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No internet again. Why do we look to it so anxiously?
One of the last bastions of literacy in Ashgabat is the second-hand bookstall outside the Russian bazaar. I am looking for a decent dictionary of Turkmen into another language, Russian or European, though have looked before and given up several times. Thus far I haven’t found one that uses the new alphabet, although this has been in official use for eleven years now. The last substantial Russian-Turkmen dictionary went out in the
very year of the change, using the old Cyrillic system, and in any case I want Turkmen-Russian, not the reverse.
The cloth-capped Russian stall-holder recognises me at once. ‘What news from the homeland?’ he demands. Homeland? Hmmm. Parents are well. Weather much like it is here. He then fires questions at me at great speed about Scottish and Welsh independence and British policy towards immigrants, German policy towards Jews and why does the Russian pogrom of Jews at the time of the 1917 revolution receive so much less coverage, and other topics that require both tact and knowledge, expecting fast, definitive answers. Soviet education seems to inculcate the idea that there is always a fast and definitive answer to everything. Still, I like him. He is an intellectual, perhaps to excess, but has a lively mind and seeks out others. There are- few of them here these days. I try to give answers, my deliberation more telling than my crumpled words. I let him fire away for half an hour, until I realise that it is cold today. He shows me an old Turkmen-Russian dictionary from 1968, well worn and superficially damaged. Far better than the newer publication, he says – much more coverage of old Turkmen words, going back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, whereas the later volume is more concerned with modern lexis and the language of propaganda – Soviet and/or subsequent. He wants a high price for the old book, 300,000 manat or some 12 US dollars – the new one is barely half that. It is a substantial tome and I am tempted, enjoying the exotic word forms lying there – Turkic words forced
bluntly into a Cyrillic alphabet, an arrangement that seems to prostitute both language and alphabet. Still, it worked for several decades, and there has been a ten-year changeover to the Latin script now officially in use that is close to Turkish orthography.
Chilled and noticing the time, I leave and make some purchases in the bazaar. Serdar the money-changer, a splendid, tall, dark and effusive thirtysomething and well on the way to becoming a fine Turkmen patriarch, is not here today, frustrating my wish to practice some Turkmen phrases with him or even the slight frisson at being gently fleeced by him for the fifteenth time. Buying fruit, cheese, honey, smetana, yoghurt and kefir my mind blocks and I can’t remember any of the words I rehearsed intensively this morning. The stallholders deal with me mechanically in Russian, then jibe at me by saying ‘Bye-bye’ as we finish. Yet my Turkmen has reached its first flush of fermentation. I have been given enough now to build a survival-level competence: to greet, ask and say goodbye, buy things in the shops, tell the time, describe the members of my family; have been shown the basic grammatical cases and two or three tenses and the possessive form. Yet all this is dormant and needs to be activated – a process rather like fermentation, in which dead ingredients, as it were, are combined into an organic compound that begins to support life.
The grey long-haired cat is waiting for me, pawing at the marble step. It follows me into the flat; I allow it to nose about for a few minutes before throwing it out. Soon Yuri arrives. We settle to tea. He had a rough night – his neighbour, a mental patient, freed himself from his hospital many miles from Ashgabat and found his way home, arriving at three in the morning and banging on the wrong door for twenty minutes. Rather than facing hours of form-filling at the police station and a subsequent record of suspicion, Yuri and his father sat it out. It transpires that the neighbour returned in the morning and apologised, seemingly somewhat sedated.
Yuri and I share pleasure in walks, and this is our third stroll about the city. It is not a big place and will soon be exhausted of anything particular to see, although the cityscape is changing as fast as the scenery on a theatrical stage. Still, we share the belief that conversation is good when walking, and walking itself is a pleasure. For him I represent the connected, cosmopolitan, free West, brought to a tightly isolated corner of the world. He is a valuable friend to me, not only for his knowledge of the city but for the willingness to spend time together. On our way out today I ask him to go to the bookstall at the Russian bazaar and enquire about a Turkmen-Russian dictionary, in order to see what price the seller will expect of a citizen. The same, it turns out. Yuri knows the stallholder and thinks well of him. I decide to buy the dictionary later.
Yuri shows me a gallery space just off the market in what was a centre for artists, perhaps the Soviet Artists’ Union. Where used to be walls full of socialist realism is now Turkmen surrealism in which the entire world is composed of symbols – the flag, the seal, Turkmen national objects – horses, carpets, women’s jewellery, ghost-spirit-presences of the poets and tribal ancestors. As at the grand but deserted Palace of Arts, the lineage of state-builders is complete but looks improbable: a line of tall, strong, manly bearded bards and warriors, their goal of nationhood completed by a fat, frog-like figure in a European suit. Appearances are not everything – they are the least of all – but in visual art they are the most obvious. Equally, being fat and besuited may represent the very destiny they sing of, for such is a sign of wellbeing and perceived good health.
Emerging from the market onto Shevchenko St – named after the Ukrainian national bard – we draw level with the new theatre on one side and the Conservatory on the other. The Conservatory was what the Soviets called a ‘slow-build’ project – they have a word for it, dolgostroy, as it was a common occurrence – in which building was often interrupted, the site often laying untouched for months or years at a time, then sometimes demolished and begun anew. The building was completed in a sudden hurry in the late 1980s and musical education began. An attractive piece of contemporary architecture happily combines two concert halls and teaching and practice rooms, white, slatted, vented, intended for a hot climate. There were plans to build a full-sized organ in the larger of the concert halls, but it never happened: the Soviet Union came undone and the organ never materialised. The building shows signs of neglect today and looks sad; musical education is minimal in any case. Yuri studied here in the 1990s, when classical education was still offered, though said that half his time was spent rehearsing for festival parades for the endless circle of official celebrations. Today there is no funding for musical schooling to speak of; Yuri tried to eke a living as a music teacher and gave up; and although the new independent state happened to be gifted with a brand-new, ready-made conservatory, it has allowed it to collect dust. Passing by, we hear somebody practicing some scales, but it is a forlorn sound. This is as sorry a place as the glistening new theatre across the road, all marble and gold glass, yet with a paralysis about it: acoustically dead, and rarely a production to be held in it.
The conservatory is almost adjacent to Yuri’s old school, which also still stands. On an earlier walk he and Olga (his girlfriend and a friend and colleague of mine from work), who both studied and later taught there, showed me round. Opposite is the memorial park that runs from the war memorial with its eternal flame to the earthquake museum and the central square, formerly Karl Marx Square and now Independence Square. Through the park is the block in which Yuri and Olga both used to live – now a marble and gold monolith behind a wrought-iron fence and standing in a sterile garden. It is the presidential palace itself, for whose construction all residents of the former apartments were made to leave for outer suburbs and the flats torn down.
We come to the axial north-south road on which the heaviest political burden was always hung: the former Prospekt Lenina, now the Turkmenbashy sayoly. It runs from the Ashgabat railway station to the Iranian border some tens of kilometres to the south, in the Kopet Dag mountains. Here is the university, and the nearest remaining thing to a bookshop. It is a state bookshop, as are they all, and it stocks the pitifully small range of approved reading allowed by the government – the Ruhnama plus gradually appearing editions of Turkmen epic, folklore and poetry and a staple range of children’s school books. Its saving grace is a disorganised section of second-hand books that still reflects an intellectual diversity. Although the Soviet system was illiberal and notorious for its censoring of authors, it placed a high value on books and knowledge, and many writers of many stripes were still able to get into print, particularly out here in the provinces.
I have set myself a task, once I can master something more of the language, of attempting to translate some of the Turkmen poets into English. There seems to be no translation available (or at least in print) of any of Kemine, Maktymguly, Mollanepes, Azadi or the dozen other classical figures. In the Soviet era there were Russian translations available, but such are hard to come by today. What I wasn’t expecting was the difficulty of finding works by these poets even in Turkmen. Their names and portraits are hung out everywhere, the newspaper (there is only one) gushes about how this or that place or event is in the name of one or another poet, or that something will be done in the spirit of that poet – yet the poems themselves are nowhere to be found. By chance this bookshop has what I seek, that nobody would have conceived of: an anthology, in some depth, of two dozen classical Turkmen poets. It is a Turkish academic publication and gives a Turkish-language translation opposite the Turkmen original of each poem. This has the advantage that the script is Latin rather than Cyrillic, although it is not yet the official Turkmen alphabet but rather a modified Turkish one, meaning that two or three letters are represented differently. It has the further advantage that the Turkish and Turkmen languages are so similar that the poems are hardly translated at all, but rather re-spelled in Turkish (significant vowel and consonant differences) and the occasional word changed where vocabularies differ, but with practically identical structure, grammar and metre. There is a Turkish-language introduction to each of the poets, which will also be a boon. I splash out another 200,000 manat (eight dollars) – this has been a big day for book purchases.
Yuri and I wander in a circle, taking in the Nissa hotel (which sells city street maps – albeit small and lacking detail, adequate only for a brief tourist visit) and returning via the new Ministry for the Textile Industry, laced with balloons and ribbons, to be ceremonially opened tomorrow, Flag Day and simultaneously the President’s Birthday. The latter’s flabby jowls droop from a portrait over the entrance, as they do from most entrances. We cross into the large park adjoining Independence Square. Ashgabat is a city of new parks – all of them bare, created by the demolition of apartment blocks or schools, planted with sapling trees too small to give any shade and that will need constant irrigation if they are to survive. The parks are largely asphalt, with grass patches, that have a sterile look. They form the backdrop to various presidential monuments and symbolic buildings. Here is ‘Forty-Legs’ (each such monument being known to the general population by the number of pillars, supports or other countable features it has, known as legs): ten horses, erected to mark the tenth year of independence, multiplied by four legs per animal. Flags flutter from long rows of flagpoles. It is not a botanical garden; on the contrary, it is a political garden.
We return to the central square and Yuri’s old home from the south. What was once a sleepy provincial town has been so altered on this side that his generation only recognise it through habit. It is not their town, not their country – and would be unrecognisable, were they not forced to live in it day after day and stop being surprised at it. We pass the Central Bank and the Rural Development Bank, both mirror-glass high-risers, and the Ruhiyet Palace, containing a huge auditorium in which festivities are held, requiring students, school children and public-sector employees to queue outside for hours to appear on stage at an appointed moment, to mouth patriotic songs while a pre-recorded version is played, Top-of-the-Pops style, to the assembled and bored dignitaries. Beyond is the square – the presidential palace, and across from it the presidential podium from which he can stand, in the shade or warm as required, and address assembled thousands of sweltering or shivering captive listeners. All this at the end of what was the street in which Yuri played as a child, before any of this had been imagined.
Be_flummoxed 