Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (22 page)

When Geldy called Turkmen Telecom and told them we were ready to hook up the Internet, they told him he needed to fill out some more paperwork. They wanted a letter from Red Crescent, pledging to cover the cost of the Internet service if I didn’t make the payments. So Geldy got started drawing up the papers and trying to talk Red Crescent officials into signing them. We began to realize that what we’d thought would take a few days, was going to take weeks or months.

***

I had nothing to do while Geldy fought through red tape, so I found other ways to occupy myself. Aman had hired a new “assistant,” a pretty 18-year-old girl named Shemshat who wore her hair pulled back tight and her eyebrows plucked into razor-thin arches. She didn’t have any actual duties in the office – Aman didn’t need any assistance reading the newspaper or staring at the wall – so every morning I would give her computer lessons. I showed her how to turn the machines on and off, type, and use a mouse. Then we started on software: Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. Most mornings, at about 10 a.m., Aman would lumber over, end the lessons, and take Shemshat away in his car for a couple hours. One day I asked her where they went together. She turned bright red and told me it was none of my business.

Though I still wasn’t allowed in the local schools, I now had my own classroom. The Internet center didn’t have Internet, but at least it was a clean, quiet, well-lit room with a conference table and chairs. One day, browsing through a thin book that a Peace Corps Volunteer named Ray had published, the result of a poetry club he’d organized for in Ashgabat his English students, I found a poem about a zoo by a student named Trina Asadi: “Observe the effect of captivity/ In the sad eyes of a hawk and an owl/ In the timid faces of a fox and a jackal/ In the sorrowful groan of a lion and a bear/ You cannot make them happy in a golden cage/ They live and die for freedom/ So value their free nature and their freedom/ Look at the always chewing mouth of a camel and a goat/ And avoid living just to chew.” I decided to start my own poetry club and publish a second volume of Turkmen students’ English language poetry.

I rarely read poetry and never wrote it, but I didn’t see that as an obstacle. Ray had published a handbook on how to start poetry clubs for English students. With a copy in hand, I convinced my friend Sasha, an Abadan girl who had just returned from a year abroad, to help me find some interested students and get started.

The poetry club usually had only three or four students, young teenagers from School No. 8. We’d sit around the table in the windowless Internet center, the door closed to block out Eminem or Usher or whatever the Red Crescent youth volunteers were playing on the stereo, and work together on cinquains, pantoums, haiku, alphabet poems, and acrostics. The kids struggled to rhyme foreign words, stretched their brains to find synonyms, and often broke into giggling fits at the resulting group poems: “My best friend is my dog/ It barks from day to night/ We call him crazy frog/ He is always in a fight.”

On days when I wasn’t working with my poetry club or teaching my bosses’ mistress how to use a computer, I taught basic English lessons. My class had three students and when we started, none of them knew more than “hello” and “okay.” We worked slowly, building vocabulary, learning basic grammar. One day we were standing in a circle practicing the words for clothing.

“Shirt,” I would say, and everyone would point to a shirt. “Dress,” I would say, and everyone would point to a dress. About 10 a.m., Aman swung the door open and beckoned for Shemshat.

“Ah, here’s a good example,” I said in English, gesturing toward Aman. “He’s wearing a ‘suit,’ a ‘
costum
.’ Everybody say suit.”

Aman looked confused for a second and then really, really angry.

“I’m a
suka
?” he yelled in Russian, using the word for bitch. “Fuck you, you’re a
suka
!”

He stormed out with Shemshat in tow. Everyone else in the room had heard the difference between ‘suit’ and
suka
. When Aman slammed the door, they looked at each other for a second, stunned. Then they started laughing. Aman didn’t talk to me for a week, even after Aynabat took him aside and explained what had happened.

***

In addition to the classes I was teaching at the youth center, I started teaching classes in Ashgabat. I wanted to put my Three-Part Plan into effect, and figured I’d have a better chance of escaping notice in the big city, where no one knew me, than in Abadan, where I was under surveillance. Also, my plan required Internet access, which was available to English students in Ashgabat but not, of course, in Abadan.

With help from another Peace Corps Volunteer, I taught classes at Internet centers in Ashgabat on how to use the eBay to sell Turkmen crafts to Western consumers. I gave talks on how to use Web sites to attract tourists and their dollars to home-stays and tours of local attractions. I took a road trip to a tiny village called Yerbent, a few hours into the desert from Ashgabat, and tried to convince the residents that they could make some extra money offering home-stays and camel rides (they thought I was insane and wanted nothing to do with me). I began working with a woman named Mehri, who’d spent a year in high school in the US, to organize a nationwide debate tournament for English students. We wrote a debate team coach’s handbook, used it to teach about a dozen Peace Corps Volunteers how to start debate teams, and then sent them back to their cities and towns to organize teams and start preparing them for the tournament.

My most successful venture during this period was a class I called “Global Citizenship.” I’d chosen a vague name to avoid attracting unwanted attention. My friend Maral, an overeducated 20-something from Ashgabat, agreed to help me teach it. Few students signed up, probably because they had no idea what the class was going to be about. On the first day, we had only five teenagers.

We taught our students about democracy in the US and invited them to draw comparisons with Turkmenistan’s system, which Niyazov insisted was also “democracy.” The size of the class tripled. We talked about the importance of participation in civic organizations and local government. We talked about the concept of human rights and about which rights were included in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). I pointed out the passages in the
Rukhnama
where Niyazov had guaranteed Turkmen citizens many of the rights from the UDHR and suggested they ought to hold him to his promises. Maral taught a session on what the Quran said about women’s rights.

About half way through the 10-week class, I was at the Peace Corps office checking my mail, when one of my supervisors appeared beside me. She told me she’d heard about my class and reminded me that as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I was supposed to be politically neutral.

“Your class is exactly the kind of thing that Peace Corps Volunteers can get sent home for,” she warned me. “Be careful.”

Although I’d long been half-hoping to get thrown out of the country, when the opportunity presented itself, I balked. I tracked down Maral and told her I was going to cancel the class.

“They’re going to send me back to the States if I don’t,” I told her.

She looked at me for a long moment.

“Do you know what could happen to me for teaching that class?” she asked me, and then walked away, leaving me to think about the answer.

Shamed, I decided to continue the class.

Even though I wasn’t allowed to teach in the schools, I managed to keep myself busy throughout the fall with my various classes in Abadan and Ashgabat. I was excited and energized in a way I hadn’t been since Ovez had asked me to try to fix School No. 8’s heating system. I felt like I was making myself useful, addressing the real problems that the country was facing (albeit in small ways). I began to feel like I’d outsmarted the government. They had tried to shut me down. They’d probably thought they’d succeeded. But I’d just gone underground.

***

I soon found out, though – yet again – how naïve and arrogant I was. The KNB had, of course, noticed what I was doing. They began to send me messages. First, a KNB man called one afternoon and told Aman to make sure I would be at Red Crescent the next morning. He said he needed to talk to me. I waited all morning in Aman’s office but the man never showed up. So I went on with my classes as usual. That happened twice more.

Then, one evening about 9:30 p.m., Ana knocked on my door to tell me someone had come to see me. I’d been lying in bed in my plaid pajama pants and a t-shirt, reading. I put on some flip-flops and shuffled out to the garden gate where a 30-something Russian man in a suit was waiting for me, flanked by two pimply Turkmen conscripts in uniforms. The Russian said he needed to check to make sure my visa and registration stamps were all in order. He refused to come inside, preferring to wait on the sidewalk while I fetched my passport. He paged through it again and again, examining each word and each stamp. I stood there in my t-shirt in the late fall chill, shivering. After about 20 minutes he thanked me for my time, told me to call him if I needed anything (he’d never introduced himself), and left. I went on with my classes as usual.

After a few more weeks, one of Catherine’s students came to find me in my Internet-less Internet center. Although I’d been unable to work with Catherine at School No. 8 all fall, I’d still visited her regularly. She always seemed happy to chat with me, make me tea, and try to feed me. That had to end, her student told me. “They” had told Catherine to stop associating with me, or risk losing her job. I went on with my classes as usual, but it was starting to dawn on me that I must have pissed someone off.

I had imagined that if I ever went too far, an angry policeman in a uniform would show up, slap me in handcuffs, and either beat the shit out of me our take me to jail. It would be unpleasant for a while, but when it was all over, it’d be something to brag about. And what could they do to me? I was an American. It never occurred to me that the KNB might take a more subtle approach. (Though it should have – in most situations confrontation is much less acceptable in Turkmenistan than in the US) As autumn turned to winter, my circle of friends and acquaintances slowly, mysteriously shrank. Soon, the only people in Abadan that I had any contact with were at home and at Red Crescent. The more my world closed in around me, the more isolated I got, the more frustrated and paranoid I became.

“What the fuck is wrong with this country?” I asked Ana one evening at the dinner table.

“I told you not to curse. Put 1,000 manat in the jar.” “Why don’t you people do something?”

“You see what happens when you try, and you’re an American. Nothing will ever change around here.”

“Nothing will ever change as long as no one stands up and does anything.”

“Oh, listen to you. You talk big but the worst thing that could happen to you is that you’d get sent home to America. That’s no punishment. I’d love to get sent to America.”

23.

It All Comes Crashing Down

Aynabat hurried over from Aman’s office to the Internet center to tell me I had a phone call from the Red Crescent office in Ashgabat. I walked back across the street with her and picked up the receiver, which was lying next to the phone on Aman’s desk. He lounged in his chair, reading the paper. He ignored me as I stood next to him and talked on the phone to a woman named Bahar whom I’d never met.

“Can you come to Ashgabat today?” she asked. “I need to talk to you.”

“Of course,” I told her. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

I couldn’t imagine what she wanted to talk to me about, but I wasn’t surprised that she didn’t want to tell me over the phone. People were often skittish about talking on the phone, since they assumed someone was listening.

I took a
marshrutka
into the city and found Geldy hiding in some bushes behind the white marble Red Crescent building, smoking a cigarette. Bahar had asked him to come to the meeting, too. He had no idea why, but he wasn’t concerned. He was always getting yelled at for something; I think he was used to it.

When Geldy finished his cigarette, we filed into Bahar’s immaculate office and stood in front of her desk with our hands in our pockets, looking at the ground, like high school students waiting to be disciplined by the vice principal. She was a petite woman in her early 40s with short black hair.

“The Ministry of Justice called me,” she said. “They chose your Internet center grant for a random audit. They said you never deposited the money in a bank. If you’ll just give me the deposit slip, I’ll pass it on to them and we can clear all this up.”

Silence.

Geldy and I looked at each other and then back at her.

“We don’t have a deposit slip,” Geldy said. “We never brought the money to the bank. We just changed it and started spending it.”

Bahar knew this would be the answer.

Almost no one deposits money in Turkmen banks if they can help it. As I’d learned first-hand, sometimes the banks were reluctant to give the money back. Besides, depositing dollars in a Turkmen bank meant that they’d be converted to manat at the official exchange rate of 5,000 manat to the dollar instead of the bazaar rate of 25,000 manat to the dollar. So, depositing a dollar in the bank meant, in effect, losing 80 percent of its value when you withdrew it later in manat (the only option). True, it was technically illegal to change money at the bazaar, but it was like speeding – everyone did it and only a few people got caught.