Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Off the big thoroughfares, on back streets, were low decaying houses and Soviet-era tenements. Some Russians remained—not many, though a small colony of hard-pressed Russian artists, voluntary exiles in a way, exhibited their work in one of Mary's neighborhoods. The Germans whom Stalin had relocated here from the Volga region during World War II had all departed. I stayed in an inexpensive government hotel, where the other guests were Turkmen officials. Most people came to Mary to see the ruins at Merv, or the ones at Gonur Depe, also nearby. Either that or the cotton fields. On some of the side roads were bakeries and some joints roasting shish kebabs and serving piles of plov and chunks of bread.

One morning in Mary I met Evgenia Golubeva. A sturdy woman of about fifty, divorced, her daughters in Moscow, Evgenia was a third-generation Russian in Turkmenistan, well known locally, much loved, and scholarly—she had studied the ruins here and in Gonur Depe in detail. As a Russian remnant, staying on, with nothing but praise for the Turkmen people ("so kind, so gentle, so hospitable"), she was a pleasure to spend time with, because she was knowledgeable and passionate about these flattened cities.

On the way to Mary, by the roadside, in the middle of a dusty plain, among thorn bushes and salty desert, I saw a startlingly beautiful Turkmen woman—golden-skinned, with a sculpted face, wearing a fluttering cloak, standing gracefully next to a bundle, probably waiting for one of those small, dirty buses. Her beauty in this crusted wasteland was like a metaphor for Turkmenistan: lovely people, awful place.

Ancient Merv, to my fascinated and amateur eye, resembled many fabled cities I'd seen that had declined, all of them in deserts—the Chinese Taklamakan Desert, or the Nafud, or here in the Karakum wasteland. It had the appearance of sandcastles after the tide had brimmed and washed over them, simplified and smoothed their walls, flattened them, pitted their battlements and pillars—so that there was only the faintest suggestion of symmetry in the slopes of sand. As for elegance, you'd have to take the guide's or the historian's word for it. Basically you were looking at a lost city of millions that was now tumbled brick and blown dust and mud heaps.

But, as I kept thinking, this was a vivid metaphor for what happened to the hubristic world of wealth and power—indeed, the world of gold statues and marble palaces and vain slogans and upstart forests. The world of armies and conquest. The realm of generals and windbags. Ha! It all turned to sand and was overrun with rodents and lizards. Hawks flew over it, searching for vermin.

"This is Erk Kala, oldest part of Merv—from sixth century B.C.," said Evgenia, indicating a wide low crater of dried mud.

This city, "Merv, Queen of the World," one of the pearls of the Silk Road, had been an early center of Zoroastrianism and been associated with Alexander the Great and Tamerlane. It had been mentioned by the Persians (it was once the capital of Persian Khorrasan); it was sacked by Tolui Khan, son of Genghis Khan, in 1221, and later visited by Marco Polo and Omar Khayyam. It had been Buddhist and Nestorian Christian. It is mentioned in Zarathustra's Avesta

as a place of strength and holiness, of the "good lands." In its opulence, its only other rival had been Baghdad. Importantly, Merv had been targeted by Muhammad as the staging post for Islamic conversion. The Prophet himself had sent two of his closest disciples here to evangelize. "My eyes in the East," he had called them; they were buried here.

And it was not one city but four or five, side by side, each of them distinct and from a different period, laid out over many square miles. The battered walls of some citadels still stood, with roughed-out rooms and the remnants of staircases, but it was all like a child's sand-pile simplification of splendor. You could wax poetic—some more recent travelers had done so, trying to give it life—but it was lifeless and pathetic, like all such desert ruins, not a vivid thing but rather a Planet of the Apes version of history, which is truer than most. You had to use your imagination.

At one of the old mosques, the graves of the seventh-century Muslim evangelists, Jaffari and Bureda, were marked by a marble slab with a long inscription. Evgenia translated: "O traveler, you visit this place and you are lucky, because the people who are buried here are holy and close to God. If you have a problem, walk three times around the tomb and it will be solved."

My problem, so I had been told, was that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ashgabat was annoyed with me because of the uproar at my talk—specifically, the outburst by the dissident politician, but more to the point, the government's photographer had been frustrated in his spying, his memory card wiped clean of any images.