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dozen tenement-blocks, until a flock of grizzled heads sprouted from rotting oriels and balconies, to bellow down their assent or refusal. Then he would march inside to harry them, yelling for me to follow. We bounded up stair-wells fetid and awash with recent rain, where bottles and cigarette stubs and sometimes broken condoms floated. We were joined by a big, hirsute man with violent eyebrows and a lax, cruel mouth. Then came a wizened old Mongoloid clutching a lute in a velvet case. And soon we were careering across the desert in a gust of anticipation, while over the hummocks around us the goosefoot and artemisia thinned, and all signs of habitation vanished.
    After an hour Murad’s face – a quivering profile of high bones – quickened into expectation. ‘We’re here!’
    He veered over virgin sand and we settled in a dip between the dunes. A weft of yellow and mauve vetch shone all over the savannah, and poppies turned the ridges scarlet. He had forgotten nothing. A felt carpet, such as once covered Turcoman yurts, was unravelled over the sands. Bags of spiced mutton appeared, with two charred samovars, an outsize stewing-pot, a basket of raw vegetables, sheafs of kebab-skewers and some fire-blackened bricks. As we scavenged for dead saxaul – the wind-blown plant whose pallid stems litter the whole country – a familiar euphoria broke out. Their voices were light and bantering. Their bodies seemed balanced only precariously on their bow-legs, as if they longed to leap on horseback. Soon we had a triple blaze of fires going. The samovars were cremated in a nest of flaming branches, the shashlik oozed and spat over charcoal heaps, and the stewing-pot – into which Murad had tossed a calf’s head – simmered balefully on a brick hob. The men’s faces lit up in sybaritic grins. The bitterness left the big man’s mouth and the Mongoloid’s face dimpled into glee.
    â€˜Isn’t this better than home?’ he cried, as we settled ceremoniously on the carpet. ‘Nothing compares with this!’
    Soon the shashlik was being thrust triumphantly from hand to hand. Dribbling blood and fat, it was tough as rope. But the three men swallowed each morsel wholesale, or clamped it between their teeth like mastiffs and worried it to and fro, until it separated with a noise like tearing sheets. They celebrated every mouthful with a carnivorous burp, and dipped gluttonously into mountains of radishes and olives. The brief respites between skewers resounded with an anticipatory grinding of gold and ivory molars and the smack of oily lips. They looked artless and timeless. At any moment, I thought, they might break into shamanistic chant or propose a raid. The time was not long past when their ancestors had cantered eighty miles a day to harvest Persian slaves – the Mongoloid’s father might just have known it – and the desert still seemed subtly to nourish them. Their earthquake-stricken country gave no confidence in building, or perhaps in any permanence at all. Better the open sky!
    Assiduously they plied me with the tenderest chunks of shashlik, but my teeth recoiled even from these. I smuggled them out of my mouth and secreted them wherever I could: in the bush behind me, under the sand between my knees, in my shirt pockets. Murad kept thrusting more at me, the point of his skewer threatening my chest. But he was grinning with hospitality. They all were. The big man detached the most succulent nuggets to press on me, with the crispest onions. But soon my pockets sagged with the telltale meat, and a betraying stain of fat was spreading across my shirt-front.
    As I masticated despairingly on another hunk, I bit on something hard, and assumed it was mutton-bone. Then I realised that it was one of my own bones I was chewing. I had lost a tooth. Neurotically I ran my tongue back and forth over the gap. Nobody else noticed. I longed to inspect it in a mirror, but I