Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (16 page)

Akhal Tekes as a breed faced extinction and many Turkmen were appalled. To protest the Soviet policy toward the Akhal Tekes, a group of Turkmen rode their horses from Ashgabat to Moscow in 1935. It took them 88 days to cross the Karakum Desert and the Kazakh steppe and arrive in the capital. It was a trek of nearly 2,500 miles, almost as far as from Los Angeles to New York. After they arrived, they entered their horses in a race around the city and won the first 16 places.

The trek and the race impressed the Soviet authorities and, for a time, the Akhal Tekes were held in high esteem in the USSR. When World War II ended, Marshall Georgi Zhukov led the victory parade in Red Square on a white Akhal Tekke. It seemed that the breed had been saved. But things began to go wrong again in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nikita Khrushchev, then the leader of the USSR, was determined to mechanize agriculture in his country. This meant distributing tractors and getting rid of horses, which had been used to pull plows. “The Communist party began to treat horses as nothing more than a food product,” Maslow wrote. “The state farms in Turkmenistan were issued quotas for horse-flesh.”
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A few old Turkmen, rather than see the graceful Akhal Tekes turned into steaks, began to lead some of them out into the desert and release them into the wild. Many Akhal Tekes, though, ended up on dinner tables.
 

When the Soviet Union fell, rich foreigners moved in to buy some of the finest remaining Akhal Tekes. Niyazov imposed tight restrictions on their sale and export. There weren’t many left, after all, and Turkmenistan didn’t want to lose the last few. By 1998, there were only about 2,000 Akhal Tekes remaining in the world. Niyazov dedicated a national holiday to them (April 27) and put one in the center of the new nation’s official seal. He gave them as gifts to foreign dignitaries, including Bill Clinton.
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Despite Niyazov’s attention to the breed, its fate seemed uncertain. Few Akhal Tekes remained and those that I saw at the hippodrome were so skinny their ribs showed. A groom told me that was the way they were supposed to look, but it seemed more likely that at a time when many humans were struggling to get by, the horses weren’t getting enough to eat.

After an hour or so with the Akhal Tekes, I wandered back across the track, through the parking lots, to the welder’s alley. The bookkeeper had returned, a 16-year-old Turkmen girl with a calculator, a pen, and some scrap paper. She took my money, pocketed it, and wrote out a receipt. The welder and a couple guys from nearby shops helped me load my billboard onto a small green truck I’d hired. I climbed into the cab with my receipt, signed and stamped permission for the project, and passport in hand, ready for the inevitable checkpoints. We fought through the city traffic and out into the countryside, windows rolled down, elbows hanging out. It was late afternoon and we were headed west. The sun was coming straight at us through the windshield. The hot breeze blew up my sleeve and across my chest, drying some of my sweat.

“So where are you from?” asked the driver, a gray-haired Turkmen man with a beer gut.

“America.”

“Ah, so what do you think of the Iraq war?”

I paused before answering to think of a careful response.

At a bar a few weeks earlier, a man with a bushy black moustache who’d been sitting on the next stool had asked me the same question. I’d launched into a long riff about how George W. Bush was a bad man and a bad president and how his war in Iraq was a disaster. The man had drained his glass of vodka, smacked it down on the bar, and glared at me, swaying a little.

“Well fuck you. I love Bush. I’m a Kurd. He freed my people,” he said and walked out of the bar.

I’d learned my lesson. This time, I mildly told the truck driver that I was against the war.

“But Saddam Hussein was a bad man,” he said. “Aren’t you glad he’s gone?”

“Saddam Hussein might have been a bad man, but the US can’t go around the world invading every country that has a bad leader. Why should American soldiers die because Iraq had a bad leader?”

“I don’t care if American soldiers die,” the driver said, looking straight ahead. “I’m Turkmen – who are they to me? I’m just glad Hussein is gone.”

We rode the rest of the way in silence. I think we’d both decided that continuing the conversation would bring nothing but trouble. When we reached Red Crescent, he waited in the truck while I went inside and rounded up a group of teenaged boys who were breakdancing in the dining hall and made them unload the billboard and carry it inside. One of them, a 16-year-old named Maksat who was always nagging me to help him transcribe Eminem lyrics, was wearing his Osama bin Laden t-shirt again, even though he knew it pissed me off. I thanked the driver, paid him, shook his hand, and waved as he drove away. Then I went looking for Shokhrat.

* * *

Shokhrat was the 17-year-old Turkmen guy that Aman had hired to replace Geldy. He was a nice kid, but he wasn’t cut out for the job. He was supposed to wrangle the groups of teenaged youth volunteers that hung out at Red Crescent, organizing them to teach health classes in schools, put on holiday events for orphans – all the stuff Geldy used to make them do. He wasn’t assertive enough, though. He was about 5-foot-8, quiet, and shy. He wanted to be an interior designer or a painter. He hid from the youth volunteers, leaving them to do what they pleased. He was happier alone in the kitchen, painting educational health posters. Needless to say, he was excited when I told about the billboard. It would give him an excuse to avoid the youth volunteers for weeks.

Shokhrat and I got along well. We talked boxing and art. I’d spent nine or 10 months training at a boxing gym in Florida (I’d never fought, just sparred a few times). He’d spent two years training at the local sport center. We talked about Roy Jones Jr. and he lent me a videotape of the 1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle.” I’d done some painting and flirted with art school in Boston for a semester. Shokhrat’s dad was a professional artist who was teaching him how to paint. He always promised to show me his work, but never got around to it. I think he was too shy.

One Saturday, Shokhrat convinced Aman to give him a morning off and took me to the new art museum in Ashgabat. He’d heard it had a real Rembrandt. The museum was built from white marble and reflective glass and topped by a turquoise and white dome – it was part of Niyazov’s new Ashgabat city center. There were no other visitors, but the museum didn’t feel empty because there were two docents loitering in every gallery.

I liked the modern Turkmen art on the first floor the best. The paintings’ colors were bright, their lines strong, their subjects historical, and their tone martial. One showed a Turkmen mother in a
koynek
leading two strapping Turkmen lads into a Soviet recruiting office, to sign them up to go fight the Germans in World War II. Another showed the doomed Akhal Teke soldiers making their stand against the Russians at Geokdepe. There was also a painting of a company of Turkmen cavalrymen in full armor slaughtering Christians during the First Crusade.

Shokhrat wasn’t interested in the first floor. He spent his morning with the European art on the second floor, wandering through the galleries, hands in his pockets, pausing in front of the pieces he liked. I joined him for a little while. The European works in the museum were nothing special. Most were attributed to “Unknown Artist.” Plaques next to the paintings offered descriptions in English, which were riddled with mistakes. A painting that showed a ship going down in a storm, for example, was labeled “Sheep Wheck.” I later pointed out these mistakes to the museum staff and offered to help correct them. They said they’d call me but never did. They probably decided that there was no need, since there were no translation errors in Niyazov’s Golden Age.

After our visit to the museum, Shokhrat and I spent three weeks painting the billboard. We worked from a design I’d drawn up months earlier and submitted to Aman, Abadan city hall, and the British Embassy. I’d chosen an anti-smoking theme because smoking was a widespread public health problem in Turkmenistan, but also for strategic reasons. In 1999, Niyazov had banned smoking in public “in name of the health of the nation.” Violators were to be fined a month’s salary.
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This meant that smokers had to hide behind buildings and bushes so the police wouldn’t catch them. It also meant that an anti-smoking project was likely to be approved. Geldy helped me insert a paragraph into my proposal about how the billboard would support the wise policies of “the Great Turkmenbashy” and, sure enough, I got permission.

The design showed a clean-cut Turkmen man stepping on an oversized pack of cigarettes. He was carrying a bag of groceries in one hand and a bag of clothing in the other. Turkmen text across the top of the billboard said: “Smoking a pack a day for a year will cost you 2,190,000 manat [about $88]. Don’t you have better things to spend your money on?” More text across the bottom explained the health risks. Then, in big red letters in the middle, it said “Quit!” Shokhrat painted the man; I was in charge of the pack of cigarettes and the text. Some of the Red Crescent volunteers helped us with the background.

When we finished, Aman called city hall and told the mayor that the billboard was ready to be hung at the bus stop. Weeks passed and nothing happened so Aman called city hall again. This time the mayor said he needed to see the billboard – not a design, the actual billboard – before he could authorize city workers to hang it anywhere. So I tracked down my friend Omar, who managed landscaping crews for the city, and he assigned some of his men to help me. Eight of us carried the giant steel slab across town, sweating and cursing, and up the stairs to the second floor of city hall. We left it in the hallway outside the mayor’s office.

Within a few days, it was hanging at the bus stop. Every morning, old Turkmen women in
koyneks
, young soldiers in fatigues, business men in suits, and children in their school uniforms, stood and stared at the billboard as they waited for their buses. There was nothing else like it in Abadan. My host family and friends congratulated me for finally managing to get something done. I made Geldy – who had insisted that the mayor would never, ever, hang the billboard – buy me a beer.

17.

This Is Not a Camp

I am a slow learner. When I applied for permission to run a five-day event in Abadan after school ended, I called it a “camp.” I’d forgotten what Ovez had taught me: to avoid trouble, call it a “seminar,” an “event,” an anything – just not a camp. Being a plainspoken person, when I wrote a proposal for a week-long day-camp, I called it a week-long day-camp. Since I planned to invite 50 kids to meet me at the sports center every day to play soccer, volleyball, Frisbee, and kickball and then sit through short seminars on why it’s good to play sports and eat well and how not to get AIDS or tuberculosis, I called it a sports/health camp. At first, my indiscretion seemed to go unnoticed.

I found 50 campers who wanted to attend. I also found funding. The costs were pretty low because the sport center’s director had agreed to waive the entrance fee for our campers. Mostly, I just needed to pay for lunch for the campers and counselors every day. Geldy had managed to get a grant from Red Crescent Ashgabat because he worked in the AIDS program and the camp had something to do with AIDS education (I think he skimmed some money off the top to buy some new clothes). I contributed some money I’d earned from an article I’d written for an American newspaper about living in Turkmenistan.