Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

NIGHT TRAIN FROM ASHGABAT TO MARY

TURKMENISTAN, the Stan next door, was a tyranny run by a madman, Saparmyrat Niyazov, who gave himself the name Turkmenbashi, "Leader of All the Turkmen." He was one of the wealthiest and most powerful lunatics on earth and the ruler of an entire country. His people cringed at his name, his prisons were full of dissenters, his roads were closed to people like me. He had recently begun to call himself Prophet (Prorók), a harmless enough conceit if you're a civilian, but a pathological if not a fatal tendency in a despot. In support of his messianic claim he had written a sort of national bible, called the Rukhnama (The Book of the Soul), and he regarded himself as an accomplished writer, a clear sign of madness in anyone. Everything I had heard about this man and this country made me want to go there.

He treated the country as his private kingdom, a land in which everything in it belonged to him, including all of Turkmenistan's plentiful natural gas, much of which issued into the air from his own person in the form of interminable speechifying. Not long ago he prophesied that the twenty-first century was the golden age of Turkmenistan. I had heard that his insane schemes for promoting his image were on display all over the country, but especially the gold statues in the capital, Ashgabat. I was disappointed at not being able to take the ferry from Baku, but I was eager to see this jowly and vindictive potentate, who in word and deed was constantly paraphrasing Shelley—"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" — in his desert wasteland.

For the first time on this trip I was airborne, on the fifty-minute flight from Baku to Ashgabat, and (so it seemed) traveling through the Looking Glass. The chummy term "Absurdistan" did not begin to describe this geopolitical aberration — it was too forgiving, too definable, too comic. "Loonistan" came closer, for it was less like a country than a gigantic madhouse run by the maddest patient, for whom "megalomaniac" sounded too affectionate and inexact. Niyazov famously hated writers and snoopers, and Turkmenistan was one of the hardest countries in the world for a solitary traveler to enter. I might not have gotten into Turkmenistan at all. There were group tours: one day in Ashgabat, a one-day trip to the ruins at Merv, and off to Uzbekistan in a bus or plane. But I had a helpful, well-placed friend. I was grateful to be there.

Niyazov had recently built a vast space-age mosque and named it after himself, Saparmyrat Hajji Mosque, and encouraged his people to visit it annually, as a rewarding pilgrimage, a national haj. His portraits, some of them hundreds of square feet of his unappealing features, were everywhere. In some he looked like a fat and grinning Dean Martin wearing a Super Bowl ring; in others he was a nasty-faced CEO with a chilly smile, smug, truculent, defiant. One showed him as a precocious child of gold, seated in the lap of his bronze mother. The most common picture portrayed him, chin on hand, squinting in insincere bonhomie, like a lounge singer. Smiling was an important part of his political philosophy. He had Italianate features and was sometimes posed with a stack of books, like an insufferable author in a book-tour shot. He was sixty-five. He had declared himself "Leader for Life." It was the will of the people, he said. Everything associated with him told you he was out of his mind. He had banned beards, gold teeth, and ballet.

Absolute ruler and head of state, and with much of the gas revenue in his own pocket, Niyazov was crazy in his own twisted way, and Ashgabat was an example of what happened when political power and money and mental illness were combined in a single paranoiac.

"He renamed bread after his mother," someone had said to me before I went.

It was apparently true that he'd floated the idea, and he'd succeeded in something even nuttier. He renamed the twelve months of the year — January after himself, and some other months after members of his family. His mother's name, Gurbansultan-ezdhe, took the place of April. The days of the week were also new, his own innovation, and one was Mom's. In the purifying interests of nationalism, he abolished all non-Turkmen names and expressions, and decreed that the dictionary should be rewritten to reflect this.

One American I met there said, "If you took Las Vegas and Pyongyang and shook them up in a blender, you'd get Ashgabat."

"Like an underfunded Las Vegas," another American said. He meant the white marble towers, the gold statues, the floodlights, the fountains, the empty spaces, the dead trees. Neither of these quips was quite right, because the place was uniquely weird. I knew that something was amiss as soon as I arrived. The gold statues and dead trees were just the beginning and were hardly the worst of it.

Apart from its gas pipeline, it was a country without a link to the world: no international telephones, no Internet, no cell phones, no satellite hookups. Newspapers, radio, and television were controlled; no real news at all and no access to the outside. My BlackBerry, which had worked in Baku and Tbilisi, went dark. The dictator had decreed that the Internet was subversive — and he was probably right. It was almost impossible to enter the country, and it was very hard to leave. Internet cafés had been closed for more than three years. People tended to whisper, and no wonder. In a typical case, reported by outside sources, a fifty-eight-year-old journalist — a reporter for Radio Free Europe — Ogulsapar Muradova, a mother of two, had been arrested, convicted (without a lawyer) in a secret trial, and given six years on a trumped-up charge. In September 2006, a month after she was imprisoned in Ashgabat, Muradova was found dead in her cell (she appeared to have suffered "a head injury"), and her body was handed over to her daughters.

Turkmenistan's oddity was apparent from the outset, long before I saw the gold statues. Few planes ever landed at the casino-style airport, which was staffed by officials who had a very slim idea of how to do their jobs or make decisions — a characteristic of most dictatorships, in which fear of retribution created such rigidity that it bred incompetence. Men in handsome uniforms stood around, delaying the processing of passengers, most of them foreign workers — British, Malaysian, Filipino — in the gas industry. The officials grinned at each other, but when they met my gaze they glowered and looked fierce.

One of them, in a wide-crowned and shiny-visored cap, looked at me and sucked his teeth and said, "Prablyema"

"What's the problem?"

"Shto eta?" He tugged at the T-shirt in my bag that held the offending object.

"Eekon," I said. The silver icon I had bought at the sidewalk flea market in Tbilisi, with an oil portrait of Jesus staring from a lozenge at the center, wrapped up so that it wouldn't get scratched.

"Eta staroye" he said.

"No, it's new."

""Ochen dorogaya

"Not really. It was cheap."

"Antikvarnaya!"

"An antique?"

"Da. Prablyema!" he said. He showed me the flat of his hand. "Zhdi zdyes"

I waited almost an hour. A team of men returned. One spoke English, while the rest of them clucked approvingly.

"Why you bring this eekon here?" he said slowly. "Why you not bring it khome?"

"I am bringing it home," I said.

He raised his hands. "This Ashgabat, not khome."

"I'm on my way home," I said. Which was, in the larger sense, true. "To give this to my mother."

"Mat'," this man explained to the team. "It is for his mother."

Any mention of mother is useful, particularly in a country of tradition-minded desert folk whose leader, I was to discover, encouraged a cult of motherhood.

But the man was holding the customs form and looking baffled. I explained that, since a section of the form asked for Description and Origin of Goods, we could fill out that portion, and I would show it at the border, when I left, to prove I wasn't smuggling antiques. They seemed to think this was an appropriate compromise, and so after two hours I was riding into Ashgabat.

"He was on TV last night. Well, he's on almost every night," the driver said. No one ever used Niyazov's name, not even the boastful "Turkmenbashi," or if they did, it was in an undertone. "He said, 'If you read my book three times you will go to heaven.'"

"How does he know this?"

"He said, 'I asked Allah to arrange it.'"

Niyazov's Rukhnama is a hefty-sized farrago of personal history, odd Turkmen lore, genealogies, national culture, dietary suggestions, Soviet-bashing, insane boasting, wild promises, and his own poems, one beginning, "Oh, my crazy soul…"The book contains more exclamation marks than a get-rich-quick ad, which it much resembles. He seemed to regard it as both a sort of Koran and how-to guide for the Turkmen people and a jingoistic pep talk, and though it is perhaps no odder, no more fabricated, than any other apocalyptic tome, it is strung on a very tenuous narrative — a blend of advice, his own speeches, and potted history — and so it is little more than a soporific, "chloroform in print," as Mark Twain described The Book of Mormon. I read it once. Niyazov would have to promise more than heaven for me to read his excruciating book two more times.

But it had immense value for the traveler passing through Turkmenistan, since all writing, even bad writing — especially bad writing — is revealing of the author's mind and heart. The ill-written Rukhnama is no exception. Early in the book, a hopeful Niyazov writes, "The foreigners who read Rukhnama will know us better, become our friends faster," though whenever I mentioned the Rukhnama to educated Turkmen, they rolled their eyes and looked embarrassed.

In his confused and patchy exposition, Niyazov reached back five thousand years (so he said) and claimed, "Turkmen history can be traced back to the flood of Noah." In the aftermath, the receding of the waters, the original ancestor of the Turkmen, Oguz Khan, emerged. Oguz's sons and grandsons produced Turkmenistan's twenty-four clans. The figure of Oguz is one of the keys to the Rukhnama: Niyazov speaks of how the Turkmen called the Milky Way the Oguz Arch, and the Amu Darya River the Oguz River, and the constellation the Oxen was the Oguz Stars. Oguz also "implemented… the use of the national Oguz alphabet." His name was set upon many features of the earth and sky. Oguz also declared a golden age.

The subtitle of the Rukhnama (now referred toas The Holy Rukhnama) could be "The Second Coming" — the actual subtitle is "Reflections on the Spiritual Values of the Turkmen." Niyazov emphasizes that he is a sort of reincarnation of Oguz Khan, just as powerful and wise, and to prove it he has named cities and hills and rivers and streets after himself. He meddled with the language in the manner of Oguz, ordering that Turkmen be written in Latin script, and claimed that because he had dedicated his life to making Turkmenistan greater, he would be its president for the rest of his life.

Niyazov was an orphan. Much is made of this in the book, and these descriptions have a clumsy tenderness. "I have borne many difficulties throughout my life," he writes, and tells how his father was killed in the Second World War, fighting for the Soviets in Ossetia. When he was a child of seven, his mother was killed in the earthquake that leveled Ashgabat in 1948. Isolated, he was made strong, and he refused to mourn. "When I considered my situation, I understood that I was not an orphan! How can someone be an orphan if he has a father like Oguz Khan?" Instead of natural parents, he had a nation and a cause and a father from history. And he incorporated his parents into the national fabric, naming the year 2003 after his father, Atamurat, and 2004 after his mother, Gurbansultan-ezdhe.

Later in the Rukhnama (oh, and 2005 was the Year of Rukhnama), he waxes emotional about his mother, and mothers in general. This turns into a program to venerate motherhood. "The mother is a sacred being… One can understand the value of sacred things only after one has lost them." He goes on to explain that a father provides material support, but the mother supplies love. He recalls a Turkmen saying: "Fatherless, I am orphan; motherless, I am captive," and concludes, "Fate decreed two pains for me. I was both an orphan and a captive."

A lost childhood seems essential in a dictator's biography, an irregular upbringing being a determiner of a person's becoming a political tyrant. Niyazov's making a meal of his early suffering, and the existence of the Palace of Orphans in Ashgabat — there were similar institutions in other big cities — were evidence that one of his priorities was to make special provisions for abandoned or parentless children. Having no clan, no real family, though, was a unique political asset to him in this clan-dominated society. "He has a feeling for orphans," a Turkmen told me. This concern was as obvious on the ground as it was in the pages of the Rukhnama, where Niyazov describes how he lost his parents, how he was alone and destined to struggle.

In terms of abandonment complaints, the book sounds (sometimes word for word) like the upward climb of the Austrian paperhanger in part one of Mein Kampf, who wrote: "In my thirteenth year I suddenly lost my father," and "When my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect, had made its decisions… The three-year-old child had become a fifteen-year-old despiser of all authority." But the orphaning is sentimentalized in the Rukhnama, and there is much more — history, old saws, the promise of greater glory, the list of obligations and duties, of which the not exactly Hitlerian "Maintain a smiling face" is one.

"Smile!" was an important Turkmenbashi command. He was as emphatic about Turkmen smiling as he was about work and worship. He wrote, "As the old saying goes, 'There will never be any wrinkles on a smiling face.'" And he reminisced: "I often remember my mother. Her smile still appears before my very eyes… The smile is visible to me in the dark of night, even if I have my eyes shut."

A smile was powerful: "A smile can make a friend for you out of an enemy. When death stares you in the face, smile at it and it may leave you untouched." Even nature smiled: "Spring is the smile of the earth." Smiling could be a form of conversation: "Smile at each other… Talk to each other with smiles."

Pages and pages of this, most of it self-reverential. To his smile Niyazov owed much of his success as a national leader. "That smile I inherited from my mother is my treasure." This was perhaps why most of the portraits of Niyazov all over Turkmenistan showed him smiling, though he never looked less reliable, or less amused, than when he was smiling. His smile — and this may be true of all political leaders — was his most sinister feature.

At Niyazov's command, his book was studied in every school in Turkmenistan; a thorough knowledge of it was an entry requirement for all the colleges and universities in the nation and for advancement in the civil service. Those immigration officials who gave me a hard time had little idea of how to handle a simple customs matter but probably could have quoted "A smile can make a friend for you out of an enemy" — though none of them smiled at me.

What Niyazov did not say in the Rukhnama was that after his education in Russia (he had studied electrical engineering), he had become a party hack. This was in the 1970s and '80s — Soviet times, when he rose through the ranks of the Politburo to become general secretary of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan. He was one of the educated provincials the Soviets (in this case Gorbachev, who had picked him, not knowing he was a flake) extolled as converts to Marxism and examples of the effectiveness of the system, and hoped might serve as agents of reform. Not mentioned in the Rukhnama is that he spent a great deal of time in Leningrad and Moscow; that he was married to a Russian — interestingly enough, a Jew — who chose to live apart from him, in Moscow; that he had two children, one of whom, Murat, hoped to succeed him.

Another significant omission in any subsequent edition of the book (of which more than a million have been printed, in more than thirty languages, including Zulu and Japanese) is any mention of the assassination attempt against Niyazov. In 2002, in what might have been a failed coup, he was almost killed when he was shot at as his motorcade sped through the city. This resulted in a wave of repression, the perpetrators and their helpers hunted down and either killed or imprisoned. Whole families were jailed, and nothing was heard of them afterwards. The word was that his own disgruntled and ambitious ministers had schemed to get rid of him, and the plan was that he would be kidnapped, taken hostage, and deposed rather than knocked off.

Anyway, the caper failed, but understandably it completed Niyazov's paranoia, and his delusions of grandeur — evident throughout the country in the form of the gold statues — were now accompanied by delusions of persecution. He ordered a clampdown: no Internet, no telephones, total control of the media, of all comings and goings.

And that other inconvenient feature of tyrannies — roadblocks. These were installed throughout all cities and on roads leading out of the cities, about every four miles. In a twelve-mile journey to some nearby ruins I was stopped three times by the usual well-armed men in spiffy uniforms who did not have the slightest notion of what to do with the cars they stopped. They examined papers, they looked into the back seat of the car, they made scowling faces and shouldered their rifles; but really, they were foxed.

On that trip to see the ruins, I asked about Niyazov's passion for renaming. I was with two Turkmen — a man I shall call Mamed, whose English was shaky, and a woman I shall call Gulnara, who was fluent.

The funny part was that although Mamed and Gulnara had read about the renamings, there were so many changes they couldn't keep them straight.

"January is now Turkmenbashi," Gulnara said. "He named the first month after himself. Ha! February is Bayderk — the flag. March is Nowruz. April is Gurbansultan-ezdhe — his mother. June is Oguz — our hero. But May is — what is May?"

Mamed said, "May is Sanjar."

"No, that's November."

"Are you sure?"

"I know September is Rukhnama," Gulnara said. "What do you think, Paul?"

I said, "It's every writer's dream to have a month named after his book."

"August is Alp Arslan," Mamed said. "He was sultan."

"You forgot July," Gulnara said.

"I don't remember July. What is it?"

Gulnara shook her head. She squinted and said, "Then there's October."

Mamed said, "Garashsyzliyk."

"Independence," Gulnara said.

They were just as vague on the days of the week, though Gulnara started confidently: "Monday is Bashgün — Beginning. Tuesday is Yashgün, Young Day. Wednesday is Hoshgün."

"Tuesday is Hoshgün," Mamed said. "Wednesday is Yashgün."

"I don't think so," Gulnara said.

Their confusion was funny but politically suspect, because the renaming was considered so important. By a government decree, all departments, all ministries, schools, colleges, the police, the army — all citizens — had to demonstrate a knowledge of the changes, and had to use them, too.

"What if people are talking in Russian?" I asked, which was common, since Ashgabat had a community of Russians who'd been there for many years, somewhat sidelined by Niyazov's nationalism, but too old to leave.

"Even speaking in Russian — although it would be normal to use the Russian names for months and days — they use the new ones. Which makes no sense."

"Someone told me he renamed bread."

"That was an idea," Gulnara said. "But he renamed ketchup. He made a big speech. 'Why do we say "ketchup"? This is a foreign word. We are Turkmen. We must have a Turkmen word for this!'"

"So what is it?"

"Ketchup is uwmech?

"If I looked up uwmech in the dictionary, what would it say?"

"It would say 'ketchup,' except we don't have any new dictionaries in Turkmenistan."

Mamed said, "He got rid of them."

All this talk of the obsessive president made Mamed and Gulnara self-conscious, and when they fell silent I said, "Does it bother you that the president has made all these changes? Not just the renaming, but his mother's name, his father's name."

"Most people don't think about it," Gulnara said. She meant: don't want to think about it, because it will only make them miserable.

"What about the gold statues he puts up of himself?"

Mamed made a face, shook his head, became alert. It was said that hotel rooms and offices were bugged, to catch any subversive talk — surely this car could be bugged too?

But Gulnara had an opinion. She was confident and bright, qualities she shared with many of the Turkmen women I met. She said, "The statues. The slogans. The five-year plans. We have seen this before. Stalin — and others."

And it was true that for self-adulatory images and mottos on buildings, the Soviets had been almost unbeatable, with Lenin's gilded face everywhere, and the cities and towns with Lenin statues to which Stalin statues were added. It was not surprising that the aspiring S. Niyazov changed his name to Turkmenbashi (as Iosif Dzhugashvili had, to Joseph Stalin) and created a dictatorship, complete with a personality cult.

"This will pass away," Gulnara said.

It was not just a wise observation but the right way to see what this autocracy was worth, for this hyperactive and domineering man would die, and since he was seriously afflicted with diabetes and had had at least one heart attack, it would happen sooner rather than later. And then the gold statues would come down.*

* He died in December 2006.

In the meantime, Turkmen, of whom there were five million, expressed their disaffection in jokes. One went, "Why is Turkmenbashi the richest man in Turkmenistan?" Answer: "Because he has five million sheep." And they laughed recalling how Niyazov had suggested that his people chew on bones, because it was good for their teeth.

On our way to the ruins we had passed a number of state-owned vineyards — one of the other oddities of Islamic Turkmenistan was that it had a vigorous wine industry, for both export and local consumption. At the edge of the desert we approached some rising ground that was more a mound than a hill, on which there was a broken structure of mud bricks that was still recognizable as a mosque.

This was Anau, the ruins of a fifteenth-century mosque — not unusual in Turkmenistan, which saw its first Islamic evangelists in the seventh century; the Prophet himself had sent his messengers in this direction from Mecca, and the conversion rate was high. What made this mosque unusual was that architecturally it showed Chinese influence, features in still bright mosaics that were almost unheard-of in mosques — images of creatures and portraits of humans, neither of them common in Islamic art, and over the archway of the entrance, shattered but sinuous dragons.

Much of Turkmenistan was desert wasteland, scrubby bushes, and dusty boulders, an emptiness of lizards and a landscape like cat litter. In Soviet times its few towns and cities were outposts as benighted as in any imperial colony, where people in colorful clothes wove carpets and surrendered their reserve of gas and oil to the Russian overlords. This exploitation, one of the injustices denounced in the Rukhnama, had not always been the case. The dragons on the mosque were a reminder that this part of Turkmenistan was on the Silk Road, the route to China, and some of the toughest travelers, the greatest treasures, the boldest generals, the largest armies, had passed this way: Alexander the Great, the Parthians, the Arabs, the Mongols.

This mosque was a place of pilgrimage, because its grounds contained the tomb of Seyyed Jamaluddin, the father of a local governor from the fifteenth century. A dozen people, most of them women with their children, prayed at the pile of broken bricks that was his grave.

"They come here because he has good communication with Allah," Mamed said.

There was another grave, the Tomb of the Unmarried Woman — though Gulnara said that "unmarried woman" could also be translated as "virgin." Young women were praying here, and hundreds had come before: they had left tokens behind in the form of symbols for requests to be granted. Most were wishes to be blessed with babies. Bows were tied to the branches of a nearby tree, small carved cradles were unambiguous, and the sheep bones that were carefully piled, Gulnara said, in dicated children too, since the bones were used as toys by Turkmen children. Hairpins meant girls, so did the patches of colored cloth; little plastic cars meant a boy child was desired.

"In Islam, this is not usually done. You don't appeal to a dead woman," Gulnara said. "You're supposed to ask Allah. But this is a powerful woman."

I mentioned that most of these appeals specified that boys were wanted.

She said, "Women who give birth to girls have another special way of indicating that they want a boy. They will name the daughter Enough — Besteir — or else Fed Up — Boyduk. These are common names. I know many."

About forty feet from the tumbledown mosque was another mound on which there were hundreds of toy huts made of broken clay tiles — propped-up walls, a lid for a roof — and some were slanted two-story huts. It looked like a miniature city. A squatting man in a smock and a woman with a billowing headscarf were setting one up as we stood nearby.

"People praying for houses," Gulnara said. The images represented the people — young couples mostly — who were living with their parents in crowded tenements or in poor villages just outside Ashgabat, who wanted homes of their own.

The cruelty of Niyazov's policies was obvious in this tableau of toy huts, which was a visible plea — not to Turkmenbashi but to Allah — for housing. Houseless people abounded in this fabulously wealthy country. In his role as city planner, Niyazov had ordered that houses be bulldozed, compounds flattened, neighborhoods of Ashgabat dispersed, but he had not rehoused the people he'd displaced. They lived precariously in temporary huts on Ashgabat's outskirts. And where their houses had stood were gold statues, fountains, oversized white marble buildings, and white marble apartment blocks of ludicrous aspect, risen like pillars of salt, with gold trim, all of them empty because they were, in their deluxe absurdity, unaffordable.

Islam was not one immutable thing but was subject to variations. In what anthropologists call syncretism — local customs or adaptations added to an imported belief system — Islam here took on a colorful form, like Catholicism in Sicily or the Congo. Here were the national saints and martyrs who might intercede, and also the fetishes. The toys and small-scale models and symbols set up in a beseeching way were an innovation. The symbolic naming was a way of gaining power over destiny. Appeals to spirits — not Allah. This sort of Turkmen-style praying, intending to control fate, was unusual among Muslims.

In the next few days, I reached the conclusion that Turkmenistan, perhaps because of its tyrannous history, was one of the most superstition-prone cultures I'd ever seen.

Because they were gilded and solemn, the statues in the Turkmen capital had an ecclesiastical aura. A leader on horseback, or one cast in bronze or carved in stone, was not quite the same as a leader shaped in gold. In all these statues Niyazov was El Dorado, the Man of Gold — all-powerful, all-knowing. You were not meant to gape at them but rather to venerate them. One statue, depicting Niyazov with his arm raised, rotated, turning to face the sun, seeming to guide it across the sky from dawn to dusk. Another, the Arch of Neutrality, stood atop a gigantic marble apparatus that looked like, and was locally known as, the Toilet Bowl Plunger. Some gold statues showed Turkmenbashi sitting, others striding, waving, saluting, and of course smiling a 24-karat smile. Many showed him as a precocious golden child.

He once said to a journalist, "I admit it, there are too many portraits, pictures and monuments [of me]. I don't find any pleasure in it, but the people demand it because of their mentality."

All of these statues and pictures were, of course, destined for destruction; their doom was spelled out in the gold lettering, in the gold gesturing. They were such hubristic conceptions, it was only a matter of time before they were pulled down. A statue of Lenin in Neutrality Square in Ashgabat was bronze and life size, its mosaic imitating the pattern of a Turkmen carpet, and its message, in Russian and Turkmen, read: LENINISM IS THE WAY FOR FREEING THE PEOPLES OF THE EAST. This was, by contrast, modest and charming, a far cry from the gold three-times-life-size Niyazov statues, which looked like commands to submit to his insanities, and by implication would challenge future Turkmen to knock them down.

Although the city was made of white marble and gold, statues and tower blocks and ministries and amphitheaters, the whole of Ashgabat had the pompous and vulnerable look of a place defying the fates. If an earthquake didn't topple it, a coup d'état would, and all of it would be smashed to bits by the indignant citizens this spendthrift had cheated.

The irony of Ashgabat was that nowhere, among the gold statues and the white marble plazas with their fountains and the triumphal archways, was there a place to sit down. It was a city without benches, the subtle message being: Keep walking.

"I will build a forest in the desert," Niyazov had promised. Turkmen said that he had loved the pine forests of Russia. He had been inspired by them; he missed them here among the stones and the dunes. Turkmenistan — its wind-scoured plains and ravines of sun-scorched rock — deserved a forest.

He had ordered the planting of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young trees; and although they were two or three feet high — the planting was still going on when I was in Ashgabat — the forestation plan was not a success.

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.

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.

I had agreed to give a harmless pep talk in Ashgabat to some writers and journalists. About thirty men and women showed up at a sort of boardroom in a hotel that the U.S. embassy used as an annex. This being Turkmenistan, they were of every physical type: stylish women in velvet dresses and white collars with the impassive faces of nomads, dark beaky men in heavy coats, younger mustached men in suits, Russian aunties in blue dresses and carrying satchels, some hefty warrior types braced behind their chairs with arms folded, a furtive man fussing with a big shoulder bag, and two pale young women, slender Slavic beauties with lank blond hair, standing shyly by the wall, staring at me with limpid blue eyes.

My topic was again the return journey, the pleasure of a traveler's growing older, how the passage of time reveals the truth of people and places. I spoke for about twenty minutes, with a young Turkmen translator who was fluent in English. At the end there was polite applause. The man who had been fussing with his shoulder bag had taken out an expensive camera and begun snapping pictures.

"Any questions?"

Hands shot up.

"What do you think of Islam?" one man asked.

I made a tactful reply, commending the verses of the Koran encouraging hospitality that I, a traveler among Muslims, appreciated, and quickly I moved on to the next question.

"I am a poet," one of the Russian aunties declared. She went on to ask how she might get her poems translated into English and published in the United States.

I referred her to the fellow who had translated her question.

"How do you write a novel?" a young man asked.

I mentioned needing an idea, and characters, and a setting, and about two years of solitude.

"You are not here for very long," another man said. "How can you understand us in such a short time?"

"You're right," I said. "It's impossible. So what particular thing do you think it's important for me to understand about Turkmenistan?"

"Do you know about the pensions?"

"No, I don't. Tell me"

"The government has reduced the state pensions for some people," he said, his voice rising. "In some cases, these were people who were granted pensions by the Soviet government, but when Turkmenistan became independent, these were eliminated. What do you think of that?"

As he spoke, the man with the camera leaned over and began snapping his picture.

He turned and snapped my picture as I said, "We have a similar problem in the United States. A lot of older people will have to work longer because the government pension fund is running out of money. The qualifying age for Social Security is now almost sixty-six, and it's rising."

"But what about us?" the questioner asked. Now his voice was strident. "This situation is serious."

The photographer positioned himself at the edge of the row of chairs and was clicking away.

"You're not getting your pension?"

"Many thousands of people are not getting it! They were workers. Now they're old and they have nothing to live on. This is a wealthy country, but they are poor. The government has done this to us. Why don't you write about that?"

"You're a writer — all you people are writers," I said. "You are the people who should write about it, not me. You have all the facts. So why don't you do it?"

"I am not a writer," the man said. "I am chairman of the Unity and Neutrality Party of Turkmenistan."

Before this could be translated, the photographer leaped forward and snapped pictures from several angles, his shoulder bag bumping his side.

And then an American security officer took three strides towards the photographer and, approaching him from behind, grasped his coat in one hand and snatched the camera with his other hand. He frog-marched the man to the back of the room and outside. This all happened so fast, the photographer did not have time to protest, though I heard him howl as the door slammed.

"Do you write about love?" one of the pretty blue-eyed women asked.

Constantly, I said. I elaborated on this subject, and then declared the meeting over. The room emptied quickly.

But the harm was done. I had allowed a political dissident a forum. It turned out that this was the first anyone had heard of this underground party. And there was collateral damage, so to speak, for the writers and journalists who had been quietly invited (many of them unpopular with the government) had all been photographed. The photographer was a government spy, sent to make a record of the meeting and to report on what had been said.

"Not good," said the young man who had done the translating.

"What just happened?" I asked the American security man.

I had been impressed by his deftness: without hesitating, almost without creating a scene, he had plucked the man and his camera from the room. Out in the corridor, the security man had popped out the camera's memory card and wiped it of its images as the photographer howled. The force of this expulsion came afterwards, like a shock wave, when it was apparent what had just occurred.

"Government guy," the American said. "He should know better. This is technically U.S. government property. Can't take pictures here."

"Is this going to be a problem?"

"We'll see," he said. "Hey, I liked your talk."

The problem developed later that day when the photographer complained to his superiors at Turkmenistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And the next day, the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Ashgabat was summoned to a meeting with the foreign minister.

Who is this Paul Theroux? she was asked. What are the details of his visa? Does he have permission to speak? When is he leaving? How is he leaving? What border crossing?

I had the answers to some of these questions. My visa was in order, and in a few days I planned to take the train to Mary, to see the ruins at Merv. Then the train to Turkmenabat and the Uzbekistan border at Farap, and then, I hoped, another train.

I spent the rest of my time in Ashgabat doing what Turkmen like doing most, sitting on a lovely carpet, eating my way down a spit of lamb kebab or through a mound of rice plov. Always there was hard bread, sometimes dumplings, tea, and wine.

"Georgian wine," one of my Turkmen hosts said. "Stalin's favorite. He wouldn't drink anything else."

Now and then these meals were served in homes that stood in empty fields, like the stage set for a Beckett play — a house in a wasteland that had been bulldozed to make room for a future prestige project or gold statue. Niyazov's people simply seized the houses and got rid of them, rarely compensating the owners. In the distance were the empty marble palaces and tower blocks, huge white follies trimmed in gold. Niyazov fancied himself a city planner, and he was obsessional, his megalomania on view for all to see. He had the dictator's most obnoxious trait of greatly resembling a dysfunctional person who had won the lottery.

Because I was now under a cloud, and being watched by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, my position as an alien in Turkmenistan was explained to me. I had to be careful. But having Niyazov — Turkmenbashi, Leader of All the Turkmen — as an enemy was helpful, because when Western diplomats explained my predicament, they revealed Niyazov's quirks.

"He hates people meddling. He hates NGOs — in fact, he banned them," one diplomat told me. He had banned human rights groups, religious groups, and environmental groups. "He allowed the Peace Corps in when they left Uzbekistan, but they can't work in any schools — they give language lessons mainly, and do what they can to make friends."

"You see what you're up against?" another diplomat said. "He's refused any help from the IMF or any loans from the World Bank, because if he accepted any money, he would have to disclose his own financial information. And that's his big secret. He considers most of these profits from gas his own, which makes him a billionaire many times over."

A person who had spent some time with him in one of his palaces said, "He's a tease. He's a mocker. He banters with his ministers and humiliates them."

"Of course his system's corrupt," a student explained to me. "You need to bribe a lot of people to get into college, but only Turkmen are allowed. A Russian or an Uzbek or a Korean wouldn't have a chance. They have no future here."

"He stopped education at the ninth grade for most people," a bureaucrat said to me. "He was once asked about that by a foreign head of state. He said, 'Uneducated people are easier to govern.'"

***

EARLY ONE EVENING I took the night train from Ashgabat to the eastern city of Mary. When I found that the sleeper ticket cost $4, I became anxious: this was the price of six melons at the bazaar, and a ticket so cheap boded ill for a long journey. I guessed that the train would be dirty and crowded, a mass of people traveling in the light of a few 25-watt bulbs, and it gave me no satisfaction to be right.

The railway station itself was lovely, a classic Soviet building from the 1950s, very clean and patrolled by soldiers with machine guns. Yet no passenger was searched, and while all travelers on Turkmenistan's roads were subject to numerous roadblocks and the arbitrary search-and-seizure rules of the security forces, train travelers were blameless and carefree — another instance of railway passengers regarded as being beneath notice.

I sat in my four-berth compartment with a soldier in his dark uniform, a student of about twenty-two, and a chin-bearded old man in traditional Turkmen dress — a cylindrical black lambskin hat, a long brown cloak over a smock, one of those national costumes that seem eternal and all-purpose and comfortable everywhere, in all seasons. He saw me and began to speak to the student.

"Salaam. Dayf al-Rahman" he said.

"Welcome," the student translated. "You are a guest of Allah, the Merciful One."

"Please thank him for me."

The man spoke again.

"He has a question for you," the student said. "Will you answer?"

I heard the whistle blow. The train slowly left Ashgabat Station, and within minutes we were in the desert. The old man was monologuing to the student.

"He says that some years ago, an astronaut went to the moon," the student said. "He was from America. When he got to the moon, he heard a strange noise. It was an azan—the call to prayer, usually chanted by a muezzin from a mosque. "The astronaut recorded it. When he came back to Earth, the scientists in America analyzed it, and they came to think that it was the voice of the Prophet Muhammad."

"On the moon?"

"Yes. On the moon."

The old man was still speaking, his chin beard swinging.

"Furthermore, he says that because of this, the astronaut became a Muslim and began praying five times a day."

The old man was facing me, as though defying me to mock the story.

"I haven't heard this story," I said.

"He says he believes it."

"What does he think about it?"

When this question was translated, the student said, "For him, it's good news."

It seemed to me like a Turkmenistan version of a Pat Robertson story: divine intervention in an unlikely place, resulting in a beatific conversion, the sun breaking through the clouds. Instead of Jesus speaking to a searcher, the speaker was Muhammad; but it came to the same thing. Muslims at the fringe always sounded to me like born-again Christians, literal-minded and impervious to reason. An Arabic scholar once told me that a persistent urban myth in the Middle East was that Neil Armstrong, sometimes confused with Louis Armstrong, converted to Islam.

But as all of us were going to Mary, the best tactic on this overnight train journey was to get along, perhaps keep off the subject of religion.

As I was thinking this, the old man was talking to the student.

"He asks if you believe in God."

"I have a lot of questions on this subject," I said.

"He asks, 'But do you believe in life after death?'"

"I don't know about this. No one has ever come back from the dead to tell us anything, so how can we know?"

"The Holy Koran tells us"

"I intend to read it when I have a chance."

The old man, who was seated across from me, spoke directly to me in Turkmen and became very animated.

"He says: 'The grass grows. Then the grass turns brown. Then the grass dies. Then it grows again. It turns green and gets tall.'"

The old man was still staring, his face narrow, one skinny gnarled hand in his lap, the other gripping the long gray beard attached to his chin. His arthritic hands gave him an even greater look of piety.

"He says, 'Life is like that, I believe.'"

"Tell him I agree. Life is like that, even where I'm from."

"Where are you from?"

"Tell him America."

The old Muslim received this information with more interest than I had expected.

"He asks, 'Do you have cotton in America?'"

"Lots of it."

"Is it a good type of cotton?"

"Very good," I said.

"He is wondering how many hectares of cotton are growing in America."

"Tell him I'm not sure. Why is he interested?"

"He works in the cotton industry."

"What does he do?"

When this question was asked, the man showed me his ruined hands, his twisted fingers.

"He picks cotton in the fields some distance from Mary — near Yeloten, south on the road to Afghanistan, where there are cotton farms."

So he lived (according to my map) a few hundred miles from the Afghanistan border, a day's drive, not far from the ancient city of Herat, which I had visited on my first Railway Bazaar trip. Now Herat was dominated by a clan of well-armed warriors and a paranoid and vindictive warlord. A German traveler had been arrested there, tortured, and shot as a spy just a month before, a fate I wished to avoid.

The old man's name was Selim. He told me his simple history. He had been born near Mary. He had not gone to school. As a boy he worked in the fields, and had picked cotton his whole life — mostly Soviet times. He had married a woman from his clan and they'd had four children.

"I think you are about sixty," he said.

When I told him my age, he challenged me to guess his. He looked about seventy, so I guessed sixty. He laughed and said he was fifty.

At my Ashgabat farewell party in a Turkmen household, I had been given a bag of food for the train — spinach pies, mushroom turnovers, sticky buns, all wrapped in paper. In the dim light of the compartment I unwrapped the food.

"Ask them if they'll share my food," I said to the student.

They nodded politely when the question was translated, and so I handed the food around — to Selim, the young soldier, the student, and a hanger-on gaping in the doorway. Elderly-looking, gray-bearded Selim — could he really be fifty? — asked a question.

"He says, 'Ask the American if we can say a prayer.'"

"Of course," I said and nodded to the man.

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.

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.

"You might have a problem at the border," I was told. "They might hassle you. They could seriously hold you up."

So I walked three times around the tomb of Jaffari and Bureda.

What I liked of Merv was its innocence — no fences, no postcards, no pests, few signs, not even much respect. In this shattered and somewhat forgotten place in the desert, some visitors scrambled up and down the steep walls, kicking them apart, picking up pieces of broken pottery, and others picnicked among the crenelations. It was possible to see young Turkmen boys genially pissing on the ruins. This was what became of pompous plans: the trickle of urine darkening the dust, the laughter of picnickers scattering crumbs and plov grains, spilling lemonade.

I was shown the old cistern and the Sassanid dome and the rebuilt ("Notice the squeenches," Evgenia said) Sultan Sanjar Mosque ("Double dome, two khundred years before Brunelleschi designed Saint Peter's in Roma"), the third-century wall of Antiochus, the big ruined Buddhist stupa, the ice house, the site of the Mongol invasion where a million people were slaughtered, the ruined watchtowers…

And masses of tamarisks with purple blossoms graced the watchtowers. A sharp-angled falcon glided slowly above, circling, stalking. In the distance some men were grazing a herd of camels. Three small boys approached us where we stood. They were mounted on donkeys, yelling and galloping across an ancient wall, leaving hoofprints on it. They had no saddles, they held on to rope bridles, they kicked their skinny gray mounts.

"They are Beluchis, from Persia," Evgenia said. "They settled here many years ago."

These human touches made the place real for me. Evgenia said that local people, superstitious about the aura of slaughter and conquest, avoided Merv and used it only to pasture their animals or to pilfer bricks. Goatherds huddled by the single remaining part of the exposed wall of the complex known as Gyaur Kala. The sun was setting on Merv. The shepherds' fire scorched the ancient bricks as they cooked their evening meal.

***

IN MARY, OVER ANOTHER mound of plov, a young Turkmen — formerly an exchange student in the United States, a recent university graduate, new to Mary — listed for me the problems in his country.

"First of all, it is a police state," he said. "We have secret police, we have spies, it is terrible. It is also a corrupt system. It is impossible to advance in any government job without bribes. Even going to a university requires bribing the admissions office. And if you are non-Turkmen, forget about it. You'll never get in."

Unemployment was high, the teacher shortage was acute, salaries were low — a university professor pedaling his bike past the gold statues earned about $150 a month. The minimum wage was $20 a month; a cotton picker like Selim did not earn much more than that. Add to this the housing shortage, the potholes that characterized most streets, the interminable roadblocks and grouchy soldiers, the disgusting toilets.

"Many people are desperate."

"Give me an example," I said.

"Girls sell themselves on the street! Didn't you see them in Ashgabat?"

I had seen pretty girls on street corners — and by the way, all the major streets were named for members of Turkmenbashi's family — but how was I to know they were selling themselves?

"Where were you in the United States?" I asked, because he now and then mentioned his American host family. And he remarked on the fact that he had been twenty-two when he went to the United States but that this was his first time in Mary.

"Spokane."

"After what you've told me about Turkmenistan, do you sometimes wish you'd stayed there?"

"No. I am a Turkmen. I love my country. I would only go to the USA in order to make money and send it to my parents."

I met other former exchange students. They were cautious when they talked to me, for fear that anything they said would expose them to retribution.

But many of them said that life was hard, and it wasn't just the low salaries and the housing shortage. Because Turkmenistan was so near to the heroin-producing areas of Afghanistan, hard drugs were a serious problem in the country. Heroin addicts were numerous, and their need for money caused crime. Turkmenistan was also a transshipment route for drugs from Afghanistan to Russia. Afghan hashish was freely available.

In Mary I was told that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was still watching me, and that this might be a good time to head east, to Turkmenabat and the Uzbek border. Someone would be sent to help me.

And one morning a man showed up at my hotel, the Margush. I shall call him Sedyk Ali. He said he had been deputized to accompany me to the border. He too had been an exchange student.

"What did you like about the States?"

"Good people. Clean conditions. No bribes."

"Tell me what you didn't like."

"The way that children treat their elders. Not good."

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.