Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (2 page)

On top of the dune, I spread out my carpet and lay down. To my left were the lights of Nurmurat’s compound. To my right, there was an orange glow on the horizon, which I assumed was from the pit of fire. The crater, which was big enough to hide a three-bedroom house, had been gouged from the desert by a Soviet natural gas-drilling explosion in the 1970s. It had been burning ever since. By 2005, the firestorm had died down, leaving only a sprinkling of flames – some a few inches high, some a few feet high – sprouting from the pit’s floor and walls. It looked as if, a few hours earlier, a meteor had crashed into the earth and exploded.
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But I couldn’t see any of that from where I lay.

In the sky above my dune, there were so, so many stars. Not just the few scattered pinpricks I was used to seeing in the US. In the middle of this Central Asian desert, seven hours from the nearest city, the sky was a blackboard sprinkled with glitter and split by the wide, chalky smudge of the Milky Way. I was dazzled. I finally understood why, for all those millennia before the glare of electric lights began to hide the stars, people had made such a big deal about the night sky. This was why people had written poems about the stars, had cobbled them together into constellations and created legends about them.

If I had stretched out on that sand dune a few weeks later, I could have spent my evening searching among all those stars for Niyazov’s book, the
Rukhnama
. The “sacred” pink and green text contained Niyazov’s history of the Turkmen people, his spiritual guidance for Turkmen citizens, and his ramblings. In places, it read like a pep talk for the Turkmen nation, acknowledging that things hadn’t gone well for a few centuries, but asserting that, nevertheless, Turkmenistan was one of the greatest nations on earth.
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It was required reading for all Turkmen – all 400 pages of it. Children studied it in school. Young adults studied it in universities. Most government buildings and schools had special “Rukhnama rooms” where copies of the book were displayed next to golden busts of Niyazov. In one of his many moments of bizarre inspiration, Niyazov paid the Russian Space Agency to launch a copy into orbit. “The book that conquered the hearts of millions on Earth is now conquering space,” a state-run Turkmen newspaper announced.
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That wouldn’t happen until late August, though. Since I was a few weeks too early to search for the president’s orbiting book, I had to content myself with gazing at the real stars. I soon dozed off, wrapped in my carpet for warmth.

I woke before dawn. I watched as the stars and crescent moon faded away and the earth appeared around me. Apart from the highway and Nurmurat’s place, there was nothing but desert as far as I could see in every direction. The dunes were like massive ocean swells, sprinkled with thorn bushes, clumps of dried grasses, and scrubby saksaul trees. I could still see the pit’s orange glow on the horizon. It might be 15 kilometers away along the winding road, but it was probably only two or three kilometers away directly through the desert, I thought. The locals probably only took the long way around by jeep because they were lazy – but I could walk. I checked my water bottle (half full) and set off, leaving my carpet spread out on the dune. After all, who was going to take it?

It did occur to me that wandering off into the Karakum Desert alone with half a bottle of water, some peanuts and raisins, no map, and no compass was a bad idea. My business-style loafers left a clear trail in the sand, though, and there was no wind to wipe it away. So off I went, climbing the fronts of dunes and sliding down the backs, investigating trails of tiny footprints, taking photographs. The sun began to rise, bloated and orange over the dunes. Soon the sky was bright blue and cloudless and the orange glow was gone. The sun had bleached it from the sky. I’d lost my beacon. I couldn’t continue the way I’d been going, because I had to climb over and around sand dunes and I would inevitably lose track of which way I’d been going. I realized I wasn’t going to see the pit of fire.

I was disappointed, but wasn’t surprised. Most things I’d tried in Turkmenistan had ended in failure. There was a pattern: I would come up with an idea without consulting any of my local friends or colleagues and attempt to put it into action. Locals would warn me that my plan wouldn’t work and I’d ignore them, assuming that their can’t-do attitude was rooted in laziness or apathy. Then, as I’d been warned, I’d run into obstacles and, instead of adjusting my plan to reality, I’d tried to bull my way through, assuming energy, persistence, creativity, and a can-do attitude was all it would take. In the end, I would accomplish nothing; I would have just worn myself out, puzzled the locals, and pissed off the government.

Frustrated, I turned back. The temperature began to rise. I started to sweat, and the blowing sand stuck to my face. I trudged through the sand toward the highway. I collected my carpet, slid down the giant sand dune where I had slept, passed Nurmurat’s yurts, and crossed the highway. I sat on my rolled-up carpet on the shoulder and waited. The sun climbed higher in the sky and the temperature continued to rise. Every 15 or 20 minutes, I would hear a car in the distance, watch as it grew larger and larger, and curse as it passed. Bored, I took photos of myself next to the highway with my thumb out, hitchhiking in the desert. I counted how many seconds it took from the time I heard each car until it appeared. I drank the last of my water. Finally, an ancient truck pulled over and the two guys in the cab motioned for me to climb in. We rattled along the highway in the burning heat, the world outside the windshield almost too bright to look at. I chatted with the truckers a little but the heat made me sleepy – the temperature was well over 100 degrees – and I dozed off, bathed in sweat.

The truck was even slower than the
marshrutka
had been. It took eight or nine hours to reach the checkpoint where I had met the blond man the previous day. He was gone. In his place was a man in a khaki uniform with a belly that spilled over his belt. He was standing outside the concrete-block building, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into the sand. I handed him my passport. He took it inside and made a phone call. When he returned, he looked angry.

“Where did you go?” he asked me, in Russian.

“To Darvaza. To see the eternal flame. Fire where gas comes out of the ground.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to see the eternal flame. I wanted to see the desert, too. It’s interesting to me. Where I am from, we don’t have desert like this.”

“You are a teacher?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have students in the desert?”

“No.”

“Then don’t go to the desert. Go to school.”

He shoved my passport at me and went back inside.

When I got back to Ashgabat, I found a cheap hotel, took a long shower, and went to bed, exhausted, dirty, and frustrated. Unfortunately, that night in the hotel, I took only one lesson from my experience: next time, leave Ashgabat earlier in the day. It took me almost a year to learn the lessons I should have learned from that trip, but when I eventually did, my life got easier, my friends and acquaintances grew less frustrated, and things I tried to do actually started working.

The next morning I went to Chuli, a resort area in the mountains outside Ashgabat where some Peace Corps Volunteers were running an English-language Model United Nations camp for several dozen teenagers. For three days I helped with Model UN debates, taught journalism, and led camp songs. I began to think my unauthorized trip to Darvaza had gone unnoticed. Then, on the fourth day, my friend Geldy showed up.

I worked with Geldy at my real job – the job I did when it wasn’t summer and I wasn’t traveling around the country teaching at Peace Corps Volunteer-organized summer camps. He’d just found out his fiancée, Maral, was pregnant, despite the fact that she faithfully used her birth control every time they had sex (a half a tab of aspirin applied directly). His response had been to go out to a bar with his girlfriend Gözel. After some beer and vodka, they’d decided to take a taxi to Chuli to find me.

“I miss you,” Geldy slurred in Russian, his arm slung around my shoulders for balance. “I haven’t seen you all summer. You’re my friend, right? We’re friends, right?”

It was about 11 p.m. when they arrived. The kids were asleep in the broken-down little hotel where we were holding the camp. I took Geldy and Gözel, who were both in their early twenties, to the bar next door. We lounged on a raised, wooden platform covered with carpets and cushions – a
tapjan
– and drank big bottles of Baltika (Russian beer). Geldy filled me in on the news from home.

The KNB had come to work looking for me three times in the past few days. My boss, Aman, had told them he didn’t know where I was or what I was doing and that he wasn’t responsible for whatever I had done wrong. A KNB man had also visited my host family’s apartment, questioned my host father, and ordered him to come to the KNB office once a week to report on me. Geldy assured me he had “taken care of it”— that he had smoothed everything over. I wondered, though, if he really had. Maybe I would get sent home after all, I thought, almost hopefully.

After a few more beers, Gözel was drunk enough to stand up, pull her dress over her head, and jump into the swimming pool. She refused to get out, spinning slowly in neck-deep water with her arms outstretched, much to the amusement of the groups of Turkmen men lounging on
tapjan
s nearby. Geldy wanted to leave her in the water and go to bed, but I climbed in, pulled her out, and put her dress back on her.

I didn’t want to bring my two drunken friends into the hotel where the campers were sleeping, but it was midnight, and there was no way for them to get home. So we all stumbled over to the hotel. I left them in an upstairs hallway while I went to my room, changed into dry clothes, and scavenged for spare mattresses and sheets. When I got back, Gözel had passed out on the thin hotel-hallway carpet. Geldy and I stripped off her wet clothes, wrapped her in sheets, and settled down on our own mattresses to get some sleep.

I lay there in the hotel hallway, a little drunk, staring at the ceiling and thinking about how strangely things had turned out. When I had signed up to become a Peace Corps Volunteer, I had been hoping to travel, learn a language, and do some good. I’d seen the photos on the Peace Corps web site of the fresh-faced female Volunteer walking down dusty village streets, mobbed by smiling black children; of the preppy young man standing at the chalkboard in front of rows of attentive brown students who were sitting cross-legged on the floor. I had not expected to be hounded by internal security police. I had not expected to spend my time fighting the local government to be allowed to do my job. I had expected I would make local friends, but not that they would be womanizers whose drunken, naked girlfriends I would have to help to put to bed on mattresses in the hallways of shabby hotels.

2.

From Palm Beach to Central Asia

I joined the Peace Corps in the spring of 2004, while I was working as a newspaper reporter in South Florida. I was 27 years old, and the life I saw stretching out before me was one I didn’t want: daily commutes to work along I-95, congratulatory holiday form-emails from corporate headquarters, articles about condo association disputes. The most exciting part of each day would be choosing whether to get Thai food or Jamaican food for lunch. I would spend my life as a professional observer, standing aside and scribbling on my notepad while things happened in front of me. I wanted to get involved in the world, have some adventures, and try to be of use.

When I applied for a two-year Peace Corps assignment, I wrote on one of the endless forms that I wanted to go to Latin America or the Middle East. Peace Corps offered me Central Asia. Although I had spent the previous four or five years working as a journalist, Peace Corps offered me an assignment as a health teacher. But Peace Corps told me Turkmenistan had asked the US government to send health teachers. I agreed to go. I figured it was less important to go where I wanted than to go where I was needed.

When I took the assignment, I didn’t really know where Turkmenistan was – just that it was over near all the other “stans.” I did a little research on the Internet and started daydreaming. I would live with a Turkmen family in a yurt in the desert. They would be shepherds. I would work in a school, teaching important things to eager little kids. I sat in the newsroom in my button-down shirt and khakis, computer screens glowing on desks all around me, and told my co-workers that from then on the only commute I’d be making would be across sand dunes on a camel. I bought a guitar, planning to learn how to play it while leaning against my yurt in the evenings, after long, fulfilling days.