Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "Now we turn to chapter sixteen. Here is Musa Nagi," Fuad said and began vigorously to read from the book.

  I hate being read to. I hate the pauses. I hate the stammers and mispronunciations. Most of all I hate the slowness of it. I can read quickly and efficiently, and cannot stand someone taking charge and denying me the pleasure of reading the damned thing myself.

  "Let me see that," I said. "Please."

  "No, no, this is the best part!" Fuad said and snatched the book away.

  And then he started to declaim it. I hated that, too.

  "'I am an old man,'" he read, stabbing his finger at the page. "'And I am sad to see what I see, and to hear what I hear. The Russians are killing the Turks, the Turks are killing the Armenians, the Armenians would like to kill us, and we the Russians..."He continued, reading very loudly and gesticulating, and when he saw my attention wandering, he stood in front of me and shouted, "'Our soul strives to go to God. But each nation believes they have a God all to themselves, and he is the one and only God. But I believe it is the same God who made himself known through the voices of all the sages. Therefore I worship Christ and Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed. We all come from one God, and through Bab we shall all return to him. Men should be told there is no Black and White, for Black is White and White is Black. "

  "How true," I said, hoping he'd stop.

  But he wasn't finished: "'So my advice is this. Let us not do anything that might hurt anybody anywhere in the world, for we are part of each soul, and each soul is part of us. "

  Fuad squeezed the book shut.

  "Now I want you to look at the building again. You see how beautiful the façade. And there is Musa Nagi, the Baha'ist."

  Carved in the stone façade of the building was Musa Nagi's benevolent face.

  Fuad's arms were crossed and he was reciting again, this time a poem:

  Every epoch has its face,

  Every epoch leaves its trace;

  Sometimes it is full of disgrace,

  And not just in this particular case.

  "I wrote that myself," Fuad said.

  We continued through the square, which was named for Mirzah Sabir, a national hero who died in 1911. A statue of Sabir in the middle of the square depicted the man seated. It was, Fuad said, a visual euphemism, because "getting him to sit" was a Russian expression for imprisoning someone, and Sabir, a writer and satirist, had been imprisoned.

  "He derided mullahs," Fuad said. "Mirzah Sabir said, 'I'm not afraid of a place of gods and devils. I'm afraid of a place with mullahs.'"

  We strolled in the old city and Fuad showed me Ali's house, just as it had been described in chapter one.

  "You see the second floor? Ali's room! Where he looks out and sees"

  — now he read from the novel—"'the Maiden's Tower, surrounded by legends and tourist guides. And behind the tower the sea began, the utterly faceless, leaden, unfathomable Caspian Sea, and beyond, the desert — jagged rocks and scrub: still, mute, unconquerable, the most beautiful landscape in the world.'"

  He was moved by his own performance.

  "Do you agree with Ali?" I asked.

  "What about?"

  "The sea. The desert. The most beautiful landscape in the world."

  "Yes, of course," he said.

  I heard an unstated but in his delivery. I said, "But—"

  "But I'm going to Canada," Fuad said.

  After all this nationalistic fervor and literary history, the civic pride, the declaiming, the quoting, the extolling of statues and mansions, the florid poems, his blazing eyes, his gestures, his red fez, he was bailing out.

  "This government is making a mess," he said, putting Ali and Nino into his briefcase. "Tearing down lovely buildings and putting up shit. So I want to leave."

  "But this is a wealthy country, and you have an important job at Interpol," I said.

  "My son is six. I don't want to bring up my child in an atmosphere of hostility. I want him to have more chances."

  "What's the problem here?"

  "Everything—the Russians mostly."

  Russia was behind all the secessionist movements, all the embattled and besieged breakaway republics, from Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Dagestan and Nagorno-Karabakh. When I asked what sense it made for the Russians to foment nationalist movements in these places, he said that of course there was no sense in it. It was perverse political malignity to make life miserable for Georgians and Azeris.

  "No, no," he said when I wanted to pursue this. "Listen to my poem." And he recited again from memory:

  Baku is the place

  Where every stone

  Has a story of its own.

  He crooked an admonitory finger in the air, sweeping the red fez off his head. His voice broke slightly as he finished:

  And the stories could be magic

  Should they not end up so tragic.

  "'Let's go to Fillifpojanz,'" Fuad said. He was quoting the novel again, because the site of the Fillifpojanz coffee house still existed, a bulky white-painted building on Barjatinsky Street, and was being restored.

  To get there, we passed the signs of Azerbaijan's prosperity: casinos and bars, shops selling luxury goods, and Internet cafés where shaggy youths were using video-mounted computers to speak with women—wives and girlfriends. The good times were reflected in the Azeris themselves, well dressed and busy, greeting the spring on this long sunny holiday. Fuad had other plans. He wasn't very interested in describing Fillifpojanz and was looking beyond Ali and Nino now. Having divulged his plan to emigrate, he spoke of how happy he'd be, how hard he'd work, when he got to Canada.

  NIGHT TRAIN FROM ASHGABAT TO MARY

  TURKMENISTAN, the Stan next door, was a tyranny run by a madman, Saparmyrat Niyazov, who gave himself the name Turkmenbashi, "Leader of All the Turkmen." He was one of the wealthiest and most powerful lunatics on earth and the ruler of an entire country. His people cringed at his name, his prisons were full of dissenters, his roads were closed to people like me. He had recently begun to call himself Prophet (Prorók), a harmless enough conceit if you're a civilian, but a pathological if not a fatal tendency in a despot. In support of his messianic claim he had written a sort of national bible, called the Rukhnama (The Book of the Soul), and he regarded himself as an accomplished writer, a clear sign of madness in anyone. Everything I had heard about this man and this country made me want to go there.

  He treated the country as his private kingdom, a land in which everything in it belonged to him, including all of Turkmenistan's plentiful natural gas, much of which issued into the air from his own person in the form of interminable speechifying. Not long ago he prophesied that the twenty-first century was the golden age of Turkmenistan. I had heard that his insane schemes for promoting his image were on display all over the country, but especially the gold statues in the capital, Ashgabat. I was disappointed at not being able to take the ferry from Baku, but I was eager to see this jowly and vindictive potentate, who in word and deed was constantly paraphrasing Shelley—"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"—in his desert wasteland.

  For the first time on this trip I was airborne, on the fifty-minute flight from Baku to Ashgabat, and (so it seemed) traveling through the Looking Glass. The chummy term "Absurdistan" did not begin to describe this geopolitical aberration—it was too forgiving, too definable, too comic. "Loonistan" came closer, for it was less like a country than a gigantic madhouse run by the maddest patient, for whom "megalomaniac" sounded too affectionate and inexact. Niyazov famously hated writers and snoopers, and Turkmenistan was one of the hardest countries in the world for a solitary traveler to enter. I might not have gotten into Turkmenistan at all. There were group tours: one day in Ashgabat, a one-day trip to the ruins at Merv, and off to Uzbekistan in a bus or plane. But I had a helpful, well-placed friend. I was grateful to be there.

  Niyazov had recently built a vast space-age mosque and named it after himself, Saparmyrat Hajji
Mosque, and encouraged his people to visit it annually, as a rewarding pilgrimage, a national haj. His portraits, some of them hundreds of square feet of his unappealing features, were everywhere. In some he looked like a fat and grinning Dean Martin wearing a Super Bowl ring; in others he was a nasty-faced CEO with a chilly smile, smug, truculent, defiant. One showed him as a precocious child of gold, seated in the lap of his bronze mother. The most common picture portrayed him, chin on hand, squinting in insincere bonhomie, like a lounge singer. Smiling was an important part of his political philosophy. He had Italianate features and was sometimes posed with a stack of books, like an insufferable author in a book-tour shot. He was sixty-five. He had declared himself "Leader for Life." It was the will of the people, he said. Everything associated with him told you he was out of his mind. He had banned beards, gold teeth, and ballet.

  Absolute ruler and head of state, and with much of the gas revenue in his own pocket, Niyazov was crazy in his own twisted way, and Ashgabat was an example of what happened when political power and money and mental illness were combined in a single paranoiac.

  "He renamed bread after his mother," someone had said to me before I went.

  It was apparently true that he'd floated the idea, and he'd succeeded in something even nuttier. He renamed the twelve months of the year—January after himself, and some other months after members of his family. His mother's name, Gurbansultan-ezdhe, took the place of April. The days of the week were also new, his own innovation, and one was Mom's. In the purifying interests of nationalism, he abolished all non-Turkmen names and expressions, and decreed that the dictionary should be rewritten to reflect this.

  One American I met there said, "If you took Las Vegas and Pyongyang and shook them up in a blender, you'd get Ashgabat."

  "Like an underfunded Las Vegas," another American said. He meant the white marble towers, the gold statues, the floodlights, the fountains, the empty spaces, the dead trees. Neither of these quips was quite right, because the place was uniquely weird. I knew that something was amiss as soon as I arrived. The gold statues and dead trees were just the beginning and were hardly the worst of it.

  Apart from its gas pipeline, it was a country without a link to the world: no international telephones, no Internet, no cell phones, no satellite hookups. Newspapers, radio, and television were controlled; no real news at all and no access to the outside. My BlackBerry, which had worked in Baku and Tbilisi, went dark. The dictator had decreed that the Internet was subversive—and he was probably right. It was almost impossible to enter the country, and it was very hard to leave. Internet cafés had been closed for more than three years. People tended to whisper, and no wonder. In a typical case, reported by outside sources, a fifty-eight-year-old journalist—a reporter for Radio Free Europe—Ogulsapar Muradova, a mother of two, had been arrested, convicted (without a lawyer) in a secret trial, and given six years on a trumped-up charge. In September 2006, a month after she was imprisoned in Ashgabat, Muradova was found dead in her cell (she appeared to have suffered "a head injury"), and her body was handed over to her daughters.

  Turkmenistan's oddity was apparent from the outset, long before I saw the gold statues. Few planes ever landed at the casino-style airport, which was staffed by officials who had a very slim idea of how to do their jobs or make decisions—a characteristic of most dictatorships, in which fear of retribution created such rigidity that it bred incompetence. Men in handsome uniforms stood around, delaying the processing of passengers, most of them foreign workers—British, Malaysian, Filipino—in the gas industry. The officials grinned at each other, but when they met my gaze they glowered and looked fierce.

  One of them, in a wide-crowned and shiny-visored cap, looked at me and sucked his teeth and said, "Prablyema"

  "What's the problem?"

  "Shto eta?" He tugged at the T-shirt in my bag that held the offending object.

  "Eekon," I said. The silver icon I had bought at the sidewalk flea market in Tbilisi, with an oil portrait of Jesus staring from a lozenge at the center, wrapped up so that it wouldn't get scratched.

  "Eta staroye" he said.

  "No, it's new."

  ""Ochen dorogaya

  "Not really. It was cheap."

  "Antikvarnaya!"

  "An antique?"

  "Da. Prablyema!" he said. He showed me the flat of his hand. "Zhdi zdyes"

  I waited almost an hour. A team of men returned. One spoke English, while the rest of them clucked approvingly.

  "Why you bring this eekon here?" he said slowly. "Why you not bring it khome?"

  "I am bringing it home," I said.

  He raised his hands. "This Ashgabat, not khome."

  "I'm on my way home," I said. Which was, in the larger sense, true. "To give this to my mother."

  "Mat'," this man explained to the team. "It is for his mother."

  Any mention of mother is useful, particularly in a country of tradition-minded desert folk whose leader, I was to discover, encouraged a cult of motherhood.

  But the man was holding the customs form and looking baffled. I explained that, since a section of the form asked for Description and Origin of Goods, we could fill out that portion, and I would show it at the border, when I left, to prove I wasn't smuggling antiques. They seemed to think this was an appropriate compromise, and so after two hours I was riding into Ashgabat.

  "He was on TV last night. Well, he's on almost every night," the driver said. No one ever used Niyazov's name, not even the boastful "Turkmenbashi," or if they did, it was in an undertone. "He said, 'If you read my book three times you will go to heaven.'"

  "How does he know this?"

  "He said, 'I asked Allah to arrange it.'"

  Niyazov's Rukhnama is a hefty-sized farrago of personal history, odd Turkmen lore, genealogies, national culture, dietary suggestions, Soviet-bashing, insane boasting, wild promises, and his own poems, one beginning, "Oh, my crazy soul..."The book contains more exclamation marks than a get-rich-quick ad, which it much resembles. He seemed to regard it as both a sort of Koran and how-to guide for the Turkmen people and a jingoistic pep talk, and though it is perhaps no odder, no more fabricated, than any other apocalyptic tome, it is strung on a very tenuous narrative—a blend of advice, his own speeches, and potted history—and so it is little more than a soporific, "chloroform in print," as Mark Twain described The Book of Mormon. I read it once. Niyazov would have to promise more than heaven for me to read his excruciating book two more times.

  But it had immense value for the traveler passing through Turkmenistan, since all writing, even bad writing—especially bad writing—is revealing of the author's mind and heart. The ill-written Rukhnama is no exception. Early in the book, a hopeful Niyazov writes, "The foreigners who read Rukhnama will know us better, become our friends faster," though whenever I mentioned the Rukhnama to educated Turkmen, they rolled their eyes and looked embarrassed.

  In his confused and patchy exposition, Niyazov reached back five thousand years (so he said) and claimed, "Turkmen history can be traced back to the flood of Noah." In the aftermath, the receding of the waters, the original ancestor of the Turkmen, Oguz Khan, emerged. Oguz's sons and grandsons produced Turkmenistan's twenty-four clans. The figure of Oguz is one of the keys to the Rukhnama: Niyazov speaks of how the Turkmen called the Milky Way the Oguz Arch, and the Amu Darya River the Oguz River, and the constellation the Oxen was the Oguz Stars. Oguz also "implemented ... the use of the national Oguz alphabet." His name was set upon many features of the earth and sky. Oguz also declared a golden age.

  The subtitle of the Rukhnama (now referred toas The Holy Rukhnama) could be "The Second Coming"—the actual subtitle is "Reflections on the Spiritual Values of the Turkmen." Niyazov emphasizes that he is a sort of reincarnation of Oguz Khan, just as powerful and wise, and to prove it he has named cities and hills and rivers and streets after himself. He meddled with the language in the manner of Oguz, ordering that Turkmen be written in Latin script, and claimed tha
t because he had dedicated his life to making Turkmenistan greater, he would be its president for the rest of his life.

  Niyazov was an orphan. Much is made of this in the book, and these descriptions have a clumsy tenderness. "I have borne many difficulties throughout my life," he writes, and tells how his father was killed in the Second World War, fighting for the Soviets in Ossetia. When he was a child of seven, his mother was killed in the earthquake that leveled Ashgabat in 1948. Isolated, he was made strong, and he refused to mourn. "When I considered my situation, I understood that I was not an orphan! How can someone be an orphan if he has a father like Oguz Khan?" Instead of natural parents, he had a nation and a cause and a father from history. And he incorporated his parents into the national fabric, naming the year 2003 after his father, Atamurat, and 2004 after his mother, Gurbansultan-ezdhe.

  Later in the Rukhnama (oh, and 2005 was the Year of Rukhnama), he waxes emotional about his mother, and mothers in general. This turns into a program to venerate motherhood. "The mother is a sacred being ... One can understand the value of sacred things only after one has lost them." He goes on to explain that a father provides material support, but the mother supplies love. He recalls a Turkmen saying: "Fatherless, I am orphan; motherless, I am captive," and concludes, "Fate decreed two pains for me. I was both an orphan and a captive."

  A lost childhood seems essential in a dictator's biography, an irregular upbringing being a determiner of a person's becoming a political tyrant. Niyazov's making a meal of his early suffering, and the existence of the Palace of Orphans in Ashgabat—there were similar institutions in other big cities—were evidence that one of his priorities was to make special provisions for abandoned or parentless children. Having no clan, no real family, though, was a unique political asset to him in this clan-dominated society. "He has a feeling for orphans," a Turkmen told me. This concern was as obvious on the ground as it was in the pages of the Rukhnama, where Niyazov describes how he lost his parents, how he was alone and destined to struggle.