Next to where the old Turkman, the boy, and I are drinking our tea stands a flower vendor. “Gradzanki,” she calls, “nev zabyvajtie roz.” Ashkhabadian roses, heavy, languorous. But no one is buying flowers; the marketplace is empty at this time of day; it is noon in the desert. Ashkhabad, crushed by the heat, lies in the sun, numbed, silent. It is one hundred meters from this place to my hotel. From here to the Iranian border — one hour’s drive. But it is far to Moscow—4,300 kilometers. To Warsaw — more than five thousand. In 1935 a group of Turkmen set off on horseback for Moscow. They rode day in and day out for three months, a total of eighty-three days, and this record has been noted down in The History of the Turkmen SSR.
In the marketplace there are vegetable vendors, meaning kolkhoz members come here to sell the produce from their private gardens and plots, vendors of medicines, which one can buy here from stalls, nationalized booksellers, and barbers. Many barbers, but only for men. Turkmen women braid their hair, and you don’t need a barber for that. There is a vendor of pencils and notebooks, so fantastically wet, sweaty, positively dripping, he looks as if he were standing under a continuous shower. “Uzbek!” he calls to the tea vendor. “Day chayu!” And he pumps the hot beverage into himself, bowl after bowl. “Grazdanie!” he calls after a moment, “support culture! Buy notebooks!”
The entire marketplace is covered in asphalt, the streets too. On the streets run trolley cars, hot as furnaces. Both sides of the streets are planted with trees; there are many lawns and flower beds; one can see a great concern for greenery; the city is well cared for, clean and groomed. The trees give shade, but they also serve another function, this one psychological. The presence of greenery eases the exhausting sense of claustrophobia, which torments the resident of the oasis. A sedentary man fears the desert; the desert fills him with dread. And all he has to do is go to the edge of town, often just to the end of his own backyard: desert all around. The desert forces its way into the city, buries squares and streets. I was in Nuakshott, which lies in the Sahara, where heaps of sand that have drifted over the asphalt are regularly removed, just as snow is removed from the streets at home during winter. In the Atar oasis I saw peasants whose continual task it was to dig out date palms that were being buried up to their tops in sand. The desert attacks houses, which is why there are no windows except those that are kept permanently closed. In such a climate! And yet in this way man protects himself from the dust, which ruins homes, provisions, possessions.
Trees create the soothing impression that the oasis is not an island endlessly under attack by the elements of the desert, but a fragment of a greater earth propitious to people and to plants.
Ashkhabad is a young city in two senses. It started to come into being only in 1881, when the Russian army, after breaking the Turkmen’s resistance, built a fort here. The fort started to sprout little streets, a small town grew around it. In 1948, during an earthquake, one of the most severe in modern history, in the space of fifteen seconds the town disappeared from the face of the earth. There had been one cemetery in the town, Misha recalls, and after the quake there were sixteen. Of all the city’s structures, only the statue of Lenin survived.
The Ashkhabad you see today is the city that came into being after the disaster, essentially new from the foundations up. There is nothing here for the lover of antiquities to visit.
RASHYD SHOWED ME on the map where the Uzboj flowed.
It drew its waters from the Amu Darya River, cut across the Kara Kum Desert, and plunged into the Caspian Sea. It was a beautiful river, said Rashyd, as long as the Seine. This river died, he said, and its death became the beginning of war. He added that the archaeologist Yusupov studied the history of the Uzboj. According to Yusupov, the river appeared on the desert suddenly and relatively recently, perhaps five thousand years ago. Together with the water, fish and birds arrived in the desert. Later, people came. They belonged to the tribes of Ali-ili, Chyzr, and Tivedzij. Turkmen at the time were divided into no tribes, perhaps even more. The people of Ali-ili, Chyzr, and Tivedzij divided the Uzboj into three segments, a third of the river’s length falling to each tribe. The banks of the Uzboj were transformed into a flowering and populous oasis. Villages and centers of manufacture, gardens and plantations, arose. In the very heart of the desert it became crowded and noisy. That is what water can bring. Water is the beginning of everything. It is the first nourishment. It is the blood of the earth. People represented water with three wavy lines. Above the lines they drew a fish. The fish was the symbol of happiness. Three lines plus a fish signified — life.
Merchant ships sailed on the river. Goods passed through here on their way from India to Anatolia, from Khorez to Persia. The Uzboj was renowned the world over. In countries where people were literate, various references to it have survived. We find references among the Greeks and Persians, and also references among the Arabs. On the banks of the Uzboj stood hospitable caravansaries where rowers could rest, get a place to sleep and a meal. There were bazaars in Dov-Kala, Orta-Kuy, and Talaychan where everyone could buy goods of the highest quality from all over the world.
The people of the Uzboj worshiped sacred stones. This is typical of inhabitants of deserts, who revere everything they have at hand — stones, gorges, wells, and trees. Fighting was forbidden in the place where a sacred stone stood. The stone protected one from death. A concentrated force dwelled inside it, imprisoned in an immutable form, bestowed upon it for all eternity. Kissing the stone gave people an almost sensual pleasure. Rashyd calls my attention to a fragment of The Voyage in which Abū ‘Abd Allāh Mohammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh al-Lawātī aṭ-Ṭandzi, otherwise known as Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, writes that “the lips feel an immense sweetness when kissing stone, so that one wants to go on kissing it forever.” To the people of the Uzboj, a stone was a divine being.
Human thought during those times revolved around such matters as the distribution of water. We can ascertain this through deductive reasoning. Even after the Revolution, until reforms were instituted, the division of water was for the Turkmen an event as important as the outbreak of war or the signing of peace. Virtually everything depended on it. Water reached the fields through canals called aryks. The distribution of water took place at the main aryk. If the spring was good, the distribution of water became a celebration. But good springs occur rarely here. In the course of an entire year there can be as little rainfall as one shower brings in Europe. And it can also happen that the entire yearly rainfall pours down from the sky in the course of only two days, and after that there is only drought. The distribution of water would then turn into war. Cemeteries stretch on both sides of the aryks, at the bottom of the canals lie human bones.
The rich had large aryks and the poor small ones. The poor man tried to open the valves on the sly to let more water into his aryk. The rich man suppressed such practices. That is how the class struggle looked. Water was an object of speculation; it was a commodity on the black market. There was a water exchange, a water boom, a water crash. People made fortunes on water, or lost everything. Various customs arose that only the Revolution would abolish. A woman did not have the right to a water allotment. Only married men received water. A man to whom a son was born married the infant to a grown girl; the infant, being married, received a water allotment. Water was the road to riches for those people to whom many sons were born. It was not until 1925 that the First Congress of the Councils of Turkmenistan ratified the revolutionary decree that forbids the marrying of infants and grants women the right to water.