Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (26 page)

Since independence, though, things had gotten harder. After the Soviet Union fell, the new government renamed the
kolkhoz
es
dayhan berleshigi
(farmers’ associations). It divided the communal fields into 2.5-acre sections and put these sections under the care of individual farmers, telling them that – if they worked hard and met certain benchmarks – the land would eventually be theirs. As of 2001, the state still owned all Turkmenistan’s farmland. The government supplied the seed to the farmers, told them what to grow (cotton or wheat, in Nurana), and bought crops at prices well below those available on world markets.
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Döwlet couldn’t make a living off his plot. Even with his full-time job at the electronics store and Jeren’s part-time job at the hospital, money was tight. And things were even harder because the Soviet social safety net had been torn apart after independence. Döwlet didn’t talk much about politics. He was more interested in being a dad and a husband. But he was nostalgic for the Soviet days.

After tea, Döwlet and I drove to Mary to fill out paperwork. I had to register with the local government, let them know where I lived, who I lived with, what my job was, and how I could be reached. The bureaucrat in the suit behind the desk warned me that if I ever wanted to leave Nurana for any reason, I was to call him and let him know where I was going and why. I assured him I would, he wished me well, and Döwlet and I drove back to Nurana.

As we bumped along the country road in the dark, the radio glowed green on the dashboard. Outside my window, the stars winked and danced.

“I’m very glad to meet you and to have you in my home,” Döwlet told me earnestly.

“I’m very glad to be here,” I said.

* * *

There was a bed in my room, but it was too short for me so I put the mattress on the floor and slept there. My room was warm and clean and comfortable and I slept well. I didn’t dream. When I woke the next morning, the sky was just getting light. I stumbled sleepy-eyed out of my room, slipped on some flip-flops, and walked out past the vineyard, across a plank bridge over an irrigation canal, past a grove of fruit trees, to the outhouse. It was just a wood-plank shack with a hole in the floor and some torn up newspapers in a box hanging on the wall. When I was done, I walked back across the bridge and across the yard to the
banya
.

At the Plotnikovs’ apartment, the
banya
had been tiny and crowded, the bathtub often filled with Misha’s fish. I had to risk blowing myself up every time I lit the hot water heater. At the Burjanadzes, the
banya
had been even smaller – I could stand in the middle and touch all the walls – and before I could wash, I had to clear the dirty salad-making dishes out of the tub. I heated my bath water in a metal bucket on the stove and rationed it carefully. This new
banya
was luxurious.

There were two rooms. The first had pegs on the walls to hang clothes and towels and a small, high window to let in the sunlight. In the inner room, a tank of hot water simmered day and night on a gas burner and a tank of cold water sat in a corner under another high window. The room was always as hot as a sauna. To take a bath, I stood on wooden slats laid over the concrete floor, mixed hot and cold water in a pitcher and poured it over myself. I stayed in the
banya
for 20 minutes, taking a long, hot bath while looking out the window at the sleet and mud. It was glorious.

Breakfast in the living room was tea, bread, butter, honey, and jam. The girls were dressed in their school clothes, hair combed and held in place with colorful barrettes. Jeren ironed Döwlet’s shirt on a towel on the floor. Döwlet sat at the
klionka
, eating and watching TV. I made myself coffee and ate bread with butter and thick, crystalline honey. After breakfast Döwlet, Jeren, and the girls piled into the old Lada and headed for Murgab, where half of them would spend the day at work and the other half in kindergarten or school.

Once they were gone, I left for work, too. I walked out the front gate, waited for some cows and camels to amble by, crossed the street, passed a tiny brick mosque, and there I was – standing outside the health clinic where I was to spend my final six months in Turkmenistan. It was a one-story yellow-brick building with blue trim. Inside, the floors were made from creaky wooden planks and everything smelled like disinfectant. I had a desk and a chair in a shared office. Unlike Red Crescent, the clinic had heat, light, and running water. My boss was a stout, round-faced Turkmen woman in her 40s named Oraztach. She was serious, efficient, and hard-working. She was my new counterpart, my new Geldy, though any comparison between the two seemed absurd.

It soon became apparent that my new life in Nurana had only one drawback. Döwlet and Jeren were kind and friendly and interesting. Their girls were adorable. Their house was spacious and clean and comfortable. My new colleagues were welcoming. But I had virtually nothing to do. The first week, Oraztach put me to work drawing a health poster about anemia. Then she told me I had to write a three-month work plan. So I spent another week doing that. Geldy had taught me well. I didn’t agonize over it. I just wrote up a wish-list of things I’d like to do in Nurana and gave it to her so she could pass it on to her boss in Murgab.

Then I ran out of things to do. I could only draw so many posters: the only places to hang them were on the walls inside the clinic – and it was a small clinic. So one day I walked across the empty lot that separated the clinic from the village school and called on the principal. He was a skinny, 50-something Turkmen man, and wore a furry Russian hat. I asked him whether he could put me to work and he said he’d love to have me teach English. He was supposed to have two English teachers but he had none, he explained. We agreed on a schedule and he said that if I taught English four days a week, I could teach health on the fifth to please my boss at Peace Corps who wanted me to be a health teacher.

The principal drew up a proposal and sent it to the superintendent for a signature and a stamp. For a week, I sat at my desk in the clinic, writing letters, studying Turkmen vocabulary, drawing a poster about dental hygiene, and waiting. When the principal sent a student over to the clinic to fetch me (there was no phone), I was excited for good news. In his office, though, he fidgeted and seemed embarrassed. The superintendent, it turned out, had decided that, since I was posted at the clinic I should stay in the clinic and out of the school. When I told Oraztach what had happened, she thought for only a moment before settling on a solution.

“I’ll give you one of the rooms in the clinic for a classroom,” she said. “The principal can just send the students over from the school when it’s time for their lessons.”

Oraztach drew up a proposal and forwarded it to her boss in Murgab for a signature and a stamp. Again, I waited. Again, the answer was negative. If I wanted to do any teaching, I could teach the clinic’s dozen or so doctors and nurses, Oraztach’s boss had decided. Other than that, I was to be hard at work at my desk all day, every day, he said. (He didn’t explain what I should be hard at work doing). The message was clear: sit still and shut up.

“If they’re going to be like that, just don’t teach anyone anything,” Jeren told me, disgusted with the whole affair.

I’d like to say that I resisted, that I fought for permission to do something useful and important because I hadn’t come all the way to Turkmenistan to sit still and shut up and the country was really fucked up and something had to be done and it might as well start with me. But I didn’t. I’d tried that for a year and a half and it had done no good for anyone. I’d driven myself half-crazy, gotten my friends into trouble, and disappointed my few supporters. Instead, I decided to spend my remaining time hanging out with my host family, drawing a few health posters, and letting someone else fix the country – if it wanted to be fixed.

26.

Working in the Vineyard

Nurana was peaceful. There were no KNB men, no surprise audits, no crises. That stuff all spread like a disease from Ashgabat’s white-marble palaces and (unlike Abadan) Nurana was a long, long way from Ashgabat. There weren’t even any police in the village. A month before I’d arrived, Döwlet told me, a man had been caught stealing. A bunch of guys had stripped off his clothes, tied him to a telephone pole in the village center, and left him there to be tut-tutted by passing grandmas.

Nurana was the kind of place where the postman knew everyone in town and their schedules, and would bring their mail to them whether they were at work, at home, or out shopping. It was the kind of place where gaggles of children jumbled through neighborhoods, bursting through one unlocked door after another, looking for a softhearted mom to feed them cookies and tea instead of chasing them away. It was the kind of place where, if you were walking home late at night from a party and found yourself too drunk to make it the whole way, you could knock on the nearest door and be sure you’d be offered a place to sleep.

Everyone was kind and polite and friendly – and curious about me. People would come to my house and to the clinic just to look at me. They would direct their questions to the nurses or Döwlet, because they assumed I couldn’t speak Russian.

“So that’s the American, huh? How old is he?”

“Twenty-nine? And he’s not married? What’s wrong with him?”

“He looks skinny. I thought Americans were fat. Are you feeding him enough?”

I usually worked at the clinic until lunchtime and then went home to heat up some leftovers and eat them while watching American movies dubbed into Russian. I was supposed to spend my afternoons finding projects around the community that I could work on. I made a few attempts. I tried to start an Ultimate Frisbee club, for example, on the premise that exercise is healthy for kids. I invited some kids I’d seen around town to join and they all promised to come, but didn’t show up. So I spent an hour every afternoon for a week throwing my Frisbee from one end of a dirt soccer field to the other by myself, hoping some kids would see me and get curious enough to come over and ask what I was doing. None did. I gave up.

After lunch, I’d often go for a run. It was winter so I liked to go when the sun was high enough in the sky to warm me a little. In a sweater and sweat-pants, I’d run out the front gate and follow the dusty streets for two or three minutes to the edge of the village. Then I’d follow the hard-packed dirt and gravel road out through the farm fields. The first time I went out, I turned left at the fork and found myself at the old brick factory. A dog came tearing out at me, barking and snapping. I scooped up a couple rocks. As I raised my hand to throw the first one, the dog skidded to a stop, tucked its tail between its legs, and slunk away, whining.

The brick factory was just a massive trench, big enough to fit a short parade of Land Rovers lined up two by two. Over the trench was a crane. I climbed up to take a look and found two guys drinking vodka in the shack at the crane’s base. They hadn’t had much yet and seemed sober and friendly, if a bit grimy. One stood up, introduced himself, and shook my hand. I asked him which road I should follow. The one I’d taken snaked past the brick factory and out to the graveyard, he told me. It would be better to retrace my steps and take a different road, one that led out into the farm fields, he said. I followed his advice, jogging along the dusty roads that bordered the bare cotton and wheat fields, hopping over irrigation canals and ducking to avoid the branches of the mulberry trees that lined the roads in places. When I was tired, I used the crane as a landmark to find my way home. The run took 45 minutes and became my standard route.

I usually got home from running at about 1:30 p.m., just about the time Jeren and the girls came home from Murgab. Then I’d play with Kümüsh and Altyn and help Jeren around the house a little bit. What she wanted, I think, was company, not help; we did a lot more talking than working. She wanted to know about my life in America, about the books I was reading, about anything and everything outside Nurana. Sometimes we looked at my photographs of Turkey, Thailand, Cambodia, the US.

“When I see pictures of such beautiful places, I don’t want to live because I know I’ll never go there,” she said one day. “You’re so lucky.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling guilty. “I am lucky.”

* * *

Spring comes early in Turkmenistan. By mid-February, the weather had already warmed and Jeren and I started working in the yard. In the afternoons, we’d go outside with teardrop-shaped spades and turn the earth under the grape vines and in the gardens.

“You know. When I married Döwlet, I set two conditions: I don’t pick cotton; and I don’t work in the garden,” she laughed.

The vineyard was laid out like the garden I’d made in Ana’s back yard, with raised planting beds surrounded by irrigation ditches. The planting beds were long and skinny, two or three paces wide, and about 30 paces long. The ditches were waist-deep and almost always dry. When it was time to water the garden, Döwlet would dig a cut into the side of the village irrigation canal that separated our yard from the neighbor’s. The water would creep through the labyrinth of ditches in our yard, filling them two feet deep, and over several hours, the planting beds would sop it up until all but the top layer of soil was moist and soft. Then he would throw shovelfuls of dirt back into the cut until the water stopped flowing.