Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (24 page)

“Ah, my favorite daughter!” Ana would sing out as Sesili arrived home in the evening, exhausted. “What did you bring me today?”

Sesili, worn out, would produce a few tangerines and ruby pomegranates, and maybe, if it was a really good day, a bottle of soda. And then we would sit at the kitchen table and count the money, piling the worn out, crumpled 10,000-manat bills into stacks of 10, the cats milling around our feet. We’d eat dinner and gossip about our days and then it was back to cooking, preparing the salads for the next day.

After months of unemployment, the money was rolling in for Ana and Sesili. They were so busy they had to hire a neighbor to help them. Sesili bought a cell phone. Ana paid back the loan I’d given her, insisted on taking me to the Tolkuchka Bazaar to buy me a new winter jacket as interest on the loan, and told me to stop paying rent (I refused).

It was a bittersweet time. We were all excited for the holiday. Things were going well for Ana and Sesili. I was relieved to be leaving Abadan and excited about going to Nurana. But I was also sad to be leaving Ana, Sesili, Tanya, Natalya, and my other friends. Almost everyone in Abadan had been welcoming and kind to me. Even the government officials and KNB men had been polite and respectful; they were just doing their jobs. The only people who had really done me wrong were Olya and Aman. As for the rest, I’d certainly caused them more trouble than they’d caused me.

Matt, who had lived with Ana and Sesili during training, came to visit for New Year’s. We all spent the afternoon cooking. The table was loaded with stuffed grape leaves; stuffed peppers; chicken legs; lamb stewed with eggplant, tomatoes and potatoes; six different Korean salads; bowls of fruit; and bottles of wine and vodka. That night, Sesili brought home 4 million manat—twice my monthly salary, four times the salad business’s startup cost. About 
10 p.m., we sat down to eat. Visitors dropped by now and then to eat a little and make toasts. We watched Russian variety shows and Putin’s holiday speech. It was a cozy night; I was content. I went to bed around 4 a.m. and, before falling asleep, I lay in the dark for a while thinking about how much I would miss Ana and Sesili.

The next day, we slept until noon and then had leftovers with wine and vodka for brunch. As dinner time approached, we took a
marshrutka
across town to Ana’s brother Andrei’s house for a second New Year’s celebration. It was chilly out. Matt, Ana, Sesili and I were wrapped in jackets and hats and gloves and scarves, and packed into the minivan with a half-dozen other passengers. The windows were half-fogged as we rolled past the bazaar. I wiped mine clean and looked outside. We passed the main bus stop. On the wall, there was a big blank space.

My billboard was gone. It had been ripped off its fasteners, leaving nothing but four scars in the building’s concrete hide.

“They tore my billboard down,” I said.

“Well what did you expect?” Ana asked.

“Are you gonna go postal?” Matt asked.

24.

Accused of Kidnapping

After New Year’s, there was still one last thing I had to do before I could move to Nurana. Months earlier, I’d promised to teach at an English immersion camp during winter break. An Ashgabat English teacher named Yelena, a friend of Catherine’s, had organized it. She was a round, soft-spoken woman in her forties, relentlessly polite and optimistic. She’d found funding, picked the campers, organized the logistics, and recruited me and five other Peace Corps Volunteers to be counselors. I was impressed. She seemed to have thought of everything.

The camp was supposed to be at Chuli, but the government had demolished almost everything there, planning to replace the old campsites and hotels with a gleaming new, white-marble resort. For some reason this involved not just tearing down the structures at Chuli, but also razing whole villages along the Ashgabat-Chuli road. Riding to Chuli in a taxi one day, I’d seen bulldozers flattening several dozen houses while the residents sat in the streets with all their belongings, looking shocked and disoriented.

“They’ll get nothing,” the taxi driver said. “We live like dogs in this country.”

Since we couldn’t hold the camp at Chuli, Yelena went looking for another site that fit her budget. She discovered that flying the two dozen campers to a hotel in Avaza, a Caspian Sea resort town just outside the city of Turkmenbashy, would be cheaper than holding the camp at a hotel in Ashgabat. Hotel rates were low in Avaza, since no one wanted to vacation on the beach in January; tickets on Turkmen Airlines’ new Boeings were subsidized – only $1 for a flight anywhere in the country (for Turkmen citizens and Peace Corps Volunteers).

Two days after New Year’s I boarded a plane at the Ashgabat airport at 7 a.m., with the other Peace Corps Volunteers. The campers would follow the next day. The plane took off and headed west. A portrait of Niyazov in a powder blue suit hung on the bulkhead, keeping watch over the cabin. An anti-evil eye charm hung near the door to the cockpit. The flight took an hour. Below the plane, the Turkmen landscape was all brown-and-gray sand dunes and half-evaporated lakes and mysterious trenches and dirt tracks.

As we approached Turkmenbashy (formerly Krasnovodsk), the tired, tree-less Balkan Mountains rose up out of the desert. And then there was the Caspian, a pool of water about the size of Montana, and about a third as salty as most seawater – calm and blue. It is a remnant of the massive Tethys Sea, which had covered Central Asia millions of years ago and then mostly dried up, leaving the Caspian and Aral seas behind. Underneath are substantial reserves of oil, which the surrounding countries pump and sell.

Our campsite in Avaza was a short walk from the shoreline, where waves crashed onto the rocks, filling tide pools with frigid seawater. It was a small hotel: about 10 two-story cabins and a dining hall arranged around a small park, protected by a fence. Surrounding our hotel were dozens of dachas (vacation houses). Young conscripts in uniforms were busily tearing them down and loading their remains onto trucks. Like Chuli, Avaza was to become a shiny new resort, whether its residents liked it or not.

The campers, teenagers from Ashgabat and Abadan, bunked in two-bedroom apartments in the cabins for the week. The Peace Corps Volunteers taught them dance, origami, English, astronomy, and a course based on Joshua Piven’s
Worst Case Scenario Survival Guide
. We played soccer with them in the park and took them on long runs through the desert. One evening we walked them down to the seashore and had a campfire. Three boys had formed a band and, dressed in black, wearing heavy eyeliner, performed a few songs. Those were the highlights. Most of the camp was a disaster.

One afternoon, the kids living in the apartment above the counselors’ locked the door and left for their classes, forgetting that they’d left the tap open in their kitchen. To be fair, the water wasn’t working so it was hard for them to tell. While they were gone, the water started working again, overflowed the sink, collected about four inches deep on the apartment floor, and started dripping through the ceiling into the apartment below.

Two counselors, returning to their apartment, discovered the disaster, and called for help. With buckets, brooms and dustpans we all bailed the water out of the upstairs apartment onto the balcony, where it froze and formed long delicate icicles as it dripped off the edge. Inside the apartment downstairs, we arranged teacups, trashcans, and Frisbees to catch the drips, and sat on the couch, watching the ceiling rain.

Meanwhile, Yelena was getting nervous because city officials kept showing up at the camp, demanding to know why there were six Americans and two dozen Turkmen students at a condemned beach resort in January. On Friday, angry school officials from the Ashgabat area started calling us on the emergency Peace Corps cell phone we had with us and asking the same sorts of questions. How they got the number was a mystery because only Peace Corps staff had it.

One principal called six or seven times, demanding to know whether we’d “kidnapped” any of her students, and insisting we give her a list of the kids who were at the camp. Government ministries started calling Peace Corps, asking questions; Peace Corps staff started calling us. Some of the campers had relatives who lived in the Turkmenbashy area and stopped by the campsite to see if everything was okay. It turned out Yelena had neglected to get government permission to move the camp to Avaza.

The situation just kept getting worse until Saturday. Then, for whatever reason – maybe all the government officials went home for the weekend – the phone stopped ringing, officials from city hall left us alone, and the KNB stopped visiting. On Monday, the camp ended and the kids went home. When they returned to school, the kids from Abadan who had attended the camp were forced to write essays on why they’d gone to the camp. Several wrote that Catherine (from Abadan’s School No. 8) had inspired them to do whatever they could to improve their English skills, so they always attended camps and special events in English. As punishment for inspiring her students, Catherine was forced to retire. I don’t know what happened to Yelena.

* * *

After the campers went home, I stayed in Turkmenbashy with my friend Alei. We had a plan: we were going to search the western Karakum Desert for the ruins of an ancient city named Dekhistan.

I’d heard it was southeast of Turkmenbashy, so we took a taxi to the biggest city in that area, an oil town called Balkanabat. We went to the nearest
marshrutka
stand and started asking questions. At first, no one had any idea what we were talking about. It took us about an hour to discover that the locals called the city Mashad-i Misirian and that we needed a four-wheel drive vehicle to get there.

We did our best to convince one of the five taxi drivers who were standing around near their cars, drinking tea, to take us. They weren’t interested. Mashad-i Misirian was a long way down a dirt road and the day was all but gone, they told us. It looked like it was going to rain.

“You’d rather stand here talking to each other for the rest of the day than make some money?” I asked.

“Yes,” one of the men said.

“Come on, we’ve got food and vodka,” Alei tried. “It won’t be like work – you’ll just be partying with Americans.”

They laughed, but still refused to take us.

They did, however, point out the road that led toward Mashad-i Misirian. We walked over to it and flagged down a car headed our way. It took us to a grimy little town called Gumdag. At the taxi stand there, we found a wiry man with a bushy mustache named Rahat who agreed to take us to the ancient city in his Toyota sedan for the right price, dirt road or no dirt road, end of the day or not. As we were about to leave, Rahat’s friend Navod jumped into the car, explaining that he was going the same direction as us. He needed to pick up a sheep for the big Kurban Bayram holiday meal he was hosting the next day at his house.

We drove south through the desert along a nice paved road. This wasn’t graceful sand dune desert like I’d seen near Darvaza. It wasn’t rolling scrub desert like I’d seen between Mary and Turkmenabat. It was wasteland. Flat, yellow-orange sand as far as I could see, with almost nothing growing. Now and then, we passed a herd of bobbing oil wells, spread out across the barren plain. We overtook several tanker trucks with Iranian plates that appeared to be carrying oil. After about an hour of driving, we cleared a checkpoint and stopped at a roadside stand to pick up a half-dozen
somsa
s filled with onions and chopped mutton fat. I ate a couple in the back seat, staring out the window, content to be on the road.

A little while later, the highway ended and we turned off onto a dirt road that led out across the desert. We passed herds of camels dressed in winter sweaters with holes cut out to accommodate their humps, tended by shepherds on ancient motorcycles. Though there were no villages in sight, the dirt tracks were busy with cars, trucks, and motorcycles. When the road ended, Rahat drove into the open desert, heading for two minarets on the horizon. The landscape had changed. The sand was now dotted with bushes, which made it seem less forbidding.

We roared along at 40 miles an hour across the open desert, dodging holes and bushes and ditches. When we got to within a quarter-mile of the minarets, Rahat stopped the car. Piles of bricks the remains of houses – blocked our way. We got out and walked, passing a desiccated camel carcass, ribs bleached by the sun, fur clinging to its face. The ground was littered with pottery shards, beautifully glazed bits of turquoise, cobalt blue, black, white, and green. Some were decorated with patterns or Arabic script. Beyond the ruined houses was a moat and then a dirt-covered city wall with brickwork showing through in places – like the ones I’d seen at Merv but much smaller. Towering over it all were three structures: two minarets and a partially ruined
pishtaq
(mosque entrance). We combed through the pottery shards and circled the walls.