Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"My son is six. I don't want to bring up my child in an atmosphere of hostility. I want him to have more chances."

"What's the problem here?"

"Everything—the Russians mostly."

Russia was behind all the secessionist movements, all the embattled and besieged breakaway republics, from Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Dagestan and Nagorno-Karabakh. When I asked what sense it made for the Russians to foment nationalist movements in these places, he said that of course there was no sense in it. It was perverse political malignity to make life miserable for Georgians and Azeris.

"No, no," he said when I wanted to pursue this. "Listen to my poem." And he recited again from memory:

Baku is the place

Where every stone

Has a story of its own.

He crooked an admonitory finger in the air, sweeping the red fez off his head. His voice broke slightly as he finished:

And the stories could be magic

Should they not end up so tragic.

"'Let's go to Fillifpojanz,'" Fuad said. He was quoting the novel again, because the site of the Fillifpojanz coffee house still existed, a bulky white-painted building on Barjatinsky Street, and was being restored.

To get there, we passed the signs of Azerbaijan's prosperity: casinos and bars, shops selling luxury goods, and Internet cafés where shaggy youths were using video-mounted computers to speak with women—wives and girlfriends. The good times were reflected in the Azeris themselves, well dressed and busy, greeting the spring on this long sunny holiday. Fuad had other plans. He wasn't very interested in describing Fillifpojanz and was looking beyond Ali and Nino now. Having divulged his plan to emigrate, he spoke of how happy he'd be, how hard he'd work, when he got to Canada.

NIGHT TRAIN FROM ASHGABAT TO MARY

TURKMENISTAN, the Stan next door, was a tyranny run by a madman, Saparmyrat Niyazov, who gave himself the name Turkmenbashi, "Leader of All the Turkmen." He was one of the wealthiest and most powerful lunatics on earth and the ruler of an entire country. His people cringed at his name, his prisons were full of dissenters, his roads were closed to people like me. He had recently begun to call himself Prophet (Prorók), a harmless enough conceit if you're a civilian, but a pathological if not a fatal tendency in a despot. In support of his messianic claim he had written a sort of national bible, called the Rukhnama (The Book of the Soul), and he regarded himself as an accomplished writer, a clear sign of madness in anyone. Everything I had heard about this man and this country made me want to go there.

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.