Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (21 page)

Merv, what was left of it, lay in the hard glitter of the central Asian desert, about an hour up the railway line, near a town and station called Bayram Ali, which dated from 1887, when Czar Nicholas II had planned to visit. A substantial villa was built for him in Bayram Ali, but in the event, his highness didn't show up, it wasn't used, and so it was turned into the sanatorium it is now, for people with heart and kidney ailments. Mary—the adjacent city and provincial capital—was the usual Turkmenistan artifact, half boomtown, half slum: gold statues of Turkmenbashi, portraits of Turkmenbashi, the eternal slogan
Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi
("People, Motherland, Me"), white marble government buildings, prestige projects (an opera house, luxury hotels, a pointless flyover), and boulevards almost empty of traffic.

Off the big thoroughfares, on back streets, were low decaying houses and Soviet-era tenements. Some Russians remained—not many, though a small colony of hard-pressed Russian artists, voluntary exiles in a way, exhibited their work in one of Mary's neighborhoods. The Germans whom Stalin had relocated here from the Volga region during World War II had all departed. I stayed in an inexpensive government hotel, where the other guests were Turkmen officials. Most people came to Mary to see the ruins at Merv, or the ones at Gonur Depe, also nearby. Either that or the cotton fields. On some of the side roads were bakeries and some joints roasting shish kebabs and serving piles of
plov
and chunks of bread.

One morning in Mary I met Evgenia Golubeva. A sturdy woman of about fifty, divorced, her daughters in Moscow, Evgenia was a third-generation Russian in Turkmenistan, well known locally, much loved, and scholarly—she had studied the ruins here and in Gonur Depe in detail. As a Russian remnant, staying on, with nothing but praise for the Turkmen people ("so kind, so gentle, so hospitable"), she was a pleasure to spend time with, because she was knowledgeable and passionate about these flattened cities.

On the way to Mary, by the roadside, in the middle of a dusty plain, among thorn bushes and salty desert, I saw a startlingly beautiful Turkmen woman—golden-skinned, with a sculpted face, wearing a fluttering cloak, standing gracefully next to a bundle, probably waiting for one of
those small, dirty buses. Her beauty in this crusted wasteland was like a metaphor for Turkmenistan: lovely people, awful place.

Ancient Merv, to my fascinated and amateur eye, resembled many fabled cities I'd seen that had declined, all of them in deserts—the Chinese Taklamakan Desert, or the Nafud, or here in the Karakum wasteland. It had the appearance of sandcastles after the tide had brimmed and washed over them, simplified and smoothed their walls, flattened them, pitted their battlements and pillars—so that there was only the faintest suggestion of symmetry in the slopes of sand. As for elegance, you'd have to take the guide's or the historian's word for it. Basically you were looking at a lost city of millions that was now tumbled brick and blown dust and mud heaps.

But, as I kept thinking, this was a vivid metaphor for what happened to the hubristic world of wealth and power—indeed, the world of gold statues and marble palaces and vain slogans and upstart forests. The world of armies and conquest. The realm of generals and windbags. Ha! It all turned to sand and was overrun with rodents and lizards. Hawks flew over it, searching for vermin.

"This is Erk Kala, oldest part of Merv—from sixth century
B.C.
," said Evgenia, indicating a wide low crater of dried mud.

This city, "Merv, Queen of the World," one of the pearls of the Silk Road, had been an early center of Zoroastrianism and been associated with Alexander the Great and Tamerlane. It had been mentioned by the Persians (it was once the capital of Persian Khorrasan); it was sacked by Tolui Khan, son of Genghis Khan, in 1221, and later visited by Marco Polo and Omar Khayyam. It had been Buddhist and Nestorian Christian. It is mentioned in Zarathustra's
Avesta
as a place of strength and holiness, of the "good lands." In its opulence, its only other rival had been Baghdad. Importantly, Merv had been targeted by Muhammad as the staging post for Islamic conversion. The Prophet himself had sent two of his closest disciples here to evangelize. "My eyes in the East," he had called them; they were buried here.

And it was not one city but four or five, side by side, each of them distinct and from a different period, laid out over many square miles. The battered walls of some citadels still stood, with roughed-out rooms and the remnants of staircases, but it was all like a child's sand-pile simplification of splendor. You could wax poetic—some more recent
travelers had done so, trying to give it life—but it was lifeless and pathetic, like all such desert ruins, not a vivid thing but rather a
Planet of the Apes
version of history, which is truer than most. You had to use your imagination.

At one of the old mosques, the graves of the seventh-century Muslim evangelists, Jaffari and Bureda, were marked by a marble slab with a long inscription. Evgenia translated: "O traveler, you visit this place and you are lucky, because the people who are buried here are holy and close to God. If you have a problem, walk three times around the tomb and it will be solved."

My problem, so I had been told, was that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ashgabat was annoyed with me because of the uproar at my talk—specifically, the outburst by the dissident politician, but more to the point, the government's photographer had been frustrated in his spying, his memory card wiped clean of any images.

"You might have a problem at the border," I was told. "They might hassle you. They could seriously hold you up."

So I walked three times around the tomb of Jaffari and Bureda.

What I liked of Merv was its innocence—no fences, no postcards, no pests, few signs, not even much respect. In this shattered and somewhat forgotten place in the desert, some visitors scrambled up and down the steep walls, kicking them apart, picking up pieces of broken pottery, and others picnicked among the crenelations. It was possible to see young Turkmen boys genially pissing on the ruins. This was what became of pompous plans: the trickle of urine darkening the dust, the laughter of picnickers scattering crumbs and
plov
grains, spilling lemonade.

I was shown the old cistern and the Sassanid dome and the rebuilt ("Notice the squeenches," Evgenia said) Sultan Sanjar Mosque ("Double dome, two khundred years before Brunelleschi designed Saint Peter's in Roma"), the third-century wall of Antiochus, the big ruined Buddhist stupa, the ice house, the site of the Mongol invasion where a million people were slaughtered, the ruined watchtowers...

And masses of tamarisks with purple blossoms graced the watchtowers. A sharp-angled falcon glided slowly above, circling, stalking. In the distance some men were grazing a herd of camels. Three small boys approached us where we stood. They were mounted on donkeys, yelling and galloping across an ancient wall, leaving hoofprints on it. They had
no saddles, they held on to rope bridles, they kicked their skinny gray mounts.

"They are Beluchis, from Persia," Evgenia said. "They settled here many years ago."

These human touches made the place real for me. Evgenia said that local people, superstitious about the aura of slaughter and conquest, avoided Merv and used it only to pasture their animals or to pilfer bricks. Goatherds huddled by the single remaining part of the exposed wall of the complex known as Gyaur Kala. The sun was setting on Merv. The shepherds' fire scorched the ancient bricks as they cooked their evening meal.

***

IN MARY, OVER ANOTHER
mound of
plov,
a young Turkmen—formerly an exchange student in the United States, a recent university graduate, new to Mary—listed for me the problems in his country.

"First of all, it is a police state," he said. "We have secret police, we have spies, it is terrible. It is also a corrupt system. It is impossible to advance in any government job without bribes. Even going to a university requires bribing the admissions office. And if you are non-Turkmen, forget about it. You'll never get in."

Unemployment was high, the teacher shortage was acute, salaries were low—a university professor pedaling his bike past the gold statues earned about $150 a month. The minimum wage was $20 a month; a cotton picker like Selim did not earn much more than that. Add to this the housing shortage, the potholes that characterized most streets, the interminable roadblocks and grouchy soldiers, the disgusting toilets.

"Many people are desperate."

"Give me an example," I said.

"Girls sell themselves on the street! Didn't you see them in Ashgabat?"

I had seen pretty girls on street corners—and by the way, all the major streets were named for members of Turkmenbashi's family—but how was I to know they were selling themselves?

"Where were you in the United States?" I asked, because he now and then mentioned his American host family. And he remarked on the fact that he had been twenty-two when he went to the United States but that this was his first time in Mary.

"Spokane."

"After what you've told me about Turkmenistan, do you sometimes wish you'd stayed there?"

"No. I am a Turkmen. I love my country. I would only go to the USA in order to make money and send it to my parents."

I met other former exchange students. They were cautious when they talked to me, for fear that anything they said would expose them to retribution.

But many of them said that life was hard, and it wasn't just the low salaries and the housing shortage. Because Turkmenistan was so near to the heroin-producing areas of Afghanistan, hard drugs were a serious problem in the country. Heroin addicts were numerous, and their need for money caused crime. Turkmenistan was also a transshipment route for drugs from Afghanistan to Russia. Afghan hashish was freely available.

In Mary I was told that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was still watching me, and that this might be a good time to head east, to Turkmenabat and the Uzbek border. Someone would be sent to help me.

And one morning a man showed up at my hotel, the Margush. I shall call him Sedyk Ali. He said he had been deputized to accompany me to the border. He too had been an exchange student.

"What did you like about the States?"

"Good people. Clean conditions. No bribes."

"Tell me what you didn't like."

"The way that children treat their elders. Not good."

What surprised him especially was the casual way that teenagers spoke to their parents—offhand, disrespectful, sarcastic, often talking to them as they walked away, with their back turned. It would never happen in Turkmenistan.

"My host family was very nice to me, but one day coming home from school the daughter was smoking a cigarette. I said her mother wouldn't like it. 'My mother's stupid. Don't pay any attention to her.' Imagine that."

"What did you think?"

"I was shocked," he said. "A mother is holy!"

We drove through the prairie towards Turkmenabat, another renamed city—most people I met in Mary still called it by its old name, Charjou.
In Ashgabat I had asked an American Peace Corps volunteer what this part of the country would look like. He had said, "Looks like west Texas"—and it did. When we came to the inevitable roadblock in the middle of the scrub and the stony plain, there was a small settlement, called Rawnina, where some people were watching us, their cloaks drawn around them because the sharp wind was lifting the grit from the land and spraying it. The air was hot, the gray sky oppressive. Intending to further lighten my bag, I gave Sedyk Ali one of my cold-weather shirts.

He thanked me and, indicating the settlement, said, "They are Kazakhs."

An old shrouded woman squatted by the road with a pile of trinkets. Here in the middle of nowhere, a seller of amulets against the evil eye and against bad luck generally. It was said that in these wild and empty places you were likely to be harried by demons.

Sedyk Ali bought me an amulet on a multicolored demon-distracting cord, thinking it might come in handy.

Perhaps it did. Our car dumped us in Turkmenabat, the driver saying he could not go farther. But when we got another car, no sooner had the old man driving it pointed out the Amu Darya River—one of the wonders of this region for its ancient association, the fabled Oxus—than a roadblock appeared. The soldiers looked at Sedyk Ali's papers and told him to turn back.

Sedyk Ali wished me luck. I saw him through the rear window, standing in the empty road.

We came to Farap, the Turkmenistan border. I was apprehensive about the customs formalities, but there was no problem. I was searched, my bag examined, my icon remarked upon. My passport, too.

"You live Gawaii."

"Yes."

"Gonolulu?"

"That's right."

"You stay Ashgabat?"

"Yes."

"You see beeg beelding?"

"Yes."

"Weech you like better?"

My favorite, I told him with absurd eagerness, was the big statue of
Turkmenbashi on the giant marble toilet-bowl plunger. "His arm is up"—I raised my arm in the same Sieg Heil way—"and when the sun moves, the gold statue moves, like this. Beautiful. Gold!"*

* In May 2008, the new President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, decreed that this monument, the 246-foot tripod with the rotating 39-foot gold statue of Niyazov on top, be dismantled. The ban on opera and circuses was also lifted.

"Yes," the border guard said, smiling in satisfaction. His interrogation over, he waved me through. "You can pass.
Nyet prablyema"

So I walked past the barbed-wire fence on the dirt road through the desert towards Uzbekistan.

M
OST TRAVEL, AND CERTAINLY
the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life. This risky suspension of disbelief is often an experience freighted with anxiety. But what's the alternative? Usually there is none. There was none for me here, at the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert, kicking through the gravel.