Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (19 page)

"I will build a forest in the desert," Niyazov had promised. Turkmen said that he had loved the pine forests of Russia. He had been inspired by them; he missed them here among the stones and the dunes. Turkmenistan—its wind-scoured plains and ravines of sun-scorched rock—deserved a forest.

He had ordered the planting of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young trees; and although they were two or three feet high—the planting was still going on when I was in Ashgabat—the forestation plan was not a success.

Now, there are trees that are drought-resistant—certain cypresses, certain poplars, the low twisted trees you see in the parched ravines of Patagonia, the ones that somehow flourish in the howling wilderness of China's Xinjiang Uygur region. But the Douglas firs, white pines, and arborvitae, dear to the heart and memory of Niyazov, were doing badly. They had been planted in immensely long ranks and rows at the center of Ashgabat, and on great swaths of dry land outside the city, as a sort of instant forest. Drip irrigation had been rigged to keep them watered, but they were the wrong species. They were baked by the sun, blown flat by the wind, and a full third of them had that peculiar rust-red hue, the vivid color of an evergreen's death.

"They are called
arçabil,"
my new guide, Masut, said. "He, um, likes them."

I was waiting for someone to speak the leader's name. "Turkmenbashi" was too pompous, "Niyazov" too presumptuous and familiar. "The President" and "the Leader" were too formal, and "the Prophet" was hard to say with a straight face. Later I learned that Turkmen usually referred to him as
mähriban ata,
"dear father," or
serdar,
"tribal leader."

We were heading west, past signs saying
PEOPLE-MOTHERLAND-TURKMENBASHI
, scores of them, out of the city, where more forest had been planted and was seriously stunted and brown; some trees that had been secured by guy wires had toppled over. The trees had come from
Russia and Ukraine—Bashi had swapped them for gas. The plantings looked like an enormous tree farm that had lost its lease.

On the side of a mountain, in large letters carved from marble blocks, was this sign in Turkmen:
OUR HEALTH ROAD OF OUR GREAT ETERNAL LEADER
. It was just the sort of clifftop message I had seen a decade before in Albania, and without doubt it would end up the same way, as a pile of rubble in the adjacent valley. This one was meant to encourage people to walk on the paved path that wound through the dying dwarf forest.

"He wants us to be healthy," Masut said.

But it was questionable whether Niyazov did want his people to be healthy. He had closed all the hospitals outside Ashgabat, replaced thousands of health care workers with military conscripts, and instructed the country's doctors to pledge their allegiance to him, Turkmenbashi, and to the
Rukhnama
rather than taking the Hippocratic oath.

"Turkmen look healthy to me," I said. "They have a good diet. They don't smoke. They seem hard-working."

"But he wants us to walk on the Health Road."

That was the program. Never mind that you were a nomad or a villager or a cotton picker, you had to do as you were told, healthwise: walk on the Eternal Great Leader's road, more than twenty miles of paved pathway traversing the mountainside. One of Bashi's many residences lay beyond that hillside, another palace. He claimed that the $100 million gold-domed, white marble presidential palace built for him was not of his choosing. ("All I wanted was a small, cozy house.")

"And many people don't have jobs," Masut said. "The figure could be sixty percent unemployed outside Ashgabat."

"I'm surprised people aren't angry," I said.

"Some are angry. But we have cheap things, too. Natural gas for heating is free. Electricity is free. Gasoline is three cents a gallon. I can fill the tank of this car for fifty cents."

"What do you think are the problems here?" I asked.

"Yes, we have problems, but we can't address problems, because there are no problems," Masut said and smiled at me, the smile that said:
Please, no more questions.

Another day we went, Masut and I, to the big bazaar outside Ashgabat, which had two names: the Tolkuchka bazaar, from a Russian word that
meant pushing, and the Jygyldyk bazaar, an onomatopoeic word in Turkmen that meant something like babbling or jabbering.

Turkmen have a horror of the evil eye, perhaps a lingering feature of the shamanism that has dominated the spiritual life in this region from ancient times, an anxious reflex that is apparent in every sphere of Turkmen existence. This aspect of superstition, combined with Islam, has produced holy-seeming paraphernalia for warding off the evil eye. These trinkets were on sale in many of the stalls in the bazaar, not just the staring glass eye or the carved wooden talisman, but a sheep-horn symbol that Masut said was effective against maledictions. This totemism was all part of the praying, the relic hunting, the tokens, the images, the bows and toy cars and dollhouses that I had seen elsewhere. In a police state that had total control of all coming and going, a locked-down populace, it was rather touching to see people obsessed with dark magic and wicked forces.

It seemed that evil came as a weird and withering blast from thin air in the form of a diabolical death ray. The most common specific against this bedevilment was a charm that broke the force into pieces, a sort of prism made of colored wool that one wore as a necklace or bracelet, or hung over a bed or a doorway. Some of these charms looked like the kind of multicolored lanyards I had made in summer camp when I was a boy. But never mind how insubstantial they looked; the things worked, or so I was assured by Masut, who bought me a length of brown and red rope, an evil-eye deflector, to get me through to Uzbekistan.

"And this herb is so powerful," Masut said, fingering a small sack of dried leaves, "that it is known as Hundred Husbands."

In most respects, the Tolkuchka bazaar on the outskirts of Ashgabat was greater, more vital and various, than its rivals—say, the covered market in Istanbul, the bazaar in Damascus, or the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota—with billowing marquees and drapes marking off the separate stalls. It was highly competitive and intensely local—not a tourist to be seen. It covered many acres, and the horse market occupied what could have been an entire fairground.

Buying a carpet or a melon or a sack of spices was only part of the interest of such a bazaar. A peripheral activity was the interaction of people—farmers from afar with their families, gawky boys, shy girls. The bazaar was a legitimate place for people to stare, to meet, and, while not exactly to flirt, to exchange smiles. Country people travel for a day or
two on an old bus or a night train to get to Ashgabat and meet city people; families rendezvous for picnics; men swagger and shout, and boys gape and seem to imitate them. This bazaar was a kind of vortex, drawing in Turkmen from all over in an ancient ceremony of encounter and negotiation, isolated people delighted to be in a big noisy crowd, with music playing and camels howling and hawkers shouting for customers.

Everything imaginable was on sale, not just Chinese clothes, shoes, belts, and blue jeans, but rows and rows of locally made velveteen dresses and their detachable white hand-embroidered collars, yoke-shaped and lovely, that are unique to Turkmen women.

Besides the produce—tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, rice, herbs, and fresh fruit, piles of it in stalls and on carts—were the traditional weavings of Turkmenistan: an acre of the bazaar devoted to rugs and carpets, most of them of a reddish hue but some of them green and yellow.

"You see these? They are fish," Masut said, indicating the motif of fish bones on a large carpet. "This one is from a clan that lives on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where fish are an important symbol."

Brassware, samovars, silver spoons, silver dishes, the sort of flea market treasures I'd seen in Tbilisi—tables and tables of these. Russian stuff—belt buckles, military buttons, medals, and campaign ribbons. And bronze artifacts, pottery from digs, some that looked genuine, others that looked fake. Stacks of coins, too, some of them rubles from the departed regime, and lots of them that the sellers swore were ancient—with a provenance that was Seljuk, Ottoman, Luristan, Gulistan, coins from the ruined cities in the desert, from the Gurly Turkmen of Afghanistan and India. How many of these were fakes? Probably many. But I found a man who swore that a coin I was flipping was actually gold, from Merv or Bokhara, and so I bought it for its portability, and its beauty, and the slipperiness of its head and tail.

Something else attracted me at the Tolkuchka bazaar: its multiracial shoppers and stallholders. Most of the people were obviously Turkmen, but there were many Russians, and some Persians, Azeris, and Uzbeks, too. In the 1930s, Stalin decreed that the Soviet populations be dispersed, so that the pull of native peoples to be unified would be weakened, the color of the population, so to speak, would be diluted. On the one hand, it gave republics like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan the look of a melting pot; on the other hand, it made them tractable.

The farthest-flung ethnic group at the bazaar, and so in Turkmenistan, were the Koreans.

"Stalin sent you?" I asked.

"He sent my father and mother," a woman said. She wore a white cap, like a nurse's cap, and a white apron.

There were several tables of Korean women, smiling, gold teeth glinting, shouting for attention, with trays piled high with pickled cabbage.

"Kimchi," I said, the only Korean word I knew.

"Yes, yes! Try some!"

"It's cheap. It's the best. Buy some."

"Take me to America!"

***

ONE AFTERNOON IN ASHGABAT
I caused a diplomatic incident—a common occurrence in Turkmenistan, but an inconvenience to a foreign traveler wishing for anonymity. Riling the government was one of the perils of life here, and was probably the reason Turkmen habitually kept their heads down and whispered.

I had agreed to give a harmless pep talk in Ashgabat to some writers and journalists. About thirty men and women showed up at a sort of boardroom in a hotel that the U.S. embassy used as an annex. This being Turkmenistan, they were of every physical type: stylish women in velvet dresses and white collars with the impassive faces of nomads, dark beaky men in heavy coats, younger mustached men in suits, Russian aunties in blue dresses and carrying satchels, some hefty warrior types braced behind their chairs with arms folded, a furtive man fussing with a big shoulder bag, and two pale young women, slender Slavic beauties with lank blond hair, standing shyly by the wall, staring at me with limpid blue eyes.

My topic was again the return journey, the pleasure of a traveler's growing older, how the passage of time reveals the truth of people and places. I spoke for about twenty minutes, with a young Turkmen translator who was fluent in English. At the end there was polite applause. The man who had been fussing with his shoulder bag had taken out an expensive camera and begun snapping pictures.

"Any questions?"

Hands shot up.

"What do you think of Islam?" one man asked.

I made a tactful reply, commending the verses of the Koran encouraging hospitality that I, a traveler among Muslims, appreciated, and quickly I moved on to the next question.

"I am a poet," one of the Russian aunties declared. She went on to ask how she might get her poems translated into English and published in the United States.

I referred her to the fellow who had translated her question.

"How do you write a novel?" a young man asked.

I mentioned needing an idea, and characters, and a setting, and about two years of solitude.

"You are not here for very long," another man said. "How can you understand us in such a short time?"

"You're right," I said. "It's impossible. So what particular thing do you think it's important for me to understand about Turkmenistan?"

"Do you know about the pensions?"

"No, I don't. Tell me"

"The government has reduced the state pensions for some people," he said, his voice rising. "In some cases, these were people who were granted pensions by the Soviet government, but when Turkmenistan became independent, these were eliminated. What do you think of that?"

As he spoke, the man with the camera leaned over and began snapping his picture.

He turned and snapped my picture as I said, "We have a similar problem in the United States. A lot of older people will have to work longer because the government pension fund is running out of money. The qualifying age for Social Security is now almost sixty-six, and it's rising."

"But what about us?" the questioner asked. Now his voice was strident. "This situation is serious."

The photographer positioned himself at the edge of the row of chairs and was clicking away.

"You're not getting your pension?"

"Many thousands of people are not getting it! They were workers. Now they're old and they have nothing to live on. This is a wealthy country, but they are poor. The government has done this to us. Why don't you write about that?"

"You're a writer—all you people are writers," I said. "You are the people who should write about it, not me. You have all the facts. So why don't you do it?"

"I am not a writer," the man said. "I am chairman of the Unity and Neutrality Party of Turkmenistan."

Before this could be translated, the photographer leaped forward and snapped pictures from several angles, his shoulder bag bumping his side.

And then an American security officer took three strides towards the photographer and, approaching him from behind, grasped his coat in one hand and snatched the camera with his other hand. He frog-marched the man to the back of the room and outside. This all happened so fast, the photographer did not have time to protest, though I heard him howl as the door slammed.

"Do you write about love?" one of the pretty blue-eyed women asked.

Constantly, I said. I elaborated on this subject, and then declared the meeting over. The room emptied quickly.