by Sam Tranum
Although Merv had been named a United Nations World Heritage site, it was not protected by walls, fences, or park rangers. Imagine if you could climb the wall of the Coliseum in Rome, lay out a blanket on top and go to sleep. That’s the sort of thing I felt I’d done when I woke atop a 2,000-year-old wall. The sun was just beginning to rise over the desert. Merv’s ruins stretched out around me for miles. I gathered my blanket and trudged down from my wall to help the others clean up the campsite. The marshrutka driver from the previous day picked us up and took us back to Bayramali. From there, we each found our own way home.
15.
A Wave of Revolutions
While I was exploring Merv, Uzbekistan was boiling over. The government had arrested 23 businessmen and charged them with being Islamic radicals. Their supporters in Andijan, insisting that the charges were trumped up, took to the streets in protest. Popular uprisings had deposed the leaders of three former Soviet states in the previous year and a half, and it looked for a while like Uzbek President Islam Karimov might be next.
In November 2003, Georgia’s president had been forced from power in the Rose Revolution, though I’d been living in the US at the time and hadn’t noticed. During the winter, I’d watched the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to power. In the spring, Kyrgyzstan’s president had bowed to opposition pressure – in the Tulip Revolution – and resigned. It looked like a wave of popular revolution was sweeping the former Soviet Union.
As it developed, I’d been watching closely and thinking that maybe, just maybe, the wave would reach Turkmenistan and wash Niyazov’s government away. Niyazov must have also considered this prospect. He closed the country’s long northern border with Uzbekistan and suspended flights between Ashgabat to Uzbekistan. Turkmen TV stations carried no news about what was happening in Andijan. I kept my bag packed, just in case something happened and I got evacuated.
Wherever I went, people were talking about Andijan. They spoke in hushed tones, always worried about who was listening. They knew that saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person could land them in prison. No one I met thought there was much chance that the spirit of revolution would spread to Turkmenistan.
“We’re too lazy,” Geldy told me. “And we’ve got no reason to have a revolution. We have food, drink, security. What more do we need? Things are okay.”
“Everyone knows things are screwed up,” said my friend Ayjamal who had been a high school exchange student in the US for a year. “But they’re all afraid to do anything.”
While I was riding in a taxi with Sesili one day, the taxi driver started talking about what was happening in Uzbekistan and the chances that something similar would happen in Turkmenistan. He was a crusty old Turkmen man with skin that looked like a brown paper bag someone had crumpled into a ball and then tried to smooth out again. He was just too old to be scared anymore, I guess. Although it was just the three of us in the car, Sesili tried to hush him.
“Stop it,” she pleaded. “We’re all going to end up in jail.”
He ignored her.
“Nothing like that will ever happen here,” the taxi driver said. He told a story: Niyazov’s son was gambling in Monaco and lost a million dollars. The loss didn’t seem to bother him at all. The man sitting next to him asked him how he could be so nonchalant about losing so much money.
“It’s nothing to me,” Niyazov’s son supposedly said. “My father owns 5 million sheep.”
“That’s us,” the taxi driver said ruefully. “We’re the sheep.”
If there had been a wave of revolutions sweeping through the former Soviet republics, Karimov stopped it on May 13, 2005. That’s the day his troops opened fire on protesters in Andijan, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians, and ending the uprising. The massacre was a warning to people across Central Asia who might have been thinking about rising up to take control of their governments. If anyone in Turkmenistan had ever had the inclination to take to the streets and oust Niyazov – and I never met anyone who admitted they did – the massacre at Andijan may well have convinced them to stay home.
16.
A Small Success
Summer arrived early, pushing temperatures into the 100s. The delicate carpet of grass that had covered the countryside wilted. The poppies and tulips dried out and died. The desert sun beat the springtime into submission and scorched the earth back to its usual monochrome brown. I no longer lived in a world of mud and slush; I lived in a world of dust and heat. After months of hoping that the clouds would part for just a few hours and let the sun shine through, I began wishing that a stray cloud – just one – would float across the bleached-out blue sky and block the sun for a few moments. When I walked home for lunch from Red Crescent, I would often stop for a few moments under one of the mulberry trees lining the road to eat a handful of sweet, black berries in the shade. I usually found children with purple-stained fingers and faces sitting in the branches, stuffing themselves.
There was no reason that I could think of for the sun to be so strong, so brutal. It was the same sun that had gently warmed my skin in the US. In Turkmenistan, though, it beat down on me, sapping my energy and baking my skin to a deep brown. During the 10-minute walk between Red Crescent and my house, my metal belt buckle would become painfully hot to the touch. The old white-bearded Turkmen men protected their heads from the sun with tall wooly hats called telpeks. I protected myself by staying inside as much as possible. The Red Crescent office was like a cave, dark and cool. The Plotnikovs had a single air conditioner that was just strong enough to keep the spot in front of the TV cool.
My life at home had become a bit lonely. Misha and Denis were both gone. Worried about the family finances, Olya had sent Misha to Russia to find work. He wasn’t earning much with his carpentry business anyway, since he spent most of his time lying in front of the TV. We’d heard nothing from him since he’d left weeks earlier. Denis had shaved his head and left to serve his mandatory two years in the army. Olya and I didn’t know where he’d be sent or what he’d be assigned to do. Turkmenistan was neutral and at peace, so most soldiers spent their two years picking cotton, guarding factories, staffing checkpoints, or planting trees in the desert as part of Niyazov’s quixotic quest to reforest Turkmenistan. We figured that was the kind of thing Denis would be assigned to do, too.
Still, we were worried about him. Turkmen soldiers were often underfed and poorly treated. Some young conscripts had to beg in the streets for food. Others were beaten badly by their commanding officers. Denis, a Russian city boy with a disdain for all things Turkmen, was likely to have a hard time in an army dominated by Turkmen kids from the countryside. Olya had done her part to ensure that his first days would be difficult. On the day he left, she decided she hadn’t packed him enough food. She chased after him, found his troop train and walked the aisles calling his name until she found him, at which point she gave him an extra package of piroshkis, some medicine for his snuffly nose, and, crying, a good luck kiss on the cheek.
With Misha and Denis gone, I often found myself home alone. I was going to have to get used to it. Sasha was leaving, too going home to live with his mother. Olya planned to escort him on his trip home and spend a couple weeks in Russia while she was there. I’d be on my own for the first time since I’d arrived in Turkmenistan. I was sad my host family was disintegrating. I’d enjoyed living in a full house, despite Misha’s binges, despite Denis’s bitter sarcasm, despite Sasha’s hyperactivity. Luckily, I had enough work to keep my mind off the changes at home. I was teaching English twice a week at School No. 1, I was giving health classes at various schools around town, and Geldy had commissioned me to create a coloring/activity book to teach middle school kids how to avoid getting HIV/AIDS. Also, I’d won a grant from the British Embassy to pay for my health mural project.
Actually, the mural project had morphed into a billboard project. The city owned all the apartment buildings in town and the new mayor had refused to
let me paint anything on any of them. Instead, he’d suggested I paint a giant metal billboard, which he’d promised to hang at the town’s main bus stop. So I’d tracked down a welder in Ashgabat who was willing to make me a billboard. His shop was in the construction supply district on the north edge of the city. Stores there sold everything from windows and toilets to hammers and nails, from paint and brushes to ladders and grout.
The welder was a wiry man who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. He worked in a roofless alleyway between two buildings, which was secured at both ends by tall metal gates that I’m sure he’d made himself. The alley was crowded with stacks of sheet metal, bits of ornate fence, and barred steel doors. I’d paid him half the money in advance and he’d promised to build the giant steel sign. It was to be nine feet tall and six feet wide, with special fittings so city workers could fasten it to a concrete wall.
Now it was time to pick up the steel canvas and haul it back to Abadan. When I arrived to pick it up, though, the bookkeeper was out to lunch. The welder was only in charge of fire and steel. He told me I’d have to wait until she came back from lunch to pay. While I waited, I wandered across the street to check out the horse track that dominated the neighborhood. When I’d worked as a newspaper reporter in West Virginia, I used to drive to the dog track outside the city after work with my editor Jody. We’d drink cheap beer and bet on horse races around the country via simulcast. A couple of times, we’d road-tripped out to Keeneland Park in Kentucky’s white-fence horse country, a four-hour trip. The track’s buildings were made from fieldstone and surrounded by shady trees and well-trimmed lawns. I stood by the rail while I lost my money, so I could feel the thunder of the horses as they passed me on the way to the finish line.
The track in Ashgabat, the hippodrome, was nothing like Keeneland. Surrounded by sprawling parking lots with pavement that’d been bleached light gray by the sun, it was a utilitarian concrete and steel complex. It was deserted. I climbed up into the bleachers and looked out over the track. It was an uneven dirt oval that looked smaller than Keeneland’s, surrounding an overgrown, weedy infield where a massive Turkmen sheepdog (an alibay) roamed. His ribs were showing. Maybe he was searching for rabbits. On the other side of the track were the stables. I could see a few horses munching on hay in a paddock. I set out across the track to visit them, hands full of rocks. I didn’t need the rocks; the dog kept its distance.
The horses, called Akhal Tekes, were sleek and delicate, with long, graceful necks and chestnut or golden coats. They wandered over to the paddock fence, where they nuzzled my hands and let me pat their haunches and scratch behind their ears. I’d read about them. They were said to have been favorites of Alexander the Great, and the ancestors of the English Thoroughbred.58 They were national symbols, parts of the country’s nomadic desert-warrior past. I’d seen them in the Independence Day parade and on TV. I’d visited a monument dedicated to them in a park in Ashgabat, near the monument to the Rukhnama. But I’d never seen one up close before. They had been nearly wiped out during the Soviet era and were still so rare and expensive that few Turkmen could afford them. Jonathan Maslow explained why in his book Sacred Horses, an account of his obsession with Akhal Tekes.
As the Soviets consolidated their control in the 1920s and worked to translate communism from theory into practice, horses – like almost everything else – became the business of the state. Private ownership of Akhal Tekes was banned and the government took over their care and breeding. Many soon died of disease, starvation, and neglect. To make things worse, the Soviets decided the wiry Akhal Tekes weren’t sturdy enough to serve as military mounts and began to breed them with Russian Thoroughbreds.
Akhal Tekes as a breed faced extinction and many Turkmen were appalled. To protest the Soviet policy toward the Akhal Tekes, a group of Turkmen rode their horses from Ashgabat to Moscow in 1935. It took them 88 days to cross the Karakum Desert and the Kazakh steppe and arrive in the capital. It was a trek of nearly 2,500 miles, almost as far as from Los Angeles to New York. After they arrived, they entered their horses in a race around the city and won the first 16 places.
The trek and the race impressed the Soviet authorities and, for a time, the Akhal Tekes were held in high esteem in the USSR. When World War II ended, Marshall Georgi Zhukov led the victory parade in Red Square on a white Akhal Tekke. It seemed that the breed had been saved. But things began to go wrong again in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Nikita Khrushchev, then the leader of the USSR, was determined to mechanize agriculture in his country. This meant distributing tractors and getting rid of horses, which had been used to pull plows. “The Communist party began to treat horses as nothing more than a food product,” Maslow wrote. “The state farms in Turkmenistan were issued quotas for horse-flesh.”59 A few old Turkmen, rather than see the graceful Akhal Tekes turned into steaks, began to lead some of them out into the desert and release them into the wild. Many Akhal Tekes, though, ended up on dinner tables.
When the Soviet Union fell, rich foreigners moved in to buy some of the finest remaining Akhal Tekes. Niyazov imposed tight restrictions on their sale and export. There weren’t many left, after all, and Turkmenistan didn’t want to lose the last few. By 1998, there were only about 2,000 Akhal Tekes remaining in the world. Niyazov dedicated a national holiday to them (April 27) and put one in the center of the new nation’s official seal. He gave them as gifts to foreign dignitaries, including Bill Clinton.60 Despite Niyazov’s attention to the breed, its fate seemed uncertain. Few Akhal Tekes remained and those that I saw at the hippodrome were so skinny their ribs showed. A groom told me that was the way they were supposed to look, but it seemed more likely that at a time when many humans were struggling to get by, the horses weren’t getting enough to eat.
After an hour or so with the Akhal Tekes, I wandered back across the track, through the parking lots, to the welder’s alley. The bookkeeper had returned, a 16-year-old Turkmen girl with a calculator, a pen, and some scrap paper. She took my money, pocketed it, and wrote out a receipt. The welder and a couple guys from nearby shops helped me load my billboard onto a small green truck I’d hired. I climbed into the cab with my receipt, signed and stamped permission for the project, and passport in hand, ready for the inevitable checkpoints. We fought through the city traffic and out into the countryside, windows rolled down, elbows hanging out. It was late afternoon and we were headed west. The sun was coming straight at us through the windshield. The hot breeze blew up my sleeve and across my chest, drying some of my sweat.
“So where are you from?” asked the driver, a gray-haired Turkmen man with a beer gut.
“America.”
“Ah, so what do you think of the Iraq war?”
I paused before answering to think of a careful response.
At a bar a few weeks earlier, a man with a bushy black moustache who’d been sitting on the next stool had asked me the same question. I’d launched into a long riff about how George W. Bush was a bad man and a bad president and how his war in Iraq was a disaster. The man had drained his glass of vodka, smacked it down on the bar, and glared at me, swaying a little.
“Well fuck you. I love Bush. I’m a Kurd. He freed my people,” he said and walked out of the bar.
I’d learned my lesson. This time, I mildly told the truck driver that I was against the war.
“But Saddam Hussein was a bad man,” he said. “Aren’t you glad he’s gone?”
“Saddam Hussein might have been a bad man, but the US can’t go around the world invading every country that has a bad leader. Why should American soldiers die because Iraq had a bad leader?”
“I don’t care if American soldiers die,” the driver said, looking straight ahead. “I’m Turkmen – who are they to me? I’m just glad Hussein is gone.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence. I think we’d both decided that continuing the conversation would bring nothing but trouble. When we reached Red Crescent, he waited in the truck while I went inside and
rounded up a group of teenaged boys who were breakdancing in the dining hall and made them unload the billboard and carry it inside. One of them, a 16-year-old named Maksat who was always nagging me to help him transcribe Eminem lyrics, was wearing his Osama bin Laden t-shirt again, even though he knew it pissed me off. I thanked the driver, paid him, shook his hand, and waved as he drove away. Then I went looking for Shokhrat.
* * *
Shokhrat was the 17-year-old Turkmen guy that Aman had hired to replace Geldy. He was a nice kid, but he wasn’t cut out for the job. He was supposed to wrangle the groups of teenaged youth volunteers that hung out at Red Crescent, organizing them to teach health classes in schools, put on holiday events for orphans – all the stuff Geldy used to make them do. He wasn’t assertive enough, though. He was about 5-foot-8, quiet, and shy. He wanted to be an interior designer or a painter. He hid from the youth volunteers, leaving them to do what they pleased. He was happier alone in the kitchen, painting educational health posters. Needless to say, he was excited when I told about the billboard. It would give him an excuse to avoid the youth volunteers for weeks.
Shokhrat and I got along well. We talked boxing and art. I’d spent nine or 10 months training at a boxing gym in Florida (I’d never fought, just sparred a few times). He’d spent two years training at the local sport center. We talked about Roy Jones Jr. and he lent me a videotape of the 1974 Muhammad Ali-George Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle.” I’d done some painting and flirted with art school in Boston for a semester. Shokhrat’s dad was a professional artist who was teaching him how to paint. He always promised to show me his work, but never got around to it. I think he was too shy.