The Day Before Yesterday

Cold, cold country, so big and empty that the immigration check post was almost a full day’s drive from the border.
I shouldered my pack and walked along the road into Tashkurgan in the dusk. The road was wide and smooth and there was pale light dying behind charcoal-black hills ahead of me. It was very cold.

All the way down from the border where the young Chinese guards with their soft faces and their over-sized green uniforms had shivered in a tin hut with new snow piled metres deep against the walls, the land had been big and empty. There were villages of red stone and smoke and dust and twisted lengths of dry wood. The Pakistani traders in the jeep stared out of the rattling, dust-touched, sun-cut windows. They themselves came from the stony, mountain world around Gilgit, but they had never seen anything like this.
“Tough people,” one of them said as we watched a tall, hard-faced woman stride between the little flat-roofed hovels; she had a heavy scarlet dress and an amber headscarf and red-raw hands. “Very tough. What do they eat? Nothing grows here.” There was only thin-cropped grass and scuffed brown earth between the huts, then a cold river, then a great bank of hard, hard mountains and a huge sky.
“Are there places like this in England?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He nodded. “I didn’t think so. It’s all green, right? Even in winter…”

The jeep stopped in the hard-metal cold under the floodlights outside immigration. I filled in the disembarkation card for a man from Skardu who couldn’t write. He didn’t know his date of birth.

The Chinese soldiers were still going through the sacks and bundles of the Pakistanis, riffling packages of dried apricots and semi-precious stones wrapped in old newspaper.  I walked away towards the town. It was bitterly cold, and there was no one out on the grid of streets. A thin Chinese girl with oil-straight hair and a short skirt leant from a red doorway and glanced along the pavement for a moment, and there were Uiyger men with flat caps and grey-green overcoats sitting over cheap china cups of tea in glass-fronted cafes. Fat men smoked behind the counters of goods stores with piled boxes and packets of soap and snacks strung from the ceiling, while a blue-grey television screen flickered in the corner. The place felt like it was being crushed by the vast weight of the cold emptiness around it.

The hotel had gloomy yellow corridors and showers that dribbled scalding water. I wandered outside, a scarf around my neck, my hands deep inside my pockets, and I ate stringy, oily kebabs in a restaurant with a plastic fountain and two sad goldfish in a grimy tank. Then I wandered outside again and bought good, warm bread, topped with sesame seeds and onion.

There was nothing I recognised.

A week earlier I had been in Passu, where the light lay broken and copper-coloured over the fractured granite spires and the long breeze ran in the yellow grass and over the grey river water and they had already brought the animals down from the high pastures. I stayed in a cold little guesthouse with tiny rooms with broken beds and icy water in buckets from a single outside tap. At night the electricity always failed, and the only other customers were a mob of Chinese road workers in threadbare blue jackets and caps. They smoked continuously and drank tea and played cards in the corner, squawking raucously at one another. The old man who owned the guesthouse had curly grey hair and a thick moustache. He would serve them tea then join me at my table where I sat reading or writing by lamplight, or eating the stewed potatoes and thick, slabby bread they make in Passu. The old man would glance at the Chinese and shake his head, “They are strange people – and they don’t know one word of English or Urdu, not one word…” (he himself spoke half a dozen languages well). I began to feel nervous about going to China.

In the guesthouse there was a damp and dog-eared collection of old guidebooks, novels and torn, coverless magazines. Among them I found a beautiful volume of photographs, all of rich colour and shade. There were pictures of Wakhi nomads leading trains of two-humped camels along the narrow defiles of their mountain corridor, of wild buzkashi matches (you could smell the dust and the horse-sweat and the cold blood from the carcass). And there were pictures of the bazaar in Tashkurgan. There was dappled light from the souk-roof of rushes, and girls with gold teeth and tattooed chins; one frame showed a bearded man, tall and gaunt with hollow cheeks, a dark robe and a heavy turban. He was standing in the cut light of some packed mud alleyway. Tethered to his wrist was a great fury-eyed hawk. Other pictures of the place showed grey-earth walls and poplar trees and a crumbling fort and a man leading camels over a bridge of ancient wood. Any of the photographs could have been taken a millennium ago – had they had cameras then. The book was published at the end of the 1970s.

In the cold and the dark at the end of 2004 I wandered through Tashkurgan, a new arrival in China at the very limit of its vastness. The streets were straight and wide and lined with grey concrete and plastic signs lit by flickering bulbs and there were fat Chinese shopkeepers and thin Chinese hookers and the Uiygers wore their flat caps and raincoats and drank their tea from cheap porcelain in cafes with goldfish and plastic fountains. I saw nothing I recognised.

© Tim Hannigan 2008