Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  The only other people at the crater are a group of Japanese tourists with tripods and long lenses. When I pass them, they nod.

  “Welcome to Japan,” one says, in English.

  I suspect that this is not what he meant to say, so I smile back at him. “Welcome to Japan,” I reply.

  When I come back to camp, Ulugbek and Jirnelle have set up for breakfast. Instead of spreading a blanket over the sand, they’ve rolled out an oriental rug.

  “It was cold last night,” Ulugbek announces.

  I glare at him. “I know.”

  Ulugbek slices a sausage on top of an unfolded newspaper. When I look closer, I see that the front page has a very obviously Photoshopped picture of the president planting a Christmas tree. His shovel looks like it’s made of marble. Ulugbek laughs when he sees me studying it.

  “Can I take a picture?” I ask.

  He nods, but tells me not to get his hand in the photo, which is strange, because how would anyone know that it was his hand? Does Turkmenistan keep a database of everyone’s finger shapes? On second thought, he might not be thinking about repercussions at all—he might just worry that my picture will look worse if his hand is blocking it.

  Ulugbek wants to wash his car before we leave, so I wander back toward the crater. A camel lingers wearily behind a sand dune, and I step toward it for a picture. The camel stares at me, then suddenly turns and gallops off. I didn’t know camels could gallop. I turn and see Ulugbek, who watched the whole encounter, buckling with laughter.

  It feels like the first exchange we’ve had where we both understood everything. This, or maybe all the time to myself beside an only slightly-more-exciting-than-usual crater makes me realize that Ulugbek and Jirnelle’s reluctance to talk politics may have nothing to do with what they know of the world outside their borders, but rather, an intense familiarity with the one inside them. Maybe it’s not that they don’t want to discuss these things with me, but that they’ve gotten out of the habit of discussing them with anyone. I now highly doubt this is all they talk about when I’m not around.

  When I get back to the car, Ulugbek is wiping the hood down with a rag and bottled water. His phone is tucked between one ear and shoulder.

  “My brother.” He grins, gesturing to the phone. “He, you: ‘hello.’”

  11

  Taken in Turkmenistan

  I wanted to go to Turkmenistan because I hoped it would be unlike anything I’d ever seen before. It is, but not in a good way.

  Ashgabat is the capital of Turkmenistan and the country’s second-biggest tourist attraction, after the burning crater. I thought I’d find this all strange and interesting, because I didn’t understand how years of authoritarian rule can wipe away any potential for charm. Copenhagen is quirky. Ashgabat is gloomy.

  Saparmurat Niyazov’s stylish, week-renaming eccentricities are all over Ashgabat, which had once been a typical Soviet city, and is now a combination marble preserve and shrine to Niyazov and Gurbangaly Berdimuhamedow. These are not elegant marble buildings. They are marble buildings for the sake of being marble buildings, with design plans that look like they were lifted from a geometry textbook. In between the buildings are gold statues of the country’s two presidents, or gold statues of Niyazov’s self-published memoir (which he forced everyone to read), or indiscernible gold statues that might as well be of the president.

  Something about Ashgabat immediately gives me the creeps. Maybe it’s the citywide ban on photography, which only makes me want to photograph everything. Perhaps it’s the ubiquitous portrait of president Berdimuhamedow, who smiles back at me from the walls in every building.

  The people I meet in Ashgabat are kind and generous, but most seem to have limited information about the outside world. When a taxi driver learns I’m twenty-eight and childless, he tries to explain how sex works.

  What gnaws at me most is the sense that the whole country runs on a set of unwritten rules obvious to everyone else, but incomprehensible to me. Which perhaps is how I end up spending my whole trip to Ashgabat staying in a hotel run by the secret police.

  I did not make reservations for the secret police hotel. I end up there because it is the only place that admits to having vacancies, and also because I am not an artist.

  First, I get dropped off at a place listed in my guidebook: the Hotel Syyahat. In an unexpectedly chaotic lobby, I’m asking a receptionist for a room.

  She stares at me. “Are you an artist?” she asks.

  I tell her I’m not.

  She shakes her head. “If you’re not an artist, you can’t stay here.”

  Perplexed, I head to the next-best hotel in the Lonely Planet. This time, I’m prepared.

  “Hello,” I say. “I’d like a room, and I’m an artist.”

  But this hotel is full, as is the next one, and the one after that, which has a travel agency inside the lobby.

  “Do you know why all of the hotels are full?” I ask the woman working there.

  She looks confused. “They’re full?” She offers to go check something. She’s gone for a long time. When she comes back, she seems surprised to still find me waiting. “I don’t know why the hotels are full,” she tells me.

  I start to panic. What if I can’t find a hotel? I’d like to think of myself as the kind of person who could, in an emergency, hole up in a bus station for the evening, but that seems like a risky move in an authoritarian state, and also that would mean skipping my night-cream routine.

  Two university students I stop on the street for directions seem to pick up on my distress. They also speak English. When I tell them my story, they insist on accompanying me to the next hotel, and also, because this is Central Asia, on carrying my suitcase.

  “It rolls,” I protest, and while they do acquiesce to rolling it, they insist on being the ones to do the rolling.

  Like all male students in Turkmenistan, the boys are dressed in plain black suits affixed with pins of the flag of Turkmenistan. Their female counterparts wear floor-length dresses of vibrant green, traditional hats, and two long braids. It’s strange to see a city full of young people all wearing the same outfits.

  I ask the boys why their English is so good.

  “The Russians are stealing all of our jobs,” one says, shaking his head. “For the future, we must speak English.”

  This job-stealing claim seems curious, given that I’ve seen exactly zero ethnic Russians in the prosperous capital, and that all of the government ministers pictured on various walls and buildings appear to be Turkmen men. But I remember that I am helpless and homeless, so I say nothing.

  The next hotel is full, too. So is the one after that, and, at this point, I beg the boys to go back to whatever they were doing before I inadvertently suckered them into escorting an ill-prepared foreigner to various disinterested hotels, but they refuse.

  “You don’t understand,” one says. “I think most people here . . . they won’t even know how to talk with foreigners.”

  What he’s trying to say, I think, is that these hotels aren’t quite sure how to deal with me. The government has enacted byzantine requirements for foreigners staying in local hotels to ensure that money is changed at the official rate, and not on the black market. For me to stay at a hotel, I learn, the hotel has to give me paperwork, which I need to bring to one specific branch of one specific bank, where I need to change the total charge for my stay into local currency, which the bank needs to confirm via endless stamps on said paperwork, which I can then bring back to the hotel to begin the process of checking in. While doing this, I will discover that none of my credit or debit cards work in Turkmenistan. Some of the places I first visited might have pretended to be full to avoid the headache, or perhaps feared the repercussions of making a mistake along the way.

  The one place that admits to having vacancies is the MKD hotel. If I knew my Soviet history, I would have known in advance that the MKD was a Soviet-era secret police force. But because I don’t, I’m merely confused whe
n I notice that everyone who passes through the lobby is wearing a full police uniform.

  I will later speculate that the hotel is operated by the MKD to raise funds, the way some police forces hold bake sales. But for now, I simply find it strange when I open the door to my room and find a police officer scrubbing the toilet.

  He finishes and leaves, allowing me to look around the space, which is billed as a deluxe suite. It comes with a living room, bedroom, and bathroom, which is helpful, because I’m sharing my room with an entire colony of cockroaches.

  Not eager to spend much time getting to know my new roommates, I head out to explore Ashgabat.

  In order to respect the ban on public photography, when I see something I want to take a picture of, I discreetly open my iPhone camera and place the phone to my ear like I’m taking a call. I attempt to hold the phone perpendicular to the ground and press a volume button on the side, which snaps the shutter. This is my small act of rebellion, and I perform it with as much stealth as a person slinking into a department store to use the bathroom. Most of my photos come out severely tilted, or obscured by strands of my hair.

  The city feels like it was designed and built for a population that never materialized. The wide sidewalks and marble underground passageways are mostly empty. The marble high-rises appear minimally inhabited. The only people reliably found on the street are police officers, who are everywhere, guarding what often seems like nothing. There’s a pair posted up at the entrance to a square not far from my hotel, and they tell me I can’t walk through. It’s closed, they say, for rehearsals for an upcoming military parade.

  I smile. “That’s interesting,” I say. “Can I see it?”

  We chat for a few minutes, and then they concede that I can walk through if I do it “quickly,” and I’m congratulating myself on once again skirting the rules when one of the officers tells me he wants to take me on a date tonight and asks for my phone number.

  I’m instantly terrified. I don’t dare give him a fake number, because, in a police state, it seems like a bad idea to romantically reject the police. I scribble my real number on a piece of paper and scurry away, resolving not to answer my phone for the duration of my stay, but it turns out there’s no need—he never calls.

  Oddities abound. I find a park being built, not by construction workers, but by students. This happens in communist countries too—students and teachers are sometimes given “holidays” that they’re required to spend helping with a harvest or contributing manual labor to a government project. For this, they’re paid only in the “honor” of serving the country.

  I pass countless statues of angry-looking warriors holding swords, which I keep jumpily mistaking for actual people. I pass another square closed for a changing of the guards, but when I ask a guard if I can walk through anyway, he grumbles and then also says yes. As I’m walking, one of the less-disciplined guards breaks from his goose-stepping to stop and stare at me.

  The rules seem most heavily enforced by the people who stand to lose the most if they’re caught breaking them. I came to Turkmenistan wary of the police, but it’s never someone in uniform who glares at me when I’m illegally taking a picture. It’s an ordinary citizen, who, I suspect, knows the limits of his own ability to protect himself against the state.

  One night, I end up in a lively restaurant filled with Turkish expats, who apparently make up a good portion of the labor force in Turkmenistan. I’m the only woman in the room, with the exception of the waitresses, who are all wearing fully transparent shirts. A bookish young guy in glasses at the table next to me strikes up a conversation in English, and I ask him, delicately, about the nature of the relationship between the clientele and the women working here.

  He picks up on my meaning and laughs. “No, no,” he protests. “Turkish men, we can’t talk to women here. It’s forbidden to . . . go on a date. Unless you’re married.”

  This turns out to be true, an arrangement that, unsurprisingly, creates more problems for the Turkmen women than it does for their foreign suitors. If the couple is caught, it’s the local woman whom the government can punish.

  At ten forty-five p.m., the Turkish man turns to me again. I’ve finished my dinner, but have stayed at my table, reading a book in a room full of drunk people, because this seems preferable to reading my book in a hotel room full of cockroaches.

  “Are you driving home?” he asks me.

  I shake my head.

  “You should go now, then,” he says. “The curfew starts at eleven.”

  “What?!” I say.

  Yes, he explains, people aren’t allowed out on the streets after eleven.

  “How can you live here?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “It’s not so bad. The work is pretty good.”

  Turkmenistan is not hooked up to the World Wide Web.

  Internet access is all but impossible to come by. There’s no Wi-Fi in hotels, restaurants, or coffee shops. Few people have Internet service at home, and most of the country rarely goes online.

  By the end of my second day, I feel completely isolated. In most places I visit, I can get intermittent texts and e-mails, which act as a virtual security blanket—here my solitude grows apparent with each passing minute.

  I decide to get a drink at the old Sofitel, which is now no longer a Sofitel, but that’s what most people still call it. It’s the same upscale hotel, except now with local management and a Turkmen name. Most important, it’s the only place I’ve seen in the entire country with Wi-Fi. After a confusing dinner at a Turkish pizza parlor, I head out into the street to find a taxi that will take me there.

  In Central Asia, any car is a potential taxi. When you want a ride, you wave your arm until a driver pulls over and asks where you’re going. If he’s heading in your direction, he tells you to get in. If he’s not, he drives away without saying another word.

  It’s dark, and the streets are empty, so I’m relieved when a car makes a U-turn to pick me up.

  But this does strike me as odd. Drivers don’t usually change direction to pick people up, because they don’t normally take passengers who aren’t heading where they’re already going.

  The man driving this car looks like he’s in his early twenties, and his friend sits in the passenger seat. This, too, isn’t unusual—drivers in Central Asia often bring friends along if they’re taking passengers at night.

  I tell them I’m heading to the Sofitel. We go back and forth negotiating a price, and then I get in.

  Then another strange thing happens: as soon as we start driving, we stop being able to communicate.

  In Russian, they ask me where I’m from and I tell them. But what they say next is impossible for me to understand. In Russian, I ask them to repeat it, and when they do, I still can’t make out a single word. They’re speaking something that sounds Russian but isn’t. My ear grasps at each sound, trying to latch on to a word I recognize.

  This, too, is troubling. Taxi small talk tends to follow a fairly standard script—where are you from, what are you doing here, are you married, do you have children, you better get pregnant soon!—and I’ve been running these lines daily for a month now. To understand nothing is so strange and frustrating I refuse to accept it.

  For a few minutes, I struggle to communicate. “What?” I keep saying, “I don’t understand. Repeat, please?” Each time, they say something that sounds like I should be able to follow, but I can’t even find simple subjects—me, I, you, us. Eventually, I give up and sit back, exasperated.

  By itself, this wouldn’t be cause for alarm, either. Anti-Russian sentiment in Turkmenistan has grown since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the younger generation doesn’t always speak the language of its former colonizers. Perhaps they are speaking Turkmen or heavily accented Russian. But why does it sound Russian? I wonder. Why could we understand each other before I got in the car?

  I stare out the window. Ashgabat is far from picturesque during the day, but at night, darkness softens the jarring marbl
e buildings, which shine gently under spotlights. I’m thinking about how it almost looks pretty when the driver cruises past the street for the Sofitel.

  Okay, I think. That was strange. But the streets in this neighborhood have been closed for rehearsals for the upcoming military parade. I remind myself that most of the taxis I’ve taken in Ashgabat have driven unbelievably circuitous routes, often, it seemed, out of a genuine enthusiasm for driving. I could ask why he skipped the turn, but I’m not anxious to revisit the linguistic barrier.

  We keep driving. Ten minutes pass, and then fifteen, and something begins to feel very wrong. The glitzy downtown buildings start to give way to a crumbling old city I haven’t seen before. How, I wonder, will this get us to the Sofitel?

  Then the driver turns north.

  This is bad. The Sofitel had been south of where he’d picked me up. We’re now much farther west than we need to be, and there’s no plausible explanation for why we’re now heading north, and out of the city.

  “Do you know where the Sofitel is?” I ask.

  “Yes,” the driver says, suddenly able to understand me again and respond in Russian.

  “It’s not north,” I reply.

  He’s silent.

  “Not north,” I try again.

  “It’s there.” He gestures.

  I repeat the name in Turkmen, and ask, again, if he’s sure he knows where it is.

  “Yes, yes,” he keeps saying, and I believe him, because no one in Ashgabat doesn’t know the Sofitel. It’s easily the city’s most famous hotel and a well-known landmark in its own right. To be unfamiliar would be like a New Yorker going, What did you say it’s called? Time’s squared?

  As the buildings become increasingly spaced out, my nervousness skyrockets.

  I try to think very carefully. It is, I suppose, theoretically possible that my normally very acute sense of direction is off, and that we are not, as I suspect, far northwest of where we need to be. I don’t have Internet, so I can’t check a map on my phone. But this should have been a ten-minute ride, and we’ve been driving for what feels like three times that.