Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age

by Sam Tranum

  We asked the driver of the Toyota with the cracked windshield and the Tagtabazaar sign how much he was charging and how long the trip would take. Only 50,000 manat (about $2), he said. Only three and a half hours. We decided to give it a try. Worst-case scenario, we decided, we would hit the first checkpoint, the soldiers would tell us we couldn’t go any further, and we’d have to get out of the taxi and find our way to Mary. We’d be out maybe $3 and a few hours. We squeezed into taxi’s back seat and rode south along the highway, passing through towns and villages, farm fields and pastures.

  The middle-aged man sitting next to me in the back seat was from Tagtabazaar, so the stamps in his passport showed that he lived there and was allowed to come and go even though it was in a restricted zone. The old woman in the front seat had a chunk of flesh missing from her nose, a common ailment for people in the Mary area, which I’d been told was caused by some kind of bug bite. She was visiting a relative in Tagtabazaar and had had to apply at a government office for permission and get a sort of visa, almost as if she were traveling to another country.

  When we reached the first checkpoint, about an hour and a half south of Mary, we expected to be sent back home. It was a sleepy little place, a booth next to the highway, staffed by two policemen. The driver parked the car and we got out and presented our passports, trying to look nonchalant. The two officers were helpful and friendly, writing down our information in a log book and wishing us a safe journey. They didn’t seem at all surprised or troubled by our presence.

  We followed the Murgab River south. The flat farmland gave way to barren plains. Then the plains started to wrinkle and rise into hills. The river, which further north had flowed free, winding and curving as it pleased, began to straighten out now that it was trapped in a valley. As we drove, the earth’s desolate winter brown gave way to a delicate green. The hillsides were covered in new, spring grass. Flowers sprouted here and there: pink tulips and red poppies. At the next checkpoint, we again braced for rejection. Again, the guards pleasantly sent us along our way. The other passengers and the taxi driver, Berdy, were as surprised as we were.

  The landscape was all rolling green hills, treeless but very much alive. We were following the river valley roughly from its delta in the desert near Merv, toward its source in Afghanistan’s Hindukush Mountains. It was a route that people had been traveling for millennia: merchants and pilgrims, scholars and migrants. The flow of people continued into the beginning of the 20th Century, when hundreds of Baloch families moved down the valley from Afghanistan into Turkmenistan, settling in towns from Tagtabazaar, to Yolotan, to Bayramali89 They looked more Indian than Central Asian and spoke their own language. When the Soviets took power, they closed the border, severing the ancient route.

  It felt like the taxi was driving me right out of winter and into spring. The further south we traveled, the greener the countryside became. On the left, a mosque stood on the grassy slope below the road, near the river. It was a square brick thing topped with an onion-shaped turquoise dome. It looked like a Disney mosque, plopped down on a vast swath of Astroturf.

  At the next checkpoint, the soldiers were more serious. They wore woolen greatcoats and had ornamental daggers tucked into their waistbands. They examined our passports for a long time inside their little booth. I was in a good mood, though, undaunted. Winter was behind me. Everything was going to be fine. I pulled two tomatoes from my jacket pockets, went over to the booth, and offered them to the soldiers. Looking puzzled, they declined. I put one back in my pocket and ate the other one like an apple, pacing next to the road. The wind blowing down the valley was cold, but it didn’t have winter’s sharp edge. The soldiers waved us on.

  Tagtabazaar was like any other medium-sized Turkmen town, except that it wasn’t in the desert. It was on the wide valley floor next to a placid stretch of the Murgab River. There was a bank, a bazaar, a city hall, and a taxi stand. The town was surrounded by kolkhozes. It reminded me of Murgab: a county seat in farm country. We dropped the middle-aged man and the woman with the ruined nose at their destinations and Berdy invited us to lunch at his house, promising to take us to Yekedeshik after we’d eaten.

  He lived on a kolkhoz outside town, in a ramshackle family compound. He’d worked at a natural gas plant until two weeks earlier, when he’d been laid off. Jobless, he was trying to support his wife and three children with the 50,000 manat per person that he earned hauling people between Tagtabazaar and Mary. He must have been worried about money, but he still got his teenaged daughter Dunya to fill the table with fried eggs and tomato sauce, tomato-and-cucumber salad, fresh yogurt, and chorek.

  When we were finished eating, he drove us through Tagtabazaar to a low, treeless mountain – more of a high hill, really with a hole in its side. We followed narrow access road to a parking lot near the top, got out, and walked down some stairs to the hole. It was reinforced with brick, and secured by a steel door. There was a caretaker sitting on a chair inside the door. He charged us 11,000 manat (about 40 cents) and took us on a tour.

  The caves had been carved out of the mountain’s sandstone heart centuries earlier. They were not rough-hewn caveman caves. The walls met at 90-degree angles. The ceilings were vaulted and, in some places, decorated with raised bands of stone. On the level we were on, there were about two dozen rooms, connected by doors, stairwells, and passageways. The caretaker said there were four additional levels, above and below us. They were filled with sand, though – inaccessible. He showed us a passageway that led out into the dark, further than my key-chain flashlight could reach.

  “That one leads through the mountain to another cave complex like this one,” he said. “But it’s full of sand.”

  Yekedeshik was probably built as a Buddhist monastery sometime around the 3rd Century A.D., as Buddhism spread northwest from India into Central Asia. And it was probably abandoned around the 9th Century, when Arab armies arrived, pushing Buddhism out of the area, and replacing it with Islam.

  The first European to report its existence was a certain Captain F. de Laessoe. It was 1885. The Great Game was in full swing. The Russians had recently taken Merv and had their eye on Tagtabazaar, which was then called Panjdeh and nominally belonged to Afghanistan. The British, worried the Russians were planning to march right through Panjdeh, into Afghanistan, and perhaps on to British India, had pledged to support Afghanistan if Russia tried to seize the town.90

  As the Russian troops crept south down the Murgab valley from Merv toward Panjdeh – along the same route I’d taken – the British readied two army corps in India to send to Afghanistan’s defense. They also convinced the Afghans to reinforce Panjdeh and they sent some British officers to the area to observe. De Laessoe was probably among these.

  As the two great empires moved closer and closer to war during February and March of 1885, de Laessoe busied himself with archaeology. A local man led him to Yekedeshik and he quickly hired a crew to dig the sand from its passageways and rooms.91 But before de Laessoe could finish his excavations, the Russians descended on Panjdeh, killing 800 Afghan soldiers, and seizing the town. De Laessoe was forced to flee, leaving behind the artifacts he’d gathered. The New York Times ran a story headlined “England and Russia to Fight,” which began: “It is war.”92

  Fortunately, the Times was wrong. The ensuing crisis convinced the Russians to stop their southward advance, but they kept Panjdeh. The caves at Yekedeshik had received little attention since that time.

  “The archaeologists are more interested in Merv and Margush,” the caretaker explained.

  After exploring the caves for a half hour or so, Kelly and I had seen enough. We climbed back out into the daylight. We found Berdy sitting on a carpet on the grassy hillside above the entrance with two other men, enjoying a picnic. They invited us to join them. I pulled the last tomato from my pocket and added it to the feast of stewed meat and chorek. We talked a little about Yekedeshik’s history. The Murgab valley spread out below us, the town of Tagtabazaar (onc
e Panjdeh) just a messy concrete blotch on its perfect curves. I looked south, hoping for a glimpse of Afghanistan’s mountains, but the gray clouds were hanging too low.

  It was getting late and we had a long drive ahead of us so we thanked our hosts, drank a vodka toast, and left. A few minutes north of town we hit the checkpoint with the serious, dagger-wearing soldiers, the ones who’d refused my tomatoes.

  “Where have you been?” one of the soldiers asked.

  “To Tagtabazaar, to see Yekedeshik,” I said.

  “How do I know that’s where you really went?”

  The soldier was bored, I realized. I was in trouble.

  “You don’t believe me?” I asked.

  “If you really went to Tagtabazaar, then what color was the door?”

  “I don’t remember. Maybe green?” I said, my first mistake.

  “It was blue,” he said and turned to his partner: “I think we have a problem.”

  That was when I made my second mistake.

  “I have proof that I was there,” I said. “I took pictures.”

  I pulled out my little point-and-shoot digital camera, turned it on, flipped to a photo of Yekedeshik’s entrance, and handed it to one of the soldiers. He looked at the photo without commenting and then began to examine the rest of my pictures, one by one. The camera’s memory card held more than 500 photos. Fifteen minutes passed. Kelly and Berdy went back to the car. The soldier browsed my pictures of Ashgabat, Abadan, Dekhistan, Anew, Kahka, Darvaza, Turkmenbashy, Avaza, Turkmenabat, Mary, Murgab, Merv, and Margush. The more photos he saw, the more suspicious he got.

  “Something’s not right here,” he said. “Something’s definitely not right. You were in all these places? Why did you take so many pictures?”

  “To show my friends when I get home,” I said, starting to get annoyed. “Don’t you take pictures when you go on vacation?”

  Why did you take this picture of frozen laundry hanging on a line?”

  “Because it’s beautiful.”

  “No it’s not. It’s stupid.”

  “What are you, an art critic now? Look, we have to go.”

  “You’ll go when I give you permission to go. I am the police,” he said. “They’ll do this at the airport when you leave the country, too, you know. It’s no big deal.”

  I was getting impatient. I was sick of being pushed around. I started tapping my fingers on the wall and getting surlier and surlier with my responses to the soldier’s questions. None of this seemed to have any effect, though, so I tried the direct approach.

  “Look, what’s your problem?” I snapped at him. “What do you want?”

  He seemed a little taken aback.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Take it easy.”

  He looked at a few more pictures and then handed back my camera.

  “I was just checking your photos,” he said. “Relax.”

  As we pulled away from the checkpoint, Berdy started yelling at me.

  “What’s wrong with you!? Why did you give him the camera!? From now on, at checkpoints, don’t talk! Hand over your passport and stand there with your mouth shut!”

  I sat silently on the lumpy front seat for the next couple hours, chastened. The old Toyota hauled us out of spring and back into winter. We left Kelly in slushy, gray-brown Yolotan so she could find another taxi to take her north up another road to her home in Turkmengala. Berdy and I continued up the highway to Murgab. We passed the former Communist Party headquarters and the World War II memorial and then he pulled over to the curb in front of Döwlet’s store, let me out, and headed to Mary to find some more customers.

  The store’s windows were fogged and its floor was slick with slush and mud. Döwlet and Azat were drinking tea from bowls at a low table set up among all the televisions and refrigerators.

  Döwlet poured me a bowl and pushed a plate of hard candies toward me.

  “Hello Sam,” he said, practicing his English. “What did you do today?”

  “I went to Tagtabazaar,” I told him, with a self-satisfied grin.

  “You went to Tagtabazaar?” he said, switching to Russian.

  “We can’t even go to Tagtabazaar. We need permits.”

  I hooked up my camera to one of the televisions and showed him my photos. He looked at them all twice, asking questions all the while. After another cup of tea, I took a taxi back to Nurana and ate a delicious dinner of potato and mutton-fat soup by candlelight with Jeren and the girls. As we lounged around the living room in the flickering light, talking about our days, Kümüsh curled up next to me, giving me her cutest puppy dog eyes, hoping I would let her have just one more chocolate-covered cookie even though her mother had already cut her off for the night. I did, of course. Who could resist? Jeren scowled at me, but Kümüsh beamed, leaning against me and munching on it, spilling crumbs everywhere. I went to bed that night tired and content.

  29.

  Reminders

  All winter, Nurana was brown and gray, dust and mud. Tree branches were bare, fields were empty, the river was slate. Then one day the naked trees in the village woke from their winter naps and, bashful, draped themselves in gauzy blankets of delicate pink and white blossoms. The village was in an oasis. People had lived there for millennia. There wasn’t a square foot of earth that hadn’t been turned by human hands, or a single tree that hadn’t been planted for a purpose. The modest beauties in their spring petal-shawls were apricot, apple, and plum trees. When the desert wind whipped through the village at night, it shook their branches, pulled at their delicate flowers, and tossed stray petals like confetti onto the ground.

  Soon the trees donned leaves to go with their blossoms, the earth sprouted grass, and the village, which had been sterile and dead only weeks before, was lush with life. The children, cooped up all winter, tumbled into the streets to play. Six yellow and brown ducklings took up residence with their parents in the irrigation canal at the edge of my yard. Clumsy lambs appeared in the flocks of sheep that passed my house on the way to pasture each morning. The neighbor’s camel gave birth to a gangly baby with long black eyelashes. Birds began to appear from nowhere and ants started building their hills.

  I sat in the clinic and watched the spring arrive. The neighbor’s camel and her awkward baby grazed outside my window. The seedlings the nurses had planted along the irrigation ditch during the winter sprouted tiny leaves. I was coloring in the letters of one of 10 signs Oraztach had asked for, warning Nurana residents to drink only boiled water. It was a futile task. No one in the village boiled their water unless they were making tea. Posting a few signs wasn’t going to change anything. I didn’t mind, though. After the long winter, I felt a little drunk from all the color and life of spring.

  I shared my office with a doctor and a nurse. The doctor, Islam, had bad teeth and squinted constantly. He’d stayed out late the night before so he was sleeping face down on his desk next to his abacus. The nurse, Maral, was a half-deaf old battleaxe two months from retirement. As I colored and Islam slept, she swabbed the entire office with a rag soaked in bleach water, as she did each morning. She sterilized the doorstep and the windowsill, the picture frames and the chair legs, the desktops and the walls. When she was done, she sat her heavy backside down on her chair with a sigh and started shuffling through the papers on her desk.

  Gözel, the new doctor, walked by our window. She was in her twenties, meek, slim, and pretty. Even though she was from a kolkhoz she had modern ways. She didn’t cover her hair. She wore traditional clothes that covered her from wrist to ankle, but only because her cafe-au-lait skin was marred by white, pigmentless blotches. She was getting married to a man she’d chosen for herself. Maral sucked her teeth. She disapproved.

  It used to be that boys and girls played separately and parents arranged their marriages. We didn’t have love back then,” she said. “These days boys and girls spend time together and marry for love.”

  Everything’s changing,” she continued, staring out the window. “Co
uples are even having fewer kids. They used to have eight, nine, maybe even 10. Now it’s more like three or four. There’s no work. Families can’t feed 10 kids anymore.”

  For the rest of the morning Maral filled out forms and I colored “Drink Only Boiled Water” signs. Around noon, I woke Islam. We all filed out the door and went home for lunch. I walked over the plank across the irrigation ditch at the edge of the clinic’s yard, passed the little brick mosque, crossed the street, and rounded the corner of my house. Seven boys were standing by the door, waiting for their advanced English class. They wore their good school clothes: black slacks and white button-down shirts. The school was too small so the students were split into morning and afternoon sessions. My boys were on afternoons. After class with me, they would run down the street to school.

  I opened the front window, reached through, and unlatched the door from the inside. The boys scrambled into the living room, sat down on the floor cross-legged, and unpacked their notebooks and pens. They were about 12 years old, which, in a little village like Nurana, meant they were still very much children. For them, the only thing girls were good for was teasing. They were in awe of adults, polite and deferential.

  We were playing bingo when Dowlet’s best friend, Azat, dropped by looking for Jeren. I would call out a number in English. The boys would find it among the 25 numbers written into the grids on their bingo boards, and cover it with a scrap of paper. When one of them covered five numbers in a row, he would yell “bingo” and then – stammering and blushing – struggle to read the numbers back in English. I told Azat that Jeren wasn’t around. He lingered for a while, watching the boys finish their lesson. When I gave him a bingo board and tried to pull him into the lesson, though, he got shy and left.