Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (10 page)

“A what?” he asked.

“A loom,” I said.

“Why do you need a loom?”

“I want to weave a carpet.”

“You?”

“Yes. Me.”

He sent me to a carpet factory a few blocks away, tucked in among the city’s white marble government ministries. It looked like all the other concrete apartment buildings in the city. I couldn’t find the front entrance, so I walked around to the back, found an open door, and walked in. I found three women sitting on a blanket on the concrete floor, surrounded by looms holding half-finished carpets. They were drinking tea from little bowls and tearing pieces from a loaf of
chorek
. I greeted them and they – looking quite surprised – invited me to join them for tea. I sat down and the young woman next to me dumped out a tea bowl, rinsed it with tea, scrubbed it a little with her thumb, refilled it with fresh tea, and handed to me. I drank, gratefully.

Her name was Altyn, which means “gold” in Turkmen. She was 27, the same age as me. She said she worked at the carpet factory all day, back aching, tying knot after knot after knot. In the evenings, she went home, ate dinner, and then got to work on the carpet she was weaving at home for extra cash. She could not imagine why I would weave a carpet on purpose – and for free. Still, after we finished our tea, she took me to a ramshackle workshop in the courtyard behind the factory and introduced me to the in-house loom builder. He was a crusty old bearded man whose clothing was streaked with soot and grease. He sold me a six-foot tall, three-foot wide contraption he’d welded from what looked like scraps of pipe and bits of a metal bed frame.

At Dom Pionerov, Mahym helped me string the loom and I started weaving. The carpet was going to be as big as a beach towel. I would weave it in rows, starting at one end and working painstakingly to the other. Each row was 240 knots wide, took me about 45 minutes to finish, and brought me about one millimeter closer to the other end of the carpet. I could only do two or three rows before my back started hurting and my eyes began to strain in the dim light. After a few days, I started to get calluses on my fingertips from handling the taut warps. A real carpet-maker like Altyn could probably finish a medium-sized carpet like the one I was working on in a few weeks. It was going to take me months.

9.

The Road to Tejen

I woke before dawn and walked to Red Crescent in the dark, sleet stinging my face. Geldy and I had arranged to go to Tejen, a small city about three hours east of Abadan, to teach health lessons at a school there. When I arrived at the office, the door was unlocked. I pushed it open and crossed the dining hall, leaving a trail of melting sleet on the floor. Geldy was making tea in the kitchen with Chary, the taxi driver he’d hired. The room was lit only by the stove’s blue flames. Geldy, usually boisterous and full of jokes, was quiet – probably hung over. Aynabat, the Red Crescent nurse, was washing a thermos to fill with tea for the road. Chary was 48 and had a wide, flat face and the creased eyes of an East Asian. He was wearing an Addidas track suit, an embroidered skullcap (tahya) of the sort popular with Muslims in Central Asia, and a woman’s thigh-length suede coat with wide, furry lapels.

“How are you doing?” I asked him.

“Excellent,” he said.

“We are going to Tejen.”

“Oh, you like Tejen?” I asked.

“No, but I love to drive,” he replied, grinning.

On the highway, Chary drove intently, flying past other cars, facing down oncoming traffic in the slush of the bumpy two-lane road, sometimes even executing a double pass – passing a car that was passing another car by pulling not just into the oncoming lane, but onto the shoulder of the oncoming lane. With all of us inside drinking tea, the windows were fogged. Now and then, I would wipe mine clean so I could look outside. The road ran along the base of the Kopetdag range. The flat desert plain we were on gave way to rolling hills and then to a wall of craggy mountains. Not a single tree marred the landscape’s clean, graceful lines. The sleet had changed to snow; everything was white.

“White is good luck,” Geldy said, grinning. “Today must be a very lucky day.”

Every twenty minutes or so, we stopped at a checkpoint, showed our passports, popped the trunk so a soldier could look inside, and moved on. After we left Ashgabat and passed through Anew, the countryside emptied out. There was an occasional shepherd, bundled up against the weather, watching from a donkey’s back as his sheep foraged for grass hidden under the snow. The only other signs of human habitation were the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the road, followed by a trail of telephone poles.

The Russians had laid the tracks in the late 1800s as part of their efforts to subdue the Turkmen tribes and beat the British in the competition for regional dominance. The Russians had initially thought to conquer the region by camel, but their campaigns against the Akhal Tekes at Geokdepe quickly drove home the need for a better way to move men and munitions across the desert. So they set to work laying rails from the Caspian coast east through Abadan, Ashgabat, Tejen, and Merv. From there, they headed north to Samarkand (in Uzbekistan) and beyond – more than 900 miles in all.
32

In 1888, George Nathaniel Curzon, a 29-year-old member of the British parliament, rode the railway and returned to give a vivid report to the Royal Geographical Society on what he had seen.
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The trip from the Caspian Sea to Samarkand took 72 hours, he said. The trains rumbled along at up to 40 miles per hour, through hardpan desert, scrub desert, and the occasional stretch of sand dune desert. “The sand of the most brilliant yellow hue,” he wrote, “is piled in loose hillocks and mobile dunes, and is swept hither and thither by powerful winds. It has all the appearance of a sea of troubled waves, billow succeeding billow in melancholy succession, with the sand driving like spray from their summits and great smooth-swept troughs lying between, on which the winds leave the imprint of their fingers in wavy indentations, just like an ebb tide on the sea shore.” Curzon found the country drab and ugly, but noted that, “It is only fair to add that the Turckmans [sic] themselves are unaware that so gloomy an impression can at any time be conveyed by their country. They have a proverb which says that Adam, when driven from Eden, never found a finer place for settlement [than Turkmenistan].”
 
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Only a couple of decades later, the British invaded Turkmenistan using this Transcaspian Railway. It was 1918. World War I was raging and the British were worried that the German-Ottoman alliance might launch an offensive through Central Asia and into British-controlled Persia and India. For a while, they were comforted by the fact that the tsar, their ally, controlled Central Asia. But then the Bolsheviks overthrew the tsar and made peace with Germany. It got worse: the Bolsheviks drafted thousands of Austrian and German prisoners of war, who were being held in Central Asia, into their new Red Army, which was fighting remnants of the tsarist forces for control of the Russian empire.
35

Russian Central Asia no longer stood as a buffer between British possessions in Asia and Ottoman and German forces. Instead, all of a sudden there was an unreliable army including thousands of (former) enemy soldiers practically on the Persian border – and not far from India. As Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, put it: “There is serious danger that [Central Asia] may fall entirely under Turco-German influence, and may be made a base for dispatch of large bodies of armed enemy agents or even organized bodies of armed enemy prisoners into Persia and Afghanistan.”
36
 
So when a motley coalition of Turkmen and Russians deposed the new Bolshevik government in Ashgabat, the British sent troops to support the new anti-Bolshevik government, which called itself the Ashgabat Committee.

For about a year, the Ashgabat Committee and the British controlled western Turkmenistan and the Bolsheviks controlled the east. Since the only practical way to move troops through the Karakum was along the railroad, the opposing forces fought along the track. Mostly, their armored trains would shell each other from a distance. Sometimes soldiers climbed off the trains and fought pitched battles. The conflict was a mix of old and new: the British cavalry used lances; each side had a reconnaissance airplane. When the war ended, the threat to India disappeared and the British withdrew from western Turkmenistan. Within months, the Bolsheviks took control. They ruled until 1991.

Outside my taxi window, the railway snaked through the snowy desert and slipped into the city of Tejen. There wasn’t much to see in Tejen: snow, mud, pre-fab concrete Soviet apartment buildings. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other city in Turkmenistan. We stayed just long enough to visit two schools, where Geldy, Aynabat, and I taught high school students how not to get AIDS. The kids sat silently in auditoriums, under their teachers’ stern gazes. We lectured, introducing posters and games when it looked like the kids might be losing interest. It felt good to be doing something.

On the ride back to Ashgabat, Chary played his only tape, which included Celine Dion, the Backstreet Boys, and a Turkmen dance remix of “Hava Nagila,” until none of us could stand it anymore. Then we gave up and talked to each other. I told Aynabat, who was sitting next to me, about the lesson I was planning on tuberculosis. She read through my pidgin-Russian lesson plan.

“You forgot to put in, under ‘treatment,’ that eating dog meat cures tuberculosis,” she said.

“Dog meat cures tuberculosis? So what kind of meat cures AIDS?” I asked.

“No, it’s true,” Geldy said, laughing. “It’s scientifically proven.”

Chary, eyes on the road, broke in: “I don’t know if dog meat cures tuberculosis, but it’s pretty tasty.”

Part II: Corruption, Absurdity, and Paranoia

10.

A New Year

Although the temperature that first winter rarely dipped below freezing, I was cold all the time. My bedroom was unheated. I slept in long underwear and a wool hat. At Red Crescent and Dom Pionerov, miniature electric heaters fought losing battles against the winter wind. At School No. 8, the situation was even worse: windowpanes were missing, snowflakes blew down the hallways, and the kids wore their hats, scarves, and mittens at their desks. In the evenings, I would take long, hot showers in the
banya
, which was the only warm room in the apartment.

The holidays came in a deluge in late December. The Russians in Turkmenistan still had not completed the switch, ordered by Lenin in 1918, from the old Julian calendar to the more accurate Gregorian calendar. They celebrated the holidays according to both calendars: Gregorian Christmas on Dec. 25 and Julian Christmas on Jan. 7; Gregorian New Year’s on Jan. 1 and Julian New Year’s on Jan. 14. Strangely, Turkmen and Russians alike had adopted the Chinese zodiac, trading little stuffed chickens on Jan. 1 to welcome the Year of the Rooster. The Christian holidays were followed by Gurban Bayram (also known as Eid al-Adha), a three-day Muslim holiday commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God.
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Last came Nowruz Bayram, the Persian celebration of the new year.

The most important of all the holidays was “new” New Year’s – Jan. 1. Families saved for months to load their holiday tables with huge feasts and buy presents for their friends and relatives. Olya started buying groceries for New Year’s in early December, bringing home a couple bottles of soda one day, a bottle of champagne another, and hiding them away in the backs of cabinets and behind sofas. Maybe she did this because she knew what was coming: Niyazov declared that, in the new year, he would raise the salaries of all public employees by 50 percent. Prices at the bazaars shot up. Niyazov ordered the bazaar merchants to stop raising their prices, but they ignored him. The salary increase never materialized.

Work nearly ceased during the buildup to New Year’s. Aman rarely showed his face at Red Crescent. I’d spend hours sitting in his office by myself, writing letters and studying Russian. During one of Aman’s few appearances, he was tagging along after a confident Turkmen man in a really nice black suit. They sat with me at Aman’s big desk and negotiated a price for some
polotki
Aman was selling. I eavesdropped ineffectively – I couldn’t remember what
polotki
were. When Aman and the suit finally settled on a price – 3.5 million manat per
polotka
(about $140) – they shook hands and stood up to leave the office.

Aman motioned for me to follow. In the dining hall, he unlocked a green door and pulled a long canvas bag painted with a red crescent from a stack of identical bags. The man in the suit took the bag, opened it, pulled out the contents, and unrolled them. It was a tent, a giant tent, big enough to fill the room, meant to house refugees in case of a war or a natural disaster. I translated the assembly instructions from English into Russian for him. The stranger, who was a cotton grower who wanted to house pickers in the tents during the harvest season, seemed satisfied. He bought 10 tents, loaded them into his Toyota 4Runner, and left. I went to the kitchen and made some tea. When Geldy returned to the office from teaching a health lesson at one of the schools, I told him what had happened.