by Sam Tranum
When morning came, I was deeply embarrassed, but too hung over to worry about it much. I apologized to Döwlet and Jeren, who said they were just glad I was feeling better. When Jeren came home from work that afternoon, she told me the wedding hall owner wanted to see me about some damage we’d caused. I peeled myself off the floor and taxied into Murgab to pay for our wedding party’s sins: a broken glass, a smashed chair, a tear in one of the wedding dresses.
As I walked from the wedding hall back to the taxi stand, a car pulled up and the driver called me over. He said we’d met at a toi, but I suspected he was lying because he tried to talk to me in Turkmen. Anyone who’d traded a few words with me knew my Russian was better. Still, when he offered me a ride to Nurana, I accepted. A free ride is a free ride. On the way, we stopped to get gas. The driver bought me a bag of salted pistachios and then turned the car around and headed the wrong direction– away from Nurana.
“Do you want to see a secret military base?” he asked. “My friend works there and they’ve got missiles so secret that they don’t even let him see them.”
It was a bizarre offer. People usually suspected I was a spy and were too nervous to talk to me about politics until after they’d known me for a while. I decided the driver was either insane or setting me up.
“Uh-uh. No way,” I said. “If it’s secret, I don’t want to go near it. Everyone here already thinks I’m a spy. I don’t need to be hanging around secret military bases.”
He wouldn’t give up. He kept trying to convince me to go with him. I wanted to go; I was dying of curiosity. Not about the base, but about where the whole thing was headed, whether it was a setup. I decided it was too risky to find out, though, so I started acting angry and yelling at him to pull over and let me go. He turned around and drove me home to Nurana. It was a long, silent ride.
* * *
In the weeks following the toi, my friends and acquaintances – and even strangers – hounded me for the tape the videographer had made. Döwlet even took a copy to work and held screenings of it on the big TVs he was supposed to be selling. I don’t know why the video was so popular. I think it was just the right combination of the familiar and the exotic. Every Turkmen couple had a toi video. I’d watched Döwlet and Jeren’s three times. But this video was something a little different. For starters, the whole toi was a game. No one was really getting married. Then there were the Americans making toasts in Russian and Turkmen and English, the Americans dancing funny, and the American wedding.
The days slipped by. I’d said all my goodbyes. I’d given away everything I couldn’t take home on the airplane. I started packing my bags. Jeren stood in the doorway and watched. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when you leave,” she said. “Every day when I come home it will be like something’s missing. And I’ll be so bored.”
The morning I left, Jeren gave me two loaves of fresh chorek for the journey. We all climbed into Döwlet and Azat’s cars with my bags and drove to Murgab. We said our goodbyes in a parking lot there. Jeren cried a little and gave me a hug. Döwlet shook my hand, warned me that if I didn’t write he’d come to America and give me a beating, and then tried to laugh. Azat took a photo of us all together.
Since Döwlet and Jeren had to go to work, Azat drove me to Mary, where I would find a taxi to Asghabat. I stared out my open window, watching the cotton fields roll by. The countryside was lush and green, the cotton high. Two shepherds wallowed in an irrigation canal as their sheep, fat and wooly, grazed nearby. Then checkpoints began to appear, manned by surly policemen. We passed the charred remains of two cars. Concrete buildings and empty lots replaced the farm fields. Dust and smog blew in my window. We entered the city.
The taxi to Ashgabat followed the familiar highway along the base of the Kopetdag range. In the capital, I found a hotel, and then went to the Peace Corps office to start filling out paperwork. That night, I called Geldy and we arranged to meet at a bar. I’d barely heard from him since leaving Abadan. I’d invited him to the toi, but he’d begged off, saying he didn’t have time to make the trip. At the bar, I ordered myself a beer and Geldy ordered a coffee. He said he’d quit drinking. He was still smoking, though. He lit one of his slim cigarettes.
“So how have you been?” he said. “You’re such a bitch. You never call. You never visit.”
“I’m the bitch?” I said. “You didn’t come to my going away party.”
“It was all the way out on the … kolkhoz,” he said with distaste.
We talked about what I was going to do when I got back to America. Then we ran out of things to talk about. We’d lost track of each other’s lives. We didn’t know the right questions to ask anymore, the secret passwords to conversations worth having. He smoked his cigarette. I sipped my beer.
“Did you know I left Red Crescent?” he asked.
“It’s about time. What are you doing now?”
“I sell ice cream. I like it. It’s honest work, not like humanitarian aid.”
Then his friends Aka, Mehri, and Nastya drifted into the bar and joined us. We made the “oh, I haven’t seen you in so long” noises, and then I told them I was leaving for America so we made the “don’t forget to write, it’s been so great to know you” noises. Then Geldy walked me out. I gave him a hug and left.
When I went to Abadan the next day to say goodbye to Ana and Sesili, I found them in the garden picking lettuce, peppers, strawberries, and scallions. The seeds I’d planted had finally sprouted. Inspired, they’d planted the strawberries and the peppers themselves. The garden was weeded and watered. The porch was freshly painted. The refrigerator was full. Andrei had recovered, and with him, the family’s finances.
We cooked a big meal together: fried chicken and potatoes, cucumber and tomato salad, wine and cake. I told them about Nurana. I think they were a little hurt to hear that I’d been so happy there, when I’d been so unhappy in Abadan. Ana packed me some pickled eggplant and a loaf of chorek for my trip to America. Then they walked me to the marshrutka stop and waved goodbye as my minivan trundled away toward Ashgabat.
My flight to America left after midnight. I spent the evening at a bar with friends and then loaded my bags into a car and headed for the airport. The capital’s white marble buildings, monuments, and fountains, were all lit up, but the streets were deserted. Only a few taxi drivers roamed the city’s wide boulevards, looking for fares. The windows of the apartment buildings were dark, the restaurants and stores were closed.
“I’m so jealous of you,” the driver told me. “I’d love to leave this country. You must be really happy.”
We left the city center and started passing row after row of identical apartment buildings – the concrete dominoes I’d known so well. I thought about Abadan, about being robbed by Olya, being blackmailed by Aman, being stonewalled by city hall, being hounded by the KNB. In my memory, it was all winter. It was all mud and slush. It was all frustrating, absurd, and ugly. Then I thought about spring in Nurana, about eating warm apricots off the trees, planting cotton with Döwlet, working in the vineyard with Jeren, hanging the swing for Altyn, and singing Kümüsh to sleep. I thought about my English students and my conversations with Maksat. I thought about all my friends who had come to say goodbye at my going-away toi.
No,” I told the taxi driver, “I’m going to miss it.”
Notes
1. Economist. (2003). “The World’s Worst: Turkmenistan.” The World in 2004. London.
2. I saw the pit on a return visit a few weeks after my original visit.
3. “The Turkmen nation has traced marks as magnificent as those of Great Britain, of the Great Indian Nation, and of the Great Chinese Nation.” Niyazov, Saparmurat. (2005). Rukhnama: Reflections on the Spiritual Values of the Turkmen. Ashgabat: Turkmenistan, p. 60.
4. Agence France Presse (Aug. 25, 2005). “Placing Book in Orbit, Turkmenistan Aims for the Stars.”
5. “Between the 17th and 19th centuries, some states diffused wicked propaganda in
pursuit of their own national interests. They falsely represented the nation of Turkmen as pillagers and merciless slaughterers, and described them as a wild community who kill each other, living in tents, an ignorant, uneducated and nomadic nation,” wrote Niyazov, Rukhnama, p. 44.
6. Hughes, Langston (1956). I Wonder as I Wander. New York: Hill & Wang, p. 102.
7. Koestler, Arthur (1954). The Invisible Writing. New York: The MacMillan Company, p. 111.
8. Allworth, Edward (Ed.) (2002). Central Asia: 130 Years of RussianDominance, A Historical Overview. London: Duke University Press.
9. Shifrin, Avraham (1980). The First Guidebook to the Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union. New York: Bantam, pp.268-269.
10. U.N. Development Program (2007). Human Development Report. Retrieved Feb. 23, 2007, from http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/ countries/data_sheets/cty_ds_TKM.html. CIA (2007). The World Factbook – Turkmenistan. Retrieved February 23, 2007, from https:// www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/tx.html.
11. Estimates on the size of Turkmenistan’s natural gas reserves vary considerably, which is not surprising given the difficulty in obtaining reliable information from the Turkmen government. Energy economist James P. Dorian offered one of the more conservative estimates in his 2006 article in the journal Energy Economist: “Turkmenistan … will play a critical role in the future of world energy markets, as it ranks 11th in world reserves of gas, above Iraq. Some analysts place reserve amounts at much higher levels [p.546].” Nancy Lubin offered a more optimistic estimate in her contribution to the 2000 book Energy and Conflict in Central Asia and the Caucasus, ranking Turkmenistan’s reserves as “third in the world after only Russia and Iran [p.108].”
12. Levine, S. and R. Corzine. (Aug. 22, 1995). Turkmenistan: A Catalogue of Promises Unfulfilled, in The Financial Times. London.
13. Global Witness (2006). “It’s a Gas: Funny Business in the Turkmen-Ukraine Gas Trade.” London: Global Witness, p. 4.
14. Polo, Marco (1931). The Travels of Marco Polo. London: G. Routeledge & Sons, p. 20.
15. Tzareva, Elena (1984). Rugs and Carpets from Central Asia. Leningrad: Aurora Art Publishers. Schurmann, Ulrich (1969). Central Asian Rugs. Frankfurt Am Main: Verlag Osterrieth.
16. Annanepesov, M. (2003). The Turkmens, in History of Civilizations of Central Asia: Volume V. Paris: UNESCO Publishing, p. 138.
17. Edgar, Adrienne Lynn (2004). Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 2-3.
18. Dawisha, Karen and Bruce Parrott (1997). Conflict, Cleavage, and Change in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 320-321.
19. Olcott, Martha Brill (2005). Central Asia’s Second Chance. Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, p. 251.
20. Heritage Foundation. “Index of Economic Freedom.” 2008. http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/.
21. Cummings, Sally (2002). Power and Change in Central Asia. New York: Routledge.
22. Hopkirk, Peter (1992). The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia. New York: Kodansha International, pp. 388, 402-407.
23. Hiebert, Fredrik Talmage (2003). A Central Asian Village at the Dawn of Civilization, Excavations at Anew, Turkmenistan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, pp. 24-25.
24. Pumpelly, Raphael. (1908). Explorations in Turkestan, Expedition of 1904. Washington DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, pp. 320-321.
25. Hiebert. A Central Asian Village, p. 9.
26. Pumpelly, My Reminiscences, p. 732.
27. Golombek, Lisa and Wilber, Donald (1988). The Timurid Architecture of Iran and Turan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 291-292.
28. The Soviet government initially reported that the death toll was 10,000. In his 1990 book published in Ashgabat, The Ashgabat Catastrophe, Shokhrat Kadyrov suggests that the proper number is closer to 35,000. In the Rukhnama, Niyazov writes that there were 198,000 people in Ashgabat at the time of the earthquake and that 176,000 of them were killed (p. 41).
29. US Geological Survey. (Accessed June 2, 2007). “Most Destructive Known Earthquakes on Record in the World.” earthquake.usgs.gov/ regional/world/most_destructive.php.
30. Kadyrov, Shokhrat. (1990). Ashkhabadskaia katastrofa: istoriko-demograficheskii ochek krupneishego zemletriasenia. XX v. Ashgabat: Turkmenistan, p. 34.
31. Niyazov, Rukhnama, pp. 41-42.
32. Curzon, George. “The Transcaspian Railway.” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 1889. Vol. 2, No. 5, p. 275.
33. Curzon took notes during his trip and then wrote a 478-page report on the railway and its significance to the Great Game, called Russia in Central Asia and the Anglo-Russian Question (according to Hopkirk). Eleven years later, Curzon would become Viceroy of India, from which post he would pursue the Great Game for years to come. He later became a member of the House of Lords and Foreign Secretary (1919-1924).
34. Curzon, “The Transcaspian Railway,” pp. 273-295, 279.
35. Morris, L.P. “British Secret Missions in Turkestan, 1918-1919.” Journal of Contemporary History, 1977. Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 363-379. Sargent, M. (2004). British Involvement in Transcaspia (1918-1919). Swindon: Conflict Studies Center, Defence Academy of the UK.
36. Morris, “British Secret Missions,” p. 365.
37. To Christians, this is the story of Abraham and Isaac.
38. According to a 2000 World Bank report, “the share of income derived from self-employment or entrepreneurial activities has increased … to more than 50 percent in the poorer republics of the Transcaucasus and Central Asia.” World Bank. “Making Transition Work for Everyone.” Washington DC: World Bank, pp. 152.
39. Olcott, Central Asia’s Second Chance, p. 251.
40. Committee to Protect Journalists. “North Korea tops CPJ list of ’10 Most Censored Countries.’ May 2, 2006.
41. Reporters Without Borders. “Worldwide Press Freedom Index.” 2006.
42. In March 2005, Niyazov ordered the country’s rural libraries closed, saying that rural Turkmen didn’t read anyway. In my experience he was right. Few Turkmen I met outside of Ashgabat used books for anything except toilet paper. (Of course, that doesn’t mean the libraries should have been closed).
43. Olcott, Central Asia’s Second Chance, p. 184.
44. Ibid, p. 67.
45. International Merv Project. (1996). The Ancient Cities of Merv, Turkmenistan: A Visitor’s Guide. London: The International Merv Project.
46. Herrmann, Monuments of Merv, p. 16.
47. Ibid, p. 121.
48. Ibid, pp. 31-32.
49. Ibid, pp. 17, 125.
50. Sevin, A. (1992) “The Seljuqs and the Khwarazm Shahs” in History of Civilizations of Central Asia Volume I: The Dawn of Civilization: Earliest Times to 700 BC, A.H. Dani.and V.M. Masson (eds.). UNESCO Publishing: Paris, pp. 147.
51. Ibid, p. 155.
52. LeStrange, Guy (1977). The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia and Central Asia from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur. Lahore: Al-Biruni, p. 401.
53. Hermann, Monuments of Merv, p. 126.
54. Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, p. 402
55. Herrmann, Monuments of Merv, pp. 127-128.
56. Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, pp. 402-403.
57. Herrmann, Monuments of Merv, p. 82.
58. Gall, Carlotta (Nov. 21, 1998). “Winged Gods of the Desert.” The Financial Times.
59. Maslow, Jonathan (1994). Sacred Horses: Memoirs of a Turkmen Cowboy. New York: Random House, pp. 113.
60. Gall, “Winged Gods of the Desert.”
61. Associated Press (Dec. 27, 1999). “Turkmenistan Bans Smoking in Public Places.”
62. Brice, W.C. (1978). The Environmental History of the Near and Middle East Since the Last Ice Age. Academic Press: London, p. 329.
63. LeStrange, Lands of the Easte
rn Caliphate, p. 457.
64. Morgan, E.D. and C.H. Coote (Eds.) (1967). Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and Other Englishmen. New York: Burt Franklin Publishers, p. 68.
65. LeStrange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, p. 403.
66. United Press International (March 2, 2005). “President Closes Down Nation’s Hospitals.”
67. CIA. “World Factbook: Turkmenistan.” Retrieved July 4, 2007, from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tx.html
68. Most of Turkmenistan’s GDP comes from exports. About 80 percent of Turkmenistan’s exports are “fuels and mining products” and 10 percent are “agricultural products.” The first category includes mostly gas and oil, while the second is mostly cotton. World Trade Organization (2007). “Country Profiles: Turkmenistan.” World Bank (2007). “Turkmenistan Data Profile.”
69. Allworth, Central Asia, p. 127, and Whitman, John. “Turkestan Cotton in Imperial Russia.” American Slavic and East European Review, 1956. Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 190-205.
