Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  Although engineers use computers to manage water flow through most major irrigation systems in the world, the remaining workers on the Karakum had to make do with more primitive technology. They monitored water levels with a series of what were essentially giant rulers. Workers noted how high the water was on the rulers and called the data in to a central office in Ashgabat – when the phones were working.103 Using this scanty information, engineers had to keep the water in the canal flowing fast enough so that sediment didn’t have time to settle to the bottom of the canal, but not so fast so fast that it ripped up the sandy bed of the canal and carried it downstream.104 They also had to balance the canal’s needs with the farmers’ needs, making sure that enough water flowed out of the main canal and into the fields to produce a good harvest.

  Under these difficult circumstances, the staff often pulled far too much water out of the Amudarya and into the Karakum Canal system. So, even as the Aral Sea was dying of thirst, engineers were dumping excess water into the desert and farmers in Turkmenistan were over-watering their fields, “which has led to widespread land degradation in the Karakum Canal zone. Rising groundwater tables and soil salinization now [have become] endemic and … resulted in large tracts of land being abandoned and a significant reduction in crop yields” 105

  The water table in Murgab was so high that when Döwlet’s brother-in-law was working in his courtyard garden, it took only two big shovels-full of dirt to dig a hole that would fill with water from underground. All over the Murgab oasis, from Mary to Bayramali to Murgab, I saw vast tracts of land covered in what looked like a sprinkling of snow; when I tasted it, it turned out to be a crust of salt.

  Despite the environmental disaster that the Karakum Canal had helped to cause in the Aral Sea and in Turkmenistan, the Soviet government looked on the bright side. A 1977 report from the USSR Academy of Sciences pointed out that the canal created a micro-climate that was slightly cooler and wetter than the standard Karakum Desert climate and, as a result, was more comfortable for people to live in. The report also pointed out that the canal had created a huge swath of new habitat for fish, birds, and plants.106 That much was true. The canal was swarming with life. In some places, the desert sloped gently into the water and the shoreline was choked with reeds taller than our boat. In others, the sand dunes dropped straight down into the canal, creating sandy cliffs, where birds dug holes for their nests. As we passed, they soared over us, diving and swooping. Though I couldn’t see any fish swimming in the murky water, I did see fishermen standing next to the canal now and then, selling fish as big as my thigh.

  The trip was peaceful. The chugging of the boat’s engine was the only sound that broke the silence. I saw a few people on shore: shepherds watching herds of sheep from the backs of donkeys and beekeepers tending to stacks of white bee boxes. But mostly we were alone under an electric blue sky with a few high, wispy clouds. We lounged on the tapjan reading, listening to music, and watching the desert drift by. Berdy stopped the boat in the late afternoon so we could jump into the water and cool off. The canal was about 10 feet deep, warm, and muddy. Lying on the deck afterwards, it took only a few minutes to dry out. As the sun dipped below the sand dunes to our stern, a crescent moon appeared, hanging precariously from the navy blue fabric of the sky.

  Then the sky faded from navy blue to black, and the stars began to appear, first by the dozen, then by the thousand.

  After finishing a half-liter bottle of vodka with Alei, I fell asleep on the tapjan. Sometime in the middle of the night, Berdy pulled the boat over into the reeds and threw an anchor ashore. A swarm of mosquitoes woke me by trying to suck as much blood as possible from my face, hands, and ankles. I wrapped myself in the carpet covering the tapjan and went back to sleep. I woke again when the marigold sun started rising over our bow. Berdy appeared from below, pulled the anchor back on board, and started the engine. After another hour, we arrived in Nichka. The trip had taken 12 hours.

  Berdy’s job was to pick up his boss, the engineer in charge of overseeing the Zakhmet-Nichka stretch of the canal, and take him back to Zakhmet. The boss was waiting on Nichka’s pier with a couple of assistants. He was a middle-aged Turkmen bureaucrat, overweight and greasy, with thinning hair. As soon as he laid eyes on Alei, Kelly, and I, he started yelling at Berdy for bringing us along. We were not going to Kugitang, we were going back to Zakhmet with him, he said. At first he didn’t want to allow us ashore even for a moment, but after Berdy put in a word for us, he told us we could go into Nichka to find a bathroom and buy some food, but we’d better hurry. We left the two men arguing on the waterfront and slipped into town.

  Nichka’s houses were weathered but well-kept, its yards were planted with vegetables and carefully weeded, its streets were sandy and clean. There were no cars in sight. In the sandy village square, there was a 30-foot-long model of the canal. When we asked for directions to the bazaar, we learned that it had been closed for the day because of a mild sandstorm. So we found a tiny shop that an old woman was running out of her house and bought what she had: orange soda and cookies. She let us use her outhouse, too, which was built from weathered scrap wood and was listing to one side. Then we hurried back to the boat.

  Berdy cast off as soon as we were on board, and turned the boat around, pointing it downstream toward Zakhmet. While the boss brooded on the bow, I ducked into the pilothouse to apologize to Berdy for getting him in trouble and to try to find out what we’d done wrong. It turned out that two KNB men had visited Berdy’s boss the previous week and warned him not to allow any strangers on the canal. Since it began within spitting distance of Afghanistan and was barely monitored by the police, it had become an opium smuggling route. The boss was convinced that we were either smugglers or spies and that he was going to end up in jail because we’d appeared on the canal on his watch.

  The authorities in Turkmenistan have been trying for at least a century to stem the flow of opium across their southern border. Raw opium has been used in Turkmenistan for centuries, both as a panacea to cure everything from aches and pains to diarrhea and coughing, and also used recreationally. When the Russians conquered the Turkmen lands, large quantities of opium were being imported from Afghanistan and Iran.107 The Russians and then the Soviets and then the independent Turkmen government fought this flow of drugs and failed.

  But it seemed the boss was determined to do his bit in this endless war on drugs by turning us in to the police. On the long ride back to Zakhmet, we took turns trying to smooth things over with him, to convince him we were neither smugglers nor spies. He immediately hated Alei, who asked him what was wrong and how we could fix things. He tolerated my questions about the plants and birds of the canal zone. He liked Kelly. Of the three of us, she spoke the best Turkmen. She was also young and pretty and had good Turkmen manners. He was charmed. The atmosphere on the boat began to thaw.

  After a few hours, we stopped at a dredging barge so the boss could bark some orders at its crew. While the boss was acting important, Berdy bought a three-foot-long fish from a man sitting on a nearby sand dune. He hung it from the awning over the tapjan where it dripped fish juice from its tail onto the deck, its mouth gaping at the sky.

  Around lunchtime, a freeway bridge appeared ahead of us, arching over the canal. The boss told Berdy to tie the boat up underneath it. Then the two of them jumped ashore and disappeared into the desert. Once they were out of sight, I climbed to the top of the bridge. There was no freeway, just a bridge. There was no town in sight, just the canal, and a whole lot of scrub-covered sand dunes. I went back to the boat to wait.

  A half-hour later, Berdy and his boss reappeared out of the desert with two bottles of vodka and a giant bowl of fish stew. Berdy refused to eat with the boss – he was still offended at being yelled at. He stayed in the pilothouse while Kelly, Alei, and I ate fish stew with his boss on the tapjan. The fish has been fried in batter and cut into chunks before being simmered in a salty broth with potatoes, green peppers, and onions. W
e ate it with stale chorek that we’d bought the day before in Zakhmet. It was delicious, much better than the orange soda and cookies I’d had for breakfast, and by the end of the second bottle of vodka, we are all friends with the boss. He had nothing against us. He was just scared.

  On the outskirts of Zakhmet, the boss told Berdy to pull the boat close to shore. He wasn’t going to drag us into the police station and tell them we were smugglers or spies with fake passports. Much better to just make the problem disappear, he’d decided. He told us to jump ashore and get lost. We didn’t argue. We grabbed our bags and leaped. From the shoreline, I waved goodbye to Berdy as he steered the boat back out into the channel and headed for the port.

  We hiked through the desert toward the highway, which we could see in the distance. A man appeared ahead of us, standing among the thorn bushes. He wore a suit and stood with his arms clasped behind his back. He was about 30 and hadn’t shaved for a couple days. His suit was dusty and had lost its creases. He looked too bedraggled to be a KNB man, but still, it was an odd place for a guy to be standing.

  “Did you just get off that boat?” he asked. “Why?” I asked.

  “Was that Berdy’s boat?”

  “Why?”

  “He’s my cousin. He said he was going to bring me a fish. Do you know if he has it?”

  Relieved, I told him Berdy had the fish. Then Alei talked him into giving us a ride up the highway to Bayramali. We piled into the car, covered in sand, exhausted from nearly 24 hours on the boat. I was still a little drunk from lunch. We bounced across the desert to the highway, dodging thorn bushes, and then turned south. Between potholes, I wrote a note to Berdy in my awkward, looping Russian cursive, apologizing for getting him in trouble and wishing him well. His cousin promised to deliver it.

  31.

  Mugged

  In exchange for speaking at its tourism conference in Ashgabat, the OSCE had paid for a room for me in the President Hotel. It was one of the best hotels in the country, with five stars from someone or other, marble-floored lobbies, bathrobe warmers in all the bathrooms, and a price tag of $95 a night – more than my monthly salary. I stayed one night, but felt out of place. I don’t like fancy hotels and restaurants, where things look too delicate and clean to touch and people dote on me. So I moved across town to the Syyhat Hotel, a seedy flophouse where I’d stayed before. For $2.50, I got a single bed in a double room. As I was falling asleep, my roommate Anamurat and his friend Ashyr showed up and sat down on Anamurat’s bed. They couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20 years old, long-necked and pimple-faced.

  “You have to get out of here for a little while,” Anamurat said. “We’re supposed to do Natasha here.”

  “You’re going to have to do Natasha somewhere else,” I said. “It’s 11. I have to be up early. I’m going to sleep.”

  “Come on …” Ashyr pleaded.

  “Why don’t you guys do Natasha in your room?” I asked him.

  Annoyed, they left. I closed the door and turned off the light. I was just falling asleep when someone opened the door (there was no lock) and flipped the light on. I opened my eyes and saw a pretty Russian girl in a short black skirt standing by the switch.

  “You called?” she asked.

  “No, Anamurat called. He went to his friend’s room down the hall,” I told her. “Could you turn off the light on your way out?”

  I went back to sleep. Sometime later, the light went on again. I rolled over and squinted at the door. There were two girls standing by the light switch this time. One was a Turkmen girl in tight jeans and a low-cut red shirt. The other was another Russian girl in another short black skirt and way too much makeup.

  “Anamurat?” the Russian girl asked.

  “No, he’s down the hall in Ashyr’s room, I think,” I said. “Turn off the light.”

  She looked around the room.

  “Well, as long as we’re here, do you want to …” she trailed off and made one of the internationally recognized hand signs for “fuck.”

  “No. I want to sleep. Turn off the light.”

  “Come on, let him sleep,” the Turkmen girl said, turning off the light and pulling the Russian girl out the door.

  Apparently three girls were enough for Anamurat and Ashyr, because no one else woke me up that night. It wasn’t the best night’s sleep I’d ever had. The upside, though, was that I’d saved myself the equivalent of a month’s salary. I decided to use the money, combined with some other money I’d saved by living way out in the country where there was nothing to buy, for tourism development. It seemed only fitting. I planned a four-day seminar designed to teach young adults from the Mary area how to be tour guides at Merv and Margush. That way, if the Turkmen government ever decided to start welcoming tourists into the country, a few local guys would know how to make some money off them.

  I found five English students who wanted to come to my seminar. Begench was a geeky 18-year-old kid, socially awkward, and much too old for his age. Kakajan was an effeminate 20-year- old wedding singer who wore a goatee, a bandana, and a white tank-top. His friend Juma was a Tupac fan and wannabe gangster with arms covered in homemade tattoos that looked like Japanese characters but meant nothing – he’d made them up. Muhammad, only 16, was painfully shy and quiet. Oraz was a big, rowdy country boy and at 22, the oldest of the group. I convinced Alei to join us.

  During the seminar, we stayed at the Bayramali sanatorium. The place had once been famous; people from all over the USSR used to visit for its famous melon cure. Its shabby concrete dormitories and hospital buildings were crumbling, but its gardens were still gorgeous, filled with luscious red roses and orange cosmos. A grove of evergreen trees shaded its grounds. Crotchety Turkmen grandparents and white-coated doctors roamed the shady paths between the buildings. My boys were easily 40 years younger than any of the other guests. The old women took a liking to them. There was a lot of “you boys are so handsome” and “you’re so skinny, you need to eat more” and “you remind me of my grandson.”

  Every day, we went on a field trip. First, we visited the museum in Mary, where a beautiful Turkmen girl in a koynek gave us a tour. At first, the boys’ constant flirting flustered her. She was sassy, though, and soon put them in their places so she could finish telling them about the ceramics, jewelry, and figurines that had been dug from the deserts of Turkmenistan, dusted off, and set on the museum’s glass shelves. When we went to Merv, the director of the national park there gave us free admission and a free guide. At the end of the day, he talked to the boys about how to get into the tourism industry.

  The next day, our guide from Merv, Jumageldy, took us to see Margush. The van was old and full of holes. The last hour of the trip was on sandy roads through the desert. Our tires kicked up a cloud of dust that blew in through the holes and filled the van. We had to hold our shirts over our faces to keep from choking. We wandered the ruins, an endless maze of knee-high mud-brick foundations that were probably built before Stonehenge. The desert wind whipped a cloud of sand across the abandoned city.

  Kakajan and Juma sang all the way back to the sanitorium. It’s what they were good at. They were an aspiring pop duo. Every day they dressed alike: white wife-beaters, blue bandanas, baseball caps tilted just so. Any time we had to wait for something – lunch, a guide, a taxi – the rest of us would find a bench to sit on or a curb to squat on. Kakajan and Juma used the time to choreograph dance routines. Alei suggested we call them Menudo, after the Puerto Rican boy band. Oraz called Juma “Michael” and Kakajan “Jackson.” In the van, they sang anything the other boys requested, from Turkmen pop songs, to Fergie, to Eminem. Everyone got into it except Begench, who sat apart, looking at them like they were all morons.

  As we were passing an old pile of bricks that Jumageldy said was a centuries-old Nestorian Christian church, an argument broke out in the van. I missed the beginning of it because it was in Turkmen, but when I caught on, Oraz was maintaining that the kulan, a type of wild Turkmen donkey, coul
d live for 700 years. The other boys were mocking him, insisting that no animal could live that long. He held his ground, though, maintaining that he’d read it in a Magtymguly poem so he was sure it was true.

  “If kulans lived for 700 years, scientists would know about it,” Juma said.

  “How? Scientists don’t live for 700 years,” Oraz said. “Besides, even if scientists knew, it doesn’t mean we would know.”

  No one could convince Oraz that Magtymguly might have been mistaken.

  * * *

  On the last day of the seminar we packed our things, left the sanatorium, and took a marshrutka south to the Hindukush Dam, which stemmed the flow of the Murgab River near Yolotan, creating a massive, swampy reservoir. The tsarist government had built the dam in 1895 as part of its effort to irrigate more land for cotton cultivation.108 By the time we arrived, the downstream side, where an enthusiastic stream of whitewater rushed out of the dam and into a shallow pool surrounded by sandy beaches and shade trees, had become a popular spot for picnicking and swimming. We were planning to eat lunch, listen to the boys’ final presentations, go swimming, and then go home.

  To make sure the boys would have an audience for their presentations, Alei and I had invited other Peace Corps Volunteers. Ngai and Kelly came. Two of Kelly’s friends from Yolotan came, too – an Uzbek girl named Umida and her father Omar. Hindukush was crowded. Boys in their underwear and girls in their dresses played in the water. Families sat under trees, eating and napping. We found a shady spot and settled down to eat somsas, fending off armies of ants. When we were all full, the boys took turns standing in front of our little group and pretending to be tour guides, telling us about the sites we’d visited at Merv and Margush.