Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

And it was true that for self-adulatory images and mottos on buildings, the Soviets had been almost unbeatable, with Lenin's gilded face everywhere, and the cities and towns with Lenin statues to which Stalin statues were added. It was not surprising that the aspiring S. Niyazov changed his name to Turkmenbashi (as Iosif Dzhugashvili had, to Joseph Stalin) and created a dictatorship, complete with a personality cult.

"This will pass away," Gulnara said.

It was not just a wise observation but the right way to see what this autocracy was worth, for this hyperactive and domineering man would die, and since he was seriously afflicted with diabetes and had had at least one heart attack, it would happen sooner rather than later. And then the gold statues would come down.*

* He died in December 2006.

In the meantime, Turkmen, of whom there were five million, expressed their disaffection in jokes. One went, "Why is Turkmenbashi the richest man in Turkmenistan?" Answer: "Because he has five million sheep." And they laughed recalling how Niyazov had suggested that his people chew on bones, because it was good for their teeth.

On our way to the ruins we had passed a number of state-owned vineyards—one of the other oddities of Islamic Turkmenistan was that it had a vigorous wine industry, for both export and local consumption. At the edge of the desert we approached some rising ground that was more a mound than a hill, on which there was a broken structure of mud bricks that was still recognizable as a mosque.

This was Anau, the ruins of a fifteenth-century mosque—not unusual in Turkmenistan, which saw its first Islamic evangelists in the seventh century; the Prophet himself had sent his messengers in this direction from Mecca, and the conversion rate was high. What made this mosque unusual was that architecturally it showed Chinese influence, features in still bright mosaics that were almost unheard-of in mosques—images of creatures and portraits of humans, neither of them common in Islamic art, and over the archway of the entrance, shattered but sinuous dragons.

Much of Turkmenistan was desert wasteland, scrubby bushes, and dusty boulders, an emptiness of lizards and a landscape like cat litter. In Soviet times its few towns and cities were outposts as benighted as in any imperial colony, where people in colorful clothes wove carpets and surrendered their reserve of gas and oil to the Russian overlords. This exploitation, one of the injustices denounced in the Rukhnama, had not always been the case. The dragons on the mosque were a reminder that this part of Turkmenistan was on the Silk Road, the route to China, and some of the toughest travelers, the greatest treasures, the boldest generals, the largest armies, had passed this way: Alexander the Great, the Parthians, the Arabs, the Mongols.

This mosque was a place of pilgrimage, because its grounds contained the tomb of Seyyed Jamaluddin, the father of a local governor from the fifteenth century. A dozen people, most of them women with their children, prayed at the pile of broken bricks that was his grave.

"They come here because he has good communication with Allah," Mamed said.

There was another grave, the Tomb of the Unmarried Woman—though Gulnara said that "unmarried woman" could also be translated as "virgin." Young women were praying here, and hundreds had come before: they had left tokens behind in the form of symbols for requests to be granted. Most were wishes to be blessed with babies. Bows were tied to the branches of a nearby tree, small carved cradles were unambiguous, and the sheep bones that were carefully piled, Gulnara said, in dicated children too, since the bones were used as toys by Turkmen children. Hairpins meant girls, so did the patches of colored cloth; little plastic cars meant a boy child was desired.

"In Islam, this is not usually done. You don't appeal to a dead woman," Gulnara said. "You're supposed to ask Allah. But this is a powerful woman."

I mentioned that most of these appeals specified that boys were wanted.

She said, "Women who give birth to girls have another special way of indicating that they want a boy. They will name the daughter Enough—Besteir—or else Fed Up—Boyduk. These are common names. I know many."

About forty feet from the tumbledown mosque was another mound on which there were hundreds of toy huts made of broken clay tiles—propped-up walls, a lid for a roof—and some were slanted two-story huts. It looked like a miniature city. A squatting man in a smock and a woman with a billowing headscarf were setting one up as we stood nearby.

"People praying for houses," Gulnara said. The images represented the people—young couples mostly—who were living with their parents in crowded tenements or in poor villages just outside Ashgabat, who wanted homes of their own.