Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (15 page)

Still being jogged in the dark compartment, I recalled the woman—where had I seen her? maybe Ankara?—who said, "I want to live your life."

And I had thought: Really! My nagged and scolded childhood, my undistinguished school career as a punk, no good at games, bewildered in college, terminated early from the Peace Corps, disgraced in Singapore when my contract wasn't renewed, hard up in London, refused a credit card by American Express at the age of thirty-two because I had no visi
ble credit, divorced—oh, sorry, you mean all the books and the fun of travel!

A knock at the door: two soldiers with rifles slung at me. "Gid owp."

So I was interrupted in my reverie by gun-toting soldiers at the Georgia border, a gritty settlement called Jandari. They went through the motions of a passport check, perfunctory and simple; but the train was jammed full of people, and it was two hours before we started again.

The next stop came fifteen minutes later—the Azerbaijan border at Beakykok, with many more soldiers and an imposing railway station. The soldiers tramped through the train, scrutinizing passports. I was apprehensive because my visa specified "Entry point—Baku." I was more than three hundred miles from there, but this didn't seem to matter to the soldier who licked his thumb and paged through my passport. He took no interest in my bag or its contents, but he admired my shortwave radio, tuned to the BBC.
Fears of a civil war in Iraq are being expressed by officials at the highest levels,
a woman was saying on the news.

After midnight we were rolling again. I woke in the darkness, urgently, to use the john but could not budge my door. It seemed I was locked in. The compartment was very hot and the train was moving fast, throwing me back and forth. It was too dark for me to see whether the lock was jammed. For five or ten minutes I struggled with the door in a cramped and growing panic—something I seldom feel. The light didn't work, but I dug out my BlackBerry and switched it on. No reception, but it proved a helpful flashlight illuminating my problem. At last, braced against the berth and kicking at the door, I managed to open it. The corridor was thick with Azerbaijanis gaping out the window at shadowy Tovuz, in the western province, and some of them were staring at me, presumably because they'd heard me kicking the door, or maybe it was my odd-shaped flashlight. The toilet was unspeakable.

At dawn, nine hours past the border, I saw great flat plains with muddy patches, looking overgrazed by the flocks of nibbling sheep—hundreds of them, a clear indication of mutton stews and shish kebabs farther down the line. The whole of the foreground was cropped flat, and in the distance were bare blue mountains.

On this great Gromboolian plain was a village of steep-roofed bungalows. Some of the bungalows had a graceful roofline, the curvature with a hint of Asia in the pitch. The landscape looked unfinished, like an Edward Lear watercolor—no trees, no people, the usual sheep, a few
sketched-in paths, and I was reminded that I had not seen a tourist or a green leaf or any sunshine since leaving Paris.

Crossing the middle of this plain was a pipeline, like a snake or an above-ground sewer pipe. It was of course oil, the basis of Azerbaijan's wealth. In front of and behind the oil pipeline were more houses with those curved roofs, and muddy roads, and from the way the old women were dressed, in smocks and high boots, the way the shepherds stood like sentinels in the fields, I realized that I was in a different place altogether, not just the whiff of Asia in the appearance of things but a part of Asia I had never seen before, the on-ramp to the Silk Road.

In all this antiquity, an enormous floodlit oil depot gleamed on the plain, with flames whipping from tall chimneys, like a city of steel and fire.

Weather-beaten one-story settlements gave onto more solid ones of two and three stories, and towards noon a metropolis loomed in the distance, the city of Baku, the whole place floating on oil. After the bleak plains, the huddled settlements, the muddy villages, and the muddier shepherds—the boomtown. Baku was sited on a wide bay of the Caspian Sea, at the tip of a hawk-nosed peninsula, and believed by many of its inhabitants to be the dividing line between Europe and Asia. This belief was dramatized in the great Azerbaijani novel
Ali and Nino,
in which I'd first read the name Baku, a book so persuasive in its detail and mysterious in its origins it made me want to go there. By "mysterious in its origins" I mean that its author, a Muslim named Kurban Said, was a man who had also used the Turkish name Essad Bey, and had been born a Jew in Baku, named Lev Nussimbaum.

No tourists stood in the train corridor gazing at the well-built suburbs of the capital, the look of prosperity increasing as we got nearer the station. All the passengers were Azeris—we'd picked them up at Ganca and Yevlax and Ucar and Kurdemir, and they seemed dazzled by the big city.

Baku doesn't need tourists. It is a wealthy place. The economy had grown 25 percent the previous year, 2005, and was doing better this year—the fastest-growing economy in the world, exclusively from oil revenues. At the turn of the twentieth century, Azerbaijani oil was gushing from onshore wells, but now it is found mainly offshore, in the Caspian Sea, so that deep-water oil-rig specialists had to be brought in from Brit
ain and the United States. These foreign oil workers swarm the bars, fill the hotels, and get into drunken brawls—exactly as I had seen in Iran in the early seventies, during its oil boom, which had produced xenophobia, notions of jihad, and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

"Azerbaijan is a police state," a Western diplomat said to me not long after I arrived. "TV is controlled. Print media is somewhat free, but an opposition editor was gunned down last year."

We were strolling through a plaza where some people were playing music. The spectators were surrounded by heavily armed police. The diplomat said, "Wherever there's more than ten Azeris gathered you find a big police presence. This festival brings out the heavies."

***

TWO OF THE MOST APPALLING
words a newly arriving traveler can hear are "national holiday." They send my heart into my boots. My train had stopped in Baku on the first day of spring, and this vernal equinox was celebrated by a festival called Novruz Bayram.
Novruz
—Farsi for "new day." Everything was closed, every shop shut, every market empty, the whole city, its harbor, its high road and back alleys; and I, who never planned ahead, had trouble finding a hotel room because all of Azerbaijan was enjoying a three-day holiday of general idleness and government-sanctioned frivolity. Nothing happened during the long festival of Novruz Bayram.

It is sometimes falsely stated that militant Islam had destroyed or displaced all the ancient pieties and rituals in the countries where it took hold, outlawing even the memory of these pieties. But Novruz Bayram was proof that some old rituals persisted, in spite of being heresies.

Rooted in Zoroastrianism, a creed much older than Islam and more than a thousand years older than Christianity, Novruz Bayram is a festival of renewal, a time for buying new clothes, dusting the furniture, scrubbing the floors, planting flowers, and being happy for the onset of warmer and longer days, overcoming the chill and darkness of winter.

The prophet Zarathustra, who gave his name to Zoroastrianism, flourished and was persecuted perhaps 3,500 years ago in what is now Iran and Afghanistan. So Novruz Bayram is one of the oldest holidays on earth, and it has always had celebrants. Zarathustra preached monotheism, advocated the equality of women, scoffed at the notion of priests (because they were middlemen, easily corruptible), railed against animal sacrifice, evangelism, and miracle-working. He denounced using the name of God to barter for power. He extolled the virtues of light and especially of fire. Novruz Bayram is a festival of springtime and sunshine.

The humane aspects of Zoroastrianism probably accounted for its diminution as a faith, if not its failure. A religion needs harshness and hokum to succeed, and all Zarathustra taught was understanding the earthly elements, the turn of the year, the one God. And three simple rules to live by: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Also a belief in the purifying nature of ire, which was central to the faith and a symbol of the Almighty.

"The Persian word for fire is
azer
" Tom Reiss wrote in
The Orientalist,
a book about Kurban Said, "and since ancient times Azerbaijan's abundance of oil and natural gas, which led whole hillsides to naturally explode into flame, made it the center of Zoroastrianism."

That was a few thousand years ago. Now only about 124,000 Zoroastrians remain—most of them in India, notably Bombay, where they're known as Parsis. They are a dying breed, the last gasp of an ancient belief system. Novruz Bayram is not celebrated throughout central Asia—indeed, it is condemned in some Muslim countries as pagan—but vigorous celebrations in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan make it one of the highlights of the year. Its old origins have been forgotten. It is an excuse to stop working, a respite from political strife, a few days of good feeling. I could see Azeris wearing their new clothes and going for promenades and eating the food associated with the festival, especially malt (
samani
) and eggs, because they represented fertility.

Most restaurants were open and, along with the malt and eggs, were serving other Azeri food: mutton pies, mutton wrapped in spinach, mutton kebabs, mutton balls, potato cakes, noodles, and big stodgy desserts. Although businesses were shut, there was more street life, more vitality in the city because of the festival. Groups of musicians played to crowds of people in plazas and on the Caspian seafront—and at each gathering there was a large police presence.

In bars and cafés, people—usually young women, usually presentable, sometimes flirtatious—asked, "What is your company?" because an American my age in Baku was probably in the oil business. Why else would I be in Baku?

"Just passing through," I would say. "To Turkmenistan."

"They have gas."

Baku got friskier at night, because the oilmen were typically roisterers, and I was assured that after midnight the roistering turned to debauchery, but I was asleep by that time.

Here on the shore of the Caspian Sea I wanted to find a ferry to take me to Turkmenbashi (formerly Krasnovodsk), on the western edge of Turkmenistan. From there by train via (so my map said) Nebitdag, Gumdag, and Gyzylarbat to Ashgabat, the capital, reputed to be one of the oddest places on earth because of the demented predilections of the current dictator, Saparmyrat Niyazov, who styled himself Turkmenbashi and renamed the port town after himself. I was eager to visit his country and ride the train through its deserts, eastward, and into Uzbekistan.

But first I had to find a ferry. Because of the holiday, the ferry port was closed. The travel agencies were shut. No one in Baku had any information about the ferry, and when I went to the port and found a dockworker, he said the ferry had no schedule.

"When it's full, the ferry leaves for Krasnovodsk," he said in Azeri, and this was translated by an English-speaking passerby, whose name was Ahmat.

"So I have to wait until it's full?"

"Yes. And maybe a long wait!"

"Why is that?"

"No one wants to go to Krasnovodsk."

I said, "I want to go."

He muttered something and walked away.

"What did he say?"

"'Must be something wrong with you.' He's joking." Ahmat peered at me. "You are from?"

"America."

This fiercely mustached man, who was a civil servant on a holiday stroll, said he was well disposed towards Americans. He was aggrieved about the Armenians, who in the 1990s had captured the Azeri province of Nagorno-Karabakh, killing 20,000 Azeris and displacing a million more. The province is home to 100,000 or so ethnic Armenians. The UN Security Council had demanded the Armenian withdrawal in 1993, but the secessionists refused to comply. They were supported by
many American politicians, whose efforts were greased by the Armenian lobby in the United States, which, like the Greek lobby, is small but wealthy and well organized. More than a hundred congressmen belong to the Armenian caucus. Until recently we had no embassy in Baku, and these days our relations with the country are poor. This is a pity, and shortsighted, since Armenia has carpets but Azerbaijan has oil.

Still, Ahmat said he felt friendly towards the United States and knew some American and English oil workers. Armenia was a problem, and so was Iran, he said.

From where we stood in Baku, the Iranian border was only about one hundred miles to the southwest. Ahmat said the Iranians were, in their way, a bigger problem than the Armenians, who didn't have much of an army. Culturally, Azerbaijan had little in common with Iran—much more with Turkey. Turkish and Azeri are almost the same language, and there was a move afoot to build a pipeline from Baku to Turkey, via Georgia. This would bypass Armenia and Iran.

In my quest to find a ferry, I met a voluble Azeri named Rashad, a man of about thirty, who said he would try to get me the ferry schedule.

"I like Bush!" he said when I told him where I was from. He began to laugh defiantly. "I don't care about Iraq. Maybe it's good for those Iraqis," he said, meaning the war. "Maybe Bush gave them a chance. We have some soldiers there."

I learned later that about 150 Azeri soldiers were stationed in Iraq, protecting a strategic dam.

"It's turning into a civil war," I said.

"Because they're Shiites and Sunnis. But Bush! What I like is his talk about Iran—maybe a war!"

The American president had made ambiguous threats against Iran for developing a nuclear capability, although Pakistan, Israel, India, and Russia—to choose a few neighbors at random—had the bomb.

"I want him to invade and destroy them," Rashad said. "Get rid of Ahmadinejad [the president of Iran] and make a lot of trouble."

"You want America to do that?"

"We'll help. It's good for Azerbaijan. It's good for me. We will join
NATO!
"

He was smiling and punching the air.