Everyone tried to live as close to the Uzboj as possible. The river carried water; it carried life. Along its banks ran the trails of caravans. In the currents of the Uzboj the army of Genghis Khan watered its horses. To its shores journeyed the merchants of Samarkand and the Yomud — slave traders.
The river’s agony, said Rashyd, began four hundred years ago. Having appeared suddenly on the desert, the river now just as suddenly began to vanish. The Uzboj had created a civilization in the very heart of the desert, had sustained three tribes, linked the west with the east; on the banks of the Uzboj stood dozens of cities and settlements, which Yusupov would excavate. Now the sands were swallowing up the river. Its energy began to weaken, its current to wane. It is not known who first noticed this. The Ali-ili, Chyzr, and Tivedzij gathered on the banks to watch the river, the source of life, departing; they sat and they watched, because people like to observe their own misfortune. The water level fell from one day to the next; an abyss was yawning before them. The whole class struggle over the opening and shutting of the valves lost all its meaning. It made no difference who had what aryk—there was no water in any of them. People ran to the mullahs, ran to the ishans, embraced every stone they came across. Nothing helped. The fields were drying up and the trees withering. For a skin of water one could buy a Karakul sheep. Caravans, which before stopped here and there, now passed by in a hurry, as if an epidemic had befallen this land. The bazaars grew deserted; merchants closed their shops.
Yusupov, who excavated in the former oases of the Uzboj, claims that there is a great disorder among the objects found there. People just abandoned everything they had. Children abandoned their toys; women abandoned their pots. They must have been seized with panic, hysteria, fear. No doubt the most fantastic rumors circulated. Perhaps prophets and fortune-tellers appeared. People felt the band of the desert tightening around them; the sand was whistling at their door.
A great exodus began. The people of the Ali-ili tribe, of the tribes of Chyzr and Tivedzij (the latter also called the camel drivers) set off toward the south, for in the south lay the then-renowned oases of Mar and Tedzhen. The exiles walked across the Kara Kum Desert, which means Black Sand, the largest desert of Turkmenistan and of all of Central Asia. Behind them was a dead river, which lay in the sands like a broken pitcher. The sand buried aryks, fields, and houses.
Rashyd says that the tribes of the dead river encountered resistance from the populations of the southern oases, the tribes of Tekke and Sariq. They were all Turkmen, the newcomers and the natives; it was one nation torn apart by the struggle for water. Rashyd says that in oases an ideal proportion reigns between the amount of water and the number of inhabitants, and that is why an oasis cannot absorb new people. An oasis can absorb a guest, it can absorb a merchant, but it will not absorb an entire tribe, for that would immediately disturb the balance upon which its very existence depends. That is why there must be war between the desert and the oasis. Man finds himself in a much more dramatic situation in these climes than does his brother living in a temperate zone, and for this reason the causes of wars are deeper here and, one would like to say, more humane than in Europe, where history records wars started over such petty affairs as lèse-majesté, a dynastic feud, or a ruler’s persecution mania. In the desert the cause of war is the desire to live, man is born already entangled in that contradiction, and therein lies the drama. That is why Turkmen never knew unity; the empty aryk divided them.
The death of the Uzboj, which drove its tribes to the south, set off the fratricidal wars of the Turkmen. The wars went on for centuries, until right after the Revolution, although these postrevolutionary struggles were already more politicized. Rashyd said that today the ministry apportions water. He said that in 1954 bulldozers arrived in Bosaga. Bosaga lies in Turkmenistan on the Amu Darya River, not far from the border with Afghanistan. They started to dig a canal from there. In this way the river, which at one time appeared all by itself and then went away, was again brought into the desert, this time by man. Such is the circle history describes. And as before, together with the water, fish and birds were drawn to the desert. The banks of the canal were transformed into a flowering and populous oasis. The canal is now eight hundred kilometers in length, and when it is completed it will have twice as many and will reach the Caspian Sea, as the Uzboj once did.
The water in the canal is sweet, said Rashyd. He filled a pitcher and ordered me to drink. It was cool and tasty. A pontoon swayed near the bank, and all around was desert. On this pontoon, in a large cabin wallpapered with photographs of actresses and naked pinup girls, lived the crew of Yaroslav Shchaviey, four Ukrainians. Rashyd and I were their guests, although by accident, for our motorboat had broken down, and we had to stop. The brigade is digging a branch of the canal so that water can reach a nearby kolkhoz. Enormous trucks, with wheels as high as a man, transport sand from one place to another. On the mountain of sand stands a blue-eyed girl, keeping a record of each run a driver makes. And how does she keep this record? In such a way as to ensure that the drivers meet their quotas. Her name is Palina, and she came here from somewhere near Char’kov. If a driver is nice, Palina will give him as many pencil marks as he needs to become a superquota worker. When it gets very hot, Palina puts down the notebook, jumps into the canal, swims to the other side, returns, and again makes her pencil marks. Shchaviey is after her to fry some fish: He himself sent one of those gigantic trucks off somewhere, to the kolkhoz, for vodka. They gave us a lavish banquet. We left in the evening. The lights of ships were reflected in the water of the canal.
RETURN TO MARY and the last day in Turkmenistan. Mary is the capital of the Murgab oasis and the second largest city after Ashkhabad, with a population of sixty thousand. The population of Turkmenistan (less than two million) lives in five oases, and the rest of the Republic, ninety percent of its surface, is desert. The center of Mary is old, single storied, painted blue and yellow. Once there were hundreds of little stores here, Uzbek, Russian, and Armenian, now nationalized or converted into workshops and warehouses. It is hot, airless; in the middle of the day it turns gray. A sandstorm is approaching from the desert. A sharp wind and clouds of dust, which fill all the space between the earth and the sky. Dust that blinds and chokes; there is nothing to breathe. All life stops; machines grind to a halt. Now Palina, Shchaviey, and everyone else hide in corners, sink into crannies, draw sheets over their heads, blankets, whatever happens to be at hand, so as not to suffocate; the sandstorm buries everything; the deluge drowns men and herds (for in the desert there are deluges!), chokes, suffocates, gags to death. Particles of dust, these bits of near nothingness (they are stones ground to powder by wind and water), suspended in the air, grow warm in the sun, and thus comes into being a dry mist, the terror of all desert people, a dry and hot mist, clouds of powder as hot as burning coals; that is what the desert commands one to breathe in the hour of its fury. I am in a hotel, in my room; there is no light, and more important there is no water; the wind must have torn down the wires, the sand stopped up the pipes; I still have a sip of warm liquid in the pitcher, but what will happen later? The city has no water; the telephones are down; there is only radio communication. I am lying on the bed, but everything is damp, dusty; the pillow gives off heat like a furnace; in the desert, during a storm, people are seized by a water madness, all of a sudden they drink their entire water supply, greedily, thoughtlessly, it is really a kind of madness, they drink not because at that moment they are suffering from thirst, they drink from fear, obsessed by the thought that there will be no more water, they drink to beat the inevitable to the punch. Deserted streets, quiet in the hotel, empty corridor, I go downstairs. Empty restaurant. The barmaid is sitting, staring out the window. A Russian comes in from the street, dusty, the wind has pulled his shirt out of his pants, on his head he wears a warm cap with earmuffs, buckled beneath his chin. “Give us two hundred grams,” he says to the barmaid. She gets up, pours him a glass of vodka. He drinks it and utters an ahhhhhhhhh! “Now that’s better,” he says, and walks out into the street with this fire in his belly — into the fire of the desert. For a moment the barmaid follows him with her eyes. “He’s one of us,” she says, “that sort will endure everything.” Then she looks at me, kindly, but also with a touch of irony, and without a word hands me a bottle of lemonade.