Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (6 page)

When I reached the war memorial, I would cross the street and turn left onto the tree-lined road that led to Dom Pionerov. The memorial, an eternal flame surrounded by 15-foot-high concrete fins meant to evoke more flames, honored the soldiers from Abadan who had died in what Americans call World War II and Soviets called the Great Patriotic War. There were similar monuments in nearly every town, village, and hamlet in Turkmenistan. The Soviet Union lost some 23 million souls in the war, more than 13 percent of its population (the United States lost about 418,500 citizens, still a staggering loss, but less than half a percent of its population). The city government had extinguished this particular eternal flame because neighborhood kids kept catching themselves on fire while playing in it.

Some days I would stop at a corner store and buy cookies to eat during the mid-morning break from Russian class. During those early days, I practically lived on the crispy, rectangular, chocolate-covered cookies that were for sale in bulk in every store and at the bazaar. I think my body was craving junk. My diet at the Plotnikovs’ apartment was just too plain and wholesome compared to American food. Olga made it all from scratch, with no preservatives and few spices.

Most days, though, I wasn’t responsible for the cookies and I would go straight to the schoolhouse, drop my notebook on the table and squeeze into a miniature chair. Sweating in the classroom one morning, flies buzzing around the outside of my head and verb conjugations rattling around the inside, I noticed something had changed. After weeks of mind-numbing Russian classes, I had memorized every object in the room and there hadn’t been a two-foot-tall carpet loom leaning in that dusty corner before. I was thrilled to see it. I had wanted to learn to weave Turkmen carpets but I hadn’t known how or where. Here was my answer.

Turkmen carpets had been famous for centuries. Long known as “Bukhara” rugs because they were sold at the bazaars in that city, they were lauded by Marco Polo as “the finest carpets in the world, and the most beautiful.”
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The classic Turkmen rug had a burgundy red background. In the center there was a field of repeating medallions called güls – different tribes used different güls – surrounded by a wide, geometric border. When the Soviets took control of Turkmenistan, they quickly saw the value of the local carpets, organized weavers into cooperatives, and started marketing the rugs abroad. They even sent one to the 1937 Paris World Fair, where it won a prize.
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After independence, the carpets became national symbols. The Turkmen flag features a gül from each of the country’s five
welayat
s (states). Niyazov had weavers make the world’s biggest carpet, which is housed in a museum in the capital, with a plaque from the Guinness Book of World Records. The Turkmen government considers antique carpets national treasures and protects them with export restrictions. Though the rugs are cheap by Western standards, few Turkmen families can afford them. Most cover their floors with poor-quality, factory made knock-offs.

It took me a week to gather my courage, practice my vocabulary, and ask Dom Pionerov’s carpet weaving teacher, Mayhm, to teach me her craft. She was a handsome middle-aged Turkmen woman with streaks of gray in her braided black hair and the smell of sweat, mutton grease, and onions hanging about her clothes. I couldn’t understand her reply in Russian, but her gold-toothed smile told me yes. Every day after lunch, I would walk back to Dom Pionerov for carpet weaving class, where I would spend two or three hours squatting on my heels over a little loom, tying knot after tiny knot.

I stood out among the other students in the class. They were all 8-to 10-year-old girls. Sometimes people would stop by to watch “the American” weave a Turkmen carpet. They were all surprised to see a man weaving a carpet. Turkmenistan is the kind of place where women weave the carpets and men just sit on them and ask when their dinners will be ready. I always worked close enough to the window to catch some light; every second or third day the power would go out, despite the fact that we were a half-mile from a power station.

Some days, after working on my carpet, I would go to Red Crescent. Aman and Geldy mostly couldn’t figure out what to do with me, so I loafed in the kitchen, drinking coffee and joking with Geldy. As the days passed, I began to suspect that he’d requested a Peace Corps Volunteer because he was bored and wanted a friend, not because he thought I could help with any of Red Crescent’s work. Occasionally, I taught lessons about hand washing and nutrition at nearby School No. 8. I taught Geldy’s youth volunteers English. I acted as the token American at the Thanksgiving and Halloween parties organized by the English teachers at School No. 8, a quartet of Russian women – Catherine (nèe Yekaterina), Rumia, Natalya, and Natasha – who had been working together for more than two decades.

In those early days, I also spent a lot of time just sitting around and talking to people. They were curious about me and I was curious about them. At first, the conversations didn’t go much further than family and work. People in Turkmenistan were careful about what they said and to whom; a few wrong words to the wrong person could mean prison. After a several weeks, though, people got more comfortable with me and started talking politics.

It made me nervous. Peace Corps had warned me again and again to avoid local politics. So I tried to either change the subject or give neutral responses. One day an acquaintance took me out to lunch and, while we were in his car, safe from eavesdroppers, launched into a rant against the government.

“This is a rich country,” he said. “There’s enough gas and oil money that Niyazov could be paying each and every person $25 a day. Where’s all the money going?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Look,
one thing you
need to understand about Turkmenistan is that our ‘president,’ Niyazov, is a dictator like Saddam Hussein. He’s as bad as Saddam Hussein.”

“Really?” I said.

We went on like that for 20 minutes or so, but I refused to engage, to commit – I was afraid it was a trick. Eventually he gave up on me. We never became friends.

Nearly everyone had something bad to say about Niyazov, though few were bold enough tell a near-stranger that he was as bad as Saddam Hussein. Perhaps the only person I knew who was a consistent Niyazov supporter was Geldy. He was a member of Niyazov’s political party (the only one in the country). He understood Turkmenistan’s problems, but he maintained that Niyazov was doing as good a job as anyone could. He knew the government had made some terrible policies and was absurdly corrupt, but he blamed all that on Niyazov’s underlings. He reminded me of the Russians I’d met – including Misha – who maintained that Stalin was a good man surrounded by vicious, greedy incompetents.

After spending my days teaching a little and talking a lot, I would go home and sit at the kitchen table with Denis and Olya while Misha lay on the floor, clicking his false teeth, chain-smoking, and watching TV. Sasha was almost always outside avoiding his homework – throwing firecrackers into apartment building stairwells or playing a game with sheep knuckles and rules similar to marbles. Sometimes I would study my Russian flashcards. Other times Denis, who spoke good English, would serve as translator so we could all chat. They had endless questions about the prices of things in America: clothes, cars, food, toothbrushes, train tickets. I had endless questions about their lives in Turkmenistan, and before that, in the Soviet Union. I was fascinated – everything I knew about the USSR I had learned from
Red Dawn
and
Rocky IV
.

Olya, it turned out, was from Siberia. She didn’t bother to tell me which city because it wouldn’t have meant anything to me anyway. While she, Misha, and Denis knew American geography in great detail, I knew embarrassingly little about the former Soviet Union. When Olya was in her 20s, a girl she knew moved to Turkmenistan for work and then invited her to visit. She did, and liked it so much she decided to stay. The bazaars were full, the winters were mild – it was “paradise,” she told me. She soon met and married Misha, who was an officer in the Soviet air force, posted at a base just outside Abadan.

The base was still there, home to fighter jets and helicopters, its hangars covered with dirt and disguised as hills. Misha had long since retired from the military and become a freelance carpenter. He didn’t seem to work much, though. Every morning when Olya went to work and Sasha went to school, Misha and Denis would also leave, supposedly to spend all day building cabinets, chairs, doors, and shelves. Every once in a while, though, I would forget something and return home later in the morning. I would invariably find Misha sleeping or lounging in front of the television. And that was when he wasn’t away on his frequent two-and three-day fishing trips. (He would return with a couple dozen hand-sized fish, which he would salt and hang on a clothesline near the window in my room to dry. This meant my room always smelled like old fish. It also meant, however, that we always had something to snack on while we played cards).

The Plotnikovs might have lived for decades in Turkmenistan, but they still considered themselves Russians. Denis, who had been born in Abadan and had spent his entire life there, spoke only the most basic Turkmen. Olya and Misha didn’t speak any. This resistance to assimilation wasn’t unique to Russians. While many Americans assume that anyone who immigrates to the US can become an American, too, the attitude is different in Turkmenistan. There, nationality is about blood, about history. It doesn’t change. Turkmen passports recorded their holders’ nationalities and casual descriptions of people invariably included nationalities. The Plotnikovs were friendly with a few Turkmen, but spent their time mostly with other Russians.

I’d usually sit around the living room talking to my host family until the sun began to set and the air cooled off a little. Then I would go for a run. No matter how hot it was I always wore pants. Only young boys wear shorts in Turkmenistan. Some days I would just jog along the streets, passing burning garbage, grazing sheep, women pushing babies in strollers, and men squatting on their haunches in doorways and on curbs, talking in low voices. Other days, I would run on the track at the town’s sport center, the “FOK.” It was a strange building, a two-story, angular tin turtle. The weight room was stocked with iron bars to which someone had welded paired chunks of scrap metal of various sizes. Outside was a half-kilometer track wrapped around a dirt soccer field. As I ran around and around, children would often chase me, grabbing my clothes, trying to slow me down, giggling. Sometimes I would pick them up and carry them with me for a half-lap, others I would convince them to race me.

While I walked home from the sport center, sweating and trying to catch my breath, the children from the neighborhood would call out to me:

“Hello, hello.”

“Hello,” I would say.

“HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!” they would chant.

“One hello is enough,” I would tell them in Russian. Most of them spoke only Turkmen.

“HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!” they would respond.

I could still hear them long after I was upstairs in the apartment, lying on the floor, sweating, and chugging water.

A few nights a week, I would go to Tanya’s apartment for Russian lessons. She and I would sit at her living room table, drinking tea and eating cookies. She gave me some grammar, vocabulary, and reading assignments, but mostly we just talked. She believed in God,
feng shui
, and horoscopes. I didn’t. We spent hours arguing over whether putting fake gold coins under her refrigerator would make her rich. I was so desperate to win the arguments that I studied hard and strained to make myself understood. Tanya was excellent at baiting me; my Russian improved fast.

5.

Marching for One Man

After about two months of studying, teaching, weaving, card playing, and running, Independence Day arrived – October 27. Someone from the KNB called Tanya and demanded to know where “her Americans” would be during the holiday. We asked what our options were and Tanya laid them out for us. That’s how I learned there was a celebration planned in Ashgabat. I was eager for a break from my routine so I arranged to go. Denis, Allen, and I took a marshrutka into Ashgabat and joined a river of people flowing through the streets into the new, optimistically named, Olympic Stadium. As the light faded from the sky, we packed into the stands with thousands of other people and waited for the show to begin. Every seat was filled.