Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  In terms of abandonment complaints, the book sounds (sometimes word for word) like the upward climb of the Austrian paperhanger in part one of Mein Kampf, who wrote: "In my thirteenth year I suddenly lost my father," and "When my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect, had made its decisions ... The three-year-old child had become a fifteen-year-old despiser of all authority." But the orphaning is sentimentalized in the Rukhnama, and there is much more—history, old saws, the promise of greater glory, the list of obligations and duties, of which the not exactly Hitlerian "Maintain a smiling face" is one.

  "Smile!" was an important Turkmenbashi command. He was as emphatic about Turkmen smiling as he was about work and worship. He wrote, "As the old saying goes, 'There will never be any wrinkles on a smiling face.'" And he reminisced: "I often remember my mother. Her smile still appears before my very eyes ... The smile is visible to me in the dark of night, even if I have my eyes shut."

  A smile was powerful: "A smile can make a friend for you out of an enemy. When death stares you in the face, smile at it and it may leave you untouched." Even nature smiled: "Spring is the smile of the earth." Smiling could be a form of conversation: "Smile at each other ... Talk to each other with smiles."

  Pages and pages of this, most of it self-reverential. To his smile Niyazov owed much of his success as a national leader. "That smile I inherited from my mother is my treasure." This was perhaps why most of the portraits of Niyazov all over Turkmenistan showed him smiling, though he never looked less reliable, or less amused, than when he was smiling. His smile—and this may be true of all political leaders—was his most sinister feature.

  At Niyazov's command, his book was studied in every school in Turkmenistan; a thorough knowledge of it was an entry requirement for all the colleges and universities in the nation and for advancement in the civil service. Those immigration officials who gave me a hard time had little idea of how to handle a simple customs matter but probably could have quoted "A smile can make a friend for you out of an enemy"—though none of them smiled at me.

  What Niyazov did not say in the Rukhnama was that after his education in Russia (he had studied electrical engineering), he had become a party hack. This was in the 1970s and '80s—Soviet times, when he rose through the ranks of the Politburo to become general secretary of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan. He was one of the educated provincials the Soviets (in this case Gorbachev, who had picked him, not knowing he was a flake) extolled as converts to Marxism and examples of the effectiveness of the system, and hoped might serve as agents of reform. Not mentioned in the Rukhnama is that he spent a great deal of time in Leningrad and Moscow; that he was married to a Russian—interestingly enough, a Jew—who chose to live apart from him, in Moscow; that he had two children, one of whom, Murat, hoped to succeed him.

  Another significant omission in any subsequent edition of the book (of which more than a million have been printed, in more than thirty languages, including Zulu and Japanese) is any mention of the assassination attempt against Niyazov. In 2002, in what might have been a failed coup, he was almost killed when he was shot at as his motorcade sped through the city. This resulted in a wave of repression, the perpetrators and their helpers hunted down and either killed or imprisoned. Whole families were jailed, and nothing was heard of them afterwards. The word was that his own disgruntled and ambitious ministers had schemed to get rid of him, and the plan was that he would be kidnapped, taken hostage, and deposed rather than knocked off.

  Anyway, the caper failed, but understandably it completed Niyazov's paranoia, and his delusions of grandeur—evident throughout the country in the form of the gold statues—were now accompanied by delusions of persecution. He ordered a clampdown: no Internet, no telephones, total control of the media, of all comings and goings.

  And that other inconvenient feature of tyrannies—roadblocks. These were installed throughout all cities and on roads leading out of the cities, about every four miles. In a twelve-mile journey to some nearby ruins I was stopped three times by the usual well-armed men in spiffy uniforms who did not have the slightest notion of what to do with the cars they stopped. They examined papers, they looked into the back seat of the car, they made scowling faces and shouldered their rifles; but really, they were foxed.

  On that trip to see the ruins, I asked about Niyazov's passion for renaming. I was with two Turkmen—a man I shall call Mamed, whose English was shaky, and a woman I shall call Gulnara, who was fluent.

  The funny part was that although Mamed and Gulnara had read about the renamings, there were so many changes they couldn't keep them straight.

  "January is now Turkmenbashi," Gulnara said. "He named the first month after himself. Ha! February is Bayderk—the flag. March is Nowruz. April is Gurbansultan-ezdhe—his mother. June is Oguz—our hero. But May is—what is May?"

  Mamed said, "May is Sanjar."

  "No, that's November."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I know September is Rukhnama," Gulnara said. "What do you think, Paul?"

  I said, "It's every writer's dream to have a month named after his book."

  "August is Alp Arslan," Mamed said. "He was sultan."

  "You forgot July," Gulnara said.

  "I don't remember July. What is it?"

  Gulnara shook her head. She squinted and said, "Then there's October."

  Mamed said, "Garashsyzliyk."

  "Independence," Gulnara said.

  They were just as vague on the days of the week, though Gulnara started confidently: "Monday is Bashgün—Beginning. Tuesday is Yashgün, Young Day. Wednesday is Hoshgün."

  "Tuesday is Hoshgün," Mamed said. "Wednesday is Yashgün."

  "I don't think so," Gulnara said.

  Their confusion was funny but politically suspect, because the renaming was considered so important. By a government decree, all departments, all ministries, schools, colleges, the police, the army—all citizens—had to demonstrate a knowledge of the changes, and had to use them, too.

  "What if people are talking in Russian?" I asked, which was common, since Ashgabat had a community of Russians who'd been there for many years, somewhat sidelined by Niyazov's nationalism, but too old to leave.

  "Even speaking in Russian—although it would be normal to use the Russian names for months and days—they use the new ones. Which makes no sense."

  "Someone told me he renamed bread."

  "That was an idea," Gulnara said. "But he renamed ketchup. He made a big speech. 'Why do we say "ketchup"? This is a foreign word. We are Turkmen. We must have a Turkmen word for this!'"

  "So what is it?"

  "Ketchup is uwmech?

  "If I looked up uwmech in the dictionary, what would it say?"

  "It would say 'ketchup,' except we don't have any new dictionaries in Turkmenistan."

  Mamed said, "He got rid of them."

  All this talk of the obsessive president made Mamed and Gulnara self-conscious, and when they fell silent I said, "Does it bother you that the president has made all these changes? Not just the renaming, but his mother's name, his father's name."

  "Most people don't think about it," Gulnara said. She meant: don't want to think about it, because it will only make them miserable.

  "What about the gold statues he puts up of himself?"

  Mamed made a face, shook his head, became alert. It was said that hotel rooms and offices were bugged, to catch any subversive talk—surely this car could be bugged too?

  But Gulnara had an opinion. She was confident and bright, qualities she shared with many of the Turkmen women I met. She said, "The statues. The slogans. The five-year plans. We have seen this before. Stalin—and others."

  And it was true that for self-adulatory images and mottos on buildings, the Soviets had been almost unbeatable, with Lenin's gilded face everywhere, and the cities and towns with Lenin statues to which Stalin statues were added. It was not surprising that the aspiring S. Niyazov changed his name to Turkmenbashi (as Iosif Dzhugashvili h
ad, to Joseph Stalin) and created a dictatorship, complete with a personality cult.

  "This will pass away," Gulnara said.

  It was not just a wise observation but the right way to see what this autocracy was worth, for this hyperactive and domineering man would die, and since he was seriously afflicted with diabetes and had had at least one heart attack, it would happen sooner rather than later. And then the gold statues would come down.*

  * He died in December 2006.

  In the meantime, Turkmen, of whom there were five million, expressed their disaffection in jokes. One went, "Why is Turkmenbashi the richest man in Turkmenistan?" Answer: "Because he has five million sheep." And they laughed recalling how Niyazov had suggested that his people chew on bones, because it was good for their teeth.

  On our way to the ruins we had passed a number of state-owned vineyards—one of the other oddities of Islamic Turkmenistan was that it had a vigorous wine industry, for both export and local consumption. At the edge of the desert we approached some rising ground that was more a mound than a hill, on which there was a broken structure of mud bricks that was still recognizable as a mosque.

  This was Anau, the ruins of a fifteenth-century mosque—not unusual in Turkmenistan, which saw its first Islamic evangelists in the seventh century; the Prophet himself had sent his messengers in this direction from Mecca, and the conversion rate was high. What made this mosque unusual was that architecturally it showed Chinese influence, features in still bright mosaics that were almost unheard-of in mosques—images of creatures and portraits of humans, neither of them common in Islamic art, and over the archway of the entrance, shattered but sinuous dragons.

  Much of Turkmenistan was desert wasteland, scrubby bushes, and dusty boulders, an emptiness of lizards and a landscape like cat litter. In Soviet times its few towns and cities were outposts as benighted as in any imperial colony, where people in colorful clothes wove carpets and surrendered their reserve of gas and oil to the Russian overlords. This exploitation, one of the injustices denounced in the Rukhnama, had not always been the case. The dragons on the mosque were a reminder that this part of Turkmenistan was on the Silk Road, the route to China, and some of the toughest travelers, the greatest treasures, the boldest generals, the largest armies, had passed this way: Alexander the Great, the Parthians, the Arabs, the Mongols.

  This mosque was a place of pilgrimage, because its grounds contained the tomb of Seyyed Jamaluddin, the father of a local governor from the fifteenth century. A dozen people, most of them women with their children, prayed at the pile of broken bricks that was his grave.

  "They come here because he has good communication with Allah," Mamed said.

  There was another grave, the Tomb of the Unmarried Woman—though Gulnara said that "unmarried woman" could also be translated as "virgin." Young women were praying here, and hundreds had come before: they had left tokens behind in the form of symbols for requests to be granted. Most were wishes to be blessed with babies. Bows were tied to the branches of a nearby tree, small carved cradles were unambiguous, and the sheep bones that were carefully piled, Gulnara said, in dicated children too, since the bones were used as toys by Turkmen children. Hairpins meant girls, so did the patches of colored cloth; little plastic cars meant a boy child was desired.

  "In Islam, this is not usually done. You don't appeal to a dead woman," Gulnara said. "You're supposed to ask Allah. But this is a powerful woman."

  I mentioned that most of these appeals specified that boys were wanted.

  She said, "Women who give birth to girls have another special way of indicating that they want a boy. They will name the daughter Enough—Besteir—or else Fed Up—Boyduk. These are common names. I know many."

  About forty feet from the tumbledown mosque was another mound on which there were hundreds of toy huts made of broken clay tiles—propped-up walls, a lid for a roof—and some were slanted two-story huts. It looked like a miniature city. A squatting man in a smock and a woman with a billowing headscarf were setting one up as we stood nearby.

  "People praying for houses," Gulnara said. The images represented the people—young couples mostly—who were living with their parents in crowded tenements or in poor villages just outside Ashgabat, who wanted homes of their own.

  The cruelty of Niyazov's policies was obvious in this tableau of toy huts, which was a visible plea—not to Turkmenbashi but to Allah—for housing. Houseless people abounded in this fabulously wealthy country. In his role as city planner, Niyazov had ordered that houses be bulldozed, compounds flattened, neighborhoods of Ashgabat dispersed, but he had not rehoused the people he'd displaced. They lived precariously in temporary huts on Ashgabat's outskirts. And where their houses had stood were gold statues, fountains, oversized white marble buildings, and white marble apartment blocks of ludicrous aspect, risen like pillars of salt, with gold trim, all of them empty because they were, in their deluxe absurdity, unaffordable.

  Islam was not one immutable thing but was subject to variations. In what anthropologists call syncretism—local customs or adaptations added to an imported belief system—Islam here took on a colorful form, like Catholicism in Sicily or the Congo. Here were the national saints and martyrs who might intercede, and also the fetishes. The toys and small-scale models and symbols set up in a beseeching way were an innovation. The symbolic naming was a way of gaining power over destiny. Appeals to spirits—not Allah. This sort of Turkmen-style praying, intending to control fate, was unusual among Muslims.

  In the next few days, I reached the conclusion that Turkmenistan, perhaps because of its tyrannous history, was one of the most superstition-prone cultures I'd ever seen.

  Because they were gilded and solemn, the statues in the Turkmen capital had an ecclesiastical aura. A leader on horseback, or one cast in bronze or carved in stone, was not quite the same as a leader shaped in gold. In all these statues Niyazov was El Dorado, the Man of Gold—all-powerful, all-knowing. You were not meant to gape at them but rather to venerate them. One statue, depicting Niyazov with his arm raised, rotated, turning to face the sun, seeming to guide it across the sky from dawn to dusk. Another, the Arch of Neutrality, stood atop a gigantic marble apparatus that looked like, and was locally known as, the Toilet Bowl Plunger. Some gold statues showed Turkmenbashi sitting, others striding, waving, saluting, and of course smiling a 24-karat smile. Many showed him as a precocious golden child.

  He once said to a journalist, "I admit it, there are too many portraits, pictures and monuments [of me]. I don't find any pleasure in it, but the people demand it because of their mentality."

  All of these statues and pictures were, of course, destined for destruction; their doom was spelled out in the gold lettering, in the gold gesturing. They were such hubristic conceptions, it was only a matter of time before they were pulled down. A statue of Lenin in Neutrality Square in Ashgabat was bronze and life size, its mosaic imitating the pattern of a Turkmen carpet, and its message, in Russian and Turkmen, read: LENINISM IS THE WAY FOR FREEING THE PEOPLES OF THE EAST. This was, by contrast, modest and charming, a far cry from the gold three-times-life-size Niyazov statues, which looked like commands to submit to his insanities, and by implication would challenge future Turkmen to knock them down.

  Although the city was made of white marble and gold, statues and tower blocks and ministries and amphitheaters, the whole of Ashgabat had the pompous and vulnerable look of a place defying the fates. If an earthquake didn't topple it, a coup d'état would, and all of it would be smashed to bits by the indignant citizens this spendthrift had cheated.

  The irony of Ashgabat was that nowhere, among the gold statues and the white marble plazas with their fountains and the triumphal archways, was there a place to sit down. It was a city without benches, the subtle message being: Keep walking.

  "I will build a forest in the desert," Niyazov had promised. Turkmen said that he had loved the pine forests of Russia. He had been inspired by them; he missed them here among the stones a
nd the dunes. Turkmenistan—its wind-scoured plains and ravines of sun-scorched rock—deserved a forest.

  He had ordered the planting of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young trees; and although they were two or three feet high—the planting was still going on when I was in Ashgabat—the forestation plan was not a success.

  Now, there are trees that are drought-resistant—certain cypresses, certain poplars, the low twisted trees you see in the parched ravines of Patagonia, the ones that somehow flourish in the howling wilderness of China's Xinjiang Uygur region. But the Douglas firs, white pines, and arborvitae, dear to the heart and memory of Niyazov, were doing badly. They had been planted in immensely long ranks and rows at the center of Ashgabat, and on great swaths of dry land outside the city, as a sort of instant forest. Drip irrigation had been rigged to keep them watered, but they were the wrong species. They were baked by the sun, blown flat by the wind, and a full third of them had that peculiar rust-red hue, the vivid color of an evergreen's death.

  "They are called arçabil," my new guide, Masut, said. "He, um, likes them."

  I was waiting for someone to speak the leader's name. "Turkmenbashi" was too pompous, "Niyazov" too presumptuous and familiar. "The President" and "the Leader" were too formal, and "the Prophet" was hard to say with a straight face. Later I learned that Turkmen usually referred to him as mähriban ata, "dear father," or serdar, "tribal leader."

  We were heading west, past signs saying PEOPLE-MOTHERLAND-TURKMENBASHI, scores of them, out of the city, where more forest had been planted and was seriously stunted and brown; some trees that had been secured by guy wires had toppled over. The trees had come from Russia and Ukraine—Bashi had swapped them for gas. The plantings looked like an enormous tree farm that had lost its lease.

  On the side of a mountain, in large letters carved from marble blocks, was this sign in Turkmen: OUR HEALTH ROAD OF OUR GREAT ETERNAL LEADER. It was just the sort of clifftop message I had seen a decade before in Albania, and without doubt it would end up the same way, as a pile of rubble in the adjacent valley. This one was meant to encourage people to walk on the paved path that wound through the dying dwarf forest.