Stanley Stewart - In the Empire of Genghis Khan - A Journey Among Nomads

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.’

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.