Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  The old man was facing me, as though defying me to mock the story.

  "I haven't heard this story," I said.

  "He says he believes it."

  "What does he think about it?"

  When this question was translated, the student said, "For him, it's good news."

  It seemed to me like a Turkmenistan version of a Pat Robertson story: divine intervention in an unlikely place, resulting in a beatific conversion, the sun breaking through the clouds. Instead of Jesus speaking to a searcher, the speaker was Muhammad; but it came to the same thing. Muslims at the fringe always sounded to me like born-again Christians, literal-minded and impervious to reason. An Arabic scholar once told me that a persistent urban myth in the Middle East was that Neil Armstrong, sometimes confused with Louis Armstrong, converted to Islam.

  But as all of us were going to Mary, the best tactic on this overnight train journey was to get along, perhaps keep off the subject of religion.

  As I was thinking this, the old man was talking to the student.

  "He asks if you believe in God."

  "I have a lot of questions on this subject," I said.

  "He asks, 'But do you believe in life after death?'"

  "I don't know about this. No one has ever come back from the dead to tell us anything, so how can we know?"

  "The Holy Koran tells us"

  "I intend to read it when I have a chance."

  The old man, who was seated across from me, spoke directly to me in Turkmen and became very animated.

  "He says: 'The grass grows. Then the grass turns brown. Then the grass dies. Then it grows again. It turns green and gets tall.'"

  The old man was still staring, his face narrow, one skinny gnarled hand in his lap, the other gripping the long gray beard attached to his chin. His arthritic hands gave him an even greater look of piety.

  "He says, 'Life is like that, I believe.'"

  "Tell him I agree. Life is like that, even where I'm from."

  "Where are you from?"

  "Tell him America."

  The old Muslim received this information with more interest than I had expected.

  "He asks, 'Do you have cotton in America?'"

  "Lots of it."

  "Is it a good type of cotton?"

  "Very good," I said.

  "He is wondering how many hectares of cotton are growing in America."

  "Tell him I'm not sure. Why is he interested?"

  "He works in the cotton industry."

  "What does he do?"

  When this question was asked, the man showed me his ruined hands, his twisted fingers.

  "He picks cotton in the fields some distance from Mary—near Yeloten, south on the road to Afghanistan, where there are cotton farms."

  So he lived (according to my map) a few hundred miles from the Afghanistan border, a day's drive, not far from the ancient city of Herat, which I had visited on my first Railway Bazaar trip. Now Herat was dominated by a clan of well-armed warriors and a paranoid and vindictive warlord. A German traveler had been arrested there, tortured, and shot as a spy just a month before, a fate I wished to avoid.

  The old man's name was Selim. He told me his simple history. He had been born near Mary. He had not gone to school. As a boy he worked in the fields, and had picked cotton his whole life—mostly Soviet times. He had married a woman from his clan and they'd had four children.

  "I think you are about sixty," he said.

  When I told him my age, he challenged me to guess his. He looked about seventy, so I guessed sixty. He laughed and said he was fifty.

  At my Ashgabat farewell party in a Turkmen household, I had been given a bag of food for the train—spinach pies, mushroom turnovers, sticky buns, all wrapped in paper. In the dim light of the compartment I unwrapped the food.

  "Ask them if they'll share my food," I said to the student.

  They nodded politely when the question was translated, and so I handed the food around—to Selim, the young soldier, the student, and a hanger-on gaping in the doorway. Elderly-looking, gray-bearded Selim—could he really be fifty?—asked a question.

  "He says, 'Ask the American if we can say a prayer.'"

  "Of course," I said and nodded to the man.

  All Muslims wash before they pray. But in the desert, or when water is unavailable, they use sand or dust. If (as on a train) there is no sand, they perform the dry ablution called tayammum, making an elaborate business of rubbing the hands and wrists and arms, and slowly wiping the face, massaging the eyes, the cheeks, the jaw, then drawing the hands downward. Selim went through this ritual as the train rushed across the desert, rattling the windows and the door handles.

  Then he prayed for almost a full minute, his eyes closed, speaking into the stifling air of the compartment. When he was finished I asked him what he had said—was it a standard prayer or had he improvised it?

  He said it was improvised for the occasion. "I thanked Allah for the food. I thanked the friend who brought the food and gave it to us. I wished the friend blessings on his journey."

  "Sagbol" I said, and in thanking him, exhausted my knowledge of Turkmen.

  "Do they pray in America at mealtime? he asks."

  "Many people do."

  "Do they pray at other times too?"

  "Yes. Americans pray a lot."

  A knock at the compartment door: the conductor. He was handing out sheets for sleeping. The arrangement was that in return for our ticket we would be given a sheet. Tomorrow morning, we'd hand over the sheet and get our ticket back—we'd need it to pass through the station at Mary.

  Though it was not late, the light was so bad there was nothing to do but sleep. The others, even the student, were early-to-bed people, I could see. So we turned in, each of us in a bunk. After the feeble light was switched off, I could see the dark plains passing, the low scrub, the boulders glowing, smooth and bluish in the moonlight.

  Hours later, it was still dark as we approached the town of Mary. Another knock at the door, demanding the sheets, offering tickets. The others were awake and yawning.

  I said to the student, "Ask him if he's met any Americans before."

  "No," Selim said. He thought a moment. He said, "But I met an Uzbek once."

  Ashgabat had been hot and dry. Wishing to lighten my bag, I had given my sweater to Mamed and my scarf to Gulnara. Approaching Mary, I gave my heavy long-sleeved polo shirt to the student, who had been so helpful.

  "It's a lucky shirt," I said.

  In return, he gave me another multicolored cord to ward off the evil eye.

  Selim said, "I will wait at the station until eight o'clock. Then I'll get the bus to Yeloten. It costs five thousand manat. A shared taxi costs ten thousand manat. But I say, better to take the bus and give the extra money to my children."

  It was a lesson in rural Turkmen economics and paternal love: this man who'd just had a fitful night of sleep on the train would crouch in the darkness and cold of Mary Station and wait for three hours, wrapped in his cloak, to save 30 cents to divide among his four kids.

  ***

  THE CONCEIT IN THE ANTIQUE land hereabouts, Khorrasan, with its noble capital called Merv, was that it was once the center of the world. In one extravagant metaphor, it was called "the Soul of Kings." It is almost axiomatic that such an oasis would eventually be turned into a dust bowl, and Merv had. But in its day, which is to say for thousands of years, it had been a marvel—an imperial metropolis, a center of learning, a place of citadels, a walled city, or rather several of them. My interest was simply that of a wandering observer, seeing once again (as I had in the great Silk Road city of Turfan, in western China) that in the course of time, all great cities and their kings and their artifacts and their splendor and their pomps turn into dust. Looted of their treasures, their porcelains shattered into a million shards, their fortresses overrun and trampled, their people scattered, they remained a crumpled example of the vanity of human wishes.

  Merv, what was left of i
t, lay in the hard glitter of the central Asian desert, about an hour up the railway line, near a town and station called Bayram Ali, which dated from 1887, when Czar Nicholas II had planned to visit. A substantial villa was built for him in Bayram Ali, but in the event, his highness didn't show up, it wasn't used, and so it was turned into the sanatorium it is now, for people with heart and kidney ailments. Mary—the adjacent city and provincial capital—was the usual Turkmenistan artifact, half boomtown, half slum: gold statues of Turkmenbashi, portraits of Turkmenbashi, the eternal slogan Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi ("People, Motherland, Me"), white marble government buildings, prestige projects (an opera house, luxury hotels, a pointless flyover), and boulevards almost empty of traffic.

  Off the big thoroughfares, on back streets, were low decaying houses and Soviet-era tenements. Some Russians remained—not many, though a small colony of hard-pressed Russian artists, voluntary exiles in a way, exhibited their work in one of Mary's neighborhoods. The Germans whom Stalin had relocated here from the Volga region during World War II had all departed. I stayed in an inexpensive government hotel, where the other guests were Turkmen officials. Most people came to Mary to see the ruins at Merv, or the ones at Gonur Depe, also nearby. Either that or the cotton fields. On some of the side roads were bakeries and some joints roasting shish kebabs and serving piles of plov and chunks of bread.

  One morning in Mary I met Evgenia Golubeva. A sturdy woman of about fifty, divorced, her daughters in Moscow, Evgenia was a third-generation Russian in Turkmenistan, well known locally, much loved, and scholarly—she had studied the ruins here and in Gonur Depe in detail. As a Russian remnant, staying on, with nothing but praise for the Turkmen people ("so kind, so gentle, so hospitable"), she was a pleasure to spend time with, because she was knowledgeable and passionate about these flattened cities.

  On the way to Mary, by the roadside, in the middle of a dusty plain, among thorn bushes and salty desert, I saw a startlingly beautiful Turkmen woman—golden-skinned, with a sculpted face, wearing a fluttering cloak, standing gracefully next to a bundle, probably waiting for one of those small, dirty buses. Her beauty in this crusted wasteland was like a metaphor for Turkmenistan: lovely people, awful place.

  Ancient Merv, to my fascinated and amateur eye, resembled many fabled cities I'd seen that had declined, all of them in deserts—the Chinese Taklamakan Desert, or the Nafud, or here in the Karakum wasteland. It had the appearance of sandcastles after the tide had brimmed and washed over them, simplified and smoothed their walls, flattened them, pitted their battlements and pillars—so that there was only the faintest suggestion of symmetry in the slopes of sand. As for elegance, you'd have to take the guide's or the historian's word for it. Basically you were looking at a lost city of millions that was now tumbled brick and blown dust and mud heaps.

  But, as I kept thinking, this was a vivid metaphor for what happened to the hubristic world of wealth and power—indeed, the world of gold statues and marble palaces and vain slogans and upstart forests. The world of armies and conquest. The realm of generals and windbags. Ha! It all turned to sand and was overrun with rodents and lizards. Hawks flew over it, searching for vermin.

  "This is Erk Kala, oldest part of Merv—from sixth century B.C.," said Evgenia, indicating a wide low crater of dried mud.

  This city, "Merv, Queen of the World," one of the pearls of the Silk Road, had been an early center of Zoroastrianism and been associated with Alexander the Great and Tamerlane. It had been mentioned by the Persians (it was once the capital of Persian Khorrasan); it was sacked by Tolui Khan, son of Genghis Khan, in 1221, and later visited by Marco Polo and Omar Khayyam. It had been Buddhist and Nestorian Christian. It is mentioned in Zarathustra's Avesta as a place of strength and holiness, of the "good lands." In its opulence, its only other rival had been Baghdad. Importantly, Merv had been targeted by Muhammad as the staging post for Islamic conversion. The Prophet himself had sent two of his closest disciples here to evangelize. "My eyes in the East," he had called them; they were buried here.

  And it was not one city but four or five, side by side, each of them distinct and from a different period, laid out over many square miles. The battered walls of some citadels still stood, with roughed-out rooms and the remnants of staircases, but it was all like a child's sand-pile simplification of splendor. You could wax poetic—some more recent travelers had done so, trying to give it life—but it was lifeless and pathetic, like all such desert ruins, not a vivid thing but rather a Planet of the Apes version of history, which is truer than most. You had to use your imagination.

  At one of the old mosques, the graves of the seventh-century Muslim evangelists, Jaffari and Bureda, were marked by a marble slab with a long inscription. Evgenia translated: "O traveler, you visit this place and you are lucky, because the people who are buried here are holy and close to God. If you have a problem, walk three times around the tomb and it will be solved."

  My problem, so I had been told, was that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ashgabat was annoyed with me because of the uproar at my talk—specifically, the outburst by the dissident politician, but more to the point, the government's photographer had been frustrated in his spying, his memory card wiped clean of any images.

  "You might have a problem at the border," I was told. "They might hassle you. They could seriously hold you up."

  So I walked three times around the tomb of Jaffari and Bureda.

  What I liked of Merv was its innocence—no fences, no postcards, no pests, few signs, not even much respect. In this shattered and somewhat forgotten place in the desert, some visitors scrambled up and down the steep walls, kicking them apart, picking up pieces of broken pottery, and others picnicked among the crenelations. It was possible to see young Turkmen boys genially pissing on the ruins. This was what became of pompous plans: the trickle of urine darkening the dust, the laughter of picnickers scattering crumbs and plov grains, spilling lemonade.

  I was shown the old cistern and the Sassanid dome and the rebuilt ("Notice the squeenches," Evgenia said) Sultan Sanjar Mosque ("Double dome, two khundred years before Brunelleschi designed Saint Peter's in Roma"), the third-century wall of Antiochus, the big ruined Buddhist stupa, the ice house, the site of the Mongol invasion where a million people were slaughtered, the ruined watchtowers...

  And masses of tamarisks with purple blossoms graced the watchtowers. A sharp-angled falcon glided slowly above, circling, stalking. In the distance some men were grazing a herd of camels. Three small boys approached us where we stood. They were mounted on donkeys, yelling and galloping across an ancient wall, leaving hoofprints on it. They had no saddles, they held on to rope bridles, they kicked their skinny gray mounts.

  "They are Beluchis, from Persia," Evgenia said. "They settled here many years ago."

  These human touches made the place real for me. Evgenia said that local people, superstitious about the aura of slaughter and conquest, avoided Merv and used it only to pasture their animals or to pilfer bricks. Goatherds huddled by the single remaining part of the exposed wall of the complex known as Gyaur Kala. The sun was setting on Merv. The shepherds' fire scorched the ancient bricks as they cooked their evening meal.

  ***

  IN MARY, OVER ANOTHER mound of plov, a young Turkmen—formerly an exchange student in the United States, a recent university graduate, new to Mary—listed for me the problems in his country.

  "First of all, it is a police state," he said. "We have secret police, we have spies, it is terrible. It is also a corrupt system. It is impossible to advance in any government job without bribes. Even going to a university requires bribing the admissions office. And if you are non-Turkmen, forget about it. You'll never get in."

  Unemployment was high, the teacher shortage was acute, salaries were low—a university professor pedaling his bike past the gold statues earned about $150 a month. The minimum wage was $20 a month; a cotton picker like Selim did not earn much more than that. Add to this the housing shortage, the p
otholes that characterized most streets, the interminable roadblocks and grouchy soldiers, the disgusting toilets.

  "Many people are desperate."

  "Give me an example," I said.

  "Girls sell themselves on the street! Didn't you see them in Ashgabat?"

  I had seen pretty girls on street corners—and by the way, all the major streets were named for members of Turkmenbashi's family—but how was I to know they were selling themselves?

  "Where were you in the United States?" I asked, because he now and then mentioned his American host family. And he remarked on the fact that he had been twenty-two when he went to the United States but that this was his first time in Mary.

  "Spokane."

  "After what you've told me about Turkmenistan, do you sometimes wish you'd stayed there?"

  "No. I am a Turkmen. I love my country. I would only go to the USA in order to make money and send it to my parents."

  I met other former exchange students. They were cautious when they talked to me, for fear that anything they said would expose them to retribution.

  But many of them said that life was hard, and it wasn't just the low salaries and the housing shortage. Because Turkmenistan was so near to the heroin-producing areas of Afghanistan, hard drugs were a serious problem in the country. Heroin addicts were numerous, and their need for money caused crime. Turkmenistan was also a transshipment route for drugs from Afghanistan to Russia. Afghan hashish was freely available.

  In Mary I was told that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was still watching me, and that this might be a good time to head east, to Turkmenabat and the Uzbek border. Someone would be sent to help me.

  And one morning a man showed up at my hotel, the Margush. I shall call him Sedyk Ali. He said he had been deputized to accompany me to the border. He too had been an exchange student.

  "What did you like about the States?"

  "Good people. Clean conditions. No bribes."

  "Tell me what you didn't like."

  "The way that children treat their elders. Not good."