Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  The earthquake hit at night, too. My Alabama boys were in bed and I was at the nightly counselors’ meeting. I was lying on the floor, waiting for it to end. I hate meetings; they’re usually a waste of time. Then the windows started to rattle and the floor trembled. My first thought was that there’d been a powerful thunder clap. Then someone yelled “earthquake” and everyone started running for the exits. With a few other counselors, I ran upstairs, rousted the kids out of bed, and led them out of the building. We spent the next two hours sitting on the playground waiting to see whether the old school would fall down, whether there would be an aftershock, trying to figure out what to do.

  Kids in their pajamas stood in tight circles on the crumbly old basketball court, sleepy but excited, all talking at once. At first, my Alabama boys sat in a row on a bench. The earthquake had knocked out the power and they spent a while arguing about whether all the planes in the area would crash without help from the ground-based navigation systems that had been disabled. Pretty soon, though, they noticed that everyone else was standing except them. They had a conference and decided to give up their seats. They chose the prettiest girls in the area and offered them the bench. They’d been taking the etiquette class and, apparently, paying attention. The school didn’t fall down and there were no aftershocks, so eventually we all went back to bed.

  * * *

  A few days later, the camp ended. I said goodbye to the campers, stuffed my clothes into my backpack and hit the road again. I rode back across the Karakum and changed taxis in Mary. On the road to Ashgabat, my taxi stopped at a gas station. (Gas, which was subsidized by the government, cost about 4 cents a gallon). I got out to stretch my legs as the attendant filled the tank. The station was at the corner of the highway and a side road that led to Kahka.

  I’d heard there was a beautiful old mosque in Kahka, but I also knew that it was in a restricted zone on the Iranian border and that I didn’t have the right documents to go there. I peered down the side road. There wasn’t a checkpoint or uniform in sight. I paid my taxi fare, retrieved my backpack from the trunk, and started walking. I don’t know why I did it. I knew I was breaking the rules, but I just didn’t care.

  The road was lined with trees and led straight toward the towering Kopetdag Mountains. Kahka, which looked much smaller than Abadan, was probably less than a mile off the highway. I stopped the first person I saw and asked for directions to the old mosque. In a few minutes I was standing at a tiny, one-room mosque that seemed to belong in New Mexico or Mali. It looked like it was made from adobe, with the ends of support poles poking out of the mud. It was crowned with an adobe dome pierced by a single window, and decorated with an intricately carved double door. The caretaker said it was 150 years old but didn’t know anything else about it. He told me there were even better things to see in Kahka and flagged down a taxi to take me on a tour. Across the highway from Kahka was an old fortress with sand-covered walls, a miniature version of Merv’s ruins. A few miles west along the highway were the remains Abiverd, a once-prosperous stop on the Silk Road. The ground around its ruined houses and fortress was sprinkled with glazed shards of pottery.

  When I’d finished seeing the sights at Kahka, I went to the bazaar, found a taxi to Ashgabat, and continued on my way. My illicit sightseeing jaunt had gone well. No one seemed to have noticed that I’d violated the government’s ridiculous travel rules, just as no one seemed to have noticed my illegal sports/health camp. I was beginning to suspect that the Turkmen government was not as omniscient and vindictive as I’d been led to believe.

  I was half-disappointed. I assumed that if I got into enough trouble, I’d get kicked out of Turkmenistan. After all my troubles in Abadan, I was pretty fed up with the country and wouldn’t have minded. Whatever the consequences, though, it felt good to stop living like a prisoner in an invisible cage, to abandon my paranoia and anxiety. I decided to see what else I could get away with. Before reporting to camp at Chuli, I rode a marshrutka to Darvaza to look for the pit of fire. At first I thought I’d gotten away with that trip, too. But when Geldy showed up at the Chuli drunk a few days later, he told me the KNB had been to my home and to Red Crescent asking questions about my travels. Heading home from Chuli after camp, I felt ambivalent: half hoping I was about to get kicked out of the country, half fearing it.

  18.

  Robbed

  While I’d been away for the summer, Olya had gone to Russia to bring Sasha home to his mother. She’d also tracked down Misha and dragged him back to Turkmenistan. When I got home from camp in Chuli at mid-day, he was sitting at the kitchen table drunk, watching TV and chain-smoking. From the overflowing ashtray, it looked like he’d been there for a while. He probably hadn’t been sober since he’d left Abadan in the spring. I dropped my backpack in my bedroom and sat down at the table with him to drink a cup of tea. He looked up at me, eyes glazed.

  “They’ve been looking for you,” he slurred. “Called me into their office. Asked me how many tape recorders and cameras you have.”

  “They?”

  “The KNB.”

  “Well, tell them whatever you want.”

  “I’m not telling those whores anything. Call me into the office. Order me around. Fuck them.”

  “I’m just saying. I’ve got no secrets. Don’t bother lying for me.” “Fuck them. Gimme 5,000 manat, will you?”

  I gave it to him. He walked down the hallway with his hand on the wall for balance and out the front door. Off to get another bottle. I wouldn’t see him for the rest of the day.

  Olya came home from work in the evening. She looked tired and worn – more than usual. We puttered around the kitchen making dinner. I sliced onions, she thawed some frozen chicken legs, and we traded stories about our summers. It turned out that before she’d gone to Russia she’d visited Denis. He was posted in a town called Garragula in a restricted area on the Iranian border. She’d spent weeks getting permission to make the trip. When she’d arrived, she’d found Denis was doing well. His commander had assigned him to be a troubleshooter for the base’s computers, a cushy job.

  While in Garragula, Olya had been shocked to run into her former secretary from the paint factory – the one who had disappeared. She was an attractive, 18-year-old girl from Ashgabat named Orazgul, half Tajik and half Turkmen. She’d simply stopped coming to work one day. When Olya had called her parents, they’d said they hadn’t seen her, either, but had refused to call the police. Olya had been puzzled by Orazgul’s parents’ reaction, but there’d been nothing she could do except wonder what happened to Orazgul. In Garragula, she’d found out.

  Orazgul had arranged to cruise around town with another woman from the paint factory after work one day, just for fun. The woman’s brother had agreed to drive. When they’d stopped at a checkpoint, the woman had jumped out and slammed the door. The brother had sped away with Orazgul still in the car, taken her to Garragula, and told her that she was going to marry him. It had been a bride kidnapping, a traditional practice in some parts of Central Asia. Banned in Soviet days, it had made a modest comeback after independence, though it was still rare in Turkmenistan. Orazgul had contacted her parents, but found them unhelpful (she’d suspected that they were complicit in the kidnapping). So she’d decided to make the best of her situation; she’d refused when Olya offered to help her escape.

  When Olya finished telling me Orazgul’s story and I finished telling her about the earthquake in Turkmenabat, there was a long silence. The chicken legs sizzled in a pot on the stove, the TV blared, the fan whirred.

  “Sam, I want you to forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  “Forgive me first, and then I’ll tell you what I did.”

  “Okay … I forgive you. What did you do?”

  “Well, when I saw my daughter in Russia, she was very sick. She needed an operation. So when I got back I went into your room and … well, I went into your room and I took $200 and sent it to her.”

  We stood there in the k
itchen, sweating, watching the chicken cook. I was angry, but I didn’t know what to say. She’d stolen a lot of money from me. I got about $80 a month from Peace Corps and it was enough to cover my rent, food, clothing, and incidental expenses. She’d taken more than two months’ salary from me. It hadn’t been hard for her to steal it. I’d left the $500 of just-in-case cash that I’d brought with me from the US hidden among the books on the shelf in my room. I never bothered to lock my door, since Olya had a key anyway. So she’d just walked in, searched through my room, and taken what she needed.

  “I wish you’d waited until I got home. I would have given you the money.”

  “It was an emergency.”

  I stalked down the hall to my room.

  “You said you would forgive me,” she called as I closed my door.

  We never sat down and talked about the money. We were busy, and avoiding each other. We had words about it as we passed each other in the mornings, on the way to work, in the evenings on the way to bed.

  In the apartment building’s stairwell: “When can you pay the money back?”

  “I don’t know. Misha’s not working. Look, I’m late to work.”

  In the kitchen doorway: “What if you pay me a little every month?”

  “Do you want tea?”

  After a while, I realized she wasn’t going to pay me back. When I confronted her, she admitted as much. I was furious. I’d lived with her for nearly a year. I’d thought she was my friend. I’d trusted her. And she’d robbed me. I yelled at her, calling her a thief, telling her she was a bad person. When I ran out of cruel words in Russian, I switched to English and kept going. I told her I was moving out. She stood in the doorway to my room, watching as I crashed around, throwing my belongings into bags. I cut my still-incomplete carpet off of the loom and stuffed it into a backpack. I couldn’t carry the loom by myself and I had no one to help me.

  “You don’t have to go,” she said, looking at the floor.

  “Don’t have to go!? You robbed me.”

  “I’m not a thief.”

  “You took $200 from my room without asking. You’re a thief!”

  I didn’t have anywhere to go, but I wanted to get out of the Plotnikovs’ house as soon as possible. When I’d arrived, the house had been full and happy. We had family dinners every night, went for walks in the evenings, helped each other out, cheered each other up. Somehow, without my noticing, it had all slipped away. I’d ended up living with a bitter alcoholic and a worn out thief. I had no where to go, so Ana and Sesili offered to let me stay with them for a couple weeks while I looked for something more permanent.

  I told the Peace Corps security officer in Ashgabat that Olya had robbed me. He was a kind, middle-aged Turkmen man named Aman with glasses and a paunch who, coincidentally, lived in Abadan and knew Olya. He had a talk with her and a few days later, she showed up at Ana and Sesili’s. We stood in the front hall. I didn’t invite her in.

  “Aman came to see me,” she said. “Here.”

  She handed me the same pair of hundred dollar bills – they had the same tears and stray markings – that had gone missing from my room. She’d never sent the money to her daughter in Russia. Maybe her daughter had never even been sick. Then she pushed a handwritten document at me. I read it. It said that I acknowledged that she’d paid me back.

  “He said I had to bring him this.”

  I signed it and gave it back to her. I never spoke to her again. I only saw her once more, on the street near the bazaar. We both looked away and kept walking. I never figured out why Olya had robbed me. Maybe she had just needed the cash. Maybe she’d thought I owed it to her. Maybe she’d wanted me to leave, but hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask me to move out, so she’d taken the money to drive me out. Whatever her reason, I wish she hadn’t done it.

  * * *

  Living with the Burjanadzes turned out to be even more hectic than living with the Plotnikovs had been, back when we’d all been together, when everything had still been good. There was a constant stream of women knocking on the door, pleading with Ana to ask her cards for answers to their questions: Is my husband cheating on me with the neighbor? Where’s the wedding ring I lost last week while I was cheating on my husband with my co-worker? Will my husband ever get off the couch and get a job? Will my next child be a boy or a girl? Ana griped and grumbled but obliged every one of them. They usually paid her for her time, after all. As she sat at the kitchen table telling fortunes, there was almost always a small herd of cats and kittens circling her chair, begging for scraps and attention, and a meal cooking on the stove.

  The apartment’s walls and ceilings were stained, streaked and peeling. A plumbing problem somewhere upstairs had caused a flood the year before and Ana didn’t have the money to repair the damage. There was no air conditioner, so the place was stifling. There was no phone; to make a call we had to walk down to the post office. There was no hot water. I had to heat tap water on the stove in a metal bucket, carry it to the banya, mix it with some cold water to get the right temperature, and pour it over myself with a ladle. I slept in the back bedroom and Ana and Sesili slept on a couch and a bed in the living room, under a huge photograph of a waterfall.

  Ana usually went to bed in the early hours of the morning and didn’t rise until midday. She couldn’t get any time to herself during the day because of all her visitors, she explained, so she stayed up late reading, thinking, and planning. Before I moved in and started paying rent, the Burjanadzes had scraped out a living in bits and pieces. The previous winter they’d sold salads at the bazaar, but when the summer had arrived, the salads began to spoil in the heat before they could sell them. So they had to make do with Ana’s fortune-telling money and whatever they could make from the socks, shawls and scarves they knitted and sold at Tolkuchka. I think Ana’s brother, who lived across town, also helped them out when he could.

  While the Plotnikovs’ few friends and acquaintances were Russians, the Burjanadzes welcomed Turkmen, Russians, Koreans, Uzbeks, and Georgians into their home. Ana just wanted smart and interesting people to talk to and didn’t care who they were or where they were from. At the Plotnikovs, I’d spent a lot of time reading, which suited me fine. People tire me out. Ana was never alone and couldn’t understand why anyone would ever want to be. She talked to me nonstop, often carrying on conversations with me even as she read fortunes.

  She told me stories about working in the carpet factory in the Soviet days, when all the mechanical looms were up and running and the factory floor was packed with 1,800 people. (When she took me to visit the factory, there were only a few dozen employees and a handful of looms working; the rest of the shop floor was dark and covered in dust). She told me how her father had come to Turkmenistan from Georgia after the 1948 earthquake with a construction crew assigned to help rebuild Ashgabat and had never left. She told me about the men she knew in town who had been on one of the many teams sent from across the Soviet Union to help clean up the mess in Chernobyl, Ukraine, after the nuclear reactor there melted down in 1986, and how some had came back sterile and others had later had deformed babies.

  She was a great storyteller, animated and ironic. I loved listening to her, but at first, before I had built up my endurance, she gave me a headache. My brain just couldn’t handle three-and four-hour stretches of conversation in Russian. I’d plead fatigue and try to go hide in my room and read, but Ana would just follow me and keep talking. Eventually, I learned to be direct. “Ana,” I’d tell her. “You’re hurting my head. Stop talking to me for a while.” She would turn to Sesili or whoever else was in the apartment and continue her story without missing a breath.

  ***

  With the summer ending and my summer camps over, it was time for met to get back to work at Red Crescent. The weather had cooled a little and the sun had lost its burning edge. The temperatures were still in the 90s, but when I was outside I no longer felt like the sun was boring a hole in the top of my head. At the back of the b
azaar, old men sat on carpets in the shade and played chess or backgammon or checkers. The gardens outside my new apartment building were lush and full. Crinkly orange squash flowers bloomed, heavy purple-black eggplants gleamed, red peppers ripened, bees swarmed around bunches of grapes. I could see why Olya had been so enchanted by Turkmenistan when she had visited from Siberia back in the 1960s. In late summer, at least, it really was a land of plenty.

  At Red Crescent, nothing had changed. When I arrived one morning at 8 a.m., I found Aman lounging at his desk, reading his newspaper. He grunted a greeting at me and told me I needed to write a new work plan. Vera, Aynabat, and Shokhrat, who were sitting in the kitchen drinking tea, asked me about my summer travels. We sat and chatted for a while and then they went back to work. It took me a few days to get my bearings. I visited Geldy in Ashgabat and Ovez at the school district headquarters. I made some phone calls to embassies and nongovernmental organizations to check on my various pending grant applications. Eventually, I got an idea of what my fall was going to look like. There was some bad news and there was some good news.

  The bad news was that, with the school-heating project dead, Ovez had rescinded my permission to teach at the schools. That meant I had very little to do. I couldn’t resume my English classes at School No. 1, my weekly meetings with the Quartet, or my health classes. The good news was that it looked like I might soon have something else to occupy my time. Before I’d hit the road for camp season, the American Embassy had approved the grant I’d written with Geldy to fund an Internet center at Red Crescent in Abadan. I’d submitted the grant and the letter of approval to the Ministry of Justice. Now the ministry had approved the project and it was time to pick up the money and get to work.

  I met Geldy at his Red Crescent office in Ashgabat one afternoon and we went to the American Embassy to pick up the cash. The building was fenced in and guarded by irritable men who were always blowing whistles at loitering pedestrians and lingering drivers. It was not a welcoming place. The first time Geldy and I had gone to meet with the grants officer, she’d greeted us in the guardhouse, next to the metal detector, and refused to allow Geldy into the building. A bulletin board on the outside of the fence informed passersby that American embassies in Central Asia were targets for terrorism and that, therefore, standing near one put the reader at risk. This time, though, they allowed us inside. We passed through security, entered the building, and picked up $2,050 in cash. As we left the building, Geldy handed it to me.