Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Now, there are trees that are drought-resistant—certain cypresses, certain poplars, the low twisted trees you see in the parched ravines of Patagonia, the ones that somehow flourish in the howling wilderness of China's Xinjiang Uygur region. But the Douglas firs, white pines, and arborvitae, dear to the heart and memory of Niyazov, were doing badly. They had been planted in immensely long ranks and rows at the center of Ashgabat, and on great swaths of dry land outside the city, as a sort of instant forest. Drip irrigation had been rigged to keep them watered, but they were the wrong species. They were baked by the sun, blown flat by the wind, and a full third of them had that peculiar rust-red hue, the vivid color of an evergreen's death.

"They are called arçabil," my new guide, Masut, said. "He, um, likes them."

I was waiting for someone to speak the leader's name. "Turkmenbashi" was too pompous, "Niyazov" too presumptuous and familiar. "The President" and "the Leader" were too formal, and "the Prophet" was hard to say with a straight face. Later I learned that Turkmen usually referred to him as mähriban ata,

"dear father," or serdar, "tribal leader."

We were heading west, past signs saying PEOPLE-MOTHERLAND-TURKMENBASHI, scores of them, out of the city, where more forest had been planted and was seriously stunted and brown; some trees that had been secured by guy wires had toppled over. The trees had come from Russia and Ukraine—Bashi had swapped them for gas. The plantings looked like an enormous tree farm that had lost its lease.

On the side of a mountain, in large letters carved from marble blocks, was this sign in Turkmen: OUR HEALTH ROAD OF OUR GREAT ETERNAL LEADER. It was just the sort of clifftop message I had seen a decade before in Albania, and without doubt it would end up the same way, as a pile of rubble in the adjacent valley. This one was meant to encourage people to walk on the paved path that wound through the dying dwarf forest.

"He wants us to be healthy," Masut said.

But it was questionable whether Niyazov did want his people to be healthy. He had closed all the hospitals outside Ashgabat, replaced thousands of health care workers with military conscripts, and instructed the country's doctors to pledge their allegiance to him, Turkmenbashi, and to the Rukhnama rather than taking the Hippocratic oath.

"Turkmen look healthy to me," I said. "They have a good diet. They don't smoke. They seem hard-working."

"But he wants us to walk on the Health Road."

That was the program. Never mind that you were a nomad or a villager or a cotton picker, you had to do as you were told, healthwise: walk on the Eternal Great Leader's road, more than twenty miles of paved pathway traversing the mountainside. One of Bashi's many residences lay beyond that hillside, another palace. He claimed that the $100 million gold-domed, white marble presidential palace built for him was not of his choosing. ("All I wanted was a small, cozy house.")

"And many people don't have jobs," Masut said. "The figure could be sixty percent unemployed outside Ashgabat."

"I'm surprised people aren't angry," I said.

"Some are angry. But we have cheap things, too. Natural gas for heating is free. Electricity is free. Gasoline is three cents a gallon. I can fill the tank of this car for fifty cents."

"What do you think are the problems here?" I asked.

"Yes, we have problems, but we can't address problems, because there are no problems," Masut said and smiled at me, the smile that said: Please, no more questions.

Another day we went, Masut and I, to the big bazaar outside Ashgabat, which had two names: the Tolkuchka bazaar, from a Russian word that meant pushing, and the Jygyldyk bazaar, an onomatopoeic word in Turkmen that meant something like babbling or jabbering.

Turkmen have a horror of the evil eye, perhaps a lingering feature of the shamanism that has dominated the spiritual life in this region from ancient times, an anxious reflex that is apparent in every sphere of Turkmen existence. This aspect of superstition, combined with Islam, has produced holy-seeming paraphernalia for warding off the evil eye. These trinkets were on sale in many of the stalls in the bazaar, not just the staring glass eye or the carved wooden talisman, but a sheep-horn symbol that Masut said was effective against maledictions. This totemism was all part of the praying, the relic hunting, the tokens, the images, the bows and toy cars and dollhouses that I had seen elsewhere. In a police state that had total control of all coming and going, a locked-down populace, it was rather touching to see people obsessed with dark magic and wicked forces.