Daily Life in Turkmenbashy's Golden Age (21 page)

After everyone else took their turn weighing in and getting paid, we all settled down to wait for the bus. Three boys lounged in the mountainous, white pile of cotton on the trailer. The adults mostly sat cross-legged in the shade underneath. A group of teenaged girls spent their time making each other pass out. One would press on the sides of another’s neck with her hands, cutting off the blood flow. After a few minutes she would collapse into a pile in the dust and then spring back up, laughing. Pretty soon, a teacher caught on and scolded them, so they went to the other side of the trailer and continued their game.

On the way home, I spent my day’s salary: We stopped at one of the ubiquitous
gazly suw
stands, where a girl mixed carbonated water with flavored syrups to make Alei and I two cold, homemade sodas. When we were done, she rinsed the glasses and put them back on the counter for the next customers. Then we went to the bakery and bought two loaves of
chorek
for dinner. And that was it. After a whole day’s work, that was all I could buy. No wonder the government had to force people to pick cotton.

21.

Korean Salads

Nearly everyone in Turkmenistan dreamed of secure government jobs, like the ones they’d had in the Soviet days: teacher, doctor, nurse, bureaucrat, postal clerk, factory worker, street sweeper, policeman. There weren’t nearly enough of these “real” jobs to go around, though, and most people had to find other ways of making a living. They were often entrepreneurial and occasionally ingenious. A fairly common scheme was to fly to Dubai, buy a used car, ship it across the Straights of Hormuz to Iran, drive it through Iran to Turkmenistan, and switch the steering wheel from the right side to the left side in a friend’s garage. Bringing the car to market cost around $2,000 and selling it brought about $3,000. Then there were the taxi drivers, the moneychangers, the subsistence farmers, the prostitutes, the wedding planners, the smugglers, the scribes, the drug dealers, the free-lance welders, the laundresses, the seamstresses, and the cooks.

Perhaps the most common line of work, however, was selling goods at the bazaar. That’s how Ana had made her living during the previous fall and winter, and with cold weather on the way, she wanted to restart her salad selling-business. Over the summer, though, she’d spent all her savings, so she didn’t have any startup capital. After some negotiations at the kitchen table, I agreed to lend her a million manat (about $40). I figured it fit well with my Three-Part Plan. She spent the next week gathering the materials she needed, traveling from bazaar to bazaar to find the best prices for sacks of carrots, cabbages, and beets. She bought graters and washtubs, spices and salt, bottles of oil and vinegar. Then we started washing and peeling and grating and mixing and tasting. For a week, we ate nothing but salads, taste-testing recipe after recipe to find just the right combination of sugar, oil, vinegar, coriander, salt, and red pepper to flavor the grated carrots and cabbage.

The salads Ana was going to sell were called “Korean 
salads.” They were common items in bazaars all over the country, but their origin was a mystery. Allen, the Korean-American Peace Corps Volunteer, insisted that there was no such thing as a Korean salad and, indeed, the dishes that Ana sold did not resemble anything I’d ever seen in a Korean restaurant or cookbook. My best guess about why they were called Korean salads was that they were made and sold mainly by Koreans (Ana being an exception). Thanks to Stalin, Turkmenistan had a small but significant Korean population, concentrated in urban areas.

Koreans started migrating to the Russian Far East in the 1860s, fleeing drought and famine. In 1937, Stalin ordered them all moved to other parts of the Soviet Union. He might have done it because he was worried about a nationalist uprising or because he thought that war with Japan was on the way and doubted the Koreans’ loyalty.
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Whatever the reason, Soviets officials loaded at least 175,000 Koreans onto trains and scattered them across Central Asia. Years later, a Kazakh witness recalled the arrival of one group: “They brought Koreans in trucks, leaving them among the withered bushes of camel thorn and tamarisk. Deprived of any amenities or self-respect, the people in white gowns and grey padded jackets clutched the drivers’ and policemen’s boots, begging to be taken to inhabited places, for in the cold and wind, with neither hearth nor roof, young children and the elderly would die, and even teenagers would hardly last.”
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Either Ana didn’t know this story or she didn’t want to talk about it. When I asked her how all the Koreans and their salads had ended up in Turkmenistan, she just held out a spoonful of marinated, roasted eggplant.

“Taste this,” she said.

Once Ana had perfected her recipes, Sesili rented a booth at one of the Abadan bazaars. Every night, Ana would mix, taste, and pour. She would fill buckets and washbasins with four or five kinds of salad. Every morning, Sesili would wake at dawn, haul the salads to the bazaar, and spend the day selling them by the sandwich bag-full. At first, Sesili would come home with only a pocketful of change, but as she built a loyal clientele, the money started rolling in. She’d come home with a stack of bills and a few treats – three pomegranates or a bottle of name-brand soda. She’d hand the money to Ana, who would sit at the kitchen table, count it, and then hide it in a closet or a book.

“My favorite daughter,” Ana would say, giving Sesili a kiss on the cheek.

“I’m your only daughter,” Sesili would reply, dryly.

22.

Isolated and Smothered

As autumn deepened, I was slowly transforming Red Crescent’s extra apartment from a sewage-scented concrete dungeon into an inhabitable space. It was well on its way to becoming the Internet center I’d been planning for so many months. I’d hired a metal worker to install two new locks to secure its steel front door and I’d put in a heating and cooling unit. I’d laid new linoleum on the floor. Using a half-can of brown paint he’d found in a closet, Shokhrat had painted the walls to look like they were made from rough-hewn stone. The youth volunteers had borrowed tables and chairs from the Red Crescent dining hall across the street. Someone had scrounged some secondhand bookshelves and an old stereo.

One cool afternoon, I sat outside the front door waiting for an electrician, a friend of Vera’s named Alexander. I needed him to wire the heating and cooling unit and install some extra lights to brighten the place up a bit. Alexander turned out to be a wiry 50-year-old who covered his short, graying hair with a baseball cap. I followed him inside and held a flashlight while he worked. He asked me questions about myself: where I was from, why I’d come to Turkmenistan, the usual. Then the conversation took an interesting turn.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

“No.”

“Neither did I, until my son died three years ago. He was 17. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. He just died.”

“I’m sorry.”

“At the hospital, I met a man who was a Jehovah’s Witness and he told me about God’s plan. I started going to meetings and began to understand. Have you read the Bible?”

Alexander spent more time trying to convert me than working. He didn’t know that it was futile. My parents hadn’t taken me to church when I was a kid and I hadn’t found my way there as an adult, either. In fact, I’d only been twice – once in high school when my coach forced the whole football team to go before a big game, and once for my grandmother’s funeral – and I didn’t plan to go again any time soon. Still, I didn’t mind listening to Alexander. I wasn’t paying him by the hour and I’m always curious to hear what people have to say. Besides, I was impressed by his courage.

Alexander was taking a big risk. It was one thing for a Jehovah’s Witness to go door-to-door hawking
The Watchtower
in the US. It was another for him to proselytize in Turkmenistan where there was no freedom of religion. Only Sunni Muslims and Orthodox Christians were allowed to practice their religions in Turkmenistan and only under state supervision. Members of other faiths were “arrested, detained (with allegations of torture and other ill-treatment), imprisoned, deported, harassed, fined, and have had their services disrupted, congregations dispersed, religious literature confiscated, and places of worship destroyed. Members of some religious minority groups in Turkmenistan have been forced to renounce their faith publicly, swearing an oath on a copy of
Rukhnama
,” according to a report from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
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I asked Alexander if he was scared.

“Whatever happens, happens,” he said, “but I have to do what I believe.”

Once Alexander had finished the electrical work, the next thing on my list was to install a door separating the first two rooms, which would become the new youth center, from the third room, which was going to be the Internet center. The door was meant to separate rowdy teenage delinquents from expensive computer equipment. Vera had asked another friend to hang the door, but she’d made the mistake of giving him the money before he’d done the work. Whenever I called, he promised he’d do it the next day. Weeks passed and he still hadn’t shown up. I ran out of patience. I went to his apartment one morning and knocked until his wife answered the door.

“Is Berdy home?” I asked.

No, but I’ll tell him you came by,” she said. “I’ll just wait for him, if that’s okay.”

Unfortunately for Berdy, his wife had excellent manners. She let me in and set me up in front of the TV with a pot of tea and a plate of cookies. I sat there watching music videos until Berdy appeared out of the back bedroom, where he’d been sleeping. He seemed more annoyed than surprised when he saw me.

“Good morning,” I said. “Hmm,” he said.

We sat and watched TV and drank our tea for a while. Once he’d had a chance to wake up a bit, I tried again to talk to him.

“You said you were going to install the door today. I came to help you carry it up to Red Crescent,” I told him.

“My friend’s going to help me install it. I have to find him. You go up to Red Crescent and we’ll meet you there,” he said.

“I’m in no hurry, I can wait with you until your friend gets here,” I said, smiling.

He looked angry, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to throw me out of his house, so he called his friend Maksat, who soon showed up on an ancient motorcycle with a sidecar. The two men hauled an unpainted pine door out of the apartment building’s basement and loaded it into the dented green sidecar. Maksat drove the door up to Red Crescent on the motorcycle and Berdy and I followed him on foot.

Berdy and Maksat were grizzled, middle-aged Turkmen guys. Their clothes were stained with what looked like engine grease, their hands were calloused and scarred. They didn’t appreciate me sitting and watching them work for six hours, but every time I left them alone – even if I just went to the bathroom – they’d stop working to sit around smoking cigarettes and cracking jokes. Berdy alternately called me Michael, George, or Smith. He said all American names sounded the same to him.

Hey Smith, what are you doing sitting there? Why don’t you go back to your own country? You don’t see me going to America do you?”

The two guys heckled me all day as I sat and watched them work. It took them forever because they were installing a rectangular wooden door into an irregularly shaped concrete doorway. It didn’t help that they were lazy and only marginally competent. If I’d had tools and a door, I could have done the same shoddy job in a quarter the time. By evening, Berdy and Maksat never wanted to see me again, but the door was hanging on its hinges and the youth center was ready for its computers.

I met Geldy at his office in Ashgabat one afternoon and we walked together to the electronics store to pick out two computers. It was a sleek, modern, air-conditioned store. Geldy flirted with the pretty young clerk, who was wearing a black mini-skirt. After a few minutes talking monitors, mice, and modems, we agreed on a price. I pulled several packets of 10,000-manat bills from the shopping bag I was carrying and stacked them on the counter. The clerk ran my money through a counting machine (a necessity for stores selling big-ticket items) and wrote me a receipt. Then one of the store’s stock boys loaded my purchases into his car and drove me out to Abadan.

At Red Crescent, I unloaded all the white boxes full of computer components at the youth center, and spent an hour cutting them open, and setting up the computers. Aynabat and Vera and all the youth volunteers came over to watch. Even Aman stopped by to order me around a little bit. He was more full of himself than usual. All of a sudden he was a big man, in charge of an office with three computers.

Aman, Geldy, and Turkmen Telecom had all promised me that hooking up the Internet service would be simple and quick once the center was ready and the computers were installed. That turned out not to be true. Aman called his friend at the telephone company to get a new phone line installed for the Internet center, only to learn it was impossible. He was told that the system in Abadan was already at capacity; no more phone lines were available. The best Aman’s friend could do was to run an extra cable from Aman’s office, across the street to the Internet center, so we could all share a single party-line. Any time Aman wanted to make a call or anyone called Red Crescent, the computers would get kicked off the Internet.