Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (17 page)

He treated the country as his private kingdom, a land in which everything in it belonged to him, including all of Turkmenistan's plentiful natural gas, much of which issued into the air from his own person in the form of interminable speechifying. Not long ago he prophesied that the twenty-first century was the golden age of Turkmenistan. I had heard that his insane schemes for promoting his image were on display all over the country, but especially the gold statues in the capital, Ashgabat. I was disappointed at not being able to take the ferry from Baku, but I was eager to see this jowly and vindictive potentate, who in word and deed was constantly paraphrasing Shelley—"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"—in his desert wasteland.

For the first time on this trip I was airborne, on the fifty-minute flight from Baku to Ashgabat, and (so it seemed) traveling through the Looking Glass. The chummy term "Absurdistan" did not begin to describe this geopolitical aberration—it was too forgiving, too definable, too comic. "Loonistan" came closer, for it was less like a country than a gigantic madhouse run by the maddest patient, for whom "megalomaniac" sounded too affectionate and inexact. Niyazov famously hated writers and snoopers, and Turkmenistan was one of the hardest countries in the world for a solitary traveler to enter. I might not have gotten into Turkmenistan at all. There were group tours: one day in Ashgabat, a one-day trip to the ruins at Merv, and off to Uzbekistan in a bus or plane. But I had a helpful, well-placed friend. I was grateful to be there.

Niyazov had recently built a vast space-age mosque and named it after himself, Saparmyrat Hajji Mosque, and encouraged his people to visit it annually, as a rewarding pilgrimage, a national haj. His portraits, some of them hundreds of square feet of his unappealing features, were everywhere. In some he looked like a fat and grinning Dean Martin wearing a Super Bowl ring; in others he was a nasty-faced CEO with a chilly smile, smug, truculent, defiant. One showed him as a precocious child of gold, seated in the lap of his bronze mother. The most common picture portrayed him, chin on hand, squinting in insincere bonhomie, like a lounge singer. Smiling was an important part of his political philosophy. He had Italianate features and was sometimes posed with a stack of books, like an insufferable author in a book-tour shot. He was sixty-five. He had declared himself "Leader for Life." It was the will of the people, he said. Everything associated with him told you he was out of his mind. He had banned beards, gold teeth, and ballet.

Absolute ruler and head of state, and with much of the gas revenue in his own pocket, Niyazov was crazy in his own twisted way, and Ashgabat was an example of what happened when political power and money and mental illness were combined in a single paranoiac.

"He renamed bread after his mother," someone had said to me before I went.

It was apparently true that he'd floated the idea, and he'd succeeded in something even nuttier. He renamed the twelve months of the year—January after himself, and some other months after members of his family. His mother's name, Gurbansultan-ezdhe, took the place of April. The days of the week were also new, his own innovation, and one was
Mom's. In the purifying interests of nationalism, he abolished all non-Turkmen names and expressions, and decreed that the dictionary should be rewritten to reflect this.

One American I met there said, "If you took Las Vegas and Pyongyang and shook them up in a blender, you'd get Ashgabat."

"Like an underfunded Las Vegas," another American said. He meant the white marble towers, the gold statues, the floodlights, the fountains, the empty spaces, the dead trees. Neither of these quips was quite right, because the place was uniquely weird. I knew that something was amiss as soon as I arrived. The gold statues and dead trees were just the beginning and were hardly the worst of it.

Apart from its gas pipeline, it was a country without a link to the world: no international telephones, no Internet, no cell phones, no satellite hookups. Newspapers, radio, and television were controlled; no real news at all and no access to the outside. My BlackBerry, which had worked in Baku and Tbilisi, went dark. The dictator had decreed that the Internet was subversive—and he was probably right. It was almost impossible to enter the country, and it was very hard to leave. Internet cafés had been closed for more than three years. People tended to whisper, and no wonder. In a typical case, reported by outside sources, a fifty-eight-year-old journalist—a reporter for Radio Free Europe—Ogulsapar Muradova, a mother of two, had been arrested, convicted (without a lawyer) in a secret trial, and given six years on a trumped-up charge. In September 2006, a month after she was imprisoned in Ashgabat, Muradova was found dead in her cell (she appeared to have suffered "a head injury"), and her body was handed over to her daughters.

Turkmenistan's oddity was apparent from the outset, long before I saw the gold statues. Few planes ever landed at the casino-style airport, which was staffed by officials who had a very slim idea of how to do their jobs or make decisions—a characteristic of most dictatorships, in which fear of retribution created such rigidity that it bred incompetence. Men in handsome uniforms stood around, delaying the processing of passengers, most of them foreign workers—British, Malaysian, Filipino—in the gas industry. The officials grinned at each other, but when they met my gaze they glowered and looked fierce.

One of them, in a wide-crowned and shiny-visored cap, looked at me and sucked his teeth and said, "
Prablyema
"

"What's the problem?"

"
Shto eta?
" He tugged at the T-shirt in my bag that held the offending object.

"Eekon," I said. The silver icon I had bought at the sidewalk flea market in Tbilisi, with an oil portrait of Jesus staring from a lozenge at the center, wrapped up so that it wouldn't get scratched.

"Eta
staroye
" he said.

"No, it's new."

""
Ochen dorogaya

"Not really. It was cheap."

"
Antikvarnaya!"

"An antique?"

"
Da. Prablyema!"
he said. He showed me the flat of his hand. "
Zhdi zdyes"

I waited almost an hour. A team of men returned. One spoke English, while the rest of them clucked approvingly.

"Why you bring this eekon here?" he said slowly. "Why you not bring it khome?"

"I
am
bringing it home," I said.

He raised his hands. "This Ashgabat, not khome."

"I'm on my way home," I said. Which was, in the larger sense, true. "To give this to my mother."

"
Mat',"
this man explained to the team. "It is for his mother."

Any mention of mother is useful, particularly in a country of tradition-minded desert folk whose leader, I was to discover, encouraged a cult of motherhood.

But the man was holding the customs form and looking baffled. I explained that, since a section of the form asked for
Description and Origin of Goods,
we could fill out that portion, and I would show it at the border, when I left, to prove I wasn't smuggling antiques. They seemed to think this was an appropriate compromise, and so after two hours I was riding into Ashgabat.

"He was on TV last night. Well, he's on almost every night," the driver said. No one ever used Niyazov's name, not even the boastful "Turkmenbashi," or if they did, it was in an undertone. "He said, 'If you read my book three times you will go to heaven.'"

"How does he know this?"

"He said, 'I asked Allah to arrange it.'"

Niyazov's
Rukhnama
is a hefty-sized farrago of personal history, odd Turkmen lore, genealogies, national culture, dietary suggestions, Soviet-bashing, insane boasting, wild promises, and his own poems, one beginning, "Oh, my crazy soul..."The book contains more exclamation marks than a get-rich-quick ad, which it much resembles. He seemed to regard it as both a sort of Koran and how-to guide for the Turkmen people and a jingoistic pep talk, and though it is perhaps no odder, no more fabricated, than any other apocalyptic tome, it is strung on a very tenuous narrative—a blend of advice, his own speeches, and potted history—and so it is little more than a soporific, "chloroform in print," as Mark Twain described
The Book of Mormon.
I read it once. Niyazov would have to promise more than heaven for me to read his excruciating book two more times.

But it had immense value for the traveler passing through Turkmenistan, since all writing, even bad writing—especially bad writing—is revealing of the author's mind and heart. The ill-written
Rukhnama
is no exception. Early in the book, a hopeful Niyazov writes, "The foreigners who read
Rukhnama
will know us better, become our friends faster," though whenever I mentioned the
Rukhnama
to educated Turkmen, they rolled their eyes and looked embarrassed.

In his confused and patchy exposition, Niyazov reached back five thousand years (so he said) and claimed, "Turkmen history can be traced back to the flood of Noah." In the aftermath, the receding of the waters, the original ancestor of the Turkmen, Oguz Khan, emerged. Oguz's sons and grandsons produced Turkmenistan's twenty-four clans. The figure of Oguz is one of the keys to the
Rukhnama:
Niyazov speaks of how the Turkmen called the Milky Way the Oguz Arch, and the Amu Darya River the Oguz River, and the constellation the Oxen was the Oguz Stars. Oguz also "implemented ... the use of the national Oguz alphabet." His name was set upon many features of the earth and sky. Oguz also declared a golden age.

The subtitle of the
Rukhnama
(now referred toas
The Holy Rukhnama
) could be "The Second Coming"—the actual subtitle is "Reflections on the Spiritual Values of the Turkmen." Niyazov emphasizes that he is a sort of reincarnation of Oguz Khan, just as powerful and wise, and to prove it he has named cities and hills and rivers and streets after himself. He meddled with the language in the manner of Oguz, ordering that Turkmen be written in Latin script, and claimed
that because he had dedicated his life to making Turkmenistan greater, he would be its president for the rest of his life.

Niyazov was an orphan. Much is made of this in the book, and these descriptions have a clumsy tenderness. "I have borne many difficulties throughout my life," he writes, and tells how his father was killed in the Second World War, fighting for the Soviets in Ossetia. When he was a child of seven, his mother was killed in the earthquake that leveled Ashgabat in 1948. Isolated, he was made strong, and he refused to mourn. "When I considered my situation, I understood that I was not an orphan! How can someone be an orphan if he has a father like Oguz Khan?" Instead of natural parents, he had a nation and a cause and a father from history. And he incorporated his parents into the national fabric, naming the year 2003 after his father, Atamurat, and 2004 after his mother, Gurbansultan-ezdhe.

Later in the
Rukhnama
(oh, and 2005 was the Year of
Rukhnama
), he waxes emotional about his mother, and mothers in general. This turns into a program to venerate motherhood. "The mother is a sacred being ... One can understand the value of sacred things only after one has lost them." He goes on to explain that a father provides material support, but the mother supplies love. He recalls a Turkmen saying: "Fatherless, I am orphan; motherless, I am captive," and concludes, "Fate decreed two pains for me. I was both an orphan and a captive."

A lost childhood seems essential in a dictator's biography, an irregular upbringing being a determiner of a person's becoming a political tyrant. Niyazov's making a meal of his early suffering, and the existence of the Palace of Orphans in Ashgabat—there were similar institutions in other big cities—were evidence that one of his priorities was to make special provisions for abandoned or parentless children. Having no clan, no real family, though, was a unique political asset to him in this clan-dominated society. "He has a feeling for orphans," a Turkmen told me. This concern was as obvious on the ground as it was in the pages of the
Rukhnama,
where Niyazov describes how he lost his parents, how he was alone and destined to struggle.

In terms of abandonment complaints, the book sounds (sometimes word for word) like the upward climb of the Austrian paperhanger in part one of
Mein Kampf,
who wrote: "In my thirteenth year I suddenly lost my father," and "When my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect,
had made its decisions ... The three-year-old child had become a fifteen-year-old despiser of all authority." But the orphaning is sentimentalized in the
Rukhnama,
and there is much more—history, old saws, the promise of greater glory, the list of obligations and duties, of which the not exactly Hitlerian "Maintain a smiling face" is one.

"Smile!" was an important Turkmenbashi command. He was as emphatic about Turkmen smiling as he was about work and worship. He wrote, "As the old saying goes, 'There will never be any wrinkles on a smiling face.'" And he reminisced: "I often remember my mother. Her smile still appears before my very eyes ... The smile is visible to me in the dark of night, even if I have my eyes shut."

A smile was powerful: "A smile can make a friend for you out of an enemy. When death stares you in the face, smile at it and it may leave you untouched." Even nature smiled: "Spring is the smile of the earth." Smiling could be a form of conversation: "Smile at each other ... Talk to each other with smiles."

Pages and pages of this, most of it self-reverential. To his smile Niyazov owed much of his success as a national leader. "That smile I inherited from my mother is my treasure." This was perhaps why most of the portraits of Niyazov all over Turkmenistan showed him smiling, though he never looked less reliable, or less amused, than when he was smiling. His smile—and this may be true of all political leaders—was his most sinister feature.

At Niyazov's command, his book was studied in every school in Turkmenistan; a thorough knowledge of it was an entry requirement for all the colleges and universities in the nation and for advancement in the civil service. Those immigration officials who gave me a hard time had little idea of how to handle a simple customs matter but probably could have quoted "A smile can make a friend for you out of an enemy"—though none of them smiled at me.