Januzak worked his way up at another tour company and then was selected to travel abroad for further NGO-sponsored training. When he returned, he was elected president of the regional tourism association. Last year, he started his own company.
The turquoise waters of the Panj slice through dusty mountains, brush clinging to the rocky banks. We turn down a road that runs directly beside the river, so close that it feels like the water could splash our tires.
“It’s so strange, to be so close to Afghanistan,” Vianney is saying.
I nod, but I actually don’t find it that strange. “Afghanistan is right behind those mountains?” I ask, pointing to the peaks across the river. To me, the country is some far-off, hypothetical place that exists on the news but, for the purposes of my life, might not even be real. But Vianney shakes his head and instead points to banks on the other side of the narrow, low river, not ten feet away, and says, “No, that’s Afghanistan.”
That changes things.
I had no idea what it would feel like to stand ten feet from Afghanistan. In truth, I didn’t think it would feel like anything. I imagined staring at trees and mountains and experiencing the letdown that comes from straddling an imaginary line that divides two countries, or two continents, and willing yourself to think, Holy shit, I’m in two places at once!
It’s not like that at all. I gape, openmouthed, at trees and mountains and think, Holy shit! That’s Afghanistan.
I’m looking at a country my country’s been at war with for most of the time I can remember. The trees are rooted in a place where men hiding in caves evaded what I’d been raised to believe was the most powerful military in the world.
I’m entranced. So is Vianney. We’re at a loss to describe why just looking at Afghanistan is making us so awestruck.
“You have to understand,” Vianney tells Januzak when we stop to examine an abandoned Soviet tank left over from the Afghan war. “For my whole life, Afghanistan was a place that fought the most powerful nations on Earth. And won.”
The Panj River marks the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan but does little to stop people from crossing it. While the river is supposedly more menacing when it swells with mountain runoff in springtime, in the fall, when we visit, the river is low and you don’t have to travel far to find a spot that looks easy to ford.
The Tajik government worries about crime and religious extremism flowing over the border, which happens occasionally, but the most regular traffic comes from something far less abstract but apparently less worrisome: drugs.
Opium poppies from Afghanistan are thought to be the source of 90 percent of the world’s heroin, and Badakhshan Province, just across the river, is a major hub for smuggling it out of the country.
An Afghan looking across the Panj River into Tajikistan sees paved roads, modern homes, and a relatively regular flow of traffic.
Where he stands, twenty yards away, roads are dirt, houses mud-brick, cars rare.
On the Tajik side, long-haul truckers in jeans and flip-flops ferry cheap Chinese goods across the country. In Afghanistan, women in chadors carry cumbersome baskets up and down the main road.
Tajikistan’s Wakhan valley is poor, but it’s much better off than Afghanistan’s Badakhshan Province across the river.
The river that divides the two countries is slow and shallow, at times more exposed land than water. Smuggling drugs at this time of year seems like only slightly more work than being an Instagram influencer, and yet, on the Tajik side, it doesn’t feel like a major drug artery. Families sell fruit on the side of the road. Five-year-olds hitchhike to and from school, an act that would seem wildly dangerous in the safest American suburb, but apparently isn’t a stone’s throw from one of the world’s most porous opium borders.
The only evidence of the drug trade is the massive, incongruous satellite dishes sitting outside some homes on both sides of the border. The satellites, Januzak tells us, are purchased with drug money.
“But now that the Taliban outlawed drugs, the violence is much less,” a Swedish volunteer at our guesthouse for the night tells us. “Well, okay, a few tourists were beheaded the other year,” he concedes. “But I would still really like to go.”
The road the next morning alternates between densely shaded settlements and vast, open expanses. The snowcapped mountains across the river seem to rise out of nowhere and soar into the clouds. We pull off at particularly picturesque points and take pictures of the turquoise river or beams of light piercing gray clouds. I keep marveling at the fact that I’m photographing Afghanistan.
We pass a large utilitarian building that looks like a development project. Vianney asks what it is, and Januzak tells him it’s a school “that our president built for our children.”
Vianney and I exchange looks. Januzak has had plenty of positive things to say about “our” president of Tajikistan, a man regularly condemned for human rights violations and who, shortly after we leave, will take the title “Founder of Peace and National Unity, Leader of the Nation, President of the Republic of Tajikistan, His Excellency Emomali Rahmon.”
The majority of post-Soviet republics have had the same president since shortly after the fall of the USSR. I always assumed, naively, that dictatorships would be difficult to sustain. I imagined that most people would resist giving one man all the power (for equality’s sake, I would support a brief reign of the world’s first female dictator). But the period that followed the Soviet Union was characterized by chaos and turmoil, and the post-Soviet autocrats seized and held onto power by promising to restore order—a pledge they often made good on with crackdowns and restrictions on rights and freedoms. For many, the memories of the 1990s loom large, and at least their current corrupt leaders are known entities.
Still, it seems strange that Januzak, who has traveled abroad and works extensively with foreigners, would be so earnest in his admiration for the president. I assumed that people exposed to the outside world would have access to news that contradicts the state-run media, and that the truth would put an end to the kind of unabashed support Januzak is espousing.
But I’m starting to see that as a flawed, simplistic way of thinking. To be fair, Januzak’s positive comments have mostly been limited to much-needed development projects, likely associated with the president to combat the region’s general aversion to being governed by him (eastern Tajikistan declared independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and has clashed with the central government ever since). But there could be a billion other explanations for Januzak’s comments: lack of interest in politics, lack of exposure to critical commentary (after all, it’s not like I get to another country and immediately Google “What is the U.S. government lying to me about?”), perceived lack of alternatives.
Or maybe he knows, but doesn’t feel like getting into it. If a solution to the country’s political ills even exists, it’s unlikely to be figured out by the four of us in this car. Especially given the geography and the fact that I can’t tell the difference between a hill and a mountain. What can Vianney and I do except shake our heads and say, “That’s terrible”? We could return to our home countries and bemoan the oppression in Tajikistan. And our friends and family would likely reply, “What’s Tajikistan?”
Each time we stop—for gas, for dinner, for a mandatory military checkpoint—Januzak tries to buy someone’s car. These vehicles are rarely for sale. Often, they’re currently being driven by the confused owners he’s propositioning.
Toward evening on the second day, we stop at the birthplace of a Sufi mystic. It’s been transformed into a museum dedicated to both the mystic, Mubarak Kadam Wakhani, and the traditional Pamiri home, a unique construction that reflects the rhythms and rituals of life in rural Tajikistan. That’s about all I can tell you, because that’s about all Norgul can translate.
Januzak, as usual, wants to nap in the car, so he sends Norgul to help us communicate. At first, it’s fine: in a cool antechamber with pottery and metalwork displaye
d on carved wooden shelving, Norgul tells us that our guide—the kindly older Pamiri gentleman who created the museum—collected a lot of artifacts. When we ask where he got them from, there’s some awkward silence and confusion, so we pose holding guns from the nineteenth century, and then the guide pulls out an old-timey wooden pointer to deliver a passionate lecture on the life of the mystic, who turns out to have been his great-, or maybe great-great-grandfather. We pick up on the odd detail: He was an astronomer, who translated the Koran into Pamiri, or maybe Tajik? Or maybe Persian?
Next, he takes us to the main room of a traditional Pamiri house. The Pamiri home’s design dates back 2,500 years. The main room consists of a sunken dining and common area surrounded by a raised platform on which the entire extended family sleeps: men on one side, women on the other. Each house has five pillars, symbolizing the five members of the prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law’s family, which feels kind of random until you learn that the five pillars originally represented five Zoroastrian gods. When Islam arrived in Central Asia, Muslim proselytizers scrambled to make their faith fit into the grooves Zoroastrianism had carved into Pamiri life and society. It’s harder to sell people on your new religion if you tell them they need to rebuild their houses. Better to just repurpose their symbolism. If Scientology ever makes it to Eastern Tajikistan, the pillars will probably stand for the five tentacles of a thetan.
Four layers of recessed squares frame a skylight in the center of the ceiling, each representing one of the four Zoroastrian elements. “Earth, water, air, and”—Norgul pauses before translating the final element—“fish,” she finally offers hesitantly.
“Do you mean fire?” we ask.
No, no, she assures us. The fourth element is fish.
Our final stop on the second day is in a tiny village where Januzak deposits us with two boys who can’t be more than twelve but tell us that they’re sixteen. When we ask ten minutes later, they tell us they’re seven. It’s unclear whether they don’t understand our question, or don’t know their own ages.
Januzak has told them to take us up the side of a hill to see a Buddhist stupa.
I regret not waiting in the car about two minutes into the fairly arduous climb. I don’t even know what a Buddhist stupa is.
The boys tell us to peek inside a small cave dug into the side of the hill. I’m expecting this Buddhist stupa thing, but instead I find myself face-to-face with a human skeleton. I jump.
“Who is that?!” we ask.
The boys shrug: no one knows. It’s been there for a long time, they assure us, but I’m not convinced.
As we get higher up, the boys point to clouds of dust billowing up behind a tiny matchbox car on the Afghan side of the valley. “That’s an American army base,” they announce.
Vianney and I lunge for his binoculars. “How do you know?” we ask.
“Everyone knows,” they tell us.
Indeed, all the attempts at inconspicuousness are what outs it as such. A cluster of low, nondescript buildings bunkered together in the middle of nothing. Telecom equipment trying to pass as low-key. We see a tiny speck meandering around an imaginary perimeter: someone on patrol.
Staring at an American army base in Afghanistan turns out to be even stranger than being an American staring at Afghanistan. It feels like a celebrity sighting. How much of my childhood was shaped by the fact that all the dyed-in-the-wool liberals who raised me were morally, vehemently opposed to the very thing I’m now staring at?
We reach the Buddhist stupa. It’s a pile of rocks that can no way compete with the binocular view of an AMERICAN ARMY BASE IN AFGHANISTAN. I stand on the stupa to get a better view of the base. The boys point to their school, a low, blue building, and then try to convince us to stay at their family’s guesthouse. When we tell them we can’t, they pull a bunch of sparkly red stones from their pockets, declare them to be rubies, and try to sell them to us.
The evening’s guesthouse is quiet. We are, in fact, the only people there. We eat dinner with the proprietor, a friendly man who serves us dinner and sits down to chat. He’s a retired teacher; he and his wife grow all of the food in their garden. They are very proud of this fact.
He kindly offers us fresh yogurt, which Vianney and I happily accept. It is only after the first bite that I realize “fresh” means “unpasteurized.” The taste is difficult to describe: it’s sour and heavy and tastes, to a child of the 1990s American suburbs, like poison.
But I don’t want to hurt our host’s feelings, or offend his wife, so I breathe through my mouth and force it down as Vianney asks the owner about his ancestry. He tells us about his grandparents, who came from Iran.
As a kid, I assumed the obsession with tracing your family back to earlier places of inhabitation was uniquely American. I attributed it to guilt over a mostly ignored displacement of indigenous populations or an attempt to distance oneself from the unsavory parts of American history that predate ancestors’ arrivals.
The Soviets drew borders in a way that left people separate from the country to which their ethnic group was native. Januzak and Norgul are ethnically Kyrgyz, but hold Tajik passports.
But even Vianney traces his ancestry to other parts of Europe.
It’s strange how we cling to these roots as part of our identity. How American teenagers in baseball hats show up in Milan and expect to find an affinity with men in pointy shoes and neatly styled hair just because they both have the last name Cogiliano. How disappointing it is when we don’t.
Maybe we all want to believe we come from someplace else. Somewhere better, cooler, more exotic. We want to wake up one morning and discover that we belong to different people.
The next morning is our last in the Wakhan valley. Before we turn off onto the road that will take us up into the mountains, Januzak pulls over at one final lookout. It doesn’t seem particularly picturesque: a few camels grazing on the far bank in Afghanistan, the same turquoise water creating a divide that transformed lives on either side of it.
Januzak motions to a small cairn on our side of the river. “You know,” he says, “that’s the border with Afghanistan.”
“So if we walked past the rocks, we’d be in . . . Afghanistan?”
Januzak nods.
It’s unguarded, and we’re the only people for miles, so alone it’s hard to imagine that ideas like borders and countries could matter so much. For a moment, it seems no more serious than the lines marked for tourists to stand in two places at once.
Does it feel different, sneaking past the rocks and planting my feet on the ground in Afghanistan?
Perhaps, in that I feel absolutely terrified. I take one shaky selfie in which I grin maniacally, look around, try to create some meaningful memory, and then sprint back into the relative safety of Tajikistan.
The biggest difference is that when I left the no-man’s-land of half Canada, half New York, I felt silly. When I stepped from Afghanistan back into Tajikistan, I felt like I’d been somewhere.
In the afternoon, we climb into the Pamir Mountains on a narrow, switchbacked dirt road. Our progress keeps being impeded by herds of livestock. The winding road, shouldered by a hundred-foot drop, is periodically blocked by shoulder-to-shoulder sheep.
“Tajikistan traffic jam,” Januzak grumbles.
Each time, he lays on the horn as shepherds try to beat a Jeep-sized path through the crush. The shepherds’ faces are obscured by bandannas and ski masks they wear to protect against high-altitude sun and wind, but also kind of make them look like they rob banks.
Up in the mountains, the landscape changes. The verdant valley becomes a craggy moonscape, more barren than anything I’ve seen. Everything is brown and dusty. Iron oxide deposits lend some hills a reddish hue; others somehow shimmer like fish scales in the bright sunlight.
Januzak pulls off the main highway, an unpaved road, and onto something even more rudimentary: a pair of parallel tire ruts that cut through the jagged landscape.
It’s strange to get do
wngraded from an unpaved road. Before, the ride was bumpy. Now it’s like we’re driving through an earthquake.
A more practical argument for a seat belt presents itself: Norgul and I are tossed around the back of the car like dice in a Yahtzee shaker. We get in a lot of core work attempting to anchor ourselves to the headrests in front of us and the overhead hand strap, whose purpose I once believed to be limited to hanging dry cleaning.
Januzak and Norgul confer in hurried, urgent Kyrgyz.
“I’m trying to find the right way,” Januzak explains.
There are dozens of ruts of varying ages and permanence. It’s hard to tell which were made by what, and where they lead. Every so often, Januzak mutters something under his breath, throws the car in reverse, and tries another. It feels like we’re following a dashed line to the cartoon X on a pirate treasure map.
Suddenly, the landscape is dotted with alpine lakes, the water so deep and clear it’s almost black. Everything else is the same brown, barren earth, some heaps piled together to form peaks, the rest flattened out in between.
We pull up to a lookout so stunning I gasp. It’s incredible: a black lake wrapped around undulating peaks colored deep blues and purples. Vianney and I are reduced to monosyllables—wow, wow, wow—and Januzak grins.
“We never tell clients we are going here,” he says finally, “because, sometimes, we can’t find it.”
“Have you noticed,” Vianney asks, “that, if you go anywhere else in the world, and you tell someone where you’re from, they’ll know one famous person from your country? Like when you say you’re American, people say, ‘Obama!’ Or for me, they’ll name some famous soccer player. But here, people just say, ‘Oh. America.’”
Open Mic Night in Moscow Page 9