At dawn we emerge from the reeds beside the highway. We take a horribly battered jig to the kolkhoz in Gök Depe with the morning shift to inquire about the world-famous stable of Akhalteke horses. The aim is to meet the breeders and spend a day with the local stable guys going about their daily business. But fate would have it otherwise. In the backyard, two athletic, tanned Kazakhs paint the corral like something out of a teenage fitness book. 100% protein, 0% fat. A joy to behold. When they see us, they start hollering. An old man with a limp and a cane emerges from the concrete yurt and begins to divide up the work for the stable boys.
*
“Get the tea ready, get the stick ready, get the cloak ready! Wipe the table. Set the table. Horses in! Clean up the yard.” We try in vain to explain that we’ve come just to chat. Just to get acquainted, there’s no need. Maybe the gentleman just wants to show off he is a great host and offer us a nice cup of tea. But no. The debate is stalled. Half an hour of silence while we’re forbidden to wander around. I, as a woman, am ignored almost perfectly (I have to repeat each question several times and with the increasing volume of the query I sometimes get a curt answer) and my friend is only half ignored.
**
The first horse out of the stable on the yard. But we didn’t want a parade! “Take a picture, this is a 2015 breeding stallion, get closer, what are you scared of, take a selfie! Wear our traditional outfit here, take a picture! Where you got it, put it here. I’ll take your picture! Don’t be afraid of him!” Despite vehement protests, we are shown the four horses in the yard, my friend is forced to take three photos, I take none. Shame is not photographed. After an hour of mutual torture, the last horse leaves. An awkward silence at the table follows.
***
“So… we’re… probably going” I sigh and give up on today’s full day program and the real reason for my entire visit to Turkmenistan – hesitantly but inevitably. Clearly we are not welcome here, the master clearly wants us to fuck off as soon as possible. So does my friend. My ability to handle the high level of awkwardness of the situation (…I know, specific instances abound…) keeps me in weird situations at times, even when everyone around me wants to leave in shame. This time, however, I’m packing myself too. We say goodbye by putting our right hand on our hearts and looking forward to enjoy a secret cigarette around the corner. So the cops don’t see us. “What about paying? We need to get paid!” The man rises abruptly on his cane. The last drop of bitterness doesn’t go unspilt. “It was a parade!” …the gentleman asks for a whopping two hundred dollars. I recall a situation when I was negotiating with a local travel agency for a week’s horseback ride and they had calculated a great fifty thousand crowns per day. There’s no point in even responding to these offers. We say goodbye and leave, the gentleman reassessing the sum quite simply at two hundred manats. This is exactly what we currently have left, it’s seven in the morning and we haven’t had breakfast yet, so the amount is also unbearable. We talk it down to a hundred manats, mutually sigh that we will never see each other again, and keep the hundred manats. That’s enough for one lunch and a sausage. It’s time to finally choose our dealer.
****
We celebrated breakfast with the cheapest lagman in the station. For eight manats, a full bowl of overcooked macaroni with peppers, tomatoes, carrots, parsley, and beef topped to the top with broth awaits you. It tastes better than it looks. Pretty okay for eleven czech crowns – our digestion doesn’t share this opinion, unfortunately. Between frantic searches for toilets, the exhaustion of the previous days catches up with us. Hitchhiking for the next car is interrupted by an hour-long crying break. Not for an hour! We’re running out of time!
*****
Two Kazakh tourists drop us in the middle of Ashgabat. The plan is simple: we have exactly eighty-two manats left for food, the need to exchange somewhere becomes acute. In marble Ashgabat, full of rich people, it’s hard to find a baksheesh. I walk randomly into shops and discreetly throw innocent people a rod of crime here and there.
“Oh, ice cream, I’d buy that. Well, I’ll take one ice cream. And one beer. Oops, but I’m out of manatees right now, such a bummer!” So I guess it’s not ice cream. Anyway. Another one, please.
“Hello, do you happen to know where the ATM is? I only have dollars.” The ATM is in the square. Oh, well, thank you. I’m a bad dealer searcher.
“Hello, can I buy dollars from you?” I can’t. I’m really bad at this.
******
The best thing to do is just stop the guy. We’ll spend the next hour hitchhiking and rejecting all the cars. The lady with the family is very polite, the suit is very slick, the looters speak very good English. Remember, undercover can be everywhere! In the end, I decide on three Uzbek gentlemen who drive straight to the border crossing. But the atmosphere in the car is strange. After the classic “…we’re running out of manats, do you know if there’s a bank on the way where we can exchange them?” there’s no reaction at all. So we get out of the car disappointedly in a random town on the way. It’s called Tejen.
********
In a fit of frustration, however, we stop BEFORE the town instead of AFTER the town. Normally this wouldn’t be such a big deal, you can walk the few miles, but Tejen is an industrial town. Full of oil factories in the desert around. It’s just about noon. The asphalt is freshly laid. Fifty-two degrees. We’re wearing hiking boots. And the morning lagman is catching up with me. When we get out of the car, we’re about to be hit by a strong wind like a hot-air oven. Then the melted asphalt sticks to our shoes. My Czech-brand boots hold up, my friend’s Italian ones start to smell like burnt rubber. I stomp through the flowing asphalt to the side of the road. In my subsequent attempt to use the toilet behind a bush beside the road, I fall into a dried up oil pond up to my knee. Oh my, impregnation level Dubai. It’d make you shit yourself.
*********
An old man and his wife, wearing a grandmother’s shawl like my grandmother from Vranovice, drive a rickety van to the kolkhoz. It was better under the communists, now almost all kolkhozes have been abolished. They invite us for tea, but they won’t change money, they don’t know what to do with something like foreign currency. We spend our last manats on water, biscuits and lemonade. We don’t even have enough for the beer.
**********
The next car comes like a light at the end of a hungry (and most importantly thirsty!) tunnel. “I’m going to see my brother in Mary, where are you going? There’s a terrible crisis here, when I make some money I’ll disappear to Turkey. A lot of people have emigrated. Two million people out of five million. My brother and I are hauling debris, making money and disappearing too. It’s impossible to live here. What about you?” Well… We go to Mary and from Mary by night train to Turkmenbashi. We have visas for only five days, so we have to make it. And we have a problem… we don’t even have money, let alone for the train. The gentleman thinks for a moment and scratches his light pink, incipient bald spot. He looks more like a purebred Volodya than a Turkmen. “Ah, how much do you want to change?” He asks hesitantly after a moment. Fifty dollars. “Well, no. I have a friend, you call him, he’ll come… but he doesn’t go under a hundred dollars.” We’re in the same desperate situation as before. After a moment of silence, Volodya takes a breath. We’re not done with him yet. “I heard there’s a market in Mary that’s for dollar dealers. Not far from the station.” Our Italian gangster adventure can begin.
***********
“So here it is,” Volodya comments on the situation as he parks in a spacious, crowded street. Its entrance is guarded by a traffic policeman who directs traffic on the main road. It’s a one-way street and a marble office building looms on its frontage. There are about twenty vehicles parked on either side, and we are the last car to park facing the office building.
************
No sooner has Volodya turned off the engine than the door of the opposite car opens and a bearded Russian man of about twenty, of smaller stature, makes his way towards us. He peers lazily into the driver’s window. “What do you want?” he asks boredly. “The kids here wanted to change forty” Volodya leans towards the window. “Okay. For eighteen” is the answer and the pimply Russian walks away again with a slow step.
*************
There is the click of a car lock as Volodya paranoidly locks the car door from the inside. “Do you have it exactly?? Get it ready!” I am clutching two chewed twenty dollar bills rolled up in my palm. A policeman a short distance behind the car continues to cheerfully direct traffic. I can feel Volodya’s nervousness growing. Time is running out. Nothing happens.
**************
The door of the opposite car opens and the Russian walks towards us again. He comes around the back of the car and gestures for us to open the door. He gets into the passenger seat and Volodya immediately clicks the doorlock again. It’s like a mafia movie. “Got it?” the driver turns to us and points at the Russian. “Give it to him.” I hand over the crumpled dollar bills. The Russian doesn’t even look at them and hands over a very thick stack of red bills tied with a rubber band. He is about to get out, but Volodya stops him. “I’ll count it.” He ungums the whole stack and starts to rearrange them on his knee. “One, two, three, four…sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy, seventy-one.” He counts to the end. “One less.” he utters fatalistically. The Russian defends himself and counts again, this time rearranging the less neat package on his knee for a change. Seventy-one red ten-man bills turn into a pile of papers thrown haphazardly on top of each other. The “seventy-one” Russian pulls a missing “seventy-two” note from his pocket. Volodya takes the stack and hands it to us in the back. “Count it.” The policeman in the back is still cheerfully directing traffic. I wonder how many of those red stacks he finds in his own car every day by complete accident for his perfect myopia.
***************
We start counting the unsightly pile of bills and end up somewhere around the number sixty-nine. Math has never been my strong suit. Fuck hedgehogs. “All right!” I declaim.
****************
With a sigh of relief, the locks on the door are undone and the Russian exits. Immediately Volodya starts the engine and takes a sharp curve onto the main road, the wheels catch a slight skid, whistle merrily, and in the course of the turn Volodya locks the door from the inside… he couldn’t have chosen a more inconspicuous exit past the policeman. We drive away like a very hysterical killer from an American movie from the crime scene. The policeman continues to stoically direct his traffic.
*****************
The ugliest toilets ever. Imagine a small village community centre with only one entrance, only instead of theatre tickets, the table at the entrance sells toilet paper with a lady in a red flowered scarf. Inside, instead of corridors, there are two passageways by gender. Instead of seats, there are leaky hints of wood grain between elongated holes cut in the tiles. No doors. There’s shit of all colors all around. Instead of spectators, cockroaches of all colors, sizes and shapes. If you squat over a hole, a few dozen are guaranteed to come and wink at you. They’ve brought in the new stuff! Occasionally, an outsider will come and have a look. No stress, žaves.
******************
It’s 45 degrees outside and slowly getting dark. The food court at the bazaar is manned by a lady and her four daughters – the oldest is the prettiest. Colourful scarves and skirts flutter behind the floods of warm meat buns brought in. The air conditioning in the small dining room is vultureing furiously at sixteen degrees. The women next door are rolling out dough for local sourdough buns with minced meat in forty-five degrees.
******************
The folks from the local pub are huddled around the crapper, having a lively debate around the table. “Where are you from?” Czech Republic. The stench from the toilets makes further conversation impossible. Nu ladna, da svidania. A drunk guy vomits gaggingly in front of the toilets. A flood of vomit hitting the fine sand swirls the dust in the light of oncoming cars. People stagger drunkenly through the darkness. Cars honk and brake in a desperate attempt by drunk drivers to avoid drunk pedestrians. Smoking is everywhere on the street, as if there were no national smoking ban. There’s smoking in front of cops, there’s drinking in front of cops, there’s smoking and drinking by cops. Four more hours until the train leaves.
