Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  ***

  When Allen and I reached the nearest of the two mounds, we saw no evidence of locusts, trenches, ancient civilizations, or Silk Road caravans. Just a lot of dust, some empty bottles and an old tire. On top, though, we discovered two ragged pillars surrounded by rubble. We’d found the mosque.

  Old photographs of the Shaykh Jamal al-Din Mosque show a soaring, arched entrance (a pishtaq) inlaid with two sinuous dragons, surrounded by geometric patterns and Arabic script. It looks about five stories tall and might once have been flanked by two minarets reaching even higher into the sky. The mosque was apparently built for a local notable sometime in the mid-15th Century. One scholar called it, “one of the most unusual and spectacular monuments of Islamic Central Asia.” 27

  By the time we arrived, though, there wasn’t much left. The graceful pishtaq had collapsed and what remained of the famous dragons had been taken to a museum in Ashgabat. All that remained were the two pillars – the sides of the pishtaq. The mosque had been destroyed during a massive earthquake that struck the Ashgabat area in 1948. The quake measured 7.3 on the Richter scale and may have killed as many as 110,000 people in and around the Ashgabat area,28 making it the ninth most destructive earthquake documented by the US Geological Survey.29

  Two men kneeled on carpets before the ruined mosque, praying. I squatted on my heels nearby, looking out over the patchwork of vineyards, cotton fields, and villages spread out below the mound. Gray-black clouds swirled overheard and the wind blew down from the mountains. The ruins had become a shrine where people came to make wishes, tying scraps of fabric to the scrubby trees nearby, leaving amulets in niches in the crumbled brick walls, propping fallen bricks up into teepee shapes. I rolled a scrap of cotton I’d pocketed in the field into a piece of yarn, tied it to a shrub, and made a wish.

  The earthquake that destroyed the mosque was so powerful, the destruction it caused so complete, that there were rumors an atomic bomb had gone off in Ashgabat. A. Abaev, who lived through the quake, wrote about it years later. He was a child, sleeping on the veranda of his family’s one-story home in Ashgabat. The quake woke him. There was silence for a moment and then people started screaming – first a few and then thousands. The earthquake had lasted only a few seconds. In that time, nine of the 17 people in his extended family had been killed.30

  The seven-year-old Saparmurat Niyazov was among the children orphaned that night. His house collapsed and killed his mother and two brothers, according to the Rukhnama. (His father had died a few years earlier, fighting in the Red Army during World War II.) Niyazov sat alone by his ruined home for six days, weeping, before his family was pulled from the wreckage and buried.31 After the Soviet Union fell and Niyazov became Turkmenistan’s president-for-life, he had a massive statue of a bull with a globe on its back built in Ashgabat’s center. The globe was split and a woman was reaching up out of the crack, lifting a child out of the destruction. The sculpture was black, except for the child, which was golden.

  The afternoon fading, Allen and I left the earthquake-ruined mosque and headed back through the cotton fields toward the highway. On the way, we had to pass one of Turkmenistan’s ubiquitous checkpoints. Manned by police or soldiers, they surrounded cities and clogged highways. Intercity journeys could involve clearing six to 10 checkpoints. (Imagine having to stop a half-dozen times while driving from Boston to New York on I-95 so that soldiers could search your car and examine your passport). The policemen at the checkpoint had ignored us on our way out of town, but we caught their attention on the way back – two foreigners appearing from a cotton field.

  Two policemen led us into a little guard shack next to the road, told us to sit down, and asked for our passports. At first they were suspicious. They asked who we were, what we were doing, where we had been, and why we had gone there. They demanded to see the photographs on Allen’s digital camera. One of them searched Allen’s courier bag, pausing to open the crisp white envelope that contained Allen’s Peace Corps salary for the month (I have no idea why he had it with him). I held my breath, sure he was going to pocket some of the cash, but he just looked gravely at Allen, closed the envelope and put it back.

  As the soldiers questioned us, they calmed down. They must have realized we were hapless teachers, not spies. Soon Allen was showing them how to use his camera and we were all taking pictures of each other and laughing. After 20 minutes, they decided to let us go. One of the soldiers stopped a minivan at the checkpoint and ordered the driver to take us back to Abadan. Grinning, the soldiers waved goodbye as the minivan pulled away. Inside, the driver’s wife fed us sweet ruby-colored pomegranates and assured us she would get us home safely, which she did.

  7.

  Permission Required

  For four days, Misha had been drinking vodka by the half-liter, alternately crashing around the house yelling, and passing out on the living room floor. He was an alcoholic and he had just fallen off the wagon, a tri-annual event in the Plotnikov household. My arrival gift, the frosted shot glass, had reappeared and been put to use. I finally understood why Olya had hidden it away right after I’d given it to Misha. I felt like an idiot.

  Olya and Sasha slept at a neighbor’s house. Denis and I stayed at the apartment with Misha, ignoring his furious outbursts and moving him to the couch when he passed out. He was old and small, more pathetic than scary. One night he went on a long rant about how the US stole Alaska from Russia. To calm him down, I promised we’d give it back. He relaxed a bit and then sunk into a fit of self pity.

  I’m a Soviet officer,” he slurred. “I’m a Soviet officer and there’s an American living in my home. What happened? I don’t understand the world anymore.”

  Misha was too drunk to work and Olya wasn’t around to give him money, so he soon ran out of vodka and sobered up. Olya and Sasha moved back in, and we all went on with our lives. I found it hard to hold the episode against Misha; I felt bad for him. Until 1991, he had lived in one of the two most powerful countries on earth. Then one day the Soviet Union fell apart. The new leaders discarded everything Misha had been brought up to believe in, ended communism and made peace with the United States. It was as if the United States suddenly disintegrated into 50 mini-countries, democracy and capitalism were discredited as viable political and economic systems, and China became the dominant world power. I could see how it would be a little disorienting.

  To make things worse, non-Turkmen weren’t very welcome in post-independence Turkmenistan. Most ethnically Russian Turkmen citizens had gone to Russia, but the Plotnikovs had stayed for some reason. I never found out exactly why, but I think the problem was money. They were just scraping by from week to week. They didn’t have enough saved to transport all their belongings to Russia and buy and apartment there. But they were always planning, always hoping.

  Despite Misha’s binge, as my 10-week training period wound down, all the trainees became Peace Corps Volunteers, and Allen, Matt, Laura, and Kellie prepared to move to their new homes in the far corners of Turkmenistan, I was glad I was staying with the Plotnikovs. So, as we organized the going away party, I was only a little bit jealous of the others. The party was at Matt’s host family’s apartment, in a building nearly identical to mine. He lived with Ana and Sesili Burjanadze, a Georgian mother and daughter who sold salads at the Abadan bazaar. Their apartment was on the ground floor, so it had a back porch and a fenced garden.

  Ana was in her 40s, cynical and sharp. About five feet tall with short black hair and dark eyes, when she wasn’t at work she sat at her kitchen table, chain-smoking, drinking cup after cup of coffee, and telling fortunes for a stream of visitors. She used playing cards, coffee grounds, whatever she could lay her hands on. The medium didn’t matter. What she was really doing was counseling people on their financial problems, their love lives, and their jobs. Sesili, barely 20, was shy, quiet, and grounded, a good counter-balance to Ana’s raucous volatility. Ana would sit in that crowded kitchen finishing a crossword puzzle and spinning ou
t a story about how she once beat a woman’s face bloody with the spiked heel of her shoe. Sesili, looking at the floor, would sigh (“Oh, mom”) and stand up to wash some dishes and put on water for more coffee.

  I arrived early for the going away party and Ana put me to work. I skewered eggplants, green peppers, and tomatoes. I chopped carrots, cabbage, and hot peppers. I put chicken legs in a massive bowl to marinate in onions, vinegar, salt, and pepper. I carried an empty five-liter bottle down to the bar and had the bartender fill it up with draft beer. Then I built a wood fire in a grill in the back yard and spent the afternoon drinking beer and roasting chicken kebabs (shashlyk) and vegetables over the glowing coals.

  By the time the kebabs were ready, Ana and Sesili’s apartment and garden were crowded with friends, neighbors, and host families. Everyone had brought a little something to eat and every counter, table, chair, and windowsill in the kitchen was crowded with food: somsas, piroshkis, cookies, chorek, and salads. The house smelled of frying onions, wood smoke, and beer. Ana’s two kittens ran around underfoot, looking for someone to pat them, hoping for a scrap of chicken. There wasn’t enough room at the kitchen table for all the guests, so we ate Turkmen-style. Ana laid out a long tablecloth – a klionka – on the floor in the living room and we all sat around it cross-legged.

  The klionka was loaded with plov (lamb pilaf), chicken shashlyk, roasted vegetables, pickled red peppers, salads, chorek, somsas, cookies, sodas, beer, and vodka. For three hours we ate and took turns making toasts, which in Turkmenistan, are supposed to be sincere and several minutes long. We drank all the vodka so someone ran down to the corner store to buy more. Everyone wished the four departing Volunteers luck and told them to come back and visit soon. Toward the end of the night, Allen’s host mother raised her glass.

  “I’d never met an American before I met Allen and his friends,” she said. “I didn’t know much about your country. But now I know that you’re good people and I will never forget you.”

  We all emptied our glasses.

  Within a few days, the other Volunteers were gone. Autumn had arrived. The leaves on the box elder and Osage-orange trees were turning yellow and falling onto the streets and sidewalks. An army of women with homemade brooms swept them up almost as soon as they touched the pavement. The air smelled like fall and burning leaves. A cold wind blew down from the Kopetdag Mountains, which were already sprinkled with snow. It was sweater weather.

  The Plotnikovs’ apartment didn’t have heat. Instead, we left the oven on, with its door open. On cold nights, we also left the hot water heater on in the banya (the room with the bath, which was separate from the room with the toilet). The heater was a five-foot- tall iron tube full of water, welded on top of an iron box into which a gas line had been routed. To light it, I had to turn on the gas, let it run for a moment, throw a match into the box, and jump back. If I waited a few seconds too long, a flame shot out the front and tried to lick my hand.

  With the training period over, my job at Red Crescent formally began. No more stopping by the office a few afternoons a week to drink coffee with Geldy. It was time to get serious. On my first official day at work, I arrived at 8 a.m. and went into Aman’s office. He lounged behind his desk, which was shaped like a “T,” with his chair positioned at the center of the crossbar, facing down the stem. He was fat, greasy, and grinning as usual. I sat nervously in a chair on one side of the stem of the “T.” He told me the first thing I should do was to write a day-by-day, hour-by-hour work plan for my first three months at work – in Russian. I told him that was impossible. I had no job description and no specific idea of how I should spend my days at work. (Peace Corps had told me I was supposed to “assess the needs of the community” and then plan projects to address those needs). Furthermore, my Russian wasn’t good enough to write a report. Geldy, who had been hovering in the background, stepped in.

  “No problem, no problem, he’ll write the plan,” he told Aman, pulling me out of the office by my elbow.

  In the kitchen, Geldy lit the stove and put the scorched old teapot on to boil. The power was out, so the kitchen was dim, lit only by the gray light from the window. He pulled out the instant coffee and two mismatched, chipped old teacups.

  “Are you crazy?” I asked Geldy. “How could you say I would write that plan? I can’t write it. I don’t even know what my job is.”

  He carefully removed a pane of glass from the window, lit one of his slim cigarettes, took a quick drag, and blew the smoke through the empty frame.

  “Calm down,” he said. “It makes no difference what you write. You don’t have to do any of it. He just wants a plan to show to his boss in Ashgabat.”

  So, over coffee, we composed a plan. I would teach health seminars at the local schools several days a week. I would hold a weekly meeting with local English teachers to help them practice their language skills. I would draw informational, health-related posters to hang at the local clinic. I would paint a health-related mural at the bus stop. I would write a grant for funds to buy toothbrushes and toothpaste to donate to the local orphanage. I would create and publish a health-related coloring and activity book to use during my lessons in schools. The list went on and on. Geldy’s response to each of my proposals was the same: “Great idea, but you’ll never get permission.”

  At the time, I didn’t understand what he was talking about – but I learned. The process was different for every situation, but it was always long and tortuous. If I wanted to paint a health mural at a bus stop, for example, I would start by writing a proposal in Russian and submitting it to Aman. After a few rewrites, he might sign it and stamp it with his personal seal. Then, if he was nervous he might get in trouble for approving it – and he surely would be – he would submit it to his boss at the Red Crescent office in Ashgabat, who would put it through the same process. Once everyone at Red Crescent had approved it, I would rewrite the proposal as a grant, in English, which I would submit to an organization that had money to give away – an embassy, an NGO, Peace Corps, etc. If, several months later, one of those organizations approved the grant and gave me the money I needed, I could it with the Ministry of Justice, and, then start trying to get permission to paint the mural. That would mean getting permission from the city government, which (as far as I could tell) owned all the buildings in town, to paint a mural on the side of a building. So I would write a new proposal, in Russian, reflecting all the changes required by Red Crescent and the granting organization, and submit that to the mayor. If the mayor was nervous that he might get in trouble for approving the project – and he surely would be – he would kick it up to a government ministry in Ashgabat for more stamps, and more signatures. If, several months later, the government approved the project, I could start painting.

  Even though Geldy knew all this, even though he warned me I would never get permission for my big ideas, he wrote them all down and turned my daydreams into an official-looking report. He typed it up on the computer in Aman’s office and gave it to me to give to Aman the next day. Aman, pleased that I’d done as he’d asked, stamped it and went back to reading his newspaper. (This is what he did for most of every day, which was quite impressive, since Turkmen newspapers, which were all government-produced, were rarely longer than eight pages). With my plan approved, Geldy and I put together proposals for the projects on my list and submitted them for permission – to Aman, to the school superintendent, to city hall. Then, when nothing happened, I settled in to wait. I had no job description and no permission to do anything but sit in the office at Red Crescent.

  Each morning, I would arrive at the office at 8 a.m. and wait on the front steps for Aman to show up with the keys. My co-workers would come to work one by one and wait with me. There was Vera, the gruff, middle-aged Russian bookkeeper; Aynabat, the young Turkmen nurse who taught health classes in local schools; and, of course, Geldy, who was in charge of the youth volunteers. Aman would arrive around 8:10 a.m. and unlock the door. The rest of us would follow him i
nside. Vera would hide in her office with the door closed. Aynabat would leave to teach a lesson somewhere. Geldy would make up some errand and skip out, too. I would spend my morning alone with Aman.

  I would sit at one end of Aman’s desk and he would sit at the other. There was no other place for me to work, except the kitchen counter. Aman would read his newspaper or stare at the wall or talk on the phone. I would, supposedly, work. This was not an ideal arrangement for me, since I didn’t really have a job. I would write new project proposals, study Russian, write letters home – anything I could do to look busy. I was right in Aman’s line of sight, so when he got bored, he’d grill me about what I was doing, usually concluding that it wasn’t enough and that I was lazy. If I asked him what I should do, he would say I should follow my work plan. I would point out that I didn’t have permission yet to do any of the things I had proposed in my work plan. We had that same conversation several times every week.

  One day, I was trying to look busy by studying Russian when the phone rang. Aman, pleased to have something to do, scooped it up and talked for a few moments. Then he stood, put on his jacket, and hurried out the front door. He returned five minutes later with a balding man in a black leather jacket. They talked and joked for a few minutes in Turkmen, which I didn’t understand. Then our guest began asking me questions in Russian: why I had come to Turkmenistan, where I lived, who my local friends were, what I did at work, when I planned to go on vacation, etc. This was not unusual. I was an oddity. People occasionally stopped by just to meet “the American” and pepper me with questions. I didn’t mind. I was used to it. After about a half-hour, the man in the leather jacket excused himself and left.

  I walked across the hallway to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, feeling proud that I had managed to carry on an entire, 30-minute conversation in Russian. Vera, the bookkeeper, was hovering in the kitchen. A stout, blond woman, she was never friendly, but usually decent. She spent her days sitting in her office with the door closed, behind a desk piled with documents. Given the amount of paperwork involved in running an office in Turkmenistan, she was probably the only one of us who was truly busy. She made me some tea, we sat down at the little table, and she asked if I knew who I’d been talking to. I told her I had assumed the man in the leather jacket was Aman’s friend. After all, Aman had been so nice to him.