Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

All Muslims wash before they pray. But in the desert, or when water is unavailable, they use sand or dust. If (as on a train) there is no sand, they perform the dry ablution called tayammum, making an elaborate business of rubbing the hands and wrists and arms, and slowly wiping the face, massaging the eyes, the cheeks, the jaw, then drawing the hands downward. Selim went through this ritual as the train rushed across the desert, rattling the windows and the door handles.

Then he prayed for almost a full minute, his eyes closed, speaking into the stifling air of the compartment. When he was finished I asked him what he had said—was it a standard prayer or had he improvised it?

He said it was improvised for the occasion. "I thanked Allah for the food. I thanked the friend who brought the food and gave it to us. I wished the friend blessings on his journey."

"Sagbol" I said, and in thanking him, exhausted my knowledge of Turkmen.

"Do they pray in America at mealtime? he asks."

"Many people do."

"Do they pray at other times too?"

"Yes. Americans pray a lot."

A knock at the compartment door: the conductor. He was handing out sheets for sleeping. The arrangement was that in return for our ticket we would be given a sheet. Tomorrow morning, we'd hand over the sheet and get our ticket back—we'd need it to pass through the station at Mary.

Though it was not late, the light was so bad there was nothing to do but sleep. The others, even the student, were early-to-bed people, I could see. So we turned in, each of us in a bunk. After the feeble light was switched off, I could see the dark plains passing, the low scrub, the boulders glowing, smooth and bluish in the moonlight.

Hours later, it was still dark as we approached the town of Mary. Another knock at the door, demanding the sheets, offering tickets. The others were awake and yawning.

I said to the student, "Ask him if he's met any Americans before."

"No," Selim said. He thought a moment. He said, "But I met an Uzbek once."

Ashgabat had been hot and dry. Wishing to lighten my bag, I had given my sweater to Mamed and my scarf to Gulnara. Approaching Mary, I gave my heavy long-sleeved polo shirt to the student, who had been so helpful.

"It's a lucky shirt," I said.

In return, he gave me another multicolored cord to ward off the evil eye.

Selim said, "I will wait at the station until eight o'clock. Then I'll get the bus to Yeloten. It costs five thousand manat. A shared taxi costs ten thousand manat. But I say, better to take the bus and give the extra money to my children."

It was a lesson in rural Turkmen economics and paternal love: this man who'd just had a fitful night of sleep on the train would crouch in the darkness and cold of Mary Station and wait for three hours, wrapped in his cloak, to save 30 cents to divide among his four kids.

***

THE CONCEIT IN THE ANTIQUE land hereabouts, Khorrasan, with its noble capital called Merv, was that it was once the center of the world. In one extravagant metaphor, it was called "the Soul of Kings." It is almost axiomatic that such an oasis would eventually be turned into a dust bowl, and Merv had. But in its day, which is to say for thousands of years, it had been a marvel—an imperial metropolis, a center of learning, a place of citadels, a walled city, or rather several of them. My interest was simply that of a wandering observer, seeing once again (as I had in the great Silk Road city of Turfan, in western China) that in the course of time, all great cities and their kings and their artifacts and their splendor and their pomps turn into dust. Looted of their treasures, their porcelains shattered into a million shards, their fortresses overrun and trampled, their people scattered, they remained a crumpled example of the vanity of human wishes.

Merv, what was left of it, lay in the hard glitter of the central Asian desert, about an hour up the railway line, near a town and station called Bayram Ali, which dated from 1887, when Czar Nicholas II had planned to visit. A substantial villa was built for him in Bayram Ali, but in the event, his highness didn't show up, it wasn't used, and so it was turned into the sanatorium it is now, for people with heart and kidney ailments. Mary—the adjacent city and provincial capital—was the usual Turkmenistan artifact, half boomtown, half slum: gold statues of Turkmenbashi, portraits of Turkmenbashi, the eternal slogan Halk, Watan, Turkmenbashi ("People, Motherland, Me"), white marble government buildings, prestige projects (an opera house, luxury hotels, a pointless flyover), and boulevards almost empty of traffic.