Samarkand Hijack

He dialled the first number.

Talib answered almost instantly. ‘Yes?’ the Uzbek asked.

‘There are no problems,’ Nasruddin told him.

‘God be praised,’ Talib said, and hung up.

Nasruddin heard footsteps behind him, and turned, slower than his nerves wished. It was only the Tajik boy’s father, come to collect their ball, which had rolled to within a few feet of the telephones. Nasruddin smiled at him, waited until the man had retrieved the ball, and then turned back to dial the other number. The Russian woman was now facing in his direction, nipples pressing against the tight T-shirt, still absorbed in her conversation.

He dialled and turned away from her. This time the phone rang several times before it was picked up, each ring heightening Nasruddin’s nervousness.

‘Sayriddin?’ he asked, struggling to keep the anger out of his voice.

‘Assalamu alaikam, Nasruddin…’

‘Yes, yes. You are ready? You know what to do?’ Though if he didn’t by this time, then God would surely abandon them…

‘Of course. I deliver the message this evening, one hour after I hear from Talib. On Thursday morning I check Voice of the People. If there is nothing there I try again the next day. When I see it, then I call you at the number you gave me.’

‘Good. God be with you.’

‘And you, brother.’

Nasruddin hung up, and noticed that the Russian woman had gone. In her place was a young Uzbek, no more than seventeen by the look of him. He was wearing a sharp suit with three pens prominent in the top pocket. It sounded as if he was trying to sell someone a second-hand tractor.

Nasruddin looked at his watch. It was still only ten to one – time to get back to the hotel and have some lunch. But he didn’t feel hungry. Nor did he fancy small talk with the members of the party.

He sat down again on the bench, and watched the world go by. The uneasy blend of Asian and European which was Samarkand still felt nothing like home to him, even though one side of his family had roots in the town which went back almost a century. A great-great-grandfather had originally come as a trader, encouraged by the bloody peace the English had imposed on Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century. Nasruddin’s side of the family had come to England instead, much later, in the mid 1950s. He himself had been born in Bradford in 1966, heard about his relatives in far-off Samarkand as a young adolescent, and had determined even then to visit them if ever the chance arose.

And here he was.

Two Uzbek women were walking towards him, both clothed head to foot in the Muslim paranca, eyes glinting behind the horsehair mesh which covered their faces. There was something so graceful about them, something so beautiful. Nasruddin turned his eyes away, and found himself remembering the pictures in Playboy which he and the others had studied so intently in the toilets at school. He watched the two women walking away, their bodies swaying in the loose black garments. When English friends had argued with him about such things he had never felt certain in his heart of the rightness of his views. But at this moment he did.

Not that it mattered. He had always been certain that the other way, the Western way, the obsession with sex, could never work. It had brought only grief in its wake – broken families, prostitution, rape, sexual abuse, AIDS…the list was endless. Whatever God expected of humanity, it was not that. In the words of one of his favourite songs as a teenager, that was the road to nowhere.

And whatever befell him and the others over the next few days, he had no doubt that they were on the right road.

He made his way slowly back to the hotel, arriving in time to supervise the boarding of the tour bus for the two-hour ride to Shakhrisabz. He watched with amusement as they all claimed the same places they had occupied that morning and the previous afternoon, and idly wondered what would happen to anyone daring enough to claim someone else’s.

Now that the dice were cast he felt, somewhat to his surprise and much to his relief, rather less nervous than he had.

Docherty also registered the guide’s change of mood, but let it slip from his mind as the views unfolding through the bus window claimed more and more of his attention. They were soon out of Samarkand, driving down a straight, metalled road between cherry orchards. Groups of men were gathered in the shade, often seated on the bed-like platforms called kravats.

‘Do you think they’re waiting for the cherries to ripen?’ Docherty asked Isabel.

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘The women probably do all the picking.’

‘Aye, but someone has to supervise them,’ Docherty argued.

She pinched the back of his neck.

The orchards soon disappeared, giving way to parched fields of grain. As the road slowly rose towards the mountains they could see the valley of the Zerafshan behind them, a receding strip of vegetation running from east to west in a yellow-brown sea, the domes of Samarkand like blue map pins in the green swathe.

‘What do you know about Shakhrisabz?’ Isabel asked.

‘Not a lot,’ Docherty said. ‘It was Tamerlane’s home town – that’s about all.’

‘There’s the ruins of his palace,’ Mike Copley volunteered, open guide book in his lap. ‘It says the only thing left is part of the entrance arch, but that that’s awesome enough.’

‘The son of a bitch didn’t do anything by halves,’ Sam Jennings commented. ‘I was reading in this’ – he held up the paperback biography – ‘about his war with the Ottoman Turks. Do you want to hear the story?’ he asked, with the boyish enthusiasm which seemed to make light of his years.

‘Go on, educate us,’ Copley told him.

‘Well, the Ottoman Turks’ leader Bayazid was just about to take Constantinople when a messenger from Tamerlane arrives on horseback. The message, basically, says that Tamerlane is the ruler of the world, and he wants Bayazid to recognize the fact. Bayazid has heard of Tamerlane, but thinks he’s just another upstart warlord. His guys, on the other hand, are the military flavour of the month. The whole of Europe’s wetting itself in anticipation, so he can hardly believe some desert bandit’s going to give him any trouble. He sends back a message telling Tamerlane to go procreate himself.

‘A few weeks later the news arrives that Tamerlane’s army is halfway across Turkey. Bayazid’s cheesed, but realizes he has to take time out to deal with the upstart, and he leads his two hundred thousand crack troops across Anatolia to meet Tamerlane. When the armies are a few miles apart the Turks get themselves in formation and wait. At which point Tamerlane’s army hits them from every conceivable side. A few hours later Bayazid is on his way to Samarkand in a cage. And the Turkish conquest of Constantinople gets put back fifty years, which probably saves the rest of Europe from Islam.’

The American smiled in pleasure at his story.

‘I think it’s a shame the way someone like Tamerlane gets glorified,’ his wife said. ‘In Samarkand he’s becoming the new Lenin – there are statues everywhere. The man turned cities into mountains of skulls, for God’s sake. He can’t be the only hero the Uzbeks have in their past.’

‘He wasn’t an Uzbek,’ Charles Ogley said, his irritable voice floating back from the front seat. ‘None of the Uzbeks’ heroes are. Nawaii, Naqshband, Avicenna. The Uzbeks didn’t get here until the end of the fifteenth century.’

Docherty, Mike Copley and Sam Jennings exchanged glances.

‘So who was here before them, Professor?’ Copley asked.

‘Mostly other Turkic peoples, some Mongols, probably a few Arabs, even some Chinese. A mixture.’

‘Maybe countries should learn to do without heroes,’ Sarah Holcroft said, almost defiantly.

‘Sounds good to me,’ Alice Jennings said.

Ogley’s grunt didn’t sound like agreement.

There were few signs of vegetation now, and fewer signs of farming. A lone donkey tied to a roadside fence brayed at them as they went past. The mountains rose like a wall in front of the bus.

The next hour offered a ride to remember, as the bus clambered up one side of the mountain range to the six-thousand-foot Tashtakaracha Pass, and then gingerly wound its way down the other. On their left were tantalizing glimpses of higher snow-capped ranges.

‘China’s on the other side of that lot,’ Copley observed.

They arrived at Shakhrisabz soon after three-thirty. ‘The name means “green city”,’ Nasruddin told them, and it did seem beautifully luxuriant after the desert and bare mountains. The bus deposited them in a car park, which turned out to occupy only a small part of the site of Tamerlane’s intended home away from home, the Ak Saray Palace. It would have been bigger than Hampden Park, Docherty decided.

As Copley’s book had said, all that remained of the edifice was a section of wall and archway. The latter, covered in blue, white and gold mosaics, loomed forty metres into the blue sky. Awesome was the word.

The other sights – another blue-domed mosque, a couple of mausoleums, a covered market – all paled in comparison. At around five-thirty, with the light beginning to take on a golden tinge, they stopped for a drink at the Ak Saray café. ‘We’ll leave for Samarkand in twenty minutes,’ Nasruddin said, before disappearing back outside.

The tourists sipped their mint tea and watched the sun sliding down over the western desert horizon. As the jagged-edged tower of Tamerlane’s gateway darkened against the yellow sky Docherty felt at peace with the world.