Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (34 page)

31.

Mugged

In exchange for speaking at its tourism conference in Ashgabat, the OSCE had paid for a room for me in the President Hotel. It was one of the best hotels in the country, with five stars from someone or other, marble-floored lobbies, bathrobe warmers in all the bathrooms, and a price tag of $95 a night – more than my monthly salary. I stayed one night, but felt out of place. I don’t like fancy hotels and restaurants, where things look too delicate and clean to touch and people dote on me. So I moved across town to the Syyhat Hotel, a seedy flophouse where I’d stayed before. For $2.50, I got a single bed in a double room. As I was falling asleep, my roommate Anamurat and his friend Ashyr showed up and sat down on Anamurat’s bed. They couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20 years old, long-necked and pimple-faced.

“You have to get out of here for a little while,” Anamurat said. “We’re supposed to do Natasha here.”

“You’re going to have to do Natasha somewhere else,” I said. “It’s 11. I have to be up early. I’m going to sleep.”

“Come on …” Ashyr pleaded.

“Why don’t you guys do Natasha in your room?” I asked him.

Annoyed, they left. I closed the door and turned off the light. I was just falling asleep when someone opened the door (there was no lock) and flipped the light on. I opened my eyes and saw a pretty Russian girl in a short black skirt standing by the switch.

“You called?” she asked.

“No, Anamurat called. He went to his friend’s room down the hall,” I told her. “Could you turn off the light on your way out?”

I went back to sleep. Sometime later, the light went on again. I rolled over and squinted at the door. There were two girls standing by the light switch this time. One was a Turkmen girl in tight jeans and a low-cut red shirt. The other was another Russian girl in another short black skirt and way too much makeup.

“Anamurat?” the Russian girl asked.

“No, he’s down the hall in Ashyr’s room, I think,” I said. “Turn off the light.”

She looked around the room.

“Well, as long as we’re here, do you want to …” she trailed off and made one of the internationally recognized hand signs for “fuck.”

“No. I want to sleep. Turn off the light.”

“Come on, let him sleep,” the Turkmen girl said, turning off the light and pulling the Russian girl out the door.

Apparently three girls were enough for Anamurat and Ashyr, because no one else woke me up that night. It wasn’t the best night’s sleep I’d ever had. The upside, though, was that I’d saved myself the equivalent of a month’s salary. I decided to use the money, combined with some other money I’d saved by living way out in the country where there was nothing to buy, for tourism development. It seemed only fitting. I planned a four-day seminar designed to teach young adults from the Mary area how to be tour guides at Merv and Margush. That way, if the Turkmen government ever decided to start welcoming tourists into the country, a few local guys would know how to make some money off them.

I found five English students who wanted to come to my seminar. Begench was a geeky 18-year-old kid, socially awkward, and much too old for his age. Kakajan was an effeminate 20-year- old wedding singer who wore a goatee, a bandana, and a white tank-top. His friend Juma was a Tupac fan and wannabe gangster with arms covered in homemade tattoos that looked like Japanese characters but meant nothing – he’d made them up. Muhammad, only 16, was painfully shy and quiet. Oraz was a big, rowdy country boy and at 22, the oldest of the group. I convinced Alei to join us.

During the seminar, we stayed at the Bayramali sanatorium. The place had once been famous; people from all over the USSR used to visit for its famous melon cure. Its shabby concrete dormitories and hospital buildings were crumbling, but its gardens were still gorgeous, filled with luscious red roses and orange cosmos. A grove of evergreen trees shaded its grounds. Crotchety Turkmen grandparents and white-coated doctors roamed the shady paths between the buildings. My boys were easily 40 years younger than any of the other guests. The old women took a liking to them. There was a lot of “you boys are so handsome” and “you’re so skinny, you need to eat more” and “you remind me of my grandson.”

Every day, we went on a field trip. First, we visited the museum in Mary, where a beautiful Turkmen girl in a
koynek
gave us a tour. At first, the boys’ constant flirting flustered her. She was sassy, though, and soon put them in their places so she could finish telling them about the ceramics, jewelry, and figurines that had been dug from the deserts of Turkmenistan, dusted off, and set on the museum’s glass shelves. When we went to Merv, the director of the national park there gave us free admission and a free guide. At the end of the day, he talked to the boys about how to get into the tourism industry.

The next day, our guide from Merv, Jumageldy, took us to see Margush. The van was old and full of holes. The last hour of the trip was on sandy roads through the desert. Our tires kicked up a cloud of dust that blew in through the holes and filled the van. We had to hold our shirts over our faces to keep from choking. We wandered the ruins, an endless maze of knee-high mud-brick foundations that were probably built before Stonehenge. The desert wind whipped a cloud of sand across the abandoned city.

Kakajan and Juma sang all the way back to the sanitorium. It’s what they were good at. They were an aspiring pop duo. Every day they dressed alike: white wife-beaters, blue bandanas, baseball caps tilted just so. Any time we had to wait for something – lunch, a guide, a taxi – the rest of us would find a bench to sit on or a curb to squat on. Kakajan and Juma used the time to choreograph dance routines. Alei suggested we call them Menudo, after the Puerto Rican boy band. Oraz called Juma “Michael” and Kakajan “Jackson.” In the van, they sang anything the other boys requested, from Turkmen pop songs, to Fergie, to Eminem. Everyone got into it except Begench, who sat apart, looking at them like they were all morons.

As we were passing an old pile of bricks that Jumageldy said was a centuries-old Nestorian Christian church, an argument broke out in the van. I missed the beginning of it because it was in Turkmen, but when I caught on, Oraz was maintaining that the
kulan
, a type of wild Turkmen donkey, could live for 700 years. The other boys were mocking him, insisting that no animal could live that long. He held his ground, though, maintaining that he’d read it in a Magtymguly poem so he was sure it was true.

“If
kulan
s lived for 700 years, scientists would know about it,” Juma said.

“How? Scientists don’t live for 700 years,” Oraz said. “Besides, even if scientists knew, it doesn’t mean we would know.”

No one could convince Oraz that Magtymguly might have been mistaken.

* * *

On the last day of the seminar we packed our things, left the sanatorium, and took a
marshrutka
south to the Hindukush Dam, which stemmed the flow of the Murgab River near Yolotan, creating a massive, swampy reservoir. The tsarist government had built the dam in 1895 as part of its effort to irrigate more land for cotton cultivation.
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By the time we arrived, the downstream side, where an enthusiastic stream of whitewater rushed out of the dam and into a shallow pool surrounded by sandy beaches and shade trees, had become a popular spot for picnicking and swimming. We were planning to eat lunch, listen to the boys’ final presentations, go swimming, and then go home.

To make sure the boys would have an audience for their presentations, Alei and I had invited other Peace Corps Volunteers. Ngai and Kelly came. Two of Kelly’s friends from Yolotan came, too – an Uzbek girl named Umida and her father Omar. Hindukush was crowded. Boys in their underwear and girls in their dresses played in the water. Families sat under trees, eating and napping. We found a shady spot and settled down to eat
somsa
s, fending off armies of ants. When we were all full, the boys took turns standing in front of our little group and pretending to be tour guides, telling us about the sites we’d visited at Merv and Margush.

After the presentations, we scattered. Some stayed at Hindukush to swim and lounge. Others walked up to the road to find a taxi. Soon only the four Peace Corps Volunteers, Begench, and Umida remained. We lazed around until the sun started to get low in the sky. Then we packed our things and walked up the sandy path to the road to find a taxi home. Begench disappeared for a minute and then reappeared, running up the path after us, carrying a plastic Coke bottle full of cloudy, yellow water. Six boys in their late teens who were wearing nothing but the white briefs they’d been swimming in were chasing him, yelling insults.

Begench ran past us, putting us between him and the underwear posse. From the yelling and cursing and Begench’s breathless explanation, I gathered that Begench had gone to a nearby spring to fill his bottle with sulfur water that he thought might help his acne. The posse had been hanging out near the spring and had insisted Begench pay them for the water. Begench, charming guy that he was, told them to fuck themselves and then ran to hide behind Alei and I. If they hadn’t already been ready to beat him up for taking “their” water without paying, they were ready to whip him for what he’d said while he was running away.

I stepped in to try to calm things down, apologizing to the posse on Begench’s behalf. But I was speaking Russian and they were country boys – they didn’t understand me very well, which annoyed them even more. So Alei tried to defuse things in Turkmen. That didn’t help either.

Why don’t you talk to us in Russian? You think we’re too stupid, we don’t understand Russian?” one of them yelled.

They closed in around us and started pushing and cursing. Alei and I told Ngai, Kelly, Umida, and Begench to go up to the road and find a taxi. They moved a little way up the path, and lingered there, not wanting to leave us behind. A short, wiry man in his 30s with a black beard appeared from somewhere and started urging the teenagers to attack us. One of the boys, thinking he was Jean-Claude Van Damme but forgetting I had four or five inches on him, tried to kick me in the head. I leaned back and his heel whizzed past my chest. Another leaned in and threw a sloppy punch at me, which I also managed to avoid.

While I was distracted, the man with the beard, the ringleader, darted into the fray, ripped my backpack off my shoulder and ran away. I chased after him and tried to grab it back. I pulled on one shoulder strap and he pulled on the other, our feet braced in the sand.

“You’re not going to get out of here alive,” he hissed at me.

All of a sudden my head lit up and I lost track of things for a second. One of the boys had snuck up behind me and punched me in the side of the face while I was focused on getting my bag back. When the world cleared up, I had what felt like some pebbles in my mouth. I spit them on the ground and yanked my backpack out of the bearded man’s hands. He slunk away to a safe distance. I walked up the hill to where Alei was still trying to fend off the posse. They were going after his backpack, too, but he didn’t seem worried.

“Look, you can have the backpack,” he said calmly. “Just let me grab my passport out of it first, okay?”

Attracted by the posse’s yelling and cursing, a crowd of picnickers started to gather around us. I weighed my options. If Alei and I fought the boys, we’d almost certainly lose. We might even get our faces smashed in with the bricks and rocks the boys were starting to collect. On the other hand, there was nowhere to run. So I just kept retreating up the path, pushing the boys back when they got too close, arguing with them in Russian.

“Aren’t you a man?” they jeered. “Won’t you fight us?” they taunted.

Then, all of a sudden, Umida was next to me. She was in her late teens, strikingly beautiful, and furious.

“What’s wrong with you!?” she yelled at the boys. “These are guests in our country! They’re teachers! Have some respect!”

The boys paused.

“I know you,” she continued, jabbing a finger at them. “I know where you live. I know your parents. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Umida’s rant didn’t have much effect on the boys. When she was done, they went back to taunting and pushing and throwing looping punches and telling us they were going to kill us. Her speech had a big effect on the crowd that had gathered to watch the fight, though. On some silent cue, they formed a human shield around us. The underwear posse backed off.

Our protectors, mostly teenaged boys and girls, led us up to the road, to a spot under an apricot tree. While we waited for a ride into town, they picked apricots for us and apologized for what had happened. My body humming with adrenaline, I munched on a handful of warm, juicy apricots and paced up and down the road. There was something sharp in my mouth that kept poking the inside of my lip. I ran my tongue over my teeth. One of them had a chunk busted out of it and another had a chip missing.

Ten minutes later, we flagged down two cars and convinced them to take us to the ice cream shop in Yolotan where Umida’s younger sister Malika worked. Sitting at one of the tables on the sidewalk outside the shop, eating bowls of soft-serve vanilla ice cream drizzled with homemade strawberry sauce, we told Malika what had happened. I showed her my chipped teeth. After we finished our ice cream, we all found our own ways home.