Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  “This isn’t right!” I try again.

  Suddenly, they’re back to speaking incomprehensibly, and I’m starting to panic.

  “No!” I say firmly. “The Sofitel, behind!”

  I start yelling; they remain unflinchingly calm.

  “It’s okay,” they keep saying in such soft and unworried tones that I start to doubt myself. Maybe I’m overreacting? Maybe they do know where we’re going?

  I start running through my options, in case my gut feeling is right. I don’t know Turkmenistan’s emergency number, but I can probably look it up in the Lonely Planet on my phone. Should I call and try to explain what’s happening? See if they can translate? Look up the number for the U.S. embassy?

  And then, to my horror, I see that we’re approaching a highway leading out of the city. I know, instantly, that I’m in a very bad situation.

  “Stop,” I scream, in Russian and English. “Stop. STOP. STOP!”

  They stay calm. The car slows but doesn’t stop. “It’s over there,” the driver repeats, gesturing.

  “STOP!” I yell again and open the door for emphasis.

  I’ve imagined this moment in countless daydreams. What would I do if someone tried to kidnap me? I’ve pictured myself jumping out of a moving car, and in these fantasies, I land, scraped and shaken, but otherwise unharmed.

  We can’t be going more than twenty miles an hour, but as soon as I see the asphalt rushing past in a blur beneath the door, I know I won’t jump.

  “It’s there,” the driver repeats.

  I close the door, because staying in the car seems less terrifying than jumping out of it, and because I’m still clinging to the last threads of hope that he’s telling the truth.

  And there’s still the fact that they’re so calm! Aren’t criminals angry and jumpy and jittery? Don’t they scream at their captives and accidentally fire their guns when a clanking radiator startles them? I’m hysterical, and these guys seem unperturbed. Maybe the hotel is just up ahead?

  Then we pull onto the highway.

  Scenes of the endless desert I drove through to get here play through my mind. Once you leave Ashgabat, it’s all desolate, uninhabited stretches of sand.

  Suddenly, I’m not wondering whether I should call the U.S. embassy or look up Turkmenistan’s emergency number. I know I need to get out of this car immediately.

  “STOP,” I yell, and again I open my door. We’re now driving highway speeds, and I know there’s no way I’m jumping out of the car, but I also know that my last hope involves not closing this door.

  The last exit before the city ends is for the airport, and though we’ve passed the off-ramp, there’s an on-ramp up ahead for cars leaving the airport to get on the highway.

  “STOP,” I scream. “STOP NOW.”

  The cars around us start honking in response, I assume, to a sedan casually driving down the highway with one door wide open.

  “I can’t stop,” the driver says. “There’s a car.”

  And he’s right—a car merging from the airport on-ramp is blocking the path to the shoulder, but this car lays on its horn so furiously that the ones behind follow suit. Up ahead in the distance, I see a vast, deserted nothingness.

  I keep my door open, and I keep yelling, and the cars around us keep honking, and then he’s slowing down, he’s pulling over, he’s stopping.

  I jump out of the car and run in the opposite direction.

  The initial burst of adrenaline carries me 100 feet before I turn back around. The car hasn’t moved. I continue to back away, pulse electric as if I’m staring down a predator. The car stays where it is for a few moments. Are they waiting for me to get back in? The brake lights go off—they’re going to drive away. The car rolls only a few feet and then stops again, as if the two men in the car are debating something. I watch, heart pounding, ready to start sprinting again if they get out. But they don’t, and a few moments later, they drive off and disappear down the highway.

  I want to cry more badly than I ever have in my life. I want to sit on the side of the highway and sob until my eyes are puffy and my eyeliner runs down my cheeks.

  But I’m stranded on the side of the highway on the outskirts of Ashgabat with no clue where I am, and a good cry is a luxury I can’t afford.

  A steady stream of traffic passes by on the highway, which is well lit for the next few hundred yards. There’s a pedestrian overpass in front of me. But there are no other pedestrians.

  The neon outlines of Ashgabat’s skyscrapers glimmering far off in the distance confirm my suspicions: I’m far outside the city center, and we were heading farther out. I look around. I’m not even in a suburb. There’s nothing out here but the highway, a set of railroad tracks, a train guardhouse, and empty land.

  Through the open guardhouse door, I see a disheveled-looking older man in a rumpled uniform.

  I call the U.S. embassy to say that I’m ready for my Navy SEAL rescue.

  Unfortunately, I reach the U.S. embassy’s voice mail.

  It lists an after-hours emergency number, which I dial, assuming it will be manned/womanned by a Navy SEAL dispatcher.

  The man that I reach does not seem to have access to the Navy SEALs.

  “Yeah . . .” he says, after I finish my story. “What I’d recommend is, walk back in the direction you came from.”

  “But I’m really far outside the city!” I protest. “I’m at least a twenty-minute drive!”

  “Oh.” He pauses. “Well, in that case, you’re probably better off taking a taxi.”

  My jaw drops. “I’m on the side of a highway! I don’t see any taxis, and anyway, I wouldn’t really feel comfortable getting in one again, because of, you know, what just happened . . .”

  “I’m not really sure what to tell you . . .” He trails off.

  “Can you speak Russian?” I ask. “There’s this guy guarding a train crossing—”

  He tells me he doesn’t. He also doesn’t speak Turkmen. I want to ask how he got an embassy job in a country where he doesn’t speak any of the local languages, but instead I say, “Are you . . . in Ashgabat?”

  “I am,” he answers, “but I’m new here, and I’m not too familiar with the city.”

  “So there’s nothing you can do to help me?” I ask.

  He confirms.

  I am never paying my taxes again, I think as I hang up the phone.

  My next recourse is the train guard.

  He does not seem particularly fazed by the appearance of a distraught American woman at his guardhouse in the middle of nowhere. His eyes stare off in two different directions.

  “Where am I?” I ask.

  He names the locality we’re in.

  “Are we in Ashgabat?” I ask.

  He seems confused and points to the distant skyline.

  My already imperfect Russian, perhaps downgraded by my acute hysteria, prevents our conversation from progressing, so I call Oleg to translate. Through Oleg, I learn that I am, as I thought, far north of the city, and that the only way back to the glittering skyscrapers downtown is to cross the highway and flag down a car.

  The hardest part of being potentially kidnapped and stranded on the side of a highway on the outskirts of Ashgabat is working up the courage to trust someone enough to get back to safety.

  I’m determined to get in a car with at least one other woman in it. The first driver who stops is a single man, and I wave him on. But he waits, and I notice his car is a BMW, which, for some reason, reassures me. Criminals never have nice cars, right? At least, not the kidnapping kind.

  His name is Azat, and he speaks good English. When I tell him what happened to me, he bangs on the steering wheel. “Those fucking bastards!” Then he brightens. “Don’t worry! God sent me to save you.”

  Azat speaks five languages and, until recently, had been working in logistics, although he’s vague about the sequence of events that culminated in his driving a taxi. So far, he’s been unsuccessful in his attempts to find a new
job because of “the fucking people in this country!”

  Part of me wants to suggest that his anger issues could be part of the problem, but then the other part of me remembers where I am.

  Azat does his best to cheer me up. He is very certain that God played a hand in everything from my abduction to his having found me. “When bad things happen, it’s always for a reason, and good things, too,” he says in a way that makes me think he is perhaps talking more about his own life than mine.

  Azat drops me off at the Sofitel with a copy of his résumé, in case I know someone in the oil processing industry looking for a polyglot with a specialization in logistics.

  “Finally, I want to tell you about something, Audrey,” he says, and from the way that he says it, I have a hunch that “something” is going to be “God.” Sure enough, he opens with a declaration that “Whether you’re Christian, Muslim, whatever, God is God,” and then rambles his way to something about, “If you go somewhere and you die, it’s okay, because God says it’s time for you to die. And if you don’t die, you don’t worry, because—”

  “Okay, bye!” I say, jumping out of the cab in the middle of his sermon. It’s as if God has inspired me to take flight.

  It’s hard to know what to think about what has happened. The waiter at the Sofitel bar first says that he thinks the guys were up to no good, but then changes his mind, and says it’s more likely that the boys hadn’t understood me. He suggests that they might not have spoken Russian, or that they were from out of town, and he, too, notes taxi drivers’ tendencies toward roundabout routes. He tells me that Ashgabat’s suburbs are slowly filling with luxury hotels (which I’m never able to find any evidence of), and that they may have heard the name “Sofitel” and assumed it was out of town, although when he draws me a map that includes the Sofitel, the location of the new hotels, and the place where I’d jumped out of the cab, this theory starts to fall apart. The new developments are concentrated on the east side of town, while we had been far to the west.

  He tells me that laws in Turkmenistan are so strict and the punishment so severe that people don’t commit crimes on impulse. He underscores the one thing that was most confusing to me, which was that they did eventually stop the car and allow me to go. But he also concedes that the Sofitel is the city’s most famous hotel, and that “everyone” should know where it is.

  My hotel calls an English-speaking tour operator, who tells me that he’s never heard of anything like this happening to tourists, which, to me, doesn’t seem to prove anything. “Anyway, you’re safe,” he says, “because your hotel is run by the police.”

  “Huh?” I say.

  “You didn’t notice that it’s all police working there?”

  The Lord’s sentinel Azat is adamant that the highway we were driving on in the sedan led only out of Ashgabat, and although he clearly has misplaced rage issues, maps that I later study seem to confirm this.

  Whether the men stopped the car because they were worried that an open car door on a major car highway would attract too much attention or because they genuinely weren’t trying to hurt me, I’ll probably never know. My gut feeling is that it was bad. I’ve taken plenty of taxis in countries where I don’t speak the language, and usually, when you start shouting, the driver pulls over and shouts back. These guys never lost their cool.

  The more I talk to people, and the more I learn about Turkmenistan, the more I suspect the worst. A few months later, a Russian friend tells me about a Turkmen gang that was busted for kidnapping women and trafficking them into the sex trade.

  “Someone committing a crime for the first time would have freaked out when you started freaking out,” one of my students says. “Only people who’ve done this many, many times before would have been calm.”

  The first full Russian phrase I learned was for a joke I had written about my upcoming trip. “I’m learning Russian because I’m traveling through Central Asia for a few months,” it went, “and so far, the only thing I’ve learned how to say is как интересно. я хочу уехать из туркменистана прямо сейчас. Which means, Oh, how interesting! I would like to leave Turkmenistan now.” It looks like the joke was on me.

  12

  How to Get out of Turkmenistan When You’re out of Cash

  If you should ever find yourself, as I will shortly, in Turkmenistan, out of cash, on the run from a restaurant in which you dined and dashed, and in desperate need of a $60 ride to the border on the day your visa expires, do not despair. Your situation is not good, but it’s not hopeless. You can make it to Kazakhstan, but you must maintain faith, commit to courage, and above all, not tell anyone.

  The morning after the taxi ride, I fly to Turkmenbashi, a city near the border with Kazakhstan. I would have just flown to Kazakhstan, but my visa will only allow me to exit the country via one land border on the Caspian Sea. The border is a four-hour drive from Turkmenbashi, and by the time I arrive, it’s too late in the day to make the trip. Though I’m anxious to leave Turkmenistan, I’ll have to spend the night here.

  I’m running low on cash because I hadn’t realized my debit and credit cards wouldn’t work in Turkmenistan. This could have presented an even bigger problem, but luckily, I’d withdrawn a good amount before leaving Uzbekistan. It probably would have been enough to get me through if I hadn’t panic-purchased the plane ticket to the border.

  I won’t be able to withdraw money until I leave the country. I should be sweating, but I feel oddly calm. After the ill-fated cab, marble-clad Ashgabat seemed even more menacing. By contrast, the normal-looking streets and buildings of Turkmenbashi put me at ease.

  My guidebook only lists one hotel for the city, so I head there to get the day over with. The receptionist hears one syllable of my Russian and informs me that I can’t have a room.

  But I’m not taking no for an answer. “Here’s my passport,” I say, in English that she doesn’t speak.

  “Not possible,” she replies, in Russian.

  We go back and forth like this: her pointing at my passport and insisting I can’t stay, me trying to climb over the desk and grab one of the keys. Finally, she calls out to an unseen backroom, and a young blonde woman appears.

  Her name is Vera, and she now has the unfortunate task of translating a battle of the wills.

  “Americans . . . can’t . . . live here,” she labors to communicate in rusty English.

  “I don’t mind,” I reply cheerfully. “I’ll stay here anyway.”

  The receptionist’s stance is unwavering; I try begging and threatening and finally explaining myself. “Yesterday, I was . . . do you know this word . . . kidnapped,” I begin. It’s the first time I’ve used that word—all day, I’ve been telling myself it must have been a misunderstanding—and as soon as I finish saying it, I burst into tears.

  Maybe Vera understands, or reads the look on my face, or maybe crying is all it takes. Either way, I can suddenly stay. Vera is going to accompany me to one specific branch of one specific bank, where, just as for the secret police hotel, I’ll exchange the amount of currency for my bill and get notarized proof.

  On the walk to the bank, I ask Vera how she learned English, and she tells me she’d been taking lessons, but had to stop when her level surpassed that of the teachers. “It’s hard to get good English teachers to come here,” she sighs.

  “Why don’t you take online classes?” I ask.

  “Online?” she replies, confused.

  I explain how online classes work, and she shakes her head. To get online, she has to go to an Internet cafe, where the connection is too slow and expensive for video classes.

  Vera dreams of being a translator. But she needs more English to get there, and until a better teacher shows up in Turkmenbashi, there’s nothing she can do to further her ambitions. She’s stuck at the hotel, waiting.

  On our walk back, we pause to take a selfie in front of a monument.

  “What’s your e-mail address?” I ask. �
�So I can send you the picture.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t have one.”

  After paying for the hotel, I’m down to my last twenty dollars. This is a problem, because I’ve negotiated a ride to the border for the next morning for $60 U.S. But it’s been a long two days: I decide to let Future Audrey handle this.

  I still have half a day to kill, which Vera suggests I do at a beach on the Caspian Sea. A ride there is less than three dollars, which I calculate that I’ve earned.

  The beach is beside a new development full of ritzy hotels, and I share my taxi there with a Turkish engineer heading over to check out a work site.

  “It looks like Abu Dhabi,” I observe as we draw near.

  “You have a good eye,” he replies. “We copied most of the designs from buildings there.”

  The swanky development is, unsurprisingly, empty. The hotels haven’t had a lot of success convincing tourists to take a beach vacation in Turkmenistan. Not that it matters: the development is just an ego project for the president.

  I get out beside one of the hotels and make my way down to a thin sliver of public beach separated from the pristinely manicured resort beaches by a rocky jetty. I look up and down the beach: I see no one else.

  Entirely alone, I can finally let my guard down. For the first time since it happened, I think about last night in Ashgabat. I return to that moment on the side of the highway.

  A cold wind whips in off the waves that a halfhearted afternoon sun has rendered a dull gray. I tuck my hands into my coat pockets and look down at the sand, where I notice a few seashells. I lean down and pick one up.

  Suddenly, I’m crying, sobbing actually, because I’m overwhelmed by a powerful but unfamiliar feeling. I can’t even name it: it’s something like gratitude, or maybe love in its purest form. Everything else melts away and life suddenly seems so simple. No matter what I call to mind, I can feel only love. Grudges and resentments seem ridiculous in the face of this all-encompassing sense of good. I’m incapable of feeling anger, even at my most reliable targets. Terrorism. Republicans. Anton. I forgive everyone. I forgive myself.