Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"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.