Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  After a few days, Ana got fed up with me. After all, she’d lived her entire life in Turkmenistan. She wasn’t sympathetic: I’d showed up, ignored her advice that I should stop making waves and was now complaining about suffering what she’d told me all along would be the consequences. She was sitting at her kitchen table, sucking down a cigarette and a cup of coffee and listening to a sobbing, elegantly dressed Turkmen woman confess that she’d cheated on her husband and plead with Ana to ask the cards whether she was going to get caught.

  “Sam, you’re never going to change anything,” Ana said, dealing the cards. “I hate to see you driving yourself crazy, banging your head against the wall. Why don’t you just go home?”

  “Thanks Ana,” I said. “Thanks for your encouragement.”

  “Just trying to help,” she said.

  My apathy soon wore off – even if my bitterness didn’t – and I started looking around for something to do. There was nowhere left for me to work in Abadan and I only had classes to teach in Ashgabat a couple afternoons a week. I was bored and restless. When I asked Ana what I could do around the house, she told me to fix the light in the banya. We’d been washing in the dark for two weeks. Why not? I thought.

  I traced the wires from the light bulb in the banya out into the hallway and the problem became obvious. They were charred and melted. I cut out the damaged sections, spliced the wires back together and, voila, there was light. I was so impressed with my electrical skills that I decided to fix the electrical socket next to my bed, too, so I could plug a space heater into it. The problem was, there was no way to turn off the current. So, as I was working with the live wires, I electrocuted myself.

  I yelped.

  “What happened? You just electrocuted yourself didn’t you?” Ana called from the kitchen. “Cut that out. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “I’m fine. I just dropped the screwdriver,” I lied.

  “I tried again and zapped myself again. With the current running through me, I couldn’t hear anything. But apparently I yelped again.

  “Sam, I told you …!” Ana yelled.

  “Ana, everything’s okay. Don’t worry,” I called through clenched teeth, my whole arm tingling.

  The third time I shocked myself, sparks shot out of the socket, landed on the bed, and set the blanket on fire. As I discretely smothered it, hoping Ana wouldn’t smell anything from the kitchen, I looked up to find her standing in the doorway. She marched over, yanked the screwdriver and pliers from my hands, pushed all the wires back into the concrete wall where I’d found them, and went back to the kitchen. That was the end of my career as an electrician.

  Still looking for ways to occupy my time, I was sitting on the porch one afternoon, playing my guitar, surrounded by giant sacks of carrots and piles of green cabbages that Ana had bought to make salads, when I got an idea. I leaned my guitar against some cabbages and walked the four blocks to the bazaar. I found a sturdy-looking, long-handled hoe, paid a few thousand manat for it, slung it over my shoulder, and carried it back to Ana’s apartment.

  The back yard was overgrown with weeds and wildflowers, strewn with trash that passing kids had thrown over the fence. For the next two days, I gathered the debris and hauled it, little by little, to the eternally smoldering trash pile at the end of the street. The weather was cool, crisp, and sunny – perfect for working outside. I was stabbed by burs, stung by nettles, and bitten by bugs, but I didn’t mind.

  When I finished, I had a bare dirt lot, about 20 feet wide by 30 feet long. Grape vines climbed the fences on the left and right. A hedge grew along the fence that separated the garden from the sidewalk. I used my hoe to turn the yard into a garden like the ones I’d seen in our neighbors’ back yards, with high planting beds rising from a shallow depression. I turned the hose on and filled the moat with water and the planting beds stayed dry, like long, skinny islands.

  When I showed Ana what I’d done and asked her what she’d like me to plant in her new garden, I thought she’d be excited. She wasn’t.

  “It’s December, Sam. Nothing’s going to grow,” she said.

  “It might be winter, but it’s still warm and sunny,” I said.

  “People don’t plant gardens in the winter.”

  “I do.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  Even though she thought sowing seeds in December was a bad idea, she fished out an old tin can stuffed with seed packets made from scraps of newspaper, labeled in pencil. We spread them out on the table and picked parsley, cilantro, chick peas, peppers, and onions. From then on, I spent several hours each day in the garden. I picked up the leaves that had fallen from the grape vines. I filled the garden with water, weeded it, and used my hoe to re-shape the planting beds so they were straight and even. Sometimes I’d just sit out there and wait for the seeds to sprout. Anna came out to the back porch one afternoon and stood among the sacks of carrots, looking down on me in the garden.

  You’re going to be waiting a long time,” she said, and went back inside.

  * * *

  When I heard back from Sachly, I learned that Peace Corps and Red Crescent had divorced; they wouldn’t be working together anymore. I needed to choose another place to work, she said. I told her I’d go anywhere she sent me – I just wanted a fresh start. If possible, though, I’d rather live in the country than in the city, I said. She chose a tiny little town named Nurana for me. It was about an hour south of Mary, which was about five hours east of Ashgabat, which was about a half-hour east of Abadan. Plenty far away.

  I was supposed to move in January. I had only about six months left in Turkmenistan. I considered getting on a plane and going home to the US instead of moving to Nurana. I had nothing in particular to do in America, though, and I was hoping to salvage something from my time in Central Asia. I didn’t want to go home angry and bitter. Besides, I thought I might finally get to live my original Peace Corps dream. Maybe my host father in Nurana would be a shepherd. Maybe we’d live in a yurt. Maybe I would get to commute to work on a camel.

  I started preparing for the move. I handed over my poetry class to Sasha. I told my Global Citizenship students I was leaving and would have to cut the course a couple weeks short. I asked Phoebe, a Peace Corps Volunteer posted in Ashgabat, to help Mehri with the debate tournament. I didn’t have many goodbyes to say in Abadan. I couldn’t talk to Catherine. I didn’t want to talk to the Plotnikovs. I had a farewell dinner with Tanya, told the youth volunteers at Red Crescent goodbye and good luck, and went out and got drunk in Ashgabat with Geldy.

  By this time, it was almost New Year’s. Ana and Sesili had been looking forward to the holiday for weeks, buying groceries little by little and storing them away. I didn’t want to ruin the event with regretful goodbyes, so I tried to keep my mouth shut about my move. They kept talking about what we would all do together in the new year, though, and I kept vaguely saying that, hopefully, yes, we would all do that. Eventually, Ana figured out that something wasn’t right and I confessed.

  “You’re just sick of living with me,” she said sadly. She seemed deflated. “I know, I know, I talk too much.”

  “No, Peace Corps is sending me – it’s not my choice,” I lied.

  “Oh,” she said, knowingly. “They’re sending you to ssilka [exile].”

  She’d seen it before. That’s what used to happen to troublemakers in the Soviet Union. They’d been sent to Siberia or some other faraway place so they couldn’t make trouble anymore.

  * * *

  Ana was too busy to dwell on my exile for long because it was high season for her Korean salad business. (Or maybe she was glad to be rid of me. Given my troubles with the government, I’m sure having me around made even tough-as-nails Ana nervous). We stayed up late most evenings, grating carrots into four-inch- long strands, marinating baby eggplants, and seasoning cotton-seed oil. Sesili woke before dawn every morning, bundled herself up in so many layers she could barely move, c
alled a taxi, and went to the bazaar. She stood there in the cold all day, selling the salads by the sandwich bag-full. Each night, she came home with fistfuls of cash.

  “Ah, my favorite daughter!” Ana would sing out as Sesili arrived home in the evening, exhausted. “What did you bring me today?”

  Sesili, worn out, would produce a few tangerines and ruby pomegranates, and maybe, if it was a really good day, a bottle of soda. And then we would sit at the kitchen table and count the money, piling the worn out, crumpled 10,000-manat bills into stacks of 10, the cats milling around our feet. We’d eat dinner and gossip about our days and then it was back to cooking, preparing the salads for the next day.

  After months of unemployment, the money was rolling in for Ana and Sesili. They were so busy they had to hire a neighbor to help them. Sesili bought a cell phone. Ana paid back the loan I’d given her, insisted on taking me to the Tolkuchka Bazaar to buy me a new winter jacket as interest on the loan, and told me to stop paying rent (I refused).

  It was a bittersweet time. We were all excited for the holiday. Things were going well for Ana and Sesili. I was relieved to be leaving Abadan and excited about going to Nurana. But I was also sad to be leaving Ana, Sesili, Tanya, Natalya, and my other friends. Almost everyone in Abadan had been welcoming and kind to me. Even the government officials and KNB men had been polite and respectful; they were just doing their jobs. The only people who had really done me wrong were Olya and Aman. As for the rest, I’d certainly caused them more trouble than they’d caused me.

  Matt, who had lived with Ana and Sesili during training, came to visit for New Year’s. We all spent the afternoon cooking. The table was loaded with stuffed grape leaves; stuffed peppers; chicken legs; lamb stewed with eggplant, tomatoes and potatoes; six different Korean salads; bowls of fruit; and bottles of wine and vodka. That night, Sesili brought home 4 million manat—twice my monthly salary, four times the salad business’s startup cost. About 10 p.m., we sat down to eat. Visitors dropped by now and then to eat a little and make toasts. We watched Russian variety shows and Putin’s holiday speech. It was a cozy night; I was content. I went to bed around 4 a.m. and, before falling asleep, I lay in the dark for a while thinking about how much I would miss Ana and Sesili.

  The next day, we slept until noon and then had leftovers with wine and vodka for brunch. As dinner time approached, we took a marshrutka across town to Ana’s brother Andrei’s house for a second New Year’s celebration. It was chilly out. Matt, Ana, Sesili and I were wrapped in jackets and hats and gloves and scarves, and packed into the minivan with a half-dozen other passengers. The windows were half-fogged as we rolled past the bazaar. I wiped mine clean and looked outside. We passed the main bus stop. On the wall, there was a big blank space.

  My billboard was gone. It had been ripped off its fasteners, leaving nothing but four scars in the building’s concrete hide.

  “They tore my billboard down,” I said.

  “Well what did you expect?” Ana asked.

  “Are you gonna go postal?” Matt asked.

  24.

  Accused of Kidnapping

  After New Year’s, there was still one last thing I had to do before I could move to Nurana. Months earlier, I’d promised to teach at an English immersion camp during winter break. An Ashgabat English teacher named Yelena, a friend of Catherine’s, had organized it. She was a round, soft-spoken woman in her forties, relentlessly polite and optimistic. She’d found funding, picked the campers, organized the logistics, and recruited me and five other Peace Corps Volunteers to be counselors. I was impressed. She seemed to have thought of everything.

  The camp was supposed to be at Chuli, but the government had demolished almost everything there, planning to replace the old campsites and hotels with a gleaming new, white-marble resort. For some reason this involved not just tearing down the structures at Chuli, but also razing whole villages along the Ashgabat-Chuli road. Riding to Chuli in a taxi one day, I’d seen bulldozers flattening several dozen houses while the residents sat in the streets with all their belongings, looking shocked and disoriented.

  “They’ll get nothing,” the taxi driver said. “We live like dogs in this country.”

  Since we couldn’t hold the camp at Chuli, Yelena went looking for another site that fit her budget. She discovered that flying the two dozen campers to a hotel in Avaza, a Caspian Sea resort town just outside the city of Turkmenbashy, would be cheaper than holding the camp at a hotel in Ashgabat. Hotel rates were low in Avaza, since no one wanted to vacation on the beach in January; tickets on Turkmen Airlines’ new Boeings were subsidized – only $1 for a flight anywhere in the country (for Turkmen citizens and Peace Corps Volunteers).

  Two days after New Year’s I boarded a plane at the Ashgabat airport at 7 a.m., with the other Peace Corps Volunteers. The campers would follow the next day. The plane took off and headed west. A portrait of Niyazov in a powder blue suit hung on the bulkhead, keeping watch over the cabin. An anti-evil eye charm hung near the door to the cockpit. The flight took an hour. Below the plane, the Turkmen landscape was all brown-and-gray sand dunes and half-evaporated lakes and mysterious trenches and dirt tracks.

  As we approached Turkmenbashy (formerly Krasnovodsk), the tired, tree-less Balkan Mountains rose up out of the desert. And then there was the Caspian, a pool of water about the size of Montana, and about a third as salty as most seawater – calm and blue. It is a remnant of the massive Tethys Sea, which had covered Central Asia millions of years ago and then mostly dried up, leaving the Caspian and Aral seas behind. Underneath are substantial reserves of oil, which the surrounding countries pump and sell.

  Our campsite in Avaza was a short walk from the shoreline, where waves crashed onto the rocks, filling tide pools with frigid seawater. It was a small hotel: about 10 two-story cabins and a dining hall arranged around a small park, protected by a fence. Surrounding our hotel were dozens of dachas (vacation houses). Young conscripts in uniforms were busily tearing them down and loading their remains onto trucks. Like Chuli, Avaza was to become a shiny new resort, whether its residents liked it or not.

  The campers, teenagers from Ashgabat and Abadan, bunked in two-bedroom apartments in the cabins for the week. The Peace Corps Volunteers taught them dance, origami, English, astronomy, and a course based on Joshua Piven’s Worst Case Scenario Survival Guide. We played soccer with them in the park and took them on long runs through the desert. One evening we walked them down to the seashore and had a campfire. Three boys had formed a band and, dressed in black, wearing heavy eyeliner, performed a few songs. Those were the highlights. Most of the camp was a disaster.

  One afternoon, the kids living in the apartment above the counselors’ locked the door and left for their classes, forgetting that they’d left the tap open in their kitchen. To be fair, the water wasn’t working so it was hard for them to tell. While they were gone, the water started working again, overflowed the sink, collected about four inches deep on the apartment floor, and started dripping through the ceiling into the apartment below.

  Two counselors, returning to their apartment, discovered the disaster, and called for help. With buckets, brooms and dustpans we all bailed the water out of the upstairs apartment onto the balcony, where it froze and formed long delicate icicles as it dripped off the edge. Inside the apartment downstairs, we arranged teacups, trashcans, and Frisbees to catch the drips, and sat on the couch, watching the ceiling rain.

  Meanwhile, Yelena was getting nervous because city officials kept showing up at the camp, demanding to know why there were six Americans and two dozen Turkmen students at a condemned beach resort in January. On Friday, angry school officials from the Ashgabat area started calling us on the emergency Peace Corps cell phone we had with us and asking the same sorts of questions. How they got the number was a mystery because only Peace Corps staff had it.

  One principal called six or seven times, demanding to know whether we’d “kidnapped” any of her students, and insisting w
e give her a list of the kids who were at the camp. Government ministries started calling Peace Corps, asking questions; Peace Corps staff started calling us. Some of the campers had relatives who lived in the Turkmenbashy area and stopped by the campsite to see if everything was okay. It turned out Yelena had neglected to get government permission to move the camp to Avaza.

  The situation just kept getting worse until Saturday. Then, for whatever reason – maybe all the government officials went home for the weekend – the phone stopped ringing, officials from city hall left us alone, and the KNB stopped visiting. On Monday, the camp ended and the kids went home. When they returned to school, the kids from Abadan who had attended the camp were forced to write essays on why they’d gone to the camp. Several wrote that Catherine (from Abadan’s School No. 8) had inspired them to do whatever they could to improve their English skills, so they always attended camps and special events in English. As punishment for inspiring her students, Catherine was forced to retire. I don’t know what happened to Yelena.

  * * *

  After the campers went home, I stayed in Turkmenbashy with my friend Alei. We had a plan: we were going to search the western Karakum Desert for the ruins of an ancient city named Dekhistan.

  I’d heard it was southeast of Turkmenbashy, so we took a taxi to the biggest city in that area, an oil town called Balkanabat. We went to the nearest marshrutka stand and started asking questions. At first, no one had any idea what we were talking about. It took us about an hour to discover that the locals called the city Mashad-i Misirian and that we needed a four-wheel drive vehicle to get there.

  We did our best to convince one of the five taxi drivers who were standing around near their cars, drinking tea, to take us. They weren’t interested. Mashad-i Misirian was a long way down a dirt road and the day was all but gone, they told us. It looked like it was going to rain.