Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  Within a decade, Niyazov had amended the constitution to declare himself president for life. He started going by Turkmenbashi, which translates to something like “father of all Turkmen people.” Children studied his bizarre book of autobiography-cum-philosophical-musings in school. His portrait hung on the insides and outsides of buildings, and he erected gold statues of himself all over the country. Foreign journalists enumerated his eccentricities: he renamed months and days of the weeks for members of his own family; he made newscasters swear an oath of loyalty before “reporting” the government-scripted evening news.

  This news, of course, spoke little of the outside world, and when it did, it was all in service of legitimizing Niyazov’s regime. Niyazov turned his borders into an airtight seal, cutting his country off from the rest of the world.

  One big difference between Niyazov’s Turkmenistan and the Kims’ North Korea or the Castros’ Cuba is that Turkmenistan has huge amounts of natural resources. It has the world’s sixth largest reserves of natural gas, but only 5.6 million people. Though profits mostly stay concentrated in the hands of a small political elite, fossil-fuel revenues mean that famine and extreme poverty didn’t plague Niyazov’s rule, nor have they that of his successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, a slightly more progressive dictator.

  Berdimuhamedow, who began his career as a dentist, got rid of some of Niyazov’s more extreme measures, like the oath of loyalty and the Niyazov-family-themed calendar names. But Berdimuhamedow still hangs his portrait in airports and bus stations, and his administration continues to purge political opponents and top the lists of worst human rights records. In the most recent election, some of Berdimuhamedow’s most enthusiastic supporters were the seven men running against him.

  I want to know if people see through the propaganda. I want to understand how it feels to be monitored by an autocrat whose face is everywhere. I want this, not because I crave a taste of totalitarianism before skipping back into the free world, but because I think it will help me understand something that seems inconceivable.

  Inside, the Turkmen border outpost I pull up my visa, which is actually just an e-mail from the Turkmen ambassador’s personal account.

  “Did you print it?” the guards ask. “You were supposed to print it.”

  My face falls. “Errr . . .” I stare at the three young men in uniform. They could easily refuse to let me into the country, which would not be ideal, because I don’t have a visa to go back into Uzbekistan either. I’ll be like Tom Hanks in Terminal, except, rather than being stuck in a fancy airport, I’ll be stranded in a sandy and possibly land mine–ridden no-man’s-land, and I’ll have to befriend that guy in the minivan and see if he’d be cool with me squatting in the trunk.

  “No problem.” The guards shrug. “We can print it.”

  This helpfulness so catches me off guard that it emboldens me, and I ask them if I can call Ulugbek, the minivan driver’s friend, to negotiate a ride to the crater. Sure, they say, no problem, don’t let him charge you more than X. Turkmenistan was supposed to be one of the least free places on Earth. But these border guards almost feel like they’re here to guard me from myself.

  Until one hears me tell Ulugbek the name of an ancient town that’s not on my handwritten itinerary.

  “You can’t go there,” he cuts in sharply.

  After the visa is in my passport, another guard hand-searches my luggage.

  “Do you have carpets?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “No.”

  He frowns and carefully opens every pocket and pouch, as though I might be hiding a carpet in my makeup case. When he finds none, he asks me again. “No carpets?”

  I’m confused. “No carpets,” I repeat.

  “In Uzbekistan, you buy carpets?”

  “I have no carpets,” I insist. Although I’m starting to wonder: do I have carpets? Did I buy them in Uzbekistan and forget? I’m kind of afraid he’ll continue interrogating me until I admit that I’m carrying a carpet factory, but he shrugs and lets me go. I gather my belongings, and I walk out the door to Turkmenistan.

  In pictures, the crater looks like a portal to a terrifying dimension, or an artist’s rendering of the Rapture, or an underfunded metal band’s album cover. It’s strange to see the earth burning without any visible fuel source. It’s like the moral to an environmental disaster movie, the earth exacting revenge for all those times we left the AC on when we ran to the grocery store.

  I have no reason to camp beside it. As my recent experiences with horse treks and yurt stays have reminded me, I’m better off being one with the indoors.

  Still, for some reason I find myself telling Ulugbek that I want to rent a tent and sleeping bag, and spend the night snoring beside a potentially haunted crater.

  Ulugbek is tall and friendly, and though the man in the minivan bragged that Ulugbek speaks excellent English, it quickly becomes clear that he does not.

  “You? Smoking?” he asks, pantomiming taking a drag of a cigarette.

  I shake my head. “Good,” he says. “In city, smoke, NO!” (The president, in an effort to kick his own cigarette habit once and for all, has outlawed smoking in all urban areas.)

  This becomes a common sentence pattern.

  “Here, kielbasa, okay. There, kielbasa, NO!” “Here, president, [indecipherable hand gestures].” “Turkmenistan, gas, goooood!”

  I respond to all of these statements with a knowing, “Ohhhh!”

  Ulugbek pulls over to get gas.

  “America, gas, free?” he asks.

  “Free?” I repeat.

  Gas used to be free in Turkmenistan, he tells me. Under the new president, it now costs $0.30 Turkmen manat a liter, which works out to about $0.32 U.S. per gallon.

  Turkmenistan’s natural resources provided the country with better economic prospects than other post-Soviet states. But many argue that central planning and bizarre subsidies, like free gasoline, have prevented Turkmenistan from reaching its full economic potential. The average monthly salary in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available, was around $330 U.S.

  “How do you know the man who gave me your number?” I ask Ulugbek as he fills his tank.

  He grins. “He is my brother.”

  Ulugbek is bringing his girlfriend with us to the crater so that I’ll feel more comfortable.

  “Two girls, okay!” he proclaims.

  His girlfriend is a young, pretty blonde named Jirnelle. We pick her up at her mother’s house, where she lives with her two young children. At twenty-five, she’s fourteen years younger than Ulugbek. Her face is scrubbed clean, and she wears a T-shirt and tracksuit.

  She joins Ulugbek in the front, and they begin talking and laughing in a mix of Uzbek and Russian. Glad as I am to have her here, I quickly start to feel like a third wheel.

  I try to suss out Ulugbek and Jirnelle, to see how much they know about the outside world, but also to figure out how they really feel about their country and the government that isolates it. I imagine that, when I’m not around, it’s all they talk about.

  They offer more promise of worldliness than most. Ulugbek was born in the Soviet Union, not Turkmenistan, and, as an ethnic Uzbek, he’s a minority in Turkmenistan. Plus, the fact that he works as a guide puts him in regular contact with foreigners. Jirnelle is half-Uzbek, half-Turkmen. She studied in Moscow for five years, a biographical detail that I can’t square with the fact of her school-aged children, who are not Ulugbek’s. She must have had children very young and then left them with her mother while she finished her education.

  “In America, do you have the sandwich shop Subway?” she asks dreamily. When I tell her we do, she replies, modestly, that she used to work at Subway in Moscow, a chain I will soon learn is an almost replica of the American version, but with draft beer.

  When we stop for lunch at a roadside cafe, I watch for my chance to steer the discussion toward politics.

  Over dumplings and soup, Jirnelle asks me if I’ve noticed the po
wer outages in Turkmenistan. I’ve only been in the country a few hours, so I haven’t, but she assures me they’re a regular occurrence.

  “Do you know why?” Ulugbek asks.

  I’m guessing inadequate infrastructure or political issues, but I don’t know how to say either of those things in Russian, so I just shake my head.

  Ulugbek leans in and confides that Uzbekistan is stealing Turkmenistan’s electricity.

  “And also petrol,” Jirnelle adds.

  I’m trying to imagine what this would look like—soldiers creeping over the border at night and making off with oil drums? Secret wires running under the no-man’s-land that funnel Turkmenistan’s hard-earned electricity into Khiva?

  Ulugbek is referring to Uzbekistan’s 2009 exit from the power grid that once fed all five Central Asian Soviet republics, a move said to have caused shortages in the other four nations, particularly Tajikistan. How Uzbekistan is stealing oil is less clear. The source of this intel, as it would be for all information outside the realm of their personal lives, is the state-run media.

  Any first impressions I had about Ulugbek and Jirnelle’s familiarity with the outside world fall away as lunch progresses. Ulugbek doesn’t understand why it’s hard for French, German, and Japanese tourists to speak English, because English is widely spoken in their home countries, no?

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  But their languages are similar to English, right?

  No, I say. Very no for Japan.

  He shakes his head. “Japan tourists, speak English: NO!”

  Jirnelle’s English is a tiny bit better than Ulugbek’s, and she asks me about my trip. I list the places I’ve been, but I get blank stares in return.

  “Bishkek?” I say with disbelief. “It’s in Kyrgyzstan?”

  She blushes. “Sorry,” she says. “I don’t know.”

  I try to play this down like it’s no big deal, but it’s stunning. Bishkek is the capital of Kyrgyzstan, a nation only two countries over from Turkmenistan. When Jirnelle’s parents were born, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan were part of the same country. Her not knowing Bishkek would be like a Bostonian never having heard of Philadelphia.

  Ulugbek’s favorite phrase is “No problem.” He uses it to punctuate each sentence.

  After I finish my meal: “Finished? No problem?”

  When the check comes: “Ten manat. No problem!”

  When it’s time to leave: “We go, no problem.”

  It’s not hard to believe Turkmenistan is 80 percent desert. Outside of the cities, that’s all there is.

  We speed toward the ancient ruins the border guard told me I wasn’t allowed to visit. I’ve decided not to share this information with Ulugbek.

  If I had to describe Ulugbek’s driving style in a word, it would be: reckless. He tails ambulances and then cuts in front of them. He puts on his seat belt as we approach checkpoints and takes it off once we’re past. He avoids traffic by getting off the road and driving around it.

  Just before sunset, we arrive at Konye-Urgench, the site of Turkmenistan’s most spectacular Silk Road ruins. Compared to Uzbekistan’s, they feel almost untouched. It’s not that they haven’t been restored—although a gaping hole in one roof suggests that the work has been more modest—it’s that there’s practically no one else there. Other than a group of women praying for fertility at one mosque, we have the whole place to ourselves.

  Or, I should say, I have the place to myself. When we pull up to each ruin, Ulugbek walks me to the entrance, attempts to impart some basic facts, and then gets back in the car with Jirnelle. As I duck inside a mausoleum that I’m not sure I’m supposed to enter, I worry that I’m holding Ulugbek and Jirnelle up. And then I remember that they’re here for me . . . some combination of their outnumbering me and my being, for all intents and purposes, mute, has made me feel like an awkward guest on their couples’ getaway they’re hoping will disappear.

  Our last stop is a spindly sand-colored minaret that rises 200 feet up to the sky like a teetering pencil. It’s the only structure that remains from a fourteenth-century mosque.

  Ulugbek tells me that Turkmenistan has the second-tallest minaret in the world after India. “Bukhara, Khiva, no!” he shouts.

  “Huh,” I reply.

  “Okay, I wait you!” Ulugbek calls, already bounding back to the car.

  We head out into the desert to find the crater, and I’m still wondering how much I can ask Ulugbek and Jirnelle about politics. Have they spent enough time outside of Turkmenistan to be skeptical of what’s reported on state-run media? Are they critical of Berdimuhamedow? Are they waiting for me to bring it up? Worried I might be a spy?

  And if they are opposed to the president and his oppressive regime, how are they just . . . sitting there? Why do they go about their lives like normal people, instead of rioting in the streets?

  We pass a herd of unaccompanied camels, nonchalantly ambling down the road, as though being a herd of unaccompanied camels roaming freely through the desert is a totally normal thing.

  One of the camels has a leash and a bell tied around its neck. “Does anyone own them?” I ask, confused, because there’s no one around.

  Ulugbek and Jirnelle are adamant: no one owns them.

  I try to picture how a herd of camels could have come to escort itself down a highway. I decide that the animals are owned by a camel herder who sent them on a journey after selecting the one with the leash as lead camel. “You’re in charge now,” he whispered before releasing them.

  We cross a rickety, Soviet-era bridge spanning a roaring river. Ulugbek wants me to check out either the bridge or the river, so he stops the car and we get out. He points to a new bridge being built a little further down. “This bridge is being built by Turkey,” he tells me. When the Soviet Union ended, Turkey saw an opportunity to strengthen relationships with the Turkic-speaking Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Turkmen. Ankara offered aid and sought closer ties with leaders of all four nations. These efforts have been most successful in Turkmenistan, perhaps because the country’s two languages are closest and mutually intelligible.

  “Did you know that, every Sunday, the president rides a horse around the hippodrome?” Ulugbek asks me.

  My ears perk up. “Wow,” I reply cautiously. “How . . . funny.”

  He either ignores my bait, or I used the wrong word. “This Sunday, he did not,” he continues. “He was busy.”

  I had worried that a guide on an official tour would try to censor what I saw in Turkmenistan. Now I’m not sure that’s true, because Ulugbek tells me he also works as a guide on official tours. He may not be particularly fluent in English or interested in the details of history, but he’s also not trying to keep me from seeing anything. When we pass billboard-sized portraits of the president hanging on the walls of public buildings, he slows down so I can photograph them, even though it’s illegal to do so.

  We’re driving along a desert highway, surrounded by darkness. It’s the kind of empty black that reminds you that there’s nothing and no one else out here. A red glow appears in the distance, the crater announcing itself from miles away.

  The glow grows as we approach, a red orb of light trapped in the thick air hanging above the fire. It’s unexpectedly creepy, menacing even, kind of in the way I expected the whole country to feel.

  Up close, it’s even stranger than in pictures. Flames jump and skitter across the crater’s rocky bowl. It doesn’t seem real, this fire raging but burning nothing. My eyes scan the edges, looking for the trick. It’s hard to wrap my head around it. I think: rocks cannot catch fire. But that’s exactly what I’m seeing.

  As far as tourist pull-offs go, it’s not bad. It’s borderline incredible. I’m momentarily overwhelmed with gratitude that I found Ulugbek, that he brought me here, that I got to see this.

  And then the novelty wears off. A burning crater is spectacular for approximately fifteen minutes, after which you realize there’s not much more to see or do or think a
bout. I don’t need to see it at sunrise. I’m very much wishing I’d arranged to have Ulugbek drive me to the closest town after a quick crater visit and then found my own way to Ashgabat in the morning. But he’s already dragged Jirnelle all the way out here, and it feels a little late to back out of sleeping in this tent.

  I did not know that as soon as the sun goes down, a desert becomes extremely cold. I have always pictured deserts as places where people died of heatstroke, not places where you can potentially contract frostbite, which is what I fear has sucked all the feeling out of my toes.

  I’m curled up in a ball and burrowed deep inside my sleeping bag. I’m wearing two layers of long underwear, wool socks, a down jacket, and a hat. I’ve never been so cold in my life. Ulugbek has given me a tent and a sleeping bag, but no sleeping pad to stop the cold from seeping up through the bottom of the tent. I shift my weight, stamp my feet, and try to wiggle my toes. Nothing.

  My heart sinks with the realization that I have, in fact, contracted frostbite. I curse myself for falling for the camp-beside-the-crater trap. Tomorrow morning, Ulugbek will drive me to a hospital in Ashgabat, where they’ll amputate my toes, or maybe, if I’m really unlucky, my whole foot. I start to cry.

  Ulugbek and Jirnelle are not as cold as I am, because they’re sleeping in the car beside me. With the engine running. Ruefully, I imagine them snuggled into blankets, lost in tranquil dreams while several of my appendages wither and die.

  Eventually, I fall asleep, but I toss and turn all night, the cold waking me on the hour. Finally, just after sunrise, I give up. I get out of my tent and go sit beside the crater, which has the benefit of giving off heat, because it’s on fire.

  In the early-morning light, the flames look far less dramatic. They seem smaller, less menacing. I can see the rusting carcass of the rig that fell into the crater. The heat shimmers above its twisted limbs. Also, bonus revelation: I did not contract frostbite last night.

  It dawns on me that I could have gotten up and slept in the car with Ulugbek and Jirnelle, and I wonder why I didn’t. My head throbs with lack of sleep.