Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  That evening, when Döwlet’s car chugged into the driveway and shuddered to a stop, Azat was in the passenger seat. He came inside, sat down at the klionka, and gave me his best, jaunty English “hello,” and a crooked grin. He stayed for plov. Jeren apologized, insisting she’d over-salted it, but she was just being modest. We all ate until there were only a few bites left on our plates, drowned in cotton seed oil. Then we scraped the remains to one side and tilted our plates to the other, to drain the oil before finishing. As we sipped our tea, full and content, Azat started telling a story in Turkmen. I heard my name.

  “What are you saying about me, Azat?” I asked. “I’m telling them about your class today,” he said.

  You should have seen Sam,” he told Döwlet and Jeren. “He was just like a kid, playing games with the students on the floor.”

  “You’re a viliki dushni chilovek [big-souled person],” he told me, smiling.

  Someone tapped on the door. Döwlet, sitting at the klionka, motioned for Jeren to answer it. When she pulled it open, she found a stocky, middle-aged man with a bristly face, wearing greasy sweatpants and a black leather cap. Döwlet put down his spoon, stood, and – still chewing – reached to shake the man’s hand. In the Soviet days, the kolkhoz had been run by a director, who’d relied on several “brigade leaders” to make sure all the kolkhozniks went to the fields to plow, plant, and harvest on time.

  The man was Döwlet’s brigade leader, still hard at work despite the fall of the Soviet Union. He’d come to tell Döwlet to get his act together. It was almost time to plant the cotton and Döwlet hadn’t even plowed his 2.5-acre plot.

  A few days later, Döwlet came home early from his job at the electronics store. He changed into a dusty, stained pair of slacks and a wrinkled Napoleon Dynamite t-shirt. We climbed into his car and bounced out of town into the cotton fields, passing donkey carts and cars, child shepherds and herds of sheep. After the brigade leader’s visit, Döwlet had hired a tractor driver to plow his land. We were going to check his work. The village disappeared in the distance behind us. We stopped next to a rectangular field so large that it would have taken 20 minutes to walk one of its long sides and 10 to walk one of its short sides.

  “All this is yours?” I asked, surprised.

  “No,” Döwlet laughed. “Just this section here, between that sapling and that really tall mulberry tree.”

  “Who owns the rest?”

  “Well, on the left of me is Juma. He’s probably got the best plot. It produced more cotton last year than any of the others in this field. Then, to the right, there’s …”

  Döwlet proceeded to tell me the owner and production history of each of the dozen or so plots in the field, which, he explained, was called the Yeke Toot (Lone Mulberry) field, because there used to be a single mulberry tree growing in its center. Then he moved on and told me about the surrounding fields. There was the one where an old woman had been bitten by a wolf. There was the one where the plows had once turned up human bones and gold trinkets. I had run through these fields a couple times a week since arriving in Nurana and to me, they all looked the same – dirt, trees, rocks. Döwlet, though, knew every inch of soil.

  The tractor driver had done poor work, Döwlet decided. The furrows weren’t straight and the field was uneven. When Döwlet opened the irrigation ditch, the water would pool in some places and would fail to reach others, drowning some plants and leaving others thirsty. He squatted on his heels at the edge of the field, a sour look on his face. I squatted next to him.

  “If my father were alive, he’d make the tractor driver plow it again,” he said.

  “You should make him redo it, whether your father’s around or not.”

  “I can’t. I’m not like that.”

  Döwlet’s father was a strong, outgoing man. A gym teacher who used to run several miles to school every day, he was full of pithy advice for every occasion. He’d died only a few months before I arrived so I’d never met him. In my imagination he resembled the ex-wrestler grandfather Iowa Bob from John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire. Döwlet must have been his mother’s son. He was quiet, soft-spoken, and shy. His older sisters he seemed to have an endless supply – were louder and more confident than him. In the Azat-Döwlet partnership, Azat was the leader and Döwlet the sidekick. At home, Jeren deferred to Döwlet’s judgment, as a good Turkmen wife was supposed to, but he always seemed a little afraid of her – she was fierce, he was not.

  We squatted next to the Lone Mulberry field for an hour, watching the flaming orange sun set over the village. Döwlet was feeling nostalgic. He missed his dad. He missed his guidance and his presence. He missed having his help planting the kitchen garden and the cotton field. He hadn’t figured out yet how to work 60-70 hours a week at the electronics store and still get everything done at home, too. He felt lonely and overwhelmed.

  Döwlet also missed the kolkhoz days. The irrigation ditches along edges of the fields were no longer maintained properly, he said. And the system of metal gates that used to regulate the flow of water in the big canals that fed those ditches had been torn apart, their pieces sold for scrap. A decade earlier, almost all of Turkmenistan’s cotton had been harvested by machine. The harvesters broke down, though, and the Turkmen were forced to go back to picking most of their cotton by hand.93

  All this, I knew, was a symptom of a larger problem: Turkmenistan wasn’t developing; it was degenerating. In the Soviet days, Russians had, to a large extent, run the country. They’d had the best educational and career opportunities and had risen to the tops of their fields, becoming directors and managers at every level, from Ashgabat to Nurana. When Russians in Moscow had given orders, in many cases it had been Russians in Turkmenistan who made sure they were carried out. After independence, many of Turkmenistan’s Russians left for Russia. The country lost many of its most experienced managers and most highly skilled workers. Those who had filled their positions had – in many cases – been unable to maintain the infrastructure the Soviets had left behind.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us,” Döwlet said sadly, staring out across the field.

  I didn’t know whether he meant his family, his village, or his country.

  * * *

  When all Nurana’s fields had been plowed, the brigade leaders decided that the time was right for planting. In the late afternoons, the streets were crowded with donkey carts hauling sacks of cotton seed out to the fields. Tractors grumbled along from one plot they’d been hired to plant to the next. All over the village, the men were tense. Since there were no permanent markers dividing the fields into individual plots, there were endless arguments over who owned what. Islam, my officemate, was tangled up in a dispute with the man who farmed the plot next to his. Each year, the man took another yard, Islam complained. Islam had looked the other way for years because he didn’t think a yard or two was enough to fight over, but his neighbor just kept taking more and more, so Islam had appealed to the village administrator for help.

  It took Döwlet a while to find time to plant. The brigade leader came by the house three times to chastise him. Then one day, Döwlet brought four sacks of cotton seed home. The sacks were as big and heavy as dead sheep. The seeds were fuzzy pellets coated in a red powder that Döwlet said was a pesticide, meant to keep critters from eating them while they lay in storage during the winter. We washed it off by dunking the sacks in the irrigation canal at the edge of our yard, where the ducklings lived. Since Döwlet’s car had a flat tire and he couldn’t afford to fix it, he borrowed a donkey and a cart from a neighbor.

  The cart was a wood-plank platform set atop a single axle that had car wheels fastened to either end. Two scrap metal bars connected it to the donkey’s saddle. Döwlet and I loaded the wet sacks onto the cart. They dripped pink pesticide water through its cracks and into the dust below. We sat on the cart’s front edge, just behind the donkey, taking turns holding the reins. The old gray beast trudged toward the fields. We rolled through
a trash-strewn empty lot at the edge of the village and then past electric-green fields of young wheat and dusty brown cotton fields.

  Döwlet was impatient. He whipped the donkey’s flanks with a twig and yelled at it to go faster. The donkey was much better at ignoring orders, though, than Döwlet was at giving them. It continued on at its own pace. Eventually he gave up and we lounged on the cart under the cloudless sky, letting the donkey find its own way along the road, at its own speed. The temperature was well above 90 degrees, but a restless wind kept us cool. As we approached farmers returning from the fields, Döwlet would sit up and greet them. They’d offer a formulaic blessing, the same every time. I didn’t understand it completely, but it was along the lines of “may your seeds grow and multiply.” Döwlet would thank them, return the blessing, and lie back down.

  When we reached the Lone Mulberry field, we found that we were fifth in line for the tractor driver’s services. For three hours, we lay in the shade of a mulberry tree, watching the ancient Soviet “Belorus” tractor kick up dust as it roared back and forth across the field, opening the furrows, depositing the seeds, closing the furrows. Back and forth, back and forth. The donkey grazed on weeds. When our turn came, we hauled our sacks of seed to the tractor and poured them into the four funnel-shaped hoppers on the sledge it was pulling. We stood on the sledge as the tractor pulled it across the field, using sticks to stir the cotton seeds in their hoppers, to make sure they flowed smoothly so they would deposit the seeds in evenly spaced rows.

  The dust swirled around us and the sledge shook and rattled like it was about to fall apart. I held on with my left hand, legs braced far apart, and stirred. I could taste the dust; I could feel the grit in my eyes. When the tractor came to the edge of the field, Döwlet and I would jump off the planter into the powdery soil. The tractor would raise the sledge, make the turn, and then lower it back to earth. As the tractor accelerated back across the field, we’d chase after it, and leap back onto the sledge.

  Once, a hopper started dumping seeds in random clumps and Döwlet threw a stick at the tractor’s back window. The driver stopped, climbed wearily down from the cab, and inspected the hopper. As the tractor idled, he walked back to the cab and found a curl of baling wire, a pair of pliers, and a hammer made from a lump of iron welded to a piece of pipe. He banged and tied and twisted for a few minutes and then climbed back into the cab. We were off again.

  When the tractor driver finished Döwlet’s plot, he paused long enough to pick up the next farmer and refill the hoppers. Then he roared away across the field again in his little tornado of dust. Döwlet and I, dirt covering our clothes and crunching between our teeth, climbed back on our donkey cart and headed home. As we approached the village, the sun was setting and we could hear the muezzin’s call to prayer, amplified by the mosque’s tinny old loudspeaker. I made a joke about how the muezzin kept calling and calling, but no one was listening – the mosque was usually empty. Döwlet took my joke as a personal criticism and said he was too busy to go to mosque. He told me a parable about two men. One secretly doubted God’s existence but went to mosque every day so his neighbors would respect him as a pious man. The other was a drinker who never set foot in a mosque but went to bed every night asking God, in whom he fervently believed, to forgive his sins. When both men died, the pious man went to hell, the drinker to heaven.

  “As long as you think of God, as long as you believe in him, you’re okay,” Döwlet said.

  At home, we took turns in the banya. With cool water from the cistern, I washed the dust from my hair and skin. In the dim room, I kicked something squishy. It turned out to be a frog, which leaped into the drain and swam out to the irrigation canal behind the banya. While Döwlet and I were in the field, Jeren had made a giant meal. The klionka was loaded with spinach somsas and plov and mutton fat soup. She had even baked yagly nan (bread dough mixed with mutton fat, salt, and onions and baked in the tamdur), one of the most delicious things in the world. There were plates of sliced cucumbers, scallions, and kiwis, and a bowl of chocolate cookies. We ate until we were stuffed and then lounged around the living room watching American movies dubbed into Russian (the end of Black Rain and the beginning of Cobra) until it was time for bed.

  * * *

  As spring deepened and the blossoms on the trees in our yard were replaced by miniature apples, apricots, plums, and pomegranates, my Turkmen lessons with Maksat started to pay off. When I met people in the street, I could ask after their families in Turkmen instead of Russian, which they seemed to appreciate. At home, I could finally talk to my little sisters, who didn’t know Russian. When Altyn asked me one day to help her tie a loop of rope onto the branch of an apricot tree in our yard, I understood her. It was an epiphany. After months of mime, we had discovered language. After I’d finished with the knots, she sat in the loop and swung toward the sky, shaking the branch and bringing a few stray leaves down on her head.

  “Do you have swings in America?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I assured her.

  She was so pleased that I could understand her that she decided I should learn faster. She started quizzing me on Turkmen vocabulary, leading me around the house, pointing to objects, and demanding that I name them. It became a competition. She had joined my basic English class and was among the best students even though, at eight, she was four years younger than most of the other kids. So when she asked me for a word in Turkmen, I’d ask her for a word in English in return. The problem was, she was learning faster than I was. She taunted me mercilessly. Teachers give Turkmen students number grades (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) instead of letter grades (A, B, C, D, F). Altyn nicknamed me birlik, which means, roughly, “1 student,” or “F student.”

  I tried to catch up, but, unfortunately, my Turkmen teacher had given up on teaching me Turkmen. He’d decided that I would never use the language once I returned to America. So he started teaching me about Turkmen culture, instead. Twice a week I’d walk across town to his house. Those spring evenings were warm and clear. As I crossed the bridge, a few of my students, swimming in the river below, would call out “hello, teacher” and I’d wave. I’d often stop at the store for a chocolate-covered ice cream bar. When I knocked at Maksat’s gate his mutt would run around the corner and bark at me until I bent down to pet it. Hearing the racket, Maksat would appear from one of the buildings surrounding the courtyard and shake my hand. Then we’d walk over to his neighbor’s mud-brick garage.

  As part of my Turkmen culture lessons, Maksat was teaching me about silk production. Nurana’s teachers were all required to buy 7 grams of silk worm eggs, raise the worms, and sell their cocoons to the government. This annoyed Maksat. He had enough to do already and there wasn’t much money in raising silk worms. The government paid less than $1 per kilogram for even the highest quality cocoons. So he gave his eggs to his neighbor to raise. That way he’d get credit for meeting his quota and the neighbor would get the profits, such as they were.

  Inside the neighbor’s garage was a single, massive table, pieced together from sawhorses and stray boards, and covered with what looked like butcher paper. A gas heater warmed the garage. A light bulb hung from the underside of its straw-and-mud roof. On the table was a pile of mulberry leaves that the women of the house had chopped with knives and scissors. It was sprinkled with squirming white silk worms. They were the size of maggots when I first saw them, but slowly grew to the size off my thumb. Eventually, they would spin themselves into cocoons of long silk threads, which the neighbor would gather and sell to the government.

  After checking on the worms’ progress, Maksat and I would go back to his house to sit in his twin easy chairs and talk. One day he gave me a lesson on Turkmen names. Some were names of precious things: Altyn means gold, and Kümüsh means silver. Others were like prayers: if a man’s wife gave birth to a series of daughters, he might name the fifth or sixth Ogulgerek, meaning, “I want a boy.” If his next child were a boy, he might call him Hudayberdy, meaning, “God gave.” O
thers were just functional. If a couple had whole series of boys, they might start numbering them: four, five, six, seven (Chary, Bashim, Alty, Yedy). So, Maksat joked, if a guy is giving you trouble and you’re thinking of fighting him, ask his name. If it’s Hudayberdy, you can be pretty sure he’s alone, so hit him. If it’s Yedy, he has six brothers, so run for your life.

  On other days, Maksat told me about Turkmen artists. He showed me a book of paintings by Ayhan Hajiyev, realistic renderings of collectivization, kolkhoz life, and Turkmen heroes. He told me how, during the Soviet era, men like Ashyr Kuliev had studied at universities in Russia and become great composers of Western-style classical music. We also talked a lot about great Turkmen writers, and especially the 18th-Century poet Magtymguly Feraghy.

  There is no writer who holds a place in American culture analogous to Magtymguly’s place in Turkmen culture. Magtymguly is a national hero and sage. Every Turkmen knows who Magtymguly is and most can quote from his work. Many of his best lines are so well known that they have become proverbs.

  Magtymguly studied in madrassahs in Bukhara and Khiva and then worked as a teacher and silversmith.94 He wrote poetry in his free time. While most Central Asian poets at the time wrote in one of the region’s literary languages (Chagatay, Arabic, and Persian), Magtymguly wrote in Turkmen, which he thought was just as beautiful. In fact, he was something of a proto-nationalist. He wrote poems decrying the tribal divisions he believed kept the Turkmen weak and disorganized. “If Turkmens would only tighten the Belt of Determination,” he wrote, “they could drink the Red Sea in their strength/ So let the tribes of Teke, Yomut, Gokleng, Yazir, and Alili/ Unite into one proud nation.”

  All the great Turkmen writers Maksat told me about were, like Magtymguly, long dead. When I asked him who the great contemporary Turkmen writers were, he laughed.

  “There’s only one,” he said. “The Great Turkmenbashy.”