Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "He wants us to be healthy," Masut said.

  But it was questionable whether Niyazov did want his people to be healthy. He had closed all the hospitals outside Ashgabat, replaced thousands of health care workers with military conscripts, and instructed the country's doctors to pledge their allegiance to him, Turkmenbashi, and to the Rukhnama rather than taking the Hippocratic oath.

  "Turkmen look healthy to me," I said. "They have a good diet. They don't smoke. They seem hard-working."

  "But he wants us to walk on the Health Road."

  That was the program. Never mind that you were a nomad or a villager or a cotton picker, you had to do as you were told, healthwise: walk on the Eternal Great Leader's road, more than twenty miles of paved pathway traversing the mountainside. One of Bashi's many residences lay beyond that hillside, another palace. He claimed that the $100 million gold-domed, white marble presidential palace built for him was not of his choosing. ("All I wanted was a small, cozy house.")

  "And many people don't have jobs," Masut said. "The figure could be sixty percent unemployed outside Ashgabat."

  "I'm surprised people aren't angry," I said.

  "Some are angry. But we have cheap things, too. Natural gas for heating is free. Electricity is free. Gasoline is three cents a gallon. I can fill the tank of this car for fifty cents."

  "What do you think are the problems here?" I asked.

  "Yes, we have problems, but we can't address problems, because there are no problems," Masut said and smiled at me, the smile that said: Please, no more questions.

  Another day we went, Masut and I, to the big bazaar outside Ashgabat, which had two names: the Tolkuchka bazaar, from a Russian word that meant pushing, and the Jygyldyk bazaar, an onomatopoeic word in Turkmen that meant something like babbling or jabbering.

  Turkmen have a horror of the evil eye, perhaps a lingering feature of the shamanism that has dominated the spiritual life in this region from ancient times, an anxious reflex that is apparent in every sphere of Turkmen existence. This aspect of superstition, combined with Islam, has produced holy-seeming paraphernalia for warding off the evil eye. These trinkets were on sale in many of the stalls in the bazaar, not just the staring glass eye or the carved wooden talisman, but a sheep-horn symbol that Masut said was effective against maledictions. This totemism was all part of the praying, the relic hunting, the tokens, the images, the bows and toy cars and dollhouses that I had seen elsewhere. In a police state that had total control of all coming and going, a locked-down populace, it was rather touching to see people obsessed with dark magic and wicked forces.

  It seemed that evil came as a weird and withering blast from thin air in the form of a diabolical death ray. The most common specific against this bedevilment was a charm that broke the force into pieces, a sort of prism made of colored wool that one wore as a necklace or bracelet, or hung over a bed or a doorway. Some of these charms looked like the kind of multicolored lanyards I had made in summer camp when I was a boy. But never mind how insubstantial they looked; the things worked, or so I was assured by Masut, who bought me a length of brown and red rope, an evil-eye deflector, to get me through to Uzbekistan.

  "And this herb is so powerful," Masut said, fingering a small sack of dried leaves, "that it is known as Hundred Husbands."

  In most respects, the Tolkuchka bazaar on the outskirts of Ashgabat was greater, more vital and various, than its rivals—say, the covered market in Istanbul, the bazaar in Damascus, or the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota—with billowing marquees and drapes marking off the separate stalls. It was highly competitive and intensely local—not a tourist to be seen. It covered many acres, and the horse market occupied what could have been an entire fairground.

  Buying a carpet or a melon or a sack of spices was only part of the interest of such a bazaar. A peripheral activity was the interaction of people—farmers from afar with their families, gawky boys, shy girls. The bazaar was a legitimate place for people to stare, to meet, and, while not exactly to flirt, to exchange smiles. Country people travel for a day or two on an old bus or a night train to get to Ashgabat and meet city people; families rendezvous for picnics; men swagger and shout, and boys gape and seem to imitate them. This bazaar was a kind of vortex, drawing in Turkmen from all over in an ancient ceremony of encounter and negotiation, isolated people delighted to be in a big noisy crowd, with music playing and camels howling and hawkers shouting for customers.

  Everything imaginable was on sale, not just Chinese clothes, shoes, belts, and blue jeans, but rows and rows of locally made velveteen dresses and their detachable white hand-embroidered collars, yoke-shaped and lovely, that are unique to Turkmen women.

  Besides the produce—tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, rice, herbs, and fresh fruit, piles of it in stalls and on carts—were the traditional weavings of Turkmenistan: an acre of the bazaar devoted to rugs and carpets, most of them of a reddish hue but some of them green and yellow.

  "You see these? They are fish," Masut said, indicating the motif of fish bones on a large carpet. "This one is from a clan that lives on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where fish are an important symbol."

  Brassware, samovars, silver spoons, silver dishes, the sort of flea market treasures I'd seen in Tbilisi—tables and tables of these. Russian stuff—belt buckles, military buttons, medals, and campaign ribbons. And bronze artifacts, pottery from digs, some that looked genuine, others that looked fake. Stacks of coins, too, some of them rubles from the departed regime, and lots of them that the sellers swore were ancient—with a provenance that was Seljuk, Ottoman, Luristan, Gulistan, coins from the ruined cities in the desert, from the Gurly Turkmen of Afghanistan and India. How many of these were fakes? Probably many. But I found a man who swore that a coin I was flipping was actually gold, from Merv or Bokhara, and so I bought it for its portability, and its beauty, and the slipperiness of its head and tail.

  Something else attracted me at the Tolkuchka bazaar: its multiracial shoppers and stallholders. Most of the people were obviously Turkmen, but there were many Russians, and some Persians, Azeris, and Uzbeks, too. In the 1930s, Stalin decreed that the Soviet populations be dispersed, so that the pull of native peoples to be unified would be weakened, the color of the population, so to speak, would be diluted. On the one hand, it gave republics like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan the look of a melting pot; on the other hand, it made them tractable.

  The farthest-flung ethnic group at the bazaar, and so in Turkmenistan, were the Koreans.

  "Stalin sent you?" I asked.

  "He sent my father and mother," a woman said. She wore a white cap, like a nurse's cap, and a white apron.

  There were several tables of Korean women, smiling, gold teeth glinting, shouting for attention, with trays piled high with pickled cabbage.

  "Kimchi," I said, the only Korean word I knew.

  "Yes, yes! Try some!"

  "It's cheap. It's the best. Buy some."

  "Take me to America!"

  ***

  ONE AFTERNOON IN ASHGABAT I caused a diplomatic incident—a common occurrence in Turkmenistan, but an inconvenience to a foreign traveler wishing for anonymity. Riling the government was one of the perils of life here, and was probably the reason Turkmen habitually kept their heads down and whispered.

  I had agreed to give a harmless pep talk in Ashgabat to some writers and journalists. About thirty men and women showed up at a sort of boardroom in a hotel that the U.S. embassy used as an annex. This being Turkmenistan, they were of every physical type: stylish women in velvet dresses and white collars with the impassive faces of nomads, dark beaky men in heavy coats, younger mustached men in suits, Russian aunties in blue dresses and carrying satchels, some hefty warrior types braced behind their chairs with arms folded, a furtive man fussing with a big shoulder bag, and two pale young women, slender Slavic beauties with lank blond hair, standing shyly by the wall, staring at me with limpid blue eyes.

  My topic was again the return journey
, the pleasure of a traveler's growing older, how the passage of time reveals the truth of people and places. I spoke for about twenty minutes, with a young Turkmen translator who was fluent in English. At the end there was polite applause. The man who had been fussing with his shoulder bag had taken out an expensive camera and begun snapping pictures.

  "Any questions?"

  Hands shot up.

  "What do you think of Islam?" one man asked.

  I made a tactful reply, commending the verses of the Koran encouraging hospitality that I, a traveler among Muslims, appreciated, and quickly I moved on to the next question.

  "I am a poet," one of the Russian aunties declared. She went on to ask how she might get her poems translated into English and published in the United States.

  I referred her to the fellow who had translated her question.

  "How do you write a novel?" a young man asked.

  I mentioned needing an idea, and characters, and a setting, and about two years of solitude.

  "You are not here for very long," another man said. "How can you understand us in such a short time?"

  "You're right," I said. "It's impossible. So what particular thing do you think it's important for me to understand about Turkmenistan?"

  "Do you know about the pensions?"

  "No, I don't. Tell me"

  "The government has reduced the state pensions for some people," he said, his voice rising. "In some cases, these were people who were granted pensions by the Soviet government, but when Turkmenistan became independent, these were eliminated. What do you think of that?"

  As he spoke, the man with the camera leaned over and began snapping his picture.

  He turned and snapped my picture as I said, "We have a similar problem in the United States. A lot of older people will have to work longer because the government pension fund is running out of money. The qualifying age for Social Security is now almost sixty-six, and it's rising."

  "But what about us?" the questioner asked. Now his voice was strident. "This situation is serious."

  The photographer positioned himself at the edge of the row of chairs and was clicking away.

  "You're not getting your pension?"

  "Many thousands of people are not getting it! They were workers. Now they're old and they have nothing to live on. This is a wealthy country, but they are poor. The government has done this to us. Why don't you write about that?"

  "You're a writer—all you people are writers," I said. "You are the people who should write about it, not me. You have all the facts. So why don't you do it?"

  "I am not a writer," the man said. "I am chairman of the Unity and Neutrality Party of Turkmenistan."

  Before this could be translated, the photographer leaped forward and snapped pictures from several angles, his shoulder bag bumping his side.

  And then an American security officer took three strides towards the photographer and, approaching him from behind, grasped his coat in one hand and snatched the camera with his other hand. He frog-marched the man to the back of the room and outside. This all happened so fast, the photographer did not have time to protest, though I heard him howl as the door slammed.

  "Do you write about love?" one of the pretty blue-eyed women asked.

  Constantly, I said. I elaborated on this subject, and then declared the meeting over. The room emptied quickly.

  But the harm was done. I had allowed a political dissident a forum. It turned out that this was the first anyone had heard of this underground party. And there was collateral damage, so to speak, for the writers and journalists who had been quietly invited (many of them unpopular with the government) had all been photographed. The photographer was a government spy, sent to make a record of the meeting and to report on what had been said.

  "Not good," said the young man who had done the translating.

  "What just happened?" I asked the American security man.

  I had been impressed by his deftness: without hesitating, almost without creating a scene, he had plucked the man and his camera from the room. Out in the corridor, the security man had popped out the camera's memory card and wiped it of its images as the photographer howled. The force of this expulsion came afterwards, like a shock wave, when it was apparent what had just occurred.

  "Government guy," the American said. "He should know better. This is technically U.S. government property. Can't take pictures here."

  "Is this going to be a problem?"

  "We'll see," he said. "Hey, I liked your talk."

  The problem developed later that day when the photographer complained to his superiors at Turkmenistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And the next day, the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Ashgabat was summoned to a meeting with the foreign minister.

  Who is this Paul Theroux? she was asked. What are the details of his visa? Does he have permission to speak? When is he leaving? How is he leaving? What border crossing?

  I had the answers to some of these questions. My visa was in order, and in a few days I planned to take the train to Mary, to see the ruins at Merv. Then the train to Turkmenabat and the Uzbekistan border at Farap, and then, I hoped, another train.

  I spent the rest of my time in Ashgabat doing what Turkmen like doing most, sitting on a lovely carpet, eating my way down a spit of lamb kebab or through a mound of rice plov. Always there was hard bread, sometimes dumplings, tea, and wine.

  "Georgian wine," one of my Turkmen hosts said. "Stalin's favorite. He wouldn't drink anything else."

  Now and then these meals were served in homes that stood in empty fields, like the stage set for a Beckett play—a house in a wasteland that had been bulldozed to make room for a future prestige project or gold statue. Niyazov's people simply seized the houses and got rid of them, rarely compensating the owners. In the distance were the empty marble palaces and tower blocks, huge white follies trimmed in gold. Niyazov fancied himself a city planner, and he was obsessional, his megalomania on view for all to see. He had the dictator's most obnoxious trait of greatly resembling a dysfunctional person who had won the lottery.

  Because I was now under a cloud, and being watched by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, my position as an alien in Turkmenistan was explained to me. I had to be careful. But having Niyazov—Turkmenbashi, Leader of All the Turkmen—as an enemy was helpful, because when Western diplomats explained my predicament, they revealed Niyazov's quirks.

  "He hates people meddling. He hates NGOs—in fact, he banned them," one diplomat told me. He had banned human rights groups, religious groups, and environmental groups. "He allowed the Peace Corps in when they left Uzbekistan, but they can't work in any schools—they give language lessons mainly, and do what they can to make friends."

  "You see what you're up against?" another diplomat said. "He's refused any help from the IMF or any loans from the World Bank, because if he accepted any money, he would have to disclose his own financial information. And that's his big secret. He considers most of these profits from gas his own, which makes him a billionaire many times over."

  A person who had spent some time with him in one of his palaces said, "He's a tease. He's a mocker. He banters with his ministers and humiliates them."

  "Of course his system's corrupt," a student explained to me. "You need to bribe a lot of people to get into college, but only Turkmen are allowed. A Russian or an Uzbek or a Korean wouldn't have a chance. They have no future here."

  "He stopped education at the ninth grade for most people," a bureaucrat said to me. "He was once asked about that by a foreign head of state. He said, 'Uneducated people are easier to govern.'"

  ***

  EARLY ONE EVENING I took the night train from Ashgabat to the eastern city of Mary. When I found that the sleeper ticket cost $4, I became anxious: this was the price of six melons at the bazaar, and a ticket so cheap boded ill for a long journey. I guessed that the train would be dirty and crowded, a mass of people traveling in the light of a few 25-watt bulbs, and it gave me no
satisfaction to be right.

  The railway station itself was lovely, a classic Soviet building from the 1950s, very clean and patrolled by soldiers with machine guns. Yet no passenger was searched, and while all travelers on Turkmenistan's roads were subject to numerous roadblocks and the arbitrary search-and-seizure rules of the security forces, train travelers were blameless and carefree—another instance of railway passengers regarded as being beneath notice.

  I sat in my four-berth compartment with a soldier in his dark uniform, a student of about twenty-two, and a chin-bearded old man in traditional Turkmen dress—a cylindrical black lambskin hat, a long brown cloak over a smock, one of those national costumes that seem eternal and all-purpose and comfortable everywhere, in all seasons. He saw me and began to speak to the student.

  "Salaam. Dayf al-Rahman" he said.

  "Welcome," the student translated. "You are a guest of Allah, the Merciful One."

  "Please thank him for me."

  The man spoke again.

  "He has a question for you," the student said. "Will you answer?"

  I heard the whistle blow. The train slowly left Ashgabat Station, and within minutes we were in the desert. The old man was monologuing to the student.

  "He says that some years ago, an astronaut went to the moon," the student said. "He was from America. When he got to the moon, he heard a strange noise. It was an azan—the call to prayer, usually chanted by a muezzin from a mosque. "The astronaut recorded it. When he came back to Earth, the scientists in America analyzed it, and they came to think that it was the voice of the Prophet Muhammad."

  "On the moon?"

  "Yes. On the moon."

  The old man was still speaking, his chin beard swinging.

  "Furthermore, he says that because of this, the astronaut became a Muslim and began praying five times a day."