Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (8 page)

We set off on foot. Although it was November already, the summer heat had barely faded. The sky was clear and the sun beat down on us. At first we followed a two-lane road lined with box elder, locust and Osage orange trees. After a half-hour, we left the road and started hiking through a field of cotton. The waist-high plants had been picked over and were starting to dry out and lose their leaves. The sounds of town faded and soon all I could hear was the wind, an occasional songbird, and my feet crunching in the crumbly soil. Clouds began to gather and the temperature dropped.

In the fields, we came upon a young couple with two little daughters who were gathering leftover cotton – a few stray puffs of pure white from each bush – into canvas bags that hung around their waists. We asked for directions to the mosque and they said we were headed the right way. We walked on. In the distance, between us and the mountains, there were two dirt mounds as big as baseball stadiums and about 50 feet high. To me, they seemed completely out of place on the flat desert plain.

The Russian General A.V. Komarov, the man placed in charge of the newly conquered Turkmen lands after the battle of Geokdepe, thought the same thing. An amateur archaeologist, he figured they were man-made and thought he might find treasure inside them. In 1886, he had his men carve a trench into one. He didn’t find gold, but he found evidence of an ancient civilization, which he later published.
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In 1904, an American geologist/ archaeologist arrived to explore the mounds more carefully.

Already in his late 60s, Raphael Pumpelly had a bushy white beard that made him look a little like Charles Darwin. His excavations uncovered evidence of human habitation stretching back 7,000 years.
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During that time, Anew had developed from a small rural settlement into an urban center. From roughly the second through the fifteenth centuries A.D., it had served as a stop for Silk Road caravans traveling between China and India in the east, and Mediterranean ports in the west.
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One day while Pumpelly’s men were digging, locusts began crawling out of the ground: first a scattered few, then thousands. “The whole surface of the oasis became at once covered with an endless insect army, always twenty or more per square foot …At last, when they accumulated in our excavation pits faster than men could shovel them out …we had to stop work and flee,” he recalled.
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As the archaeologists retreated, the locusts gorged themselves on the surrounding wheat fields, creating a regional famine.

***

When Allen and I reached the nearest of the two mounds, we saw no evidence of locusts, trenches, ancient civilizations, or Silk Road caravans. Just a lot of dust, some empty bottles and an old tire. On top, though, we discovered two ragged pillars surrounded by rubble. We’d found the mosque.

Old photographs of the Shaykh Jamal al-Din Mosque show a soaring, arched entrance (a pishtaq) inlaid with two sinuous dragons, surrounded by geometric patterns and Arabic script. It looks about five stories tall and might once have been flanked by two minarets reaching even higher into the sky. The mosque was apparently built for a local notable sometime in the mid-15th Century. One scholar called it, “one of the most unusual and spectacular monuments of Islamic Central Asia.”
 
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By the time we arrived, though, there wasn’t much left. The graceful pishtaq had collapsed and what remained of the famous dragons had been taken to a museum in Ashgabat. All that remained were the two pillars – the sides of the pishtaq. The mosque had been destroyed during a massive earthquake that struck the Ashgabat area in 1948. The quake measured 7.3 on the Richter scale and may have killed as many as 110,000 people in and around the Ashgabat area,
28
 
making it the ninth most destructive earthquake documented by the US Geological Survey.
29

Two men kneeled on carpets before the ruined mosque, praying. I squatted on my heels nearby, looking out over the patchwork of vineyards, cotton fields, and villages spread out below the mound. Gray-black clouds swirled overheard and the wind blew down from the mountains. The ruins had become a shrine where people came to make wishes, tying scraps of fabric to the scrubby trees nearby, leaving amulets in niches in the crumbled brick walls, propping fallen bricks up into teepee shapes. I rolled a scrap of cotton I’d pocketed in the field into a piece of yarn, tied it to a shrub, and made a wish.

The earthquake that destroyed the mosque was so powerful, the destruction it caused so complete, that there were rumors an atomic bomb had gone off in Ashgabat. A. Abaev, who lived through the quake, wrote about it years later. He was a child, sleeping on the veranda of his family’s one-story home in Ashgabat. The quake woke him. There was silence for a moment and then people started screaming – first a few and then thousands. The earthquake had lasted only a few seconds. In that time, nine of the 17 people in his extended family had been killed.
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The seven-year-old Saparmurat Niyazov was among the children orphaned that night. His house collapsed and killed his mother and two brothers, according to the
Rukhnama
. (His father had died a few years earlier, fighting in the Red Army during World War II.) Niyazov sat alone by his ruined home for six days, weeping, before his family was pulled from the wreckage and buried.
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After the Soviet Union fell and Niyazov became Turkmenistan’s president-for-life, he had a massive statue of a bull with a globe on its back built in Ashgabat’s center. The globe was split and a woman was reaching up out of the crack, lifting a child out of the destruction. The sculpture was black, except for the child, which was golden.

The afternoon fading, Allen and I left the earthquake-ruined mosque and headed back through the cotton fields toward the highway. On the way, we had to pass one of Turkmenistan’s ubiquitous checkpoints. Manned by police or soldiers, they surrounded cities and clogged highways. Intercity journeys could involve clearing six to 10 checkpoints. (Imagine having to stop a half-dozen times while driving from Boston to New York on I-95 so that soldiers could search your car and examine your passport). The policemen at the checkpoint had ignored us on our way out of town, but we caught their attention on the way back – two foreigners appearing from a cotton field.

Two policemen led us into a little guard shack next to the road, told us to sit down, and asked for our passports. At first they were suspicious. They asked who we were, what we were doing, where we had been, and why we had gone there. They demanded to see the photographs on Allen’s digital camera. One of them searched Allen’s courier bag, pausing to open the crisp white envelope that contained Allen’s Peace Corps salary for the month (I have no idea why he had it with him). I held my breath, sure he was going to pocket some of the cash, but he just looked gravely at Allen, closed the envelope and put it back.

As the soldiers questioned us, they calmed down. They must have realized we were hapless teachers, not spies. Soon Allen was showing them how to use his camera and we were all taking pictures of each other and laughing. After 20 minutes, they decided to let us go. One of the soldiers stopped a minivan at the checkpoint and ordered the driver to take us back to Abadan. Grinning, the soldiers waved goodbye as the minivan pulled away. Inside, the driver’s wife fed us sweet ruby-colored pomegranates and assured us she would get us home safely, which she did.

7.

Permission Required

For four days, Misha had been drinking vodka by the half-liter, alternately crashing around the house yelling, and passing out on the living room floor. He was an alcoholic and he had just fallen off the wagon, a tri-annual event in the Plotnikov household. My arrival gift, the frosted shot glass, had reappeared and been put to use. I finally understood why Olya had hidden it away right after I’d given it to Misha. I felt like an idiot.

Olya and Sasha slept at a neighbor’s house. Denis and I stayed at the apartment with Misha, ignoring his furious outbursts and moving him to the couch when he passed out. He was old and small, more pathetic than scary. One night he went on a long rant about how the US stole Alaska from Russia. To calm him down, I promised we’d give it back. He relaxed a bit and then sunk into a fit of self pity.

I’m a Soviet officer,” he slurred. “I’m a Soviet officer and there’s an American living in my home. What happened? I don’t understand the world anymore.”

Misha was too drunk to work and Olya wasn’t around to give him money, so he soon ran out of vodka and sobered up. Olya and Sasha moved back in, and we all went on with our lives. I found it hard to hold the episode against Misha; I felt bad for him. Until 1991, he had lived in one of the two most powerful countries on earth. Then one day the Soviet Union fell apart. The new leaders discarded everything Misha had been brought up to believe in, ended communism and made peace with the United States. It was as if the United States suddenly disintegrated into 50 mini-countries, democracy and capitalism were discredited as viable political and economic systems, and China became the dominant world power. I could see how it would be a little disorienting.

To make things worse, non-Turkmen weren’t very welcome in post-independence Turkmenistan. Most ethnically Russian Turkmen citizens had gone to Russia, but the Plotnikovs had stayed for some reason. I never found out exactly why, but I think the problem was money. They were just scraping by from week to week. They didn’t have enough saved to transport all their belongings to Russia and buy and apartment there. But they were always planning, always hoping.

Despite Misha’s binge, as my 10-week training period wound down, all the trainees became Peace Corps Volunteers, and Allen, Matt, Laura, and Kellie prepared to move to their new homes in the far corners of Turkmenistan, I was glad I was staying with the Plotnikovs. So, as we organized the going away party, I was only a little bit jealous of the others. The party was at Matt’s host family’s apartment, in a building nearly identical to mine. He lived with Ana and Sesili Burjanadze, a Georgian mother and daughter who sold salads at the Abadan bazaar. Their apartment was on the ground floor, so it had a back porch and a fenced garden.

Ana was in her 40s, cynical and sharp. About five feet tall with short black hair and dark eyes, when she wasn’t at work she sat at her kitchen table, chain-smoking, drinking cup after cup of coffee, and telling fortunes for a stream of visitors. She used playing cards, coffee grounds, whatever she could lay her hands on. The medium didn’t matter. What she was really doing was counseling people on their financial problems, their love lives, and their jobs. Sesili, barely 20, was shy, quiet, and grounded, a good counter-balance to Ana’s raucous volatility. Ana would sit in that crowded kitchen finishing a crossword puzzle and spinning out a story about how she once beat a woman’s face bloody with the spiked heel of her shoe. Sesili, looking at the floor, would sigh (“Oh, mom”) and stand up to wash some dishes and put on water for more coffee.

I arrived early for the going away party and Ana put me to work. I skewered eggplants, green peppers, and tomatoes. I chopped carrots, cabbage, and hot peppers. I put chicken legs in a massive bowl to marinate in onions, vinegar, salt, and pepper. I carried an empty five-liter bottle down to the bar and had the bartender fill it up with draft beer. Then I built a wood fire in a grill in the back yard and spent the afternoon drinking beer and roasting chicken kebabs (
shashlyk
) and vegetables over the glowing coals.

By the time the kebabs were ready, Ana and Sesili’s apartment and garden were crowded with friends, neighbors, and host families. Everyone had brought a little something to eat and every counter, table, chair, and windowsill in the kitchen was crowded with food:
somsa
s,
piroshki
s, cookies,
chorek
, and salads. The house smelled of frying onions, wood smoke, and beer. Ana’s two kittens ran around underfoot, looking for someone to pat them, hoping for a scrap of chicken. There wasn’t enough room at the kitchen table for all the guests, so we ate Turkmen-style. Ana laid out a long tablecloth – a
klionka
– on the floor in the living room and we all sat around it cross-legged.

The
klionka
was loaded with
plov
(lamb pilaf), chicken
shashlyk
, roasted vegetables, pickled red peppers, salads,
chorek
,
somsa
s, cookies, sodas, beer, and vodka. For three hours we ate and took turns making toasts, which in Turkmenistan, are supposed to be sincere and several minutes long. We drank all the vodka so someone ran down to the corner store to buy more. Everyone wished the four departing Volunteers luck and told them to come back and visit soon. Toward the end of the night, Allen’s host mother raised her glass.