Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (30 page)

Soon the trees donned leaves to go with their blossoms, the earth sprouted grass, and the village, which had been sterile and dead only weeks before, was lush with life. The children, cooped up all winter, tumbled into the streets to play. Six yellow and brown ducklings took up residence with their parents in the irrigation canal at the edge of my yard. Clumsy lambs appeared in the flocks of sheep that passed my house on the way to pasture each morning. The neighbor’s camel gave birth to a gangly baby with long black eyelashes. Birds began to appear from nowhere and ants started building their hills.

I sat in the clinic and watched the spring arrive. The neighbor’s camel and her awkward baby grazed outside my window. The seedlings the nurses had planted along the irrigation ditch during the winter sprouted tiny leaves. I was coloring in the letters of one of 10 signs Oraztach had asked for, warning Nurana residents to drink only boiled water. It was a futile task. No one in the village boiled their water unless they were making tea. Posting a few signs wasn’t going to change anything. I didn’t mind, though. After the long winter, I felt a little drunk from all the color and life of spring.

I shared my office with a doctor and a nurse. The doctor, Islam, had bad teeth and squinted constantly. He’d stayed out late the night before so he was sleeping face down on his desk next to his abacus. The nurse, Maral, was a half-deaf old battleaxe two months from retirement. As I colored and Islam slept, she swabbed the entire office with a rag soaked in bleach water, as she did each morning. She sterilized the doorstep and the windowsill, the picture frames and the chair legs, the desktops and the walls. When she was done, she sat her heavy backside down on her chair with a sigh and started shuffling through the papers on her desk.

Gözel, the new doctor, walked by our window. She was in her twenties, meek, slim, and pretty. Even though she was from a
kolkhoz
she had modern ways. She didn’t cover her hair. She wore traditional clothes that covered her from wrist to ankle, but only because her cafe-au-lait skin was marred by white, pigmentless blotches. She was getting married to a man she’d chosen for herself. Maral sucked her teeth. She disapproved.

It used to be that boys and girls played separately and parents arranged their marriages. We didn’t have love back then,” she said. “These days boys and girls spend time together and marry for love.”

Everything’s changing,” she continued, staring out the window. “Couples are even having fewer kids. They used to have eight, nine, maybe even 10. Now it’s more like three or four. There’s no work. Families can’t feed 10 kids anymore.”

For the rest of the morning Maral filled out forms and I colored “Drink Only Boiled Water” signs. Around noon, I woke Islam. We all filed out the door and went home for lunch. I walked over the plank across the irrigation ditch at the edge of the clinic’s yard, passed the little brick mosque, crossed the street, and rounded the corner of my house. Seven boys were standing by the door, waiting for their advanced English class. They wore their good school clothes: black slacks and white button-down shirts. The school was too small so the students were split into morning and afternoon sessions. My boys were on afternoons. After class with me, they would run down the street to school.

I opened the front window, reached through, and unlatched the door from the inside. The boys scrambled into the living room, sat down on the floor cross-legged, and unpacked their notebooks and pens. They were about 12 years old, which, in a little village like Nurana, meant they were still very much children. For them, the only thing girls were good for was teasing. They were in awe of adults, polite and deferential.

We were playing bingo when Dowlet’s best friend, Azat, dropped by looking for Jeren. I would call out a number in English. The boys would find it among the 25 numbers written into the grids on their bingo boards, and cover it with a scrap of paper. When one of them covered five numbers in a row, he would yell “bingo” and then – stammering and blushing – struggle to read the numbers back in English. I told Azat that Jeren wasn’t around. He lingered for a while, watching the boys finish their lesson. When I gave him a bingo board and tried to pull him into the lesson, though, he got shy and left.

That evening, when Döwlet’s car chugged into the driveway and shuddered to a stop, Azat was in the passenger seat. He came inside, sat down at the
klionka
, and gave me his best, jaunty English “hello,” and a crooked grin. He stayed for
plov
. Jeren apologized, insisting she’d over-salted it, but she was just being modest. We all ate until there were only a few bites left on our plates, drowned in cotton seed oil. Then we scraped the remains to one side and tilted our plates to the other, to drain the oil before finishing. As we sipped our tea, full and content, Azat started telling a story in Turkmen. I heard my name.

“What are you saying about me, Azat?” I asked. “I’m telling them about your class today,” he said.

You should have seen Sam,” he told Döwlet and Jeren. “He was just like a kid, playing games with the students on the floor.”

“You’re a
viliki dushni chilovek
[big-souled person],” he told me, smiling.

Someone tapped on the door. Döwlet, sitting at the
klionka
, motioned for Jeren to answer it. When she pulled it open, she found a stocky, middle-aged man with a bristly face, wearing greasy sweatpants and a black leather cap. Döwlet put down his spoon, stood, and – still chewing – reached to shake the man’s hand. In the Soviet days, the
kolkhoz
had been run by a director, who’d relied on several “brigade leaders” to make sure all the
kolkhoznik
s went to the fields to plow, plant, and harvest on time.

The man was Döwlet’s brigade leader, still hard at work despite the fall of the Soviet Union. He’d come to tell Döwlet to get his act together. It was almost time to plant the cotton and Döwlet hadn’t even plowed his 2.5-acre plot.

A few days later, Döwlet came home early from his job at the electronics store. He changed into a dusty, stained pair of slacks and a wrinkled Napoleon Dynamite t-shirt. We climbed into his car and bounced out of town into the cotton fields, passing donkey carts and cars, child shepherds and herds of sheep. After the brigade leader’s visit, Döwlet had hired a tractor driver to plow his land. We were going to check his work. The village disappeared in the distance behind us. We stopped next to a rectangular field so large that it would have taken 20 minutes to walk one of its long sides and 10 to walk one of its short sides.
 

“All this is yours?” I asked, surprised.

“No,” Döwlet laughed. “Just this section here, between that sapling and that really tall mulberry tree.”

“Who owns the rest?”

“Well, on the left of me is Juma. He’s probably got the best plot. It produced more cotton last year than any of the others in this field. Then, to the right, there’s …”

Döwlet proceeded to tell me the owner and production history of each of the dozen or so plots in the field, which, he explained, was called the Yeke Toot (Lone Mulberry) field, because there used to be a single mulberry tree growing in its center. Then he moved on and told me about the surrounding fields. There was the one where an old woman had been bitten by a wolf. There was the one where the plows had once turned up human bones and gold trinkets. I had run through these fields a couple times a week since arriving in Nurana and to me, they all looked the same – dirt, trees, rocks. Döwlet, though, knew every inch of soil.

The tractor driver had done poor work, Döwlet decided. The furrows weren’t straight and the field was uneven. When Döwlet opened the irrigation ditch, the water would pool in some places and would fail to reach others, drowning some plants and leaving others thirsty. He squatted on his heels at the edge of the field, a sour look on his face. I squatted next to him.

“If my father were alive, he’d make the tractor driver plow it again,” he said.

“You should make him redo it, whether your father’s around or not.”

“I can’t. I’m not like that.”

Döwlet’s father was a strong, outgoing man. A gym teacher who used to run several miles to school every day, he was full of pithy advice for every occasion. He’d died only a few months before I arrived so I’d never met him. In my imagination he resembled the ex-wrestler grandfather Iowa Bob from John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire. Döwlet must have been his mother’s son. He was quiet, soft-spoken, and shy. His older sisters he seemed to have an endless supply – were louder and more confident than him. In the Azat-Döwlet partnership, Azat was the leader and Döwlet the sidekick. At home, Jeren deferred to Döwlet’s judgment, as a good Turkmen wife was supposed to, but he always seemed a little afraid of her – she was fierce, he was not.

We squatted next to the Lone Mulberry field for an hour, watching the flaming orange sun set over the village. Döwlet was feeling nostalgic. He missed his dad. He missed his guidance and his presence. He missed having his help planting the kitchen garden and the cotton field. He hadn’t figured out yet how to work 60-70 hours a week at the electronics store and still get everything done at home, too. He felt lonely and overwhelmed.

Döwlet also missed the
kolkhoz
days. The irrigation ditches along edges of the fields were no longer maintained properly, he said. And the system of metal gates that used to regulate the flow of water in the big canals that fed those ditches had been torn apart, their pieces sold for scrap. A decade earlier, almost all of Turkmenistan’s cotton had been harvested by machine. The harvesters broke down, though, and the Turkmen were forced to go back to picking most of their cotton by hand.
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All this, I knew, was a symptom of a larger problem: Turkmenistan wasn’t developing; it was degenerating. In the Soviet days, Russians had, to a large extent, run the country. They’d had the best educational and career opportunities and had risen to the tops of their fields, becoming directors and managers at every level, from Ashgabat to Nurana. When Russians in Moscow had given orders, in many cases it had been Russians in Turkmenistan who made sure they were carried out. After independence, many of Turkmenistan’s Russians left for Russia. The country lost many of its most experienced managers and most highly skilled workers. Those who had filled their positions had – in many cases – been unable to maintain the infrastructure the Soviets had left behind.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to us,” Döwlet said sadly, staring out across the field.

I didn’t know whether he meant his family, his village, or his country.

* * *

When all Nurana’s fields had been plowed, the brigade leaders decided that the time was right for planting. In the late afternoons, the streets were crowded with donkey carts hauling sacks of cotton seed out to the fields. Tractors grumbled along from one plot they’d been hired to plant to the next. All over the village, the men were tense. Since there were no permanent markers dividing the fields into individual plots, there were endless arguments over who owned what. Islam, my officemate, was tangled up in a dispute with the man who farmed the plot next to his. Each year, the man took another yard, Islam complained. Islam had looked the other way for years because he didn’t think a yard or two was enough to fight over, but his neighbor just kept taking more and more, so Islam had appealed to the village administrator for help.

It took Döwlet a while to find time to plant. The brigade leader came by the house three times to chastise him. Then one day, Döwlet brought four sacks of cotton seed home. The sacks were as big and heavy as dead sheep. The seeds were fuzzy pellets coated in a red powder that Döwlet said was a pesticide, meant to keep critters from eating them while they lay in storage during the winter. We washed it off by dunking the sacks in the irrigation canal at the edge of our yard, where the ducklings lived. Since Döwlet’s car had a flat tire and he couldn’t afford to fix it, he borrowed a donkey and a cart from a neighbor.

The cart was a wood-plank platform set atop a single axle that had car wheels fastened to either end. Two scrap metal bars connected it to the donkey’s saddle. Döwlet and I loaded the wet sacks onto the cart. They dripped pink pesticide water through its cracks and into the dust below. We sat on the cart’s front edge, just behind the donkey, taking turns holding the reins. The old gray beast trudged toward the fields. We rolled through a trash-strewn empty lot at the edge of the village and then past electric-green fields of young wheat and dusty brown cotton fields.