It’s like a switch has been flipped and I suddenly understand some powerful, larger truth. Not that life is good or that there is some good in everything, but that there is some privilege in this: in simply being here, in simply being alive.
I stay on the beach for as long as I can, because I want to hold on to this feeling. I somehow know that I’ll lose it as soon as I step off the sand, and I’m desperate to trap it inside of me. I don’t want to go back to that other way of being, of getting annoyed at a long wait for a train or condemning people for the wrongs they do me.
Why can’t I carry this truth with me? Is it because it’s an illusion, or because I still have a lot of growing up to do?
I wish I could say that after that moment I never again poison a relationship or summon the conductor when someone takes a call on the quiet car. But this feeling is fleeting, its truth unsubstantiated, and by the time I am home, the effects of this day will have dwindled to an occasional, passing thought when I catch myself being petty. I’d be a way better person, I think, if I could get kidnapped every once in a while.
It never occurs to me to abandon the trip after the kidnapping scare.
It’s not that I have never felt unsafe traveling alone as a woman. There have been moments that gave me pause and dark streets I hurried along. I try not to stay out late or draw attention to myself. As much as I can, I stay alert to my surroundings, and I listen to my gut.
In spite of that, the ride to the Sofitel could have easily ended differently. I’ll take credit for the quick thinking that led to creating a diversion and drawing attention to our car, but if any number of tiny details had been different—if there hadn’t been anyone around to honk, if one of the men had pulled out a weapon—the outcome might have been something that no amount of quick thinking could have prevented.
But in this moment, the overwhelming sense I have is that something bad happened and I got myself out of it.
Later, a well-meaning relative tries to insinuate that an angel saved me.
“No,” I snap. “I saved myself.”
I go to a nearby restaurant and order a dinner that I think costs $10, but when the bill comes, it’s for $40.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell the waitress, “but I don’t have enough cash.”
She’s confused.
I open my wallet to show her and then offer her all three of my credit cards. As I suspected, none work.
She can see I’m getting upset. “Don’t worry!” she says. “Can you come back tomorrow and pay?”
I know that I can’t.
I’ve never stolen anything in my life, and I feel awful as I lie to the waitress and tell her I’ll return in the morning with the money to cover my bill. I feel even worse that she seems to trust me completely as she carefully writes the address and a reminder of how much money to bring on a card that she gives me.
“See you tomorrow.” She smiles.
The next morning, I show up for my ride to the border. I haven’t mentioned that I have no way of paying for it. My plan is to remain very silent on the subject.
Our driver is a young Turkmen man with a wife and small children at home; my companions, three older, weathered Kazakh men. It’s very unclear why anyone besides me is making this trip. There’s vague mention of family: one of the Kazakh men seems to be the Turkmen driver’s uncle, and it seems families are scattered on both sides of a border that was once more like a state line.
Two of the Kazakh men are short, round, and difficult to tell apart, but the third is easily distinguishable. He’s tall and thin and has dressed in a worn pin-striped suit and battered cowboy hat for the ride. There’s something regal about the way he holds himself, though his nose looks like it’s been broken, and a cigarette burn mars his right sleeve. On one hand is a small homemade tattoo.
His two stout friends smile convivially; the Kazakh cowboy shoots me a pointed question. “Do you have a husband and children?” he asks.
I tell him I don’t.
“I am not married,” he declares. His tone is less flirtatious, more wedding guest about to request “Single Ladies.”
I smile and say nothing, reminding myself that I have no way of paying for this ride, and therefore no right to complain.
On our ride to the border, we pass burning smokestacks, empty oil containers sitting in front yards, mountains, and heavy machinery.
Turkmenistan’s northwest border is dominated by heavy industry. Specifically, oil. It scars and chews up the landscape, which is really saying something, because the landscape is mostly barren desert.
The ride is so bumpy that we put on our seat belts. Tires have cut paths in the sand beside what appears to have once been a functioning highway; several times, eighteen-wheelers barrel down it toward us.
The men chat in local languages—a mix of Kazakh and Turkmen and Russian—and I stare out the window, wondering how I will pay the driver and contemplating my other options. Now that I’ve skipped out on one check, I am an accomplished, if guilt-ridden criminal. I suppose I was in Uzbekistan too, but those were laws everyone else was breaking too, and doing so didn’t violate my principles. This time, it feels like I stole from a person. Perhaps I am now really living a life of crime. Maybe from this day forward, I won’t be able to resist the urge to hop turnstiles, commit fraud, and jaywalk.
The problem is that rides to the border normally end at the border. The driver drops you off at an ominous-looking gate, and then you walk through the space in which one country ends and another begins. At the end, you reach another gate, and negotiate another ride onward to your final destination. I know I can get money out of an ATM in Kazakhstan, but our driver will be long gone.
It’s safe to assume that no one will be happy when I announce that I am out of cash. It’s equally safe to assume that the driver does not accept Venmo. I’m considering asking one of the Kazakh noncowboys to spot me until we hit the first ATM in Kazakhstan. I’ve been furtively looking up Russian words I haven’t needed yet in my dictionary: borrow, pay back, also ran out on a check in Turkmenbashi and don’t really need you to do anything about that, just wanted to get it off my chest.
Just before the border, we pull off at a cairn, where my companions step out to pray. I realize this must be a holy site.
Many rides I’ve taken in Central Asia have included a stop off at a holy site whose historical origins seem murky. Everyone, it seems, has a spot where the prophet Mohammed’s daughter or son-in-law visited or was buried or was once buried before his grave was moved. But the ritual is always the same: the devout run their hands over their faces as reflexively as Americans offer benedictions after sneezes.
I came to Central Asia a month ago knowing little about the place, except that it had once been part of the Soviet Union. Since then, I’ve wandered through countries I’d previously barely heard of, trying to both mask my ignorance and rid myself of it.
Travel is often espoused as a way of understanding the world and the people in it, but the things I now know about Central Asia are still vastly outnumbered by the things I don’t: which parts of this ritual belong to what religion, many of the words these men speak to me, the landscape, the desert, the Kazakh cowboy. Maybe I’m supposed to understand that these are people, just like you and me!, though if I didn’t know that before, how will a four-hour drive through the desert change that? But maybe for the rest of my life, when I hear the word Turkmenistan, I will remember this moment and the name will mean something to me that the names of places I haven’t been do not, or maybe my face will flush with anger when I remember the men whose car I jumped out of on the side of a highway, or maybe I’ll feel a pang of guilt about running away from an unpaid check, or maybe all of these things will happen at once in a flash, and then I’ll be back to worrying about money and what there is to eat in the house and whether I should go out and get snacks.
There’s a long line of trucks waiting to cross the border, and our Jeep slips in behind them. We turn off the engine. Thi
s is nice, because I now have extra time to fret about our impending farewell from the driver, who will likely ask me for the money for this trip, which I do not have.
One of the non-Kazakh cowboys is nudging me, pointing to the truck beside me. “It’s from Belarus!” he marvels.
I look at the license plates, and he’s right. For a moment, I assume he is marveling for the same reason I am: because Belarus is Europe’s last dictatorship, because what a strange place it must be, because what must it be like to be from a place with so little freedom and such systemic corruption and ineptitude weighing down on you? And then I realize that Turkmenistan is no different, and that he’s marveling because Belarus is so far from where we are now.
We crawl toward a border outpost more desolate than any other I’ve seen, which is saying something, because I crossed from Tajikistan into Kyrgyzstan in mountains surrounded by no-man’s-land. But the isolation here is even more apparent, because the land is flat, and you can see for miles in every direction and all you can see is sand and a sad-looking outhouse.
While I’m patronizing the outhouse, it briefly occurs to me that I could avoid this whole no-cash-to-pay-for-the-ride mess by just not returning from the outhouse, waiting until the Kazakh cowboy has crossed and the Jeep has headed back to Turkmenbashi, but then I remember that they have my luggage, and besides, I don’t think I want to be the type of person who travels the world regularly leaving debts unpaid.
I return to the Jeep as the traffic lets up, and suddenly we are all getting out of the car with our luggage to walk through the border checkpoint while our driver stays with the car.
The Kazakh cowboy insists on carrying my suitcase into the border outpost.
“He’s going to Kazakhstan?” I ask nervously, re: the driver.
The Kazakh cowboy says yes.
Well, maybe things are looking up.
Inside, things are casual. There’s no line demarcating where Turkmenistan ends and Kazakhstan begins, but there is a queue (which is largely ignored) and an X-ray machine (which seems equally optional). The men pass through with no problem, but the border guard, who is wearing a novelty FBI hat, takes one look at my U.S. passport and refuses to touch it. I try to pass it to him, and he puts up his hands like my passport is a gun and this is a stickup.
He calls over a more senior guard, who frowns and tells me I need a visa to go to Kazakhstan.
I stare in disbelief. “Americans don’t need visas,” I assure him.
He looks at me for a long time, trying to decide whether to believe me. This seems crazy: Can’t he look it up? It occurs to me that this border might be so remote that they don’t have telecommunications, but shouldn’t they have some kind of documentation, or even a handy cheat sheet of nationalities that are and are not allowed in? “Are you sure?” he asks finally.
“Yes!” I exclaim. I open my passport to show him the stamps from when I entered and exited Kazakhstan a month ago.
With nothing, I guess, to dispute my claim, he begrudgingly stamps me in.
We walk out of the border outpost and into Kazakhstan. I could fall to my knees and kiss the ground, which is strange, because I did not previously know myself to be the type of person to do that, but I have the sensation of having survived some kind of ordeal, and of having put it behind me by leaving Turkmenistan. I feel light, almost giddy. Even more so when I see our driver getting back into the Jeep, which I think means that he will drive us to our final destination, and that I can pay him there, that I can be a woman of my word, or something like that.
As we get back in the car, the Kazakh cowboy asks me what I’m writing about, and I try to explain.
“My son wrote a book,” he says.
This comment gets lost as we pack ourselves back into the car, so he says it again.
“My son wrote a book,” the Kazakh cowboy repeats. “It was about how I drank too much. And I hurt my family.” He shakes his head. “I cried and cried as I read it.”
I am unsure if I misunderstood him, because the last thing I’m expecting this weathered Kazakh cowboy to tell me is that his son wrote a book and he cried and cried, but his friend jumps in and confirms.
“He hasn’t had a drink since then,” the friend says.
The Kazakh cowboy nods. “Seven years.”
The mood on the other side is lighter, celebratory even. It’s like Turkmenistan was weighing on all of us, and now we are free. We stop at a convenience store made of wooden planks and buy celebratory rounds of energy drinks that taste like some combination of sugar, medicine, and poison.
We haven’t gone far into Kazakhstan when we pass a car broken down on the side of the road.
Our driver pulls over without any discussion, and the men hop out to help the stranded vehicle. Well, maybe help is a stretch, because our driver appears to be the only one who knows anything about cars, but what the Kazakh cowboy and his friends lack in mechanical know-how, they make up for in shared snacks and camaraderie. They all shake the car from side to side and then stand around, laughing and chatting.
To make strangers seem familiar, all you have to do is add other strangers. Next to even less recognizable faces, the Kazakh cowboy’s looks like one I’ve known all my life.
I realize now why he was so quick to declare his singlehood when we got in the car. He destroyed his family and then tried to right his wrongs, but it was too late.
Maybe the one thing that most unites all of us is not love of family or fear of death or inability to stick to diets, but the fact we’re constantly messing up and trying to make amends. No matter how hard we strive to be good and virtuous, we all end up reading the book that shows us our sins. Our lives are all shaped by past mistakes. And in the moments when the mistakes seem most grave, our greatest ambition isn’t love or money or recognition, but rather, the fortitude to get up and put on a suit and cowboy hat and drive across the desert to a place where one thing ends and another begins.
So, in conclusion, if you should ever find yourself in Turkmenistan, out of cash, and on the run, there’s no need to panic. The driver will be very understanding when he returns from fixing the stranger’s car and you tell him you don’t have any money. When your offer to stop at the first ATM and pay him in Kazakh currency comes off as terrified and pleading, he will laugh and tell you not to worry. And you shouldn’t. It all more or less sorts itself out in the end.
13
Clubbing with Strangers from a Convenience Store in Kazakhstan
The first thing you need to know about Aktau is that the city was built long after the rest of the world had adopted the street name + number convention of assigning addresses. The White House had been at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a century and a half; government leaders had been moving in and out of 10 Downing Street for hundreds of years; even Sherlock Holmes had long ago established residency at 221B Baker Street. The point is that people were using this system, and it seemed to be working.
For reasons that are not immediately obvious to visitors, Aktau’s city planners decided to try something new. Whether because they were tired of coming up with street names or because Russian doesn’t have a saying that means, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” we’ll never know. In any case, the addresses in Aktau are a string of three numbers, separated by dashes, seemingly indecipherable to visitors, residents, and Google Maps alike, making the most reliable method of navigation not directions, but luck.
Instead of 34 West Third Street, an address in Aktau will be given as something like 12–19–04. You could be forgiven for thinking that the person sending you this accidentally messaged you her date of birth.
It turns out that the first number denotes the microdistrict, a Soviet administrative division somewhat analogous to a neighborhood. In Aktau, the microdistricts are numbered, from one to twenty-nine, not in order. Microdistrict three sits between microdistrict six and microdistrict one, which is not adjacent to microdistrict two. The coastline goes: microdistrict four, microdistrict five, mi
crodistrict seven, microdistrict nine, microdistrict fourteen, microdistrict fifteen. Microdistrict twenty-four is also microdistrict twenty-five; microdistricts sixteen through twenty-one are missing.
The second number is the building number, which again seems to follow no discernible pattern. While looking for building thirteen, you might pass building eight, then building eleven, then building fourteen. You would perhaps check across the street, assuming that, as in most places, even- and odd-numbered buildings are on opposite sides of the street, that building eleven is sandwiched between buildings eight and fourteen because someone made a mistake, which you can forgive, because we’re all human, aren’t we? But why does the other side of the street go building five, building six, building fifteen? What kind of anarchy is this? What sins of my forefathers am I atoning for? How badly do I need to eat dinner in this Indian restaurant?
The final number is the room number. For all I know, these numbers might follow an entirely intuitive system of logic. I can’t say because, in my three days in Aktau, I was never able to successfully locate a restaurant or establishment using its 11–19–03 locker combination.
To be fair, if you’re looking at Aktau on a map, the address system kind of makes sense. Patterns that don’t make sense on the ground become logical from a bird’s-eye view. The only problem is, I’m not a bird.
I came to Aktau to fly out of Kazakhstan, which means I have low expectations. When you visit a place specifically for its transportation offerings, you’re not expecting a city that inspired a Paris, je t’aime spin-off. There’s a New York, I Love You. There’s no Newark, I Appreciate Your Airport.
I arrive in Aktau in a shared taxi with two men and a stylish forty-something woman. She wears large sunglasses and carries her belongings in a chic leather purse.
The Central Asian equivalent of A/S/L is A/H/C (Age? Husband? Children?), and so we all go around and share. I brace myself for the usual reaction of horror to “twenty-eight/no/not that I know of,” but it turns out the other woman is also unmarried.
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