Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (31 page)

Döwlet was impatient. He whipped the donkey’s flanks with a twig and yelled at it to go faster. The donkey was much better at ignoring orders, though, than Döwlet was at giving them. It continued on at its own pace. Eventually he gave up and we lounged on the cart under the cloudless sky, letting the donkey find its own way along the road, at its own speed. The temperature was well above 90 degrees, but a restless wind kept us cool. As we approached farmers returning from the fields, Döwlet would sit up and greet them. They’d offer a formulaic blessing, the same every time. I didn’t understand it completely, but it was along the lines of “may your seeds grow and multiply.” Döwlet would thank them, return the blessing, and lie back down.

When we reached the Lone Mulberry field, we found that we were fifth in line for the tractor driver’s services. For three hours, we lay in the shade of a mulberry tree, watching the ancient Soviet “Belorus” tractor kick up dust as it roared back and forth across the field, opening the furrows, depositing the seeds, closing the furrows. Back and forth, back and forth. The donkey grazed on weeds. When our turn came, we hauled our sacks of seed to the tractor and poured them into the four funnel-shaped hoppers on the sledge it was pulling. We stood on the sledge as the tractor pulled it across the field, using sticks to stir the cotton seeds in their hoppers, to make sure they flowed smoothly so they would deposit the seeds in evenly spaced rows.

The dust swirled around us and the sledge shook and rattled like it was about to fall apart. I held on with my left hand, legs braced far apart, and stirred. I could taste the dust; I could feel the grit in my eyes. When the tractor came to the edge of the field, Döwlet and I would jump off the planter into the powdery soil. The tractor would raise the sledge, make the turn, and then lower it back to earth. As the tractor accelerated back across the field, we’d chase after it, and leap back onto the sledge.

Once, a hopper started dumping seeds in random clumps and Döwlet threw a stick at the tractor’s back window. The driver stopped, climbed wearily down from the cab, and inspected the hopper. As the tractor idled, he walked back to the cab and found a curl of baling wire, a pair of pliers, and a hammer made from a lump of iron welded to a piece of pipe. He banged and tied and twisted for a few minutes and then climbed back into the cab. We were off again.

When the tractor driver finished Döwlet’s plot, he paused long enough to pick up the next farmer and refill the hoppers. Then he roared away across the field again in his little tornado of dust. Döwlet and I, dirt covering our clothes and crunching between our teeth, climbed back on our donkey cart and headed home. As we approached the village, the sun was setting and we could hear the muezzin’s call to prayer, amplified by the mosque’s tinny old loudspeaker. I made a joke about how the muezzin kept calling and calling, but no one was listening – the mosque was usually empty. Döwlet took my joke as a personal criticism and said he was too busy to go to mosque. He told me a parable about two men. One secretly doubted God’s existence but went to mosque every day so his neighbors would respect him as a pious man. The other was a drinker who never set foot in a mosque but went to bed every night asking God, in whom he fervently believed, to forgive his sins. When both men died, the pious man went to hell, the drinker to heaven.

“As long as you think of God, as long as you believe in him, you’re okay,” Döwlet said.

At home, we took turns in the
banya
. With cool water from the cistern, I washed the dust from my hair and skin. In the dim room, I kicked something squishy. It turned out to be a frog, which leaped into the drain and swam out to the irrigation canal behind the
banya
. While Döwlet and I were in the field, Jeren had made a giant meal. The
klionka
was loaded with spinach
somsa
s and
plov
and mutton fat soup. She had even baked
yagly nan
(bread dough mixed with mutton fat, salt, and onions and baked in the
tamdur
), one of the most delicious things in the world. There were plates of sliced cucumbers, scallions, and kiwis, and a bowl of chocolate cookies. We ate until we were stuffed and then lounged around the living room watching American movies dubbed into Russian (the end of
Black Rain
and the beginning of
Cobra
) until it was time for bed.

* * *

As spring deepened and the blossoms on the trees in our yard were replaced by miniature apples, apricots, plums, and pomegranates, my Turkmen lessons with Maksat started to pay off. When I met people in the street, I could ask after their families in Turkmen instead of Russian, which they seemed to appreciate. At home, I could finally talk to my little sisters, who didn’t know Russian. When Altyn asked me one day to help her tie a loop of rope onto the branch of an apricot tree in our yard, I understood her. It was an epiphany. After months of mime, we had discovered language. After I’d finished with the knots, she sat in the loop and swung toward the sky, shaking the branch and bringing a few stray leaves down on her head.

“Do you have swings in America?” she asked.

“Yes,” I assured her.

She was so pleased that I could understand her that she decided I should learn faster. She started quizzing me on Turkmen vocabulary, leading me around the house, pointing to objects, and demanding that I name them. It became a competition. She had joined my basic English class and was among the best students even though, at eight, she was four years younger than most of the other kids. So when she asked me for a word in Turkmen, I’d ask her for a word in English in return. The problem was, she was learning faster than I was. She taunted me mercilessly. Teachers give Turkmen students number grades (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) instead of letter grades (A, B, C, D, F). Altyn nicknamed me
birlik
, which means, roughly, “1 student,” or “F student.”

I tried to catch up, but, unfortunately, my Turkmen teacher had given up on teaching me Turkmen. He’d decided that I would never use the language once I returned to America. So he started teaching me about Turkmen culture, instead. Twice a week I’d walk across town to his house. Those spring evenings were warm and clear. As I crossed the bridge, a few of my students, swimming in the river below, would call out “hello, teacher” and I’d wave. I’d often stop at the store for a chocolate-covered ice cream bar. When I knocked at Maksat’s gate his mutt would run around the corner and bark at me until I bent down to pet it. Hearing the racket, Maksat would appear from one of the buildings surrounding the courtyard and shake my hand. Then we’d walk over to his neighbor’s mud-brick garage.

As part of my Turkmen culture lessons, Maksat was teaching me about silk production. Nurana’s teachers were all required to buy 7 grams of silk worm eggs, raise the worms, and sell their cocoons to the government. This annoyed Maksat. He had enough to do already and there wasn’t much money in raising silk worms. The government paid less than $1 per kilogram for even the highest quality cocoons. So he gave his eggs to his neighbor to raise. That way he’d get credit for meeting his quota and the neighbor would get the profits, such as they were.

Inside the neighbor’s garage was a single, massive table, pieced together from sawhorses and stray boards, and covered with what looked like butcher paper. A gas heater warmed the garage. A light bulb hung from the underside of its straw-and-mud roof. On the table was a pile of mulberry leaves that the women of the house had chopped with knives and scissors. It was sprinkled with squirming white silk worms. They were the size of maggots when I first saw them, but slowly grew to the size off my thumb. Eventually, they would spin themselves into cocoons of long silk threads, which the neighbor would gather and sell to the government.

After checking on the worms’ progress, Maksat and I would go back to his house to sit in his twin easy chairs and talk. One day he gave me a lesson on Turkmen names. Some were names of precious things: Altyn means gold, and Kümüsh means silver. Others were like prayers: if a man’s wife gave birth to a series of daughters, he might name the fifth or sixth Ogulgerek, meaning, “I want a boy.” If his next child were a boy, he might call him Hudayberdy, meaning, “God gave.” Others were just functional. If a couple had whole series of boys, they might start numbering them: four, five, six, seven (Chary, Bashim, Alty, Yedy). So, Maksat joked, if a guy is giving you trouble and you’re thinking of fighting him, ask his name. If it’s Hudayberdy, you can be pretty sure he’s alone, so hit him. If it’s Yedy, he has six brothers, so run for your life.

On other days, Maksat told me about Turkmen artists. He showed me a book of paintings by Ayhan Hajiyev, realistic renderings of collectivization,
kolkhoz
life, and Turkmen heroes. He told me how, during the Soviet era, men like Ashyr Kuliev had studied at universities in Russia and become great composers of Western-style classical music. We also talked a lot about great Turkmen writers, and especially the 18th-Century poet Magtymguly Feraghy.

There is no writer who holds a place in American culture analogous to Magtymguly’s
place in Turkmen culture. Magtymguly is a national hero and sage. Every Turkmen knows who Magtymguly is and most can quote from his work. Many of his best lines are so well known that they have become proverbs.

Magtymguly studied in madrassahs in Bukhara and Khiva and then worked as a teacher and silversmith.
94
 
He wrote poetry in his free time. While most Central Asian poets at the time wrote in one of the region’s literary languages (Chagatay, Arabic, and Persian), Magtymguly wrote in Turkmen, which he thought was just as beautiful. In fact, he was something of a proto-nationalist. He wrote poems decrying the tribal divisions he believed kept the Turkmen weak and disorganized. “If Turkmens would only tighten the Belt of Determination,” he wrote, “they could drink the Red Sea in their strength/ So let the tribes of Teke, Yomut, Gokleng, Yazir, and Alili/ Unite into one proud nation.”

All the great Turkmen writers Maksat told me about were, like Magtymguly, long dead. When I asked him who the great contemporary Turkmen writers were, he laughed.

“There’s only one,” he said. “The Great Turkmenbashy.”

* * *

I was content in Nurana, happy. The village was beautiful, my friends and host family were kind, and my English classes kept me busy. I had to return to the Ashgabat area twice during the spring, though, and each time I was reminded why I’d been so frustrated and angry for my first year and a half in Turkmenistan. There were the checkpoints clogging the roads on the way to the capital, staffed by surly guards and stuffed with impatient travelers. And there were Ashgabat’s golden statues and stupid slogans: “The 
21st Century is Turkmenistan’s Golden Age,” “People, Nation, Turkmenbashy.” Within hours of leaving Nurana, I was wound up, pissed off, and full of despair for the future of the country.

The first time I returned to Ashgabat, it was for the debate tournament I’d begun planning with Mehri so many months earlier. The tournament itself went fine. Mehri and Phoebe had arranged travel and lodging for the nine debate teams that slipped quietly into Ashgabat from across Turkmenistan. The debaters met at the Peace Corps office for a series of 44-minute debates on whether it was better to deal with drug addicts through law enforcement (throw them in prison) or harm reduction (give them clean needles, put them in rehab). Each team debated four times, starting with prepared statements and working through a series of cross-examinations and rebuttals. Panels of Peace Corps Volunteers served as judges.

The kids were terrified at first, but their coaches had prepared them well, and after the second round their stage fright wore off and they dug in for battle. They’d spent weeks doing research and came armed with statistics on things like how much it cost to imprison a drug addict versus how much it cost to put him in rehab. In the final round, a team from Mary and a team from Turkmenbashy faced off in front a panel of seven judges and an audience of about 40. After it was all over, we talked to the debaters about how to start debate clubs, sent them home with debate coach handbooks, and went to the bar to celebrate.

The depressing part of the trip came after the tournament was over, when I took a
marshrutka
to Abadan to visit Ana and Sesili. The hot weather had ruined their business; their Korean salads had started spoiling before they could sell them. Then Ana’s brother Andrei had gotten sick. Helping to pay his hospital bills and support his family while he was out of work had wiped out Ana and Sesili’s savings. They were scraping by on the money that Sesili brought home from selling cabbages at the bazaar for 1,500 manat a piece (about 6 cents). They were so broke they couldn’t even offer me dinner. We drank tea together for a while and then I excused myself. I left a roll of cash on the bathroom sink with a note that said: “Don’t argue with me, just take it.” On my way out, I stopped to check on my garden. Nothing had sprouted.