Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  Breakfast in the living room was tea, bread, butter, honey, and jam. The girls were dressed in their school clothes, hair combed and held in place with colorful barrettes. Jeren ironed Döwlet’s shirt on a towel on the floor. Döwlet sat at the klionka, eating and watching TV. I made myself coffee and ate bread with butter and thick, crystalline honey. After breakfast Döwlet, Jeren, and the girls piled into the old Lada and headed for Murgab, where half of them would spend the day at work and the other half in kindergarten or school.

  Once they were gone, I left for work, too. I walked out the front gate, waited for some cows and camels to amble by, crossed the street, passed a tiny brick mosque, and there I was – standing outside the health clinic where I was to spend my final six months in Turkmenistan. It was a one-story yellow-brick building with blue trim. Inside, the floors were made from creaky wooden planks and everything smelled like disinfectant. I had a desk and a chair in a shared office. Unlike Red Crescent, the clinic had heat, light, and running water. My boss was a stout, round-faced Turkmen woman in her 40s named Oraztach. She was serious, efficient, and hard-working. She was my new counterpart, my new Geldy, though any comparison between the two seemed absurd.

  It soon became apparent that my new life in Nurana had only one drawback. Döwlet and Jeren were kind and friendly and interesting. Their girls were adorable. Their house was spacious and clean and comfortable. My new colleagues were welcoming. But I had virtually nothing to do. The first week, Oraztach put me to work drawing a health poster about anemia. Then she told me I had to write a three-month work plan. So I spent another week doing that. Geldy had taught me well. I didn’t agonize over it. I just wrote up a wish-list of things I’d like to do in Nurana and gave it to her so she could pass it on to her boss in Murgab.

  Then I ran out of things to do. I could only draw so many posters: the only places to hang them were on the walls inside the clinic – and it was a small clinic. So one day I walked across the empty lot that separated the clinic from the village school and called on the principal. He was a skinny, 50-something Turkmen man, and wore a furry Russian hat. I asked him whether he could put me to work and he said he’d love to have me teach English. He was supposed to have two English teachers but he had none, he explained. We agreed on a schedule and he said that if I taught English four days a week, I could teach health on the fifth to please my boss at Peace Corps who wanted me to be a health teacher.

  The principal drew up a proposal and sent it to the superintendent for a signature and a stamp. For a week, I sat at my desk in the clinic, writing letters, studying Turkmen vocabulary, drawing a poster about dental hygiene, and waiting. When the principal sent a student over to the clinic to fetch me (there was no phone), I was excited for good news. In his office, though, he fidgeted and seemed embarrassed. The superintendent, it turned out, had decided that, since I was posted at the clinic I should stay in the clinic and out of the school. When I told Oraztach what had happened, she thought for only a moment before settling on a solution.

  “I’ll give you one of the rooms in the clinic for a classroom,” she said. “The principal can just send the students over from the school when it’s time for their lessons.”

  Oraztach drew up a proposal and forwarded it to her boss in Murgab for a signature and a stamp. Again, I waited. Again, the answer was negative. If I wanted to do any teaching, I could teach the clinic’s dozen or so doctors and nurses, Oraztach’s boss had decided. Other than that, I was to be hard at work at my desk all day, every day, he said. (He didn’t explain what I should be hard at work doing). The message was clear: sit still and shut up.

  “If they’re going to be like that, just don’t teach anyone anything,” Jeren told me, disgusted with the whole affair.

  I’d like to say that I resisted, that I fought for permission to do something useful and important because I hadn’t come all the way to Turkmenistan to sit still and shut up and the country was really fucked up and something had to be done and it might as well start with me. But I didn’t. I’d tried that for a year and a half and it had done no good for anyone. I’d driven myself half-crazy, gotten my friends into trouble, and disappointed my few supporters. Instead, I decided to spend my remaining time hanging out with my host family, drawing a few health posters, and letting someone else fix the country – if it wanted to be fixed.

  26.

  Working in the Vineyard

  Nurana was peaceful. There were no KNB men, no surprise audits, no crises. That stuff all spread like a disease from Ashgabat’s white-marble palaces and (unlike Abadan) Nurana was a long, long way from Ashgabat. There weren’t even any police in the village. A month before I’d arrived, Döwlet told me, a man had been caught stealing. A bunch of guys had stripped off his clothes, tied him to a telephone pole in the village center, and left him there to be tut-tutted by passing grandmas.

  Nurana was the kind of place where the postman knew everyone in town and their schedules, and would bring their mail to them whether they were at work, at home, or out shopping. It was the kind of place where gaggles of children jumbled through neighborhoods, bursting through one unlocked door after another, looking for a softhearted mom to feed them cookies and tea instead of chasing them away. It was the kind of place where, if you were walking home late at night from a party and found yourself too drunk to make it the whole way, you could knock on the nearest door and be sure you’d be offered a place to sleep.

  Everyone was kind and polite and friendly – and curious about me. People would come to my house and to the clinic just to look at me. They would direct their questions to the nurses or Döwlet, because they assumed I couldn’t speak Russian.

  “So that’s the American, huh? How old is he?”

  “Twenty-nine? And he’s not married? What’s wrong with him?”

  “He looks skinny. I thought Americans were fat. Are you feeding him enough?”

  I usually worked at the clinic until lunchtime and then went home to heat up some leftovers and eat them while watching American movies dubbed into Russian. I was supposed to spend my afternoons finding projects around the community that I could work on. I made a few attempts. I tried to start an Ultimate Frisbee club, for example, on the premise that exercise is healthy for kids. I invited some kids I’d seen around town to join and they all promised to come, but didn’t show up. So I spent an hour every afternoon for a week throwing my Frisbee from one end of a dirt soccer field to the other by myself, hoping some kids would see me and get curious enough to come over and ask what I was doing. None did. I gave up.

  After lunch, I’d often go for a run. It was winter so I liked to go when the sun was high enough in the sky to warm me a little. In a sweater and sweat-pants, I’d run out the front gate and follow the dusty streets for two or three minutes to the edge of the village. Then I’d follow the hard-packed dirt and gravel road out through the farm fields. The first time I went out, I turned left at the fork and found myself at the old brick factory. A dog came tearing out at me, barking and snapping. I scooped up a couple rocks. As I raised my hand to throw the first one, the dog skidded to a stop, tucked its tail between its legs, and slunk away, whining.

  The brick factory was just a massive trench, big enough to fit a short parade of Land Rovers lined up two by two. Over the trench was a crane. I climbed up to take a look and found two guys drinking vodka in the shack at the crane’s base. They hadn’t had much yet and seemed sober and friendly, if a bit grimy. One stood up, introduced himself, and shook my hand. I asked him which road I should follow. The one I’d taken snaked past the brick factory and out to the graveyard, he told me. It would be better to retrace my steps and take a different road, one that led out into the farm fields, he said. I followed his advice, jogging along the dusty roads that bordered the bare cotton and wheat fields, hopping over irrigation canals and ducking to avoid the branches of the mulberry trees that lined the roads in places. When I was tired, I used the crane as a landmark to find my way home. The run took 45 min
utes and became my standard route.

  I usually got home from running at about 1:30 p.m., just about the time Jeren and the girls came home from Murgab. Then I’d play with Kümüsh and Altyn and help Jeren around the house a little bit. What she wanted, I think, was company, not help; we did a lot more talking than working. She wanted to know about my life in America, about the books I was reading, about anything and everything outside Nurana. Sometimes we looked at my photographs of Turkey, Thailand, Cambodia, the US.

  “When I see pictures of such beautiful places, I don’t want to live because I know I’ll never go there,” she said one day. “You’re so lucky.”

  “Yes,” I said, feeling guilty. “I am lucky.”

  * * *

  Spring comes early in Turkmenistan. By mid-February, the weather had already warmed and Jeren and I started working in the yard. In the afternoons, we’d go outside with teardrop-shaped spades and turn the earth under the grape vines and in the gardens.

  “You know. When I married Döwlet, I set two conditions: I don’t pick cotton; and I don’t work in the garden,” she laughed.

  The vineyard was laid out like the garden I’d made in Ana’s back yard, with raised planting beds surrounded by irrigation ditches. The planting beds were long and skinny, two or three paces wide, and about 30 paces long. The ditches were waist-deep and almost always dry. When it was time to water the garden, Döwlet would dig a cut into the side of the village irrigation canal that separated our yard from the neighbor’s. The water would creep through the labyrinth of ditches in our yard, filling them two feet deep, and over several hours, the planting beds would sop it up until all but the top layer of soil was moist and soft. Then he would throw shovelfuls of dirt back into the cut until the water stopped flowing.

  On our first afternoon out in the garden, Jeren and I each picked a skinny strip of vineyard and began working from one end to the other. An irrigation ditch divided us. A white alabay puppy wandered over from the neighbor’s yard, tumbling into an irrigation ditch and struggling to climb up onto the planting bed where I was standing. Its ears and tail had been pruned, according to custom, and were still raw. At first it was terrified when I tried to pat it. But once it got used to me, it wouldn’t leave me alone. It started attacking my ankles as I worked, biting my pants cuffs, pulling and growling.

  “No fair, you’ve got a helper,” Jeren said.

  “He’s helping you a lot more than he’s helping me,” I said.

  A neighbor stopped by with a plate of curly strips of fried dough, sprinkled with sugar. I stopped to squat on my heels, eat a little, and drink from a bucket of cool water I’d pulled from our cistern. (There’s a trick to getting water from a cistern: drop a tin bucket on a rope in and it’ll just float; it takes a special flick of the wrist to make it fill with water). Altyn came over, a skinny little thing in a long dress, hair pulled back in a lacy, white scrunchy. She squatted next to me and watched her mother work. When she said something in Turkmen, Jeren started laughing.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “She said: ‘Mom if you win, I’ll buy you a really nice birthday present,’” Jeren told me.

  When I was done with my snack, I went back to work. My soft, city boy hands were starting to blister and my back ached, but as the sun began to sink, I was a few feet ahead. I wasn’t about to give up.

  “Aren’t you thirsty?” Jeren asked. “Take another break and have some more water.”

  “I think I smell dinner burning,“ I said. “Maybe you better take a break and check on it.”

  When the sun set fat and orange behind the house and the muezzin called the evening prayer over the loudspeaker attached to the mosque, we both quit. We lay our spades behind the cookhouse and squatted on our heels next to the vineyard, sharing a dipper of water from the bucket. I’d won by several yards. I gloated.

  “Of course you won,” Jeren said. “You’re a man. It would have been embarrassing for you if you hadn’t won.”

  “If you knew I was going to win, why’d you race me?”

  “Because you’re an American. I didn’t think Americans knew how to do this kind of thing.”

  From that day on, we worked in the yard most afternoons until sunset. Jeren would take breaks to get dinner simmering and steaming on the stove in the cookhouse. When it got dark, I’d lay out the klionka on the living room floor in the main house and help her fetch the meal from the cookhouse across the yard. That’s about when Döwlet’s car would clatter into the driveway. The girls would run outside to meet their daddy and a few seconds later, he would appear in the doorway, grinning. Some nights, he’d come alone. We’d have a quiet family dinner sitting cross-legged at the klionka, gas stove burning to keep the room cozy and warm. After eating, I’d often give Döwlet an English lesson.

  “In school, I wanted to learn English so badly, but my teacher was terrible and I didn’t learn much,” he’d told me. “I think a person who knows a lot of languages and has seen a lot of beautiful places is the richest kind of person.”

  On the nights when the power was out, we’d sit in the pitch-black living room (candles were expensive), backs against the walls, talking. When we ran out of things to say, I’d fetch my guitar and play a little bit. I’d had the thing for a year and a half, but I still wasn’t any good. Jeren would always tease me for not being able to sing and play at the same time – “half a bird,” she’d call me.

  On the nights when Döwlet brought guests home, we’d sit for hours with them, talking and eating. It was often a surprise. We didn’t have a phone, so he couldn’t call ahead to warn us. Jeren was a great cook. She’d make plov (lamb pilaf with carrots and onions), or manty (steamed ravioli-like dumplings filled with lamb, squash, and onions), or salty lamb stew, or fresh-baked spinach somsas. And there was always chorek, which she baked twice a week in the tamdur in the yard. The guests often brought vodka or beer. Döwlet didn’t touch alcohol because liver problems ran in his family and Jeren didn’t drink because it was an unseemly thing for a good Turkmen woman to do. They didn’t mind if their guests drank, though.

  Döwlet’s best friend Azat visited often. They were the same age but, while Döwlet looked 40, with a creased face and deep-set eyes, Azat was boyish and could have passed for 20 except for the sprinkling of gray in the black hair at his temples. They had always been neighbors, had gone to school together, and now worked together. While Döwlet was a simple, good man, Azat was a hustler. He always had some shady business deal going and a couple mistresses in Murgab.

  Azat barely spoke any Russian, so he and Döwlet would talk in Turkmen and I’d do my best to keep up with the gist of the conversation. But when Jeren left the room, Azat would often mock Döwlet for being too much of a wimp too get a woman on the side – and he’d switch to broken Russian to make sure I understood. Döwlet would laugh bashfully and insist that he wasn’t scared, he just didn’t want to do it. I’d tell Azat he was a jerk and that he should leave Döwlet alone.

  Gaigasyz, a retired English teacher from Murgab, also visited now and then. He was in his mid-60s and had a big belly and bristly gray hair, which he covered with a fedora. He spoke excellent English with an archaic touch (using “shall” instead of “will,” for example). He’d been an English teacher for a few years before climbing his way into the ranks of the local branch of the Communist Party. He’d spent most of his working life overseeing Party admissions and expulsions, he told me, and had always loved his job. He was still loyal to the Party.

  “Gorbachev was a traitor,” he said one night. “He sold out the Party.”

  Gaigasyz struck an imperious, worldly attitude with Döwlet, Azat, and the other country boys from Nurana. They deferred to him, calling him Gaigasyz Aga as a sign of respect, and listening attentively to whatever he said. While he was holding court in Russian or Turkmen, he’d try to make me feel included with English-language asides that only he and I understood.

  “These fools think Turkmenistan is paradise b
ecause they’ve never been anywhere else,” he said once. “If they only knew.”

  One night while both Gaigasyz and Azat were over for dinner, after several rounds of vodka, Azat started going on about his new mistress. She’d given him a watch and he passed it around the klionka, showing it off.

  “Azat you better be using condoms with these girls,” I said. “I don’t even know how to use a condom,” Azat said. “I’ve never tried.”

  “I used to use them, but now that I’ve gotten older, I can’t anymore – it doesn’t work,” Gaigasyz said. “But you should be using them, Azat. You’re still young.”

  Döwlet just listened and looked embarrassed.

  “Azat, I need a favor,” Gaigasyz said. “Can you find me a nice woman in Murgab to keep? She should be about 45 years old and very respectable – I have a family, you know.”

  Azat thought about it.

  “My wife can’t even walk anymore. The only time she stands up is to go out to the bathroom,” Gaigasyz said to me.

  “That’s very sad,” I said.

  “Yes it is. She doesn’t have sex with me. I may be old, but I still want sex. Not a lot. Maybe once a week,” he said. “They have that Viagra from India at the bazaar now. It works pretty well.”

  “I think I know a woman for you,” Azat said. “I’ll introduce you to her.”

  27.

  Conversations With a KGB Agent

  My life in Nurana had a rhythm. Each day was nearly the same as the next. The events that defined my weeks were finishing a health poster at work, getting a letter from home, or Jeren cooking plov, my favorite. I thought I would hate the monotony of such a quiet life. Jeren did. She suffered from a nagging dissatisfaction. She was always saying things like, “I want something, but I just don’t know what it is.” Maybe it was because I’d had enough excitement in Abadan to last me for a while, but for some reason, I found the routine comforting. As the weeks passed, my anger, bitterness, and frustration faded away.