Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

It seemed that evil came as a weird and withering blast from thin air in the form of a diabolical death ray. The most common specific against this bedevilment was a charm that broke the force into pieces, a sort of prism made of colored wool that one wore as a necklace or bracelet, or hung over a bed or a doorway. Some of these charms looked like the kind of multicolored lanyards I had made in summer camp when I was a boy. But never mind how insubstantial they looked; the things worked, or so I was assured by Masut, who bought me a length of brown and red rope, an evil-eye deflector, to get me through to Uzbekistan.

"And this herb is so powerful," Masut said, fingering a small sack of dried leaves, "that it is known as Hundred Husbands."

In most respects, the Tolkuchka bazaar on the outskirts of Ashgabat was greater, more vital and various, than its rivals—say, the covered market in Istanbul, the bazaar in Damascus, or the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota—with billowing marquees and drapes marking off the separate stalls. It was highly competitive and intensely local—not a tourist to be seen. It covered many acres, and the horse market occupied what could have been an entire fairground.

Buying a carpet or a melon or a sack of spices was only part of the interest of such a bazaar. A peripheral activity was the interaction of people—farmers from afar with their families, gawky boys, shy girls. The bazaar was a legitimate place for people to stare, to meet, and, while not exactly to flirt, to exchange smiles. Country people travel for a day or two on an old bus or a night train to get to Ashgabat and meet city people; families rendezvous for picnics; men swagger and shout, and boys gape and seem to imitate them. This bazaar was a kind of vortex, drawing in Turkmen from all over in an ancient ceremony of encounter and negotiation, isolated people delighted to be in a big noisy crowd, with music playing and camels howling and hawkers shouting for customers.

Everything imaginable was on sale, not just Chinese clothes, shoes, belts, and blue jeans, but rows and rows of locally made velveteen dresses and their detachable white hand-embroidered collars, yoke-shaped and lovely, that are unique to Turkmen women.

Besides the produce—tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, rice, herbs, and fresh fruit, piles of it in stalls and on carts—were the traditional weavings of Turkmenistan: an acre of the bazaar devoted to rugs and carpets, most of them of a reddish hue but some of them green and yellow.

"You see these? They are fish," Masut said, indicating the motif of fish bones on a large carpet. "This one is from a clan that lives on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where fish are an important symbol."

Brassware, samovars, silver spoons, silver dishes, the sort of flea market treasures I'd seen in Tbilisi—tables and tables of these. Russian stuff—belt buckles, military buttons, medals, and campaign ribbons. And bronze artifacts, pottery from digs, some that looked genuine, others that looked fake. Stacks of coins, too, some of them rubles from the departed regime, and lots of them that the sellers swore were ancient—with a provenance that was Seljuk, Ottoman, Luristan, Gulistan, coins from the ruined cities in the desert, from the Gurly Turkmen of Afghanistan and India. How many of these were fakes? Probably many. But I found a man who swore that a coin I was flipping was actually gold, from Merv or Bokhara, and so I bought it for its portability, and its beauty, and the slipperiness of its head and tail.

Something else attracted me at the Tolkuchka bazaar: its multiracial shoppers and stallholders. Most of the people were obviously Turkmen, but there were many Russians, and some Persians, Azeris, and Uzbeks, too. In the 1930s, Stalin decreed that the Soviet populations be dispersed, so that the pull of native peoples to be unified would be weakened, the color of the population, so to speak, would be diluted. On the one hand, it gave republics like Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan the look of a melting pot; on the other hand, it made them tractable.

The farthest-flung ethnic group at the bazaar, and so in Turkmenistan, were the Koreans.

"Stalin sent you?" I asked.

"He sent my father and mother," a woman said. She wore a white cap, like a nurse's cap, and a white apron.

There were several tables of Korean women, smiling, gold teeth glinting, shouting for attention, with trays piled high with pickled cabbage.

"Kimchi," I said, the only Korean word I knew.

"Yes, yes! Try some!"

"It's cheap. It's the best. Buy some."

"Take me to America!"

***

ONE AFTERNOON IN ASHGABAT I caused a diplomatic incident—a common occurrence in Turkmenistan, but an inconvenience to a foreign traveler wishing for anonymity. Riling the government was one of the perils of life here, and was probably the reason Turkmen habitually kept their heads down and whispered.