisition to me and to Kolya in some act of petty revenge.

They sat together on the bunk opposite. Anna stroked his thigh. They chattered together in Ukrainian. The boy watched them coldly. Rasputin tried to draw him out with bantering exchanges. The nightclub had closed and the two were trying to press Kolya for his usual hospitality. Anna had delved into one of Kolya’s bags and produced a bottle of vodka which she proposed they drink. Rasputin held it up and made to open the screw top, looking teasingly to Kolya for his response. He was laughing open-mouthed, a barking ridicule emerging from between rows of long yellow teeth. Then he closed his mouth suddenly, and his expression changed. Anna and Rasputin were suddenly rigid.

I looked round at Kolya. The boy was pointing his gun at the singer. He swore at him, under his breath, as if he was speaking to himself.

‘Put the gun down, Kolya,’ I said.

He did not respond. For what seemed like long minutes no one moved. We were transfixed by the gun.

‘Put it down, Kolya.’ I forced myself to stand up. Kolya’s gaze flickered toward me for a second then returned to Rasputin. His face was flushed. I felt my heart pounding and my legs felt watery. I stepped between the two.

‘Get out,’ I said to Rasputin.

The singer seemed about to protest, but Anna silenced him. She stood up and pulled his arm. I herded them out of the door then closed it after them.

Kolya had lowered the gun. He picked at the barrel absentmindedly, childishly, with his middle finger. He pursed his lips, affecting a casual expression, as if the sudden terror that still stiffened the air in the room had nothing to do with him.

‘You’re an idiot,’ I told him. I wanted to shout at him; my own tension needed an outlet. He sat chewing his lip, gazing at the floor, then threw the gun on his bunk.

‘You’ll have to get rid of it,’ I told him. He said nothing. ‘The singer will tell the Ukrainian customs about the gun. They will search you. He might even be telling the captain now. You need to get rid of it. Immediately.’

He sat staring at the floor. Then with the surly grace of a child who had been ordered to clean his room, he picked up the gun, opened the porthole and dropped it into the sea. Then he lay down on his bunk and sobbed into his pillow.

Perched on the southern shores of the old Soviet Union, Sevastopol was a window on more tolerant worlds. There is a Mediterranean feel about the place, some tang of the south, some promise of escape, a lightness borne on the sea air and reflected in the pinkish hue of the stone façades. Built by Black Sea traders who had seen Naples, it has touches of architectural grandeur and a southern desire for colour. Side streets were full of flower boxes and haughty cats. Flights of stone steps connected avenues of plane trees and trolley buses. Vines trailed between the mulberry trees in walled gardens. In the midday sun cafés spilled onto the pavements, and people grew animated and gregarious.

It is easy to understand why the Crimea was the envy of the rest of the Soviet Union. Dour people from Moscow used to come to Sevastopol and Odessa just to look at the vegetables. In those days the Politburo holidayed on the Black Sea. In this easy southern climate it was a simple matter to believe that things were going well. Every other year the first families of the East, leaving their overcoats and their worries at home, gathered at a resort near Yalta just along the coast – the Brezhnevs, the Honeckers, the Zhivkovs, the Ceausescus, and the Tsendbals – to compare growth rates and grandchildren.

Though virtually unknown outside his own country, Tsendbal’s survival eclipsed them all. For forty-four years, as general secretary and then president, this obscure figure ruled the People’s Republic of Mongolia, the world’s second Communist state and the oldest of Russia’s allies. To keep tabs on him, the KGB had managed to marry him off to one of their agents, the boorish Filatova, a Russian from Soviet Central Asia. The Crimea was one of her passions and the Tsendbals came to the Black Sea at least twice a year. If any folk memories of the Mongol Hordes lurked in the Crimean subconscious, Tsendbal must have confused them. The heir to Genghis Khan was a small mousy man, the epitome of the faceless bureaucrat, obsequious to his domineering wife and his masters in the Kremlin.

In the afternoon I wandered through the park where Crimean War monuments were deployed between the flower beds. Todleben, who organized the defence of Sevastopol in 1855, towered serenely over strolling naval cadets in hats so ridiculous they might have been dressed for a children’s party. At the far end of the park a fat man reading a newspaper sold me a ticket for an empty Ferris wheel.

Ten years ago Sevastopol was the most closed of the Soviet Union’s closed cities, and spies in every Western nation would have considered a ride on this Ferris wheel as the pinnacle of their careers. Now the operator hardly cared enough about the presence of the former enemy to look up from the sports pages. With a series of creaking shudders I rose above the city. Beneath me, in the long protected harbour, lay the great Black Sea Fleet. It looked like a vast naval scrap yard full of rusting hulks. Economic collapse appeared to have done for the fleet what the naval strategies of Nato failed to do – keep much of it in harbour. Russia and the Ukraine had argued over the disposition of the ships when the latter declared its independence, though neither of them can afford to maintain its share of the naval loot.

Back at my hotel the lobby was dominated by a flashing sign that read El Dorado. Beneath it a cabal of young venture capitalists in baseball caps worked the slot machines. Upstairs in my room the television offered two Russian channels. On the first, old Russia survived. Rectangular men in grey suits were making interminable speeches. On the other channel, new Russia was in full cry. Encouraged by a deranged game-show host, housewives were performing a striptease. The applause levels of the audience determined which one would win the kind of washing machine I remember my mother throwing out in the 1960s. It was not difficult to guess which channel was winning the ratings war.

The finest part of Sevastopol is the esplanade along the seafront which stages the evening passeggiata. A series of neo-classical buildings – naval academies, customs houses, municipal offices – lines the long promenade where the inhabitants stroll arm in arm taking the sea air as swallows dive between the rooftops. Like the promenaders most of the buildings appeared to have lost the security of state employment and now struggle to make ends meet. Corner rooms in the old academies have been rented out as bars and restaurants. As the soft southern night fell, noisy discos mushroomed between the Corinthian columns where visiting leaders, including the Tsendbals of Outer Mongolia, once reviewed the naval fleet that was the pride of the Soviet Union.

At this season the Crimea was full of poppies. In the winding defile that climbed towards the interior, the kind of treacherous geography that betrayed the Light Brigade, poppies wreathed the outcrops of pink rock. Above on the plateau, ramparts of poppies enclosed fields where armies of stout women were cutting hay with scythes. Then the bus passed into a country of orchards where poppies trickled down the aisles between the trees to gather in pools among apple-green shadows.

I felt relieved to be on the move, to be consuming landscapes. The boat and its complex relationships had engendered a sense of confinement, some cloying and unsuitable feeling of responsibility. Now I was performing the traveller’s trick, the trick of departure, the vanishing act that marks the stages of a journey. For the traveller every encounter is conditioned by departure, by the impending schedule of trains, by the tickets already folded in his pocket, by the promise of new pastures. Departure is the constraint and the liberation of journeys.

On this bright morning fresh landscapes opened in front of me. Gazing out the window of the bus I delighted in the flash of fields and houses, the blur of poppies. I watched whole towns sweep past, adrift among wheat fields, then fall rapidly astern. At Simferopol I would get the train and tomorrow evening I would be on the Volga, seven hundred miles to the east. I felt the elation of movement. On this bus fleeing eastward, I felt I was staging my own disappearance, vanishing into Asia, leaving only a handwritten sign on the window of my former life: ‘Gone to Outer Mongolia, please cancel the papers’.

Since the time of the Scythians, the pastures of the Crimean interior had lured successive waves of Asian nomads onto the peninsula from the southern Russian steppes. When the Mongols arrived here in the thirteenth century it became an important component of the western province of the Mongolian Empire known as the Golden Horde whose capital lay at Sarai on the Volga. The Russians mistakenly called these eastern invaders Tatars, one of the many tribes that had been subdued by Genghis Khan in the early years of conquest, and the name stuck. In the west this became Tartar when Louis IX, William’s benefactor, transformed it by way of a Latin pun on ex tartarus, meaning ‘from the regions of hell’ recorded in classical legend.

Friar William landed at Sudak on the southern shore of the Crimea on 21 May, 1253. His plan was to visit a Mongol prince, Sartaq, rumoured to be a Christian, whose camp lay three days’ ride beyond the River Don. On the advice of the Greek merchants in Sudak he opted to travel by cart, filling one with ‘fruits, muscatel wine and dry biscuits’ as gifts for the Mongol officials that they would encounter along the way. He set off with four companions: his colleague, Friar Bartholomew, a man whose age and bulk made him even less suited to this epic journey than William himself; Gosset, ‘a bearer’; Homo Dei, a Syrian interpreter whose knowledge of any useful language was fairly shaky; and Nicholas, a slave boy that William had rescued in Constantinople.

But William’s journey was to take him a good deal further than he had planned. He was embarking on an odyssey that would lead him eventually to the distant Mongol capital of Qaraqorum, at the other end of Asia, well over four thousand miles away. If he had hoped to be back with his fellow monks in time for Christmas, he was to be disappointed.

At Simferopol I found the train to Volgograd guarded by an army of formidable carriage attendants, big-breasted women who stood by the doors like bouncers. They had beehive hairdos, thick necks and the kind of shoulders born of a career spent wrestling baggage and the heavy windows of Russian trains. Even their make-up was intimidating – scarlet lipstick, blue eyelids, raspberry-rouged cheeks, and malevolent bits of mascara gathered at the corners of their eyes. But once the train started, they underwent a transformation, from security guards to matrons. They abandoned their jackboots for carpet slippers, and began to fuss with the curtains. Taking pity on a hapless foreigner, my carriage attendant brought me a mug of tea from her samovar and I spread out a picnic of bananas, smoked cheese, a sausage, and Ukrainian pastries.

I shared my compartment with a burly Russian with mechanic’s hands and a simian haircut growing low on his forehead. He lay down on the bunk opposite and was asleep before we cleared the industrial suburbs of Simferopol. He slept with one eye slightly ajar. From beneath its lowered lid it followed me round the compartment. As he fell deeper into his slumbers his limbs began to convulse, like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits.

On the edges of the Azov Sea we crossed out of Crimea on a littoral of islands. For a time the world was poised uneasily between land, water and sky. Causeways linked narrow tongues of marsh where lone houses stood silhouetted against uncertain horizons. A fisherman passed in a boat no bigger than a bathtub, his head bowed over nets, like a man at prayer. Watery planes tapered beneath landscapes of cloud until the sea and the sky began to merge, the same placid grey, the same boundless horizontals.

Beyond Melitopol we sailed over prairies tilting beneath towering skies. This was nomad country, the Don steppe, traversed by winds blowing out of the heart of Asia. The first Greek traders who ventured across the Black Sea were alarmed to find themselves here on the edge of another sea running north and east on waves of grass. The southern reaches of grasslands that stretch intermittently from Hungary to Manchuria, these prairies lent themselves for millennia to a culture of movement.

Maritime metaphors adhere to these landscapes with the tenacity of barnacles. Chekov grew up at Taganrog east of here along the shores of the Sea of Azov. He remembered as a boy lying among sacks of wheat in the back of an oxcart sailing slowly across the great ocean of the steppe. William wrote in a similar vein. ‘When … we finally came across some people,’ he wrote, ‘we rejoiced like shipwrecked sailors coming into harbour.’ Pastoralism survived on these prairies until the beginning of the twentieth century when the fatal combination of the modern age and Communism brought the world of the Scythians to a close. The tents and the horses retreated as lumbering tractors ploughed up the grasslands for wheat, and the prairie was colonized by villages and farmers.

The afternoon was full of country stations and haycocks. Peasant women lined the platforms with metal buckets of fat red cherries which they sold by the bowlful to the passengers through the windows of the train. As we pulled away they slung their buckets on the handlebars of old bicycles and diminished down dirt roads between flat fields of cabbages and banks of cream-coloured blossoms. Pegged like an unruly sheet by a line of telegraph poles, the prairie flapped away into unfathomable distances.

In the early evening I stood in the corridor at an open window, breathing in the country air as we passed through invisible chambers of scent: cut hay, strawberries, wet stagnant ditches, newly-turned earth, wood smoke. In a blue twilight we came to the estuary of the Dneiper, as dark as steel and as wide as a lake. Trails of mist unravelled across its polished surface. Dim yellow lights marked another horizon. It was impossible to tell if they were houses or ships.

All that remains of the great nomadic cultures that once roamed these regions are the tombs of their ancestors. William describes the landscape as being composed of three elements: heaven, earth and tombs. Scythians tombs, known as kurgans, litter these steppes like humpbacked whales riding seas of wheat. Beneath great mounds of stone and earth their chiefs were buried with their horses and their gold, their servants and their wives. The tombs were the only permanent habitation they ever built. Grave robbers have plundered the tall barrows for centuries, carrying off the spectacular loot of Scythian gold – ornaments, jewellery, weapons, horse trappings, all decorated in an ‘animal style’ with parades of ibex and stags, eagles and griffons, lions and serpents. But it was horses not gold that were the most compelling feature of these burials.

Horses attain a mythical status in nomadic cultures, and have always been crucial to their burials and their notions of immortality. Sacrificed at the funerary rites, they joined their masters in order to carry them to the next world. In a famous passage Herodotus described the mounted attendants placed round the Scythian tomb chambers. An entire cavalry of horses and riders had been strangled, disembowelled, stuffed with straw and impaled upon poles in an enclosing circle ready to accompany the dead king on his last ride. For centuries it was treated as just another of Herodotus’ tall tales until the Russian archaeologist N.I. Veselovsky opened the Ulskii mound in the nineteenth century and found the remains of three hundred and sixty horses tethered on stakes in a ring about the mound, their hooves pawing the air in flight.

The nomadic association of horses with immortality had even reached China, beyond the eastern shores of the grass sea, as early as the second century BC. In the mind of the Chinese emperor Wu-ti, military humiliations at the hands of the Xiongnu, the Huns of Western records, and fears about his own immortality had become strangely entwined. He seemed to embrace the convictions of the nomads who threatened his frontiers. From behind the claustrophobic walls of imperial China, he envied them their sudden arrivals, their fleet departures. Their horses, he believed, would be his salvation, and he set his heart on acquiring the fabled steeds of far-off Fergana in Central Asia. Known to the Chinese as the Heavenly Horses, they were said to sweat blood and to be able to carry their riders into the celestial arms of their ancestors.

Throughout his reign, Wu-ti lavished enormous expense and countless lives on expeditions to bring thirty breeding pairs of these divine steeds home to China. Only when they finally arrived was he at peace. He watched them from the windows of his palace like a smitten lover, tall beautiful horses grazing on pastures of alfalfa, their flanks shining, their fine heads lifting in unison to scent the air. ‘They will draw me up’, he wrote in a poem, ‘and carry me to the Holy Mountain. (On their backs) I shall reach the Jade Terrace.’