Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (5 page)

It was still morning, but I was exhausted and overwhelmed so I went to my room, lay down, and fell asleep. When I woke up an hour later, I wandered into the kitchen and sat down across from Olya at the table, which was covered with a purple-and white-checked tablecloth. She had a lump of dough and a bowl of seasoned, ground meat and she was making Russian tortellini –
pelmini
– one by one. Wordlessly, she showed me how. We sat in silence, folding pasta, and sweating. It was well over 90 degrees outside, and the apartment’s un-insulated concrete walls radiated heat. Misha lay on the floor shirtless, watching TV and smoking. I was relieved that no one was trying to talk to me. My brain hurt from trying all morning to speak and understand a language I had been studying for only a few days. Olya boiled a few handfuls of
pelmini
in a pot on the stove and served them in bowls with sour cream, salt, and pepper. It was delicious. I had seconds.

That evening, Sasha knocked on the door to my room and asked if I wanted to "
goolyat"
with him and Olya. I didn’t understand, so while he stood there in the doorway impatiently, I paged through my yellow Russian-English dictionary. It took me a while to find the word, since I barely knew the Russian alphabet. It turned out he was asking if I wanted to go out for a walk. I put on a long-sleeved shirt, sat on the floor, and pulled on my shoes. Outside, night was falling but it was still about 85 degrees. People escaping their stifling apartments for the cool of the evening filled the streets. Women walked in groups, little children tugging at their skirts. Men squatted in rows on curbs, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the husks into the gutters. Smoke from burning trash piles drifted among the buildings.

We walked toward the mountains, passing among row upon row of concrete apartment buildings just like ours. Satellite dishes sprouted from nearly every window, all facing the same direction, like rows of giant, gray sunflowers. Each first-floor apartment had its own garden. I peeked over hedges and through fences at them as we passed. In the gardens, men lounged under grape arbors drinking tea on
tapjans
. Women baked
chorek
in clay ovens and fried
somsa
s in cast-iron cauldrons over wood fires. We passed a man butchering a sheep that was hanging by its back legs from the side of a concrete telephone pole.

Six blocks or so from our apartment, we came to the town’s main bazaar. Roofed with a patchwork of canvas and plastic, its tables were laden with pyramids of fruits and vegetables. The street in front of the bazaar was crowded. Turkmen women with long black braids and
koyneks
walked with Russian bottle-blonds in mini-skirts and high heels. Most men – Turkmen and Russian alike – wore black pants and white, button-down shirts. In the buildings around the bazaar, there were convenience stores, a dressmaker’s shop, and a barber’s shop the size of a phone booth. We passed an arcade where a crowd of kids clamored to rent time on two Sony PlayStations. When it got dark, families hauled beds from their apartments onto the sidewalks so they could sleep outside where it was cool. Olya, Sasha, and I headed home. Back at the apartment, I read for a few minutes and then fell asleep, exhausted.

I had expected Turkmenistan to be extremely poor. After exploring Ashgabat and now Abadan, though, I was beginning to realize that it was not as underdeveloped as places I’d visited in Latin America and Africa. On international scales of development, Turkmenistan ranked somewhere in the middle (although that still meant that 58 percent of Turkmen lived in poverty and 60 percent were unemployed).
10
 
The frustrating thing was that it should have ranked much higher. It had a small population, some of the world’s largest natural gas reserves, and small but significant oil reserves.
11

After independence, Niyazov promised that this fortuitous combination would turn the country into the “Kuwait of Central Asia” and “promised every family free bread and a new Mercedes.”
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But a combination of factors kept the people of Turkmenistan relatively poor.

Bad government was certainly part of the problem. The nongovernmental organization Transparency International ranked Turkmenistan among the ten most corrupt countries in the world in
2005, worse than Nigeria and on par with Haiti. Turkmenistan made about $2 billion a year off of its natural gas, according to one estimate. But “…Niyazov [kept] most of the gas revenues under his effective control in overseas and off-budget funds…no money from the sale of Turkmen gas even [made] it into the national budget.”
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He spent tens of millions on prestige projects like the reconstruction of downtown Ashgabat, which didn’t do much to improve life for the Turkmen people or strengthen the country’s economy. It’s not clear where the rest went.

Bad government wasn’t the only factor keeping Turkmenistan poor, though. Pipeline politics also played a role. During the Soviet days, Turkmenistan’s gas flowed north, through Soviet pipelines. It was provided at artificially low prices to other Soviet republics. While the other republics got cheap gas, Turkmenistan stayed poor. After independence, not much changed: most of Turkmenistan’s gas continued to flow through the same pipelines. Russia used the leverage that arrangement provided – it could close its pipelines, virtually shutting down the country’s ability to export gas – to buy Turkmen gas for artificially low prices. Turkmenistan remained relatively poor. Niyazov had looked for ways to break Russia’s stranglehold on Turkmenistan’s ability to export its gas, investigating the possibility of building pipelines across Afghanistan to Pakistan and India, across the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus to Turkey, and across Kazakhstan to China, but he had not managed to solve the problem.

* * *

Almost every morning for the first 10 weeks, I had language classes at Dom Pionerov with the other trainees who lived in Abadan. We had been assigned to live in cities where there were lots of Russian speakers, so we were learning Russian. All the other Peace Corps trainees were learning Turkmen. The schoolhouse and everything in it had been designed for children; for class, we squeezed into miniature chairs, around a miniature table. Flies buzzed in and out of the open windows. We struggled to conjugate verbs and memorize vocabulary, sweating in the late-summer heat.

Sitting around the table were Matt, a metro-sexual from New Hampshire who had just graduated from law school; Allen, a distracted Korean American guy fresh out of Yale who rarely talked; Laura, a kindhearted woman from suburban Miami who looked a little like Sandra Bullock and had a good story about an NBA player grabbing her ass; and Kellie, a good Christian girl from Washington state who often looked like she was about to burst into tears and occasionally did. Our teacher, Tanya, had worked for Peace Corps for nearly a decade. She was patient and good at her job. We learned fast.

Every day after class, our little group would walk from Dom Pionerov through the dust and glaring late-summer heat to Aunt Olga’s apartment for lunch. A full, gray-haired woman of about 65, she would kiss our cheeks, tell us what good boys and girls we were, pile our plates with stuffed peppers and push us to eat more and more because we were “too skinny.”

After lunch, we’d trudge out the door, down the grimy stairwell, and back out into the heat, trying to avoid the emaciated, mangy cat that was dying in the stairwell, day-by-day. One afternoon, just outside the building, I found a boy and a girl – they looked like they were three or four years old – playing in a mud puddle. They were sucking up the stagnant water with dirty plastic syringes and squirting it at each other, giggling. At a loss, I checked to make sure there were no needles attached to the syringes, returned them to the kids, and went on my way.

At first I was assigned to spend several hours a week at a clinic – a standard training assignment for health teachers. Soon, though, I got permission to skip my clinic time, since I wouldn’t be working at a clinic after training, anyway. Instead, I was to spend a few hours a week at the local branch of the Red Crescent (the Red Cross of the Islamic world).

This turned out to be difficult to arrange, since I couldn’t find the Red Crescent office. I couldn’t look up its location on the Web, since Internet access was not available in Abadan. I couldn’t look it up in the Abadan telephone book, because there didn’t seem to be one. Besides, even if I had been able to find Red Crescent’s address somehow, it wouldn’t have helped because there were few street signs or numbers in Abadan. People in Turkmenistan don’t move around much—in part because they aren’t allowed to – so almost everyone in Abadan is from Abadan. They don’t need yellow pages or street signs to find their ways around. They just know.

With Tanya’s help, I asked around for a few days and eventually learned Red Crescent’s location: “In the building across from city hall, where the old
pelmini
shop used to be. Everyone knows that.” The office was on the first floor of an apartment building. I knocked, but there was no answer. I pushed open the green metal door and found myself in a dark, musty dining hall, about 30 feet square. A few plastic tables and chairs stood on the tile floor and a portrait of Niyazov hung on the wall. I didn’t see anyone around, so I crossed the room and ducked through a curtain into a short hallway. On my right, a door opened into a kitchen where a skeleton-skinny 21-year-old was standing by the window smoking a cigarette – one of those slim menthol ones marketed to women – and drinking instant coffee. His name was Geldy. He grinned at me.

Geldy was my official “counterpart,” which meant he was supposed to be my guide, interpreter, and primary contact at work. When he was younger he had been a Red Crescent youth volunteer in Ashgabat, teaching health lessons in schools, putting on New Year’s shows at orphanages, and going on camping trips in the mountains. He stuck around for so long that they hired him to coordinate the Abadan youth volunteer group. He lived with his parents in Ashgabat and took the bus to Abadan every morning. He led me across the hall and into the main office to introduce me to Aman, our boss.

Aman turned out to be a fat, greasy looking man with a comb-over, sitting behind an empty desk. A portrait of Niyazov hung on the wall behind him. He put down his newspaper and gave me a fake smile. I introduced myself and he welcomed me and said some things in Russian that I didn’t understand. Geldy, who was supposed to be my interpreter, stood next to him to facilitate the exchange. It turned out, though, that he only knew a few words of English.

“He bitch,” Geldy told me, straight-faced. “He big fat bitch.”

Aman spoke again.

“He stupid gravedigger,” Geldy explained, helpfully.

Aman concluded his remarks.

“He bad man,” Geldy said.

I told Aman I was pleased to meet him and followed Geldy back across the hall to the kitchen, where we both burst out laughing. We spent the next few hours talking, with lots of help from my little yellow dictionary, and drinking coffee. He told me Aman was a greedy, corrupt ex-dentist and asked me a million questions about myself. He turned out to be sharp, funny, and well-read, full of sayings like: “Never be afraid to try new things. Remember, Noah was an amateur and the guys who built the Titanic were professionals.” He had a black, cynical sense of humor, which I found hilarious. I didn’t realize yet how deep his cynicism ran, though; I thought he was joking when he called himself “the Turkmen Machiavelli.” When it was time for me to go, I used my dictionary to try to tell him I had class until noon the next day but would come by after I’d finished. He burst out laughing.

“After you’ve finished?” he asked, giggling.

“Yes,” I said, showing him the word in the dictionary. “After I’ve finished.”

Don’t use that word,” he said, laughing so hard he had to put his coffee on the counter so he wouldn’t spill it. “We use that word for when a man finishes having sex.”

4.

Life in the Gulag

Lying diagonally to fit my six-foot-plus body between the headboard and footboard of my little bed, I would watch the sky lighten through my window each morning. A grape vine as thick as my arm grew up the side of the apartment building. As summer wore into autumn, the leaves browned and fell. I would note the changes as I lay in bed, adjusting to the waking world, listening to Olya clattering around the kitchen, putting together a breakfast of tea and cookies and sometimes – on special days – Russian crepes called
blini
.

After breakfast, I would iron my button-down shirt and slacks, shine my shoes and walk to work. If I wanted to be respected, I’d been told, I had to look good. Turkmen men were obsessive about their shoes, carrying handkerchiefs so they could stop from time to time to wipe the dust off them. Most Turkmen could not understand the American jeans-and-t-shirt aesthetic. I once overheard a teenager who had visited the United States telling a friend in an amused tone that, “in America, even the rich people dress like they’re poor.”

I would leave my building and cross a ruined playground, a desolate dirt lot with a busted merry-go-round and a swing set with only one swing left. I would turn right onto the main road to the bazaar, which was wide, paved, and flanked by concrete sidewalks. On my right were rows of apartment buildings. On my left was a neighborhood of brick and stucco family compounds. They were walled-in clusters of one-story houses built around central courtyards, which sheltered gardens, livestock, and
tapjan
s. I would often pass a child driving his family’s sheep, goats, cows, or camels to the fields to graze. I would follow the road south, up a slight incline, toward the Kopetdag range, which rose up off the flat desert plain like a wall, its highest peaks topping 10,000 feet. Denis, my host-brother, had told me that the tallest mountains, furthest in the distance, were in Iran.