Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  My journal entries from my time in Abadan were filled with cryptic references. I’d feared the KNB would send someone to read my journal. (After all, they read my mail and clumsily re-sealed it before forwarding it to me). The entries were filled with screaming capital letters, furious exclamation points, and sarcastic asides. They focused on my frustrations at work, the wrongs done to me, the country’s flaws. In Nurana, I wrote my entries in neat, even letters. I didn’t use any cryptic entries because I wasn’t doing anything worth hiding. I recorded my little adventures, small discoveries, and tiny triumphs:

  Kümüsh, my little imp, my sweet little demon sister, stopped being shy around me. It took a while because I was an alien; I spoke only a few words of her language. One evening, while we were all lounging around the living room in front of the television, she walked over me in her frilly white dress, all lace and taffeta and bows in her hair, sat down and started talking to me. When she realized that I still didn’t understand Turkmen, she stopped trying to explain and just took my wrist and tied a white string around it, a makeshift alaja, a charm against the evil eye. Then she kissed me on the cheek. I was charmed – hers forever. From then on, when Jeren went to a neighbor’s house after dinner, Kümüsh would curl up next to me on the living room floor. I’d sing her nonsense lullabies until she fell asleep and then lie there reading my book with her snuggled up in my armpit until Jeren came home and put her to bed.

  While I was watching a Russian satellite TV station with Jeren one evening, waiting for Döwlet to get home from work, a furniture commercial came on. “Buy this furniture set now and we’ll give you 20 percent off,” and that sort of thing. It showed dining room sets and couches, four-poster beds and bookshelves. Jeren was nearly drooling with desire.

  “Look at the bed,” she said. “And the table…”

  I’d been told during my Peace Corps training that Turkmen ate and slept on their carpeted floors for cultural reasons, because for generations they’d been nomads and so that’s the way they’d always lived. I told Jeren that and she laughed at me.

  “It’s not cultural. It’s just because we’re too poor to buy furniture,” she said.

  Döwlet and Azat decided I needed to “try” a Turkmen girl. They were offended that I’d spent a year and a half in the country and hadn’t already done so. Azat said he knew a girl in Murgab whom he thought I could afford. I thanked him but demurred, telling him that, as a rule, I didn’t pay for sex. He was shocked – it was an idea that apparently had not occurred to him. One night Döwlet asked me to help him install a satellite dish in Murgab, something he often did for extra cash. When we arrived, Azat was there, with a mischievous grin and a gorgeous Turkmen girl, with long black hair, dark eyes, and a delicate homemade dress, which, although it covered her from wrist to ankle, left little to the imagination. I chatted with her while I helped Döwlet install the dish, but I declined to go inside with her. Azat, frustrated, got in his car and roared off.

  * * *

  As winter turned to spring, my routine changed in two ways. One was completely unexpected. I was sitting at my desk in the clinic one morning, working on a poster about anemia, drawing foods that were high in iron. Through the window, I could see three boys standing outside. They’d been whispering to each other and pointing at each other and looking nervously at me for about 15 minutes. Finally, two of them pushed the third toward the door. He was maybe 12 years old, and looked like a miniature Döwlet, with deep-set eyes, dark skin, and bristly black hair. He shuffled in, hands in his pockets, looking at the floor. I put down my colored pencil.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Will you teach us English because we really want to learn but there’s no teacher at school so we don’t know what to do and we were thinking you might teach us because we heard you can speak English,” he blurted out.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m not allowed in the school and I’m not allowed to teach you here,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said, looking disappointed.

  He walked back outside and conferred with his friends for a few moments. They sent him back in to talk to me again.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You could teach us at your house,” he said and stood there looking at me.

  I thought about it. I was bored sitting in my office and coloring pictures of spinach, liver, and beans all the time, but I’d resolved to avoid trouble, and government officials had already made it clear to me that they didn’t want me teaching English in Nurana. So I put the boys off, thinking they’d lose interest.

  “Come back tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  The boys came back the next day – and the day after that and the day after that. They were telling me two important things: first, how they wanted me to help them; and second, how to get around the obstacles to doing it. It took about a week, but I finally heard them. It turned into one of my most pleasant, most satisfying, most productive projects in Turkmenistan and it never caused any trouble with the local authorities.

  * * *

  At first, I had only three students. They’d meet me at my house at lunch time three days a week and we would sit cross-legged in the living room, the heater making us all sweat, since winter’s chill was gone. We started with the alphabet and numbers. I made up games and songs. I drew posters. I invented dialogues. And little by little, my class grew.

  “We have a friend who really wants to learn English. He’s a good student. He won’t be any trouble,” the boys would plead.

  “Okay, but this is the last one,” I’d say.

  Soon I was teaching two or three classes a day, six days a week. I split the kids into beginner and advanced classes (those who knew the alphabet and those who didn’t) and divided them into boys’ and girls’ sections (trying to teach them together led to too much pigtail pulling and giggling). Village fathers and mothers started showing up at my door, asking me to let their sons or daughters into my classes. The two basic classes, which met three times a week, grew to 25 students each. I was having a wonderful time.

  Two of my students knew some Russian. The vast majority, however, spoke only Turkmen. That was fine at first. I knew more Turkmen than they knew English – I knew my alphabet, my numbers, my greetings, my colors, how to give directions, and a few simple sentence constructions. I studied in the evenings, adding to my vocabulary, but it soon became clear that my students were learning English faster than I was learning Turkmen and that I was going to have trouble teaching them if I didn’t do something drastic. So I started looking for a Turkmen tutor.

  When the principal sent a student messenger to the clinic to fetch me, I thought he’d gotten permission for me to teach at his school. Having my kids seated at desks would have cut down on poking and fidgeting. Having a chalkboard would have been easier than drawing a new poster every day. When I arrived in his office, though, it turned out he’d heard I was looking for a tutor. He, like everyone else in Nurana, was eager for me to learn his native language, so he’d convinced one of his teachers to take me on.

  That’s how I met Maksat. He was a short, stocky middle-aged man with bushy black eyebrows – gruff but friendly. He lived on the far side of the village from me. Two nights a week, after dinner, I’d cross the bridge over the Murgab River, pass the three shops that made up Nurana’s downtown, and then follow dirt roads to Maksat’s house. It was a large compound, covering about two acres. A yellow-brick wall wrapped around a main house, a cookhouse, and a banya. There were also brick houses for his chickens and sheep, a big garden, and an orchard. He had three nearly grown sons and a daughter. His wife was a teacher.

  At first, Maksat was wary of me. He mixed pro-government propaganda into his lessons, teaching me words like Rukhnama, democracy, independence, and neutrality, which were commonly used in Niyazov’s slogans. We sat side by side in easy chairs in his living room, with a coffee table between us. His daughter would bring us a thermos of tea and a plate of hard candies. We would study Turkmen
for an hour, until my brain was full, and then sit and talk in Russian for a few minutes before I started home along the unlit streets.

  After a few weeks, I learned why Maksat was uncomfortable. In the Soviet era, he’d earned a degree in Marxist-Leninist ideology and then applied to join the KGB. When the recruiter had asked him about his motivation, he recalled, he’d told them: “During the Great Patriotic War the fascists tried to destroy the Soviet Union and my father went to the frontlines to face them. Now, the fascists have been defeated and the capitalist imperialists are trying to destroy the Soviet Union by sending their spies to infiltrate it and spread lies. I want to fight on this new, internal front line, to defend my country.” He’d been accepted. Although he’d tried to adjust to the post-Soviet reality, it was still hard for him to have an American sitting in his house. For most of his life, Americans had been enemies, saboteurs, and spies.

  One day, Maksat and I were sitting in our twin easy chairs sipping tea when he put his cup down on the table, looked at me, and cleared his throat. He paused and reached down to fiddle with his cup, turning it in circles.

  “Sam, you were brought up and educated in a capitalist system and I was brought up and educated in a socialist system. Do you see a big difference? Do we disagree a lot?” he asked me.

  “No, I think we mostly agree,” I said.

  “Me, too,” he said. “I think you’re not that different from me.”

  From then on, our Turkmen lessons got shorter and our Russian conversations got longer. We talked about history, politics, economics, religion, and culture. He was well-read and curious. Each of us was fascinated with the other’s experiences and ideas. We talked for hours at a time. Maksat was careful not to criticize Niyazov’s government. He talked about the country’s problems, but like Geldy, insisted that Niyazov was doing as good a job as anyone could, given the circumstances.

  “My country is still young,” he said. “They didn’t build Moscow in a decade. First it was wood and brick, then concrete, then marble. It took time. It’ll take time here, too. It’s all well and fine to have lots of gas, but if you can’t sell it at a good price, it doesn’t do you any good.”

  He told me how, after the Soviet Union fell, he’d lost his savings. He’d had 3,000 rubles in the bank, which was enough at that time to buy two or three new cars or four or five good bulls, he said. When Turkmenistan switched from the ruble to the manat, inflation wiped out his savings.

  “I haven’t been back to the bank since then. I ask my friends sometimes whether the building is still there,” he said. “I keep hoping that the government will give me some kind of compensation.”

  Since independence, Turkmenistan had moved toward a democratic political system and a capitalist economy. Like most middle-aged Turkmen I’d met, Maksat believed that democracy was equivalent to chaos and that capitalism was a brutal, Hobbesian system, a lot like the law of the jungle. He saw it as the opposite of the humane communist system he’d grown up with. Still, he had come to believe that capitalism probably worked better in the long-run.

  “Capitalism is when the strong succeed and the weak fail, when the hard workers prosper and the lazy ones don’t,” he said. “I agree with that. That is the way the world works. That’s okay. But you have to let it work. Right now there are too many obstacles.”

  Niyazov had abolished communism and moved toward capitalism. But his constant meddling, regulating, and restricting meant that Turkmenistan still didn’t really have capitalism, Maksat said. Instead, it had the worst of both worlds: captialism’s brutality and uncertainty and communism’s poverty and government interference. People were poor and desperate, he said.

  “In the old days, you didn’t need to lock your door. You would just put a brick in front of it to keep the wind from blowing it open. Now there are poor people so there are thieves. People are building gates and walls and locking their doors,” he said.

  “People don’t do their jobs well anymore because they aren’t thinking about their jobs. They are worrying about how to make more money, how to make a living, how to feed their families. Usually the salary from one job isn’t enough to do that. Take me, for example. It would be good if I could just teach my students. I want to teach them. But I can’t do good work when I have so much to worry about.”

  “Why do you think so many people are having problems with blood pressure, strokes, and paralysis since independence? Our diet is the same. Our genetics are the same. I think it’s the stress. When the USSR was around, we didn’t have to worry about anything. Everything was provided for us: jobs, food, everything. Now we worry all the time.”

  I’m raising three boys. I don’t have enough money to send them to university. There are no jobs for them. I need to find 60 million manat (about $2,400) for bride prices and weddings to marry each of them. I lie awake at night worrying: Where am I going to get the money? What’s going to happen to my sons?”

  “I guess I won’t have to worry for long. I’m 50 and the life expectancy for Turkmen men is only about 60. Most of the time we don’t even live that long,” he said grimly.87 “Folk wisdom says that women live longer because they cry themselves clean. Men keep everything bottled up inside and it eventually kills them.”

  “Every generation here has had its challenge,” he said. “My grandparents went through collectivization and the revolution. My parents faced World War II, when there was nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, nothing. I have seen the end of the USSR and the Golden Age of Turkmenbashy. During World War II, there was always hope, at least. They knew the war would end. But now? There is no end in sight. What can we hope for? When will things get better? No one knows.”

  “I don’t know why we put up with it,” he said. “The people in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Ukraine all stood up. Either we are just quiet and obedient like sheep or the future will show that we are wise. I like to think that we are wise.”

  One of the subjects he returned to week after week was his fear that Turkmenistan was somehow inferior to the rest of the world. He saw Russia, Europe, and America on TV and wondered why those places were so much more developed than Turkmenistan.

  “Do you think the intellectual development of people in Turkmenistan is equal to that in America?” he asked me one evening. “During the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, Turkmen people were still nomads in the desert. Development here is stunted for some reason.”

  “In China they make televisions,” he said. “I have a Chinese television and I can’t even work all the different functions, much less make one myself.”

  As the weeks passed, our post-lesson conversations got darker and darker.

  “People here, when they are young, often ask why they were born here,” he said on one particularly black day. “‘Why not somewhere else, like America? People live well in America,’ they say. When they get older, they stop asking. There’s no use.”

  28.

  A City Inside a Mountain

  After two months in Nurana, I was starting to feel like I was running out of time. I’d applied to graduate schools the previous fall, while my life in Abadan was spiraling out of control and Ana was urging me to go home before I drove myself and everyone around me crazy. To attend, I’d have to leave Turkmenistan early – serving only 22 months of the full, 27-month Peace Corps term.

  That was part of the plan, of course. It was an excuse to leave Turkmenistan early without having to admit that I was quitting. Since I’d moved to Nurana, I was no longer so eager to leave Turkmenistan, but I’d organized my life around a June 30 departure date. The wheels were in motion. I was going early whether I liked it or not. That meant that I had only four months left to see everything I wanted to see.

  At the top of my list were: Margush, Merv’s abandoned Bronze Age ancestor; Yekedeshik, a city-within-a-mountain near the Afghan border; and the Kugitang Nature Reserve, which had petrified dinosaur footprints and good hiking. I decided to start with Margush, since it was an established
tourist site in an unrestricted area. It was easy. I just hired a guide and a marshrutka and invited my friends Leo and Heidi to come down from Charjou and join me. Döwlet agreed to come, too.

  The ruins of the city of Margush lay in the heart of the desert, several hours north of Mary. Called Gonur by archaeologists, it was probably the capital of a kingdom that had thrived in the Murghab delta during the Bronze Age, some 5,000 years ago.88 The river had receded to the south, though, leaving what had once been a network of perhaps eight major oases thirsty, stranded in the sands of the Karakum. The winter wind kicked up dust and cut through our coats. The ruins were desolately beautiful and our guide brought them to life, conjuring stories from the brick foundations.

  The city’s residents had been mostly and the guide showed us the remains of one of their massive temples. It was surrounded by little booths set aside for the preparation of a narcotic ceremonial beverage, he said. Inside, there was a vast basin that he said had been a swimming pool, where worshippers in white gowns had ritually bathed (presumably while high).

  Lying discarded in the midst of these Bronze Age ruins, we found a four-inch piece of what looked like thick bronze wire. It was green and crusty with corrosion. The guide said that thousands of years ago a woman had probably used it to apply her eyeliner. I held it in the palm of my hand and looked around, trying to imagine all the bricks and broken pottery as a thriving city filled with people not so different from me.

  After the tour was over, on the ride home, I asked Döwlet what he’d thought.

  “It was boring,” he said.

  * * *

  Visiting Yekedeshik was more complicated because it was in a restricted zone along the Afghan border. Kelly and I decided to try it anyway. We met at the bus stop in Mary early one morning and browsed the shared taxis idling there. They had signs in their windows indicating their destinations. We walked down the row: Yolotan, Murgab, Bayramali, Tagtabazaar.