by Sam Tranum
“He was KNB,” she said.
“He seemed nice enough.”
“They always do.”
8.
Without Permission
The mountains were sprinkled with muddy snow, the trees as bare as skeletons. Everything in the world was either gray or brown: gray concrete buildings, gray streets, gray sky; brown cotton fields, brown mountains, brown trees. The clouds hung low over the city, hiding the sun from view and leaking half-frozen raindrops. I sat in Aman’s cold office at Red Crescent, wearing my coat, trying to look busy. The electricity was out again so all the curtains were open to let as much gray light into the room as possible. Aman, in his black leather jacket, alternately read his newspaper and stared at the wall.
I still did not have permission to teach health classes in the schools or to make health posters for the clinic. Aman had not approved the grant proposals I had left on his desk. I was frustrated. There was so much to do; there were so many things to fix. I had the time and ability to make some (small) contributions. I just didn’t have permission. So, instead of doing useful things, I was stuck at Aman’s desk, studying Russian and writing letters.
When lunchtime mercifully arrived, Aman folded up his newspaper and left the office. I heard his boxy, Soviet-era Lada rattle to life and rumble away down the street. I gathered my papers, put on my hat and scarf, and walked out of the dark office and into the gloom outside. I turned right and walked along a row of anonymous gray apartment buildings, peeking in first-floor windows. In one, a family was sitting around a wood fire they’d built on their apartment’s bare concrete floor. Smoke poured from their half-open windows. The heat must have been broken in their building for so long that they just got fed up.
At the end of the row of apartment buildings, I turned right again and walked through the back of the bazaar. In the front of the bazaar, the sellers offered neatly stacked fruits and vegetables at high prices. Clementines were in season – imported from Pakistan, I’d been told. In the back, there were several giant dumpsters and a crew of men who sat on the tailgates of trucks selling cabbages, carrots, and potatoes. There were also the junk shops with piles of everything from bicycles to buckets, bolts to batteries. I stopped for a few moments to browse some books I found stacked between a pile of electrical outlets and an old air conditioner.
At the far side of the bazaar’s back lot, I turned left onto a sidewalk and walked past the photo shop, the pharmacy, and the barber’s shop. Dodging old Ladas and Volgas, I crossed the street to the bakery. Under a corrugated tin roof, three tamdur ovens stood like giant clay eggs half-buried in the ground, smoke rising from holes in their tops. The women who tended the tamdurs covered their hair and faces – except for their eyes – with white cloth, to keep from burning their hair or scorching their cheeks as they leaned into the ovens to tend the chorek.
A baker reached inside a tamdur with her gloved hand, pulled out a golden brown oval of flatbread, and flopped it on the table. I left her 2,500 manat (about 10 cents), picked up the chorek, broke off a piece to eat right away, and tucked the rest inside my jacket to keep me warm on the walk home. It was two inches thick, crusty on the outside, and soft in the middle – delicious and hot on a winter day.
At home, there was chicken-and-spaghetti soup on the stove. Olya had made it that morning from the previous night’s leftovers. The apartment was empty. Misha and Denis were at work for a change. I lit the stove to warm the soup and went into the banya to light the pitch. I almost blew myself up by waiting too long with the gas running before throwing a match into the metal box. A flame shot out and there was a loud “whump.” I warmed my hands for a few minutes and started removing layers of clothing: hat, scarf, jacket, and sweater.
When the soup was ready, I carried my bowl to the table, and turned on the BBC news. I tore off pieces of fresh chorek and dipped them in my soup. When I was full, I made myself a cup of tea. On TV, the anchor was talking in his prim British accent about the latest developments in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Thousands of Ukrainians in Kiev were protesting the results of an election, which – they believed – pro-Russian Prime Minister Victor Yanukovich had stolen from pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko.
After lunch, I went to Dom Pionerov to work on my carpet. I had finally managed to get my own loom, though it hadn’t been easy. After weeks of promises and procrastination, Misha had built me a wooden one. When Mahym saw it, though, she said it was too flimsy. If I tried to string it, she said, the tension of the warps would bend it out of shape. She said I needed a metal loom but she had no idea where I could buy one. Husbands made looms, she said. I didn’t have a husband, so I took a marshrutka to Ashgabat to look for a loom store. With no Internet to consult and no yellow pages to thumb through, I started at a carpet shop. When I asked the man behind the counter where I could buy a loom, he looked surprised.
“A what?” he asked.
“A loom,” I said.
“Why do you need a loom?”
“I want to weave a carpet.”
“You?”
“Yes. Me.”
He sent me to a carpet factory a few blocks away, tucked in among the city’s white marble government ministries. It looked like all the other concrete apartment buildings in the city. I couldn’t find the front entrance, so I walked around to the back, found an open door, and walked in. I found three women sitting on a blanket on the concrete floor, surrounded by looms holding half-finished carpets. They were drinking tea from little bowls and tearing pieces from a loaf of chorek. I greeted them and they – looking quite surprised – invited me to join them for tea. I sat down and the young woman next to me dumped out a tea bowl, rinsed it with tea, scrubbed it a little with her thumb, refilled it with fresh tea, and handed to me. I drank, gratefully.
Her name was Altyn, which means “gold” in Turkmen. She was 27, the same age as me. She said she worked at the carpet factory all day, back aching, tying knot after knot after knot. In the evenings, she went home, ate dinner, and then got to work on the carpet she was weaving at home for extra cash. She could not imagine why I would weave a carpet on purpose – and for free. Still, after we finished our tea, she took me to a ramshackle workshop in the courtyard behind the factory and introduced me to the in-house loom builder. He was a crusty old bearded man whose clothing was streaked with soot and grease. He sold me a six-foot tall, three-foot wide contraption he’d welded from what looked like scraps of pipe and bits of a metal bed frame.
At Dom Pionerov, Mahym helped me string the loom and I started weaving. The carpet was going to be as big as a beach towel. I would weave it in rows, starting at one end and working painstakingly to the other. Each row was 240 knots wide, took me about 45 minutes to finish, and brought me about one millimeter closer to the other end of the carpet. I could only do two or three rows before my back started hurting and my eyes began to strain in the dim light. After a few days, I started to get calluses on my fingertips from handling the taut warps. A real carpet-maker like Altyn could probably finish a medium-sized carpet like the one I was working on in a few weeks. It was going to take me months.
9.
The Road to Tejen
I woke before dawn and walked to Red Crescent in the dark, sleet stinging my face. Geldy and I had arranged to go to Tejen, a small city about three hours east of Abadan, to teach health lessons at a school there. When I arrived at the office, the door was unlocked. I pushed it open and crossed the dining hall, leaving a trail of melting sleet on the floor. Geldy was making tea in the kitchen with Chary, the taxi driver he’d hired. The room was lit only by the stove’s blue flames. Geldy, usually boisterous and full of jokes, was quiet – probably hung over. Aynabat, the Red Crescent nurse, was washing a thermos to fill with tea for the road. Chary was 48 and had a wide, flat face and the creased eyes of an East Asian. He was wearing an Addidas track suit, an embroidered skullcap (tahya) of the sort popular with Muslims in Central Asia, and a woman’s thigh-length suede coat with
wide, furry lapels.
“How are you doing?” I asked him.
“Excellent,” he said.
“We are going to Tejen.”
“Oh, you like Tejen?” I asked.
“No, but I love to drive,” he replied, grinning.
On the highway, Chary drove intently, flying past other cars, facing down oncoming traffic in the slush of the bumpy two-lane road, sometimes even executing a double pass – passing a car that was passing another car by pulling not just into the oncoming lane, but onto the shoulder of the oncoming lane. With all of us inside drinking tea, the windows were fogged. Now and then, I would wipe mine clean so I could look outside. The road ran along the base of the Kopetdag range. The flat desert plain we were on gave way to rolling hills and then to a wall of craggy mountains. Not a single tree marred the landscape’s clean, graceful lines. The sleet had changed to snow; everything was white.
“White is good luck,” Geldy said, grinning. “Today must be a very lucky day.”
Every twenty minutes or so, we stopped at a checkpoint, showed our passports, popped the trunk so a soldier could look inside, and moved on. After we left Ashgabat and passed through Anew, the countryside emptied out. There was an occasional shepherd, bundled up against the weather, watching from a donkey’s back as his sheep foraged for grass hidden under the snow. The only other signs of human habitation were the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the road, followed by a trail of telephone poles.
The Russians had laid the tracks in the late 1800s as part of their efforts to subdue the Turkmen tribes and beat the British in the competition for regional dominance. The Russians had initially thought to conquer the region by camel, but their campaigns against the Akhal Tekes at Geokdepe quickly drove home the need for a better way to move men and munitions across the desert. So they set to work laying rails from the Caspian coast east through Abadan, Ashgabat, Tejen, and Merv. From there, they headed north to Samarkand (in Uzbekistan) and beyond – more than 900 miles in all.32
In 1888, George Nathaniel Curzon, a 29-year-old member of the British parliament, rode the railway and returned to give a vivid report to the Royal Geographical Society on what he had seen.33 The trip from the Caspian Sea to Samarkand took 72 hours, he said. The trains rumbled along at up to 40 miles per hour, through hardpan desert, scrub desert, and the occasional stretch of sand dune desert. “The sand of the most brilliant yellow hue,” he wrote, “is piled in loose hillocks and mobile dunes, and is swept hither and thither by powerful winds. It has all the appearance of a sea of troubled waves, billow succeeding billow in melancholy succession, with the sand driving like spray from their summits and great smooth-swept troughs lying between, on which the winds leave the imprint of their fingers in wavy indentations, just like an ebb tide on the sea shore.” Curzon found the country drab and ugly, but noted that, “It is only fair to add that the Turckmans [sic] themselves are unaware that so gloomy an impression can at any time be conveyed by their country. They have a proverb which says that Adam, when driven from Eden, never found a finer place for settlement [than Turkmenistan].” 34
Only a couple of decades later, the British invaded Turkmenistan using this Transcaspian Railway. It was 1918. World War I was raging and the British were worried that the German-Ottoman alliance might launch an offensive through Central Asia and into British-controlled Persia and India. For a while, they were comforted by the fact that the tsar, their ally, controlled Central Asia. But then the Bolsheviks overthrew the tsar and made peace with Germany. It got worse: the Bolsheviks drafted thousands of Austrian and German prisoners of war, who were being held in Central Asia, into their new Red Army, which was fighting remnants of the tsarist forces for control of the Russian empire.35
Russian Central Asia no longer stood as a buffer between British possessions in Asia and Ottoman and German forces. Instead, all of a sudden there was an unreliable army including thousands of (former) enemy soldiers practically on the Persian border – and not far from India. As Edwin Montagu, Secretary of State for India, put it: “There is serious danger that [Central Asia] may fall entirely under Turco-German influence, and may be made a base for dispatch of large bodies of armed enemy agents or even organized bodies of armed enemy prisoners into Persia and Afghanistan.”36 So when a motley coalition of Turkmen and Russians deposed the new Bolshevik government in Ashgabat, the British sent troops to support the new anti-Bolshevik government, which called itself the Ashgabat Committee.
For about a year, the Ashgabat Committee and the British controlled western Turkmenistan and the Bolsheviks controlled the east. Since the only practical way to move troops through the Karakum was along the railroad, the opposing forces fought along the track. Mostly, their armored trains would shell each other from a distance. Sometimes soldiers climbed off the trains and fought pitched battles. The conflict was a mix of old and new: the British cavalry used lances; each side had a reconnaissance airplane. When the war ended, the threat to India disappeared and the British withdrew from western Turkmenistan. Within months, the Bolsheviks took control. They ruled until 1991.
Outside my taxi window, the railway snaked through the snowy desert and slipped into the city of Tejen. There wasn’t much to see in Tejen: snow, mud, pre-fab concrete Soviet apartment buildings. There was nothing to distinguish it from any other city in Turkmenistan. We stayed just long enough to visit two schools, where Geldy, Aynabat, and I taught high school students how not to get AIDS. The kids sat silently in auditoriums, under their teachers’ stern gazes. We lectured, introducing posters and games when it looked like the kids might be losing interest. It felt good to be doing something.
On the ride back to Ashgabat, Chary played his only tape, which included Celine Dion, the Backstreet Boys, and a Turkmen dance remix of “Hava Nagila,” until none of us could stand it anymore. Then we gave up and talked to each other. I told Aynabat, who was sitting next to me, about the lesson I was planning on tuberculosis. She read through my pidgin-Russian lesson plan.
“You forgot to put in, under ‘treatment,’ that eating dog meat cures tuberculosis,” she said.
“Dog meat cures tuberculosis? So what kind of meat cures AIDS?” I asked.
“No, it’s true,” Geldy said, laughing. “It’s scientifically proven.”
Chary, eyes on the road, broke in: “I don’t know if dog meat cures tuberculosis, but it’s pretty tasty.”
Part II: Corruption, Absurdity, and Paranoia
10.
A New Year
Although the temperature that first winter rarely dipped below freezing, I was cold all the time. My bedroom was unheated. I slept in long underwear and a wool hat. At Red Crescent and Dom Pionerov, miniature electric heaters fought losing battles against the winter wind. At School No. 8, the situation was even worse: windowpanes were missing, snowflakes blew down the hallways, and the kids wore their hats, scarves, and mittens at their desks. In the evenings, I would take long, hot showers in the banya, which was the only warm room in the apartment.
The holidays came in a deluge in late December. The Russians in Turkmenistan still had not completed the switch, ordered by Lenin in 1918, from the old Julian calendar to the more accurate Gregorian calendar. They celebrated the holidays according to both calendars: Gregorian Christmas on Dec. 25 and Julian Christmas on Jan. 7; Gregorian New Year’s on Jan. 1 and Julian New Year’s on Jan. 14. Strangely, Turkmen and Russians alike had adopted the Chinese zodiac, trading little stuffed chickens on Jan. 1 to welcome the Year of the Rooster. The Christian holidays were followed by Gurban Bayram (also known as Eid al-Adha), a three-day Muslim holiday commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God.37 Last came Nowruz Bayram, the Persian celebration of the new year.
The most important of all the holidays was “new” New Year’s – Jan. 1. Families saved for months to load their holiday tables with huge feasts and buy presents for their friends and relatives. Olya started buying groceries for New Year’s in early December, bringing ho
me a couple bottles of soda one day, a bottle of champagne another, and hiding them away in the backs of cabinets and behind sofas. Maybe she did this because she knew what was coming: Niyazov declared that, in the new year, he would raise the salaries of all public employees by 50 percent. Prices at the bazaars shot up. Niyazov ordered the bazaar merchants to stop raising their prices, but they ignored him. The salary increase never materialized.
Work nearly ceased during the buildup to New Year’s. Aman rarely showed his face at Red Crescent. I’d spend hours sitting in his office by myself, writing letters and studying Russian. During one of Aman’s few appearances, he was tagging along after a confident Turkmen man in a really nice black suit. They sat with me at Aman’s big desk and negotiated a price for some polotki Aman was selling. I eavesdropped ineffectively – I couldn’t remember what polotki were. When Aman and the suit finally settled on a price – 3.5 million manat per polotka (about $140) – they shook hands and stood up to leave the office.
Aman motioned for me to follow. In the dining hall, he unlocked a green door and pulled a long canvas bag painted with a red crescent from a stack of identical bags. The man in the suit took the bag, opened it, pulled out the contents, and unrolled them. It was a tent, a giant tent, big enough to fill the room, meant to house refugees in case of a war or a natural disaster. I translated the assembly instructions from English into Russian for him. The stranger, who was a cotton grower who wanted to house pickers in the tents during the harvest season, seemed satisfied. He bought 10 tents, loaded them into his Toyota 4Runner, and left. I went to the kitchen and made some tea. When Geldy returned to the office from teaching a health lesson at one of the schools, I told him what had happened.
