Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

What surprised him especially was the casual way that teenagers spoke to their parents—offhand, disrespectful, sarcastic, often talking to them as they walked away, with their back turned. It would never happen in Turkmenistan.

"My host family was very nice to me, but one day coming home from school the daughter was smoking a cigarette. I said her mother wouldn't like it. 'My mother's stupid. Don't pay any attention to her.' Imagine that."

"What did you think?"

"I was shocked," he said. "A mother is holy!"

We drove through the prairie towards Turkmenabat, another renamed city—most people I met in Mary still called it by its old name, Charjou. In Ashgabat I had asked an American Peace Corps volunteer what this part of the country would look like. He had said, "Looks like west Texas"—and it did. When we came to the inevitable roadblock in the middle of the scrub and the stony plain, there was a small settlement, called Rawnina, where some people were watching us, their cloaks drawn around them because the sharp wind was lifting the grit from the land and spraying it. The air was hot, the gray sky oppressive. Intending to further lighten my bag, I gave Sedyk Ali one of my cold-weather shirts.

He thanked me and, indicating the settlement, said, "They are Kazakhs."

An old shrouded woman squatted by the road with a pile of trinkets. Here in the middle of nowhere, a seller of amulets against the evil eye and against bad luck generally. It was said that in these wild and empty places you were likely to be harried by demons.

Sedyk Ali bought me an amulet on a multicolored demon-distracting cord, thinking it might come in handy.

Perhaps it did. Our car dumped us in Turkmenabat, the driver saying he could not go farther. But when we got another car, no sooner had the old man driving it pointed out the Amu Darya River—one of the wonders of this region for its ancient association, the fabled Oxus—than a roadblock appeared. The soldiers looked at Sedyk Ali's papers and told him to turn back.

Sedyk Ali wished me luck. I saw him through the rear window, standing in the empty road.

We came to Farap, the Turkmenistan border. I was apprehensive about the customs formalities, but there was no problem. I was searched, my bag examined, my icon remarked upon. My passport, too.

"You live Gawaii."

"Yes."

"Gonolulu?"

"That's right."

"You stay Ashgabat?"

"Yes."

"You see beeg beelding?"

"Yes."

"Weech you like better?"

My favorite, I told him with absurd eagerness, was the big statue of Turkmenbashi on the giant marble toilet-bowl plunger. "His arm is up"—I raised my arm in the same Sieg Heil way—"and when the sun moves, the gold statue moves, like this. Beautiful. Gold!"*

* In May 2008, the new President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, decreed that this monument, the 246-foot tripod with the rotating 39-foot gold statue of Niyazov on top, be dismantled. The ban on opera and circuses was also lifted.

"Yes," the border guard said, smiling in satisfaction. His interrogation over, he waved me through. "You can pass. Nyet prablyema"

So I walked past the barbed-wire fence on the dirt road through the desert towards Uzbekistan.

NIGHT TRAIN TO TASHKENT

MOST TRAVEL, AND CERTAINLY the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life. This risky suspension of disbelief is often an experience freighted with anxiety. But what's the alternative? Usually there is none. There was none for me here, at the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert, kicking through the gravel.

As I picked my way across the weeds and stones in the no man's land between the two frontiers, from dismal Farap in Turkmenistan to dismal Jalkym in Uzbekistan, it began to rain, not a downpour but desert rain, a bleak pattering that served only to moisten the dust and intensify the gloom. I came to a gate in a high barrier, the sort of fifteen-foot fence you see at the edge of a sports stadium parking lot, except that this one was trimmed with razor wire and enclosed nothing but a few low huts and stony desert. Not a car to be seen. The fence continued into the distance, the national boundary of Uzbekistan.

Some downhearted people were waiting by the gate, about twenty of them, their fingers hooked into the rusted chain-link fence, like captives, prisoners gazing mournfully through it. They were very wet. I took this to mean they had been there a long time. Obviously they were waiting to enter. But the gate was padlocked; no cars, no trucks, no camels, no traffic at all on the road.