Amansoltan Saparova recognised me instantly. I thanked my lucky stars for that, because at this second meeting my own memory seemed to be failing me. Had her hair really been that long? Didn’t she wear glasses? Gone too was the 1950s dress she had worn at the salt conference in Moscow.

When she opened the garden gate, she was in a robe that reached to her ankles. She looked younger than she had the year before, and her raven hair was no longer tied up in a knot; she had braided it with strands of artificial hair. Her greeting, here in her yard in Ashgabat, was less formal than it had been at Hotel University.

Amansoltan lived in a ‘Finnish house’, one of the Finnish-style wooden prefabs set up in the Turkmen capital after the 1948 earthquake. With a fearful eye on further upheavals, Ashgabat consisted largely of one- or two-storey housing; the Finnish houses had only a ground floor, compensated for by their large gardens. Amansoltan’s was a miniature Eden: fruit trees grew in profusion around a well. I recognised a fig, a hedge of young citrus trees and grapevines winding their way up a satellite dish. There was also a leafless bush hung with orange baubles.

‘Persimmons,’ Amansoltan said as she picked a handful for me. She invited me in, set the orange globes on a plate and excused herself: a tabib, whom she had summoned in connection with some unexplained disorder, was waiting for her in the back room. The session would last half an hour at most: could I wait that long?

‘A tabib?’ I said in amazement. I’d assumed that the Soviets had eliminated all such medicine men.

‘They remained in hiding all those years,’ Amansoltan explained in a whisper. ‘But now they’ve come back.’

Through the open door I caught a glimpse of him: the old shaman sat cross-legged, his turban beside him on the floor. A snakeskin, a pair of dice, a stick of incense and other attributes were arranged before him on the carpet. As Amansoltan closed the door I realised that, as a Soviet chemist, she inhabited two distinct worlds – traditional Turkmen on the one hand, rational Russian on the other.

Alone in the empty living room, I looked around for a place to sit but could not find a chair. Turkmen, I concluded, with or without a PhD, sit on carpets on the floor. And own a television that is never turned off. I settled down in front of the set with my plate of persimmons. The programme featured folk dances, with shepherd children playing stringed instruments as they squatted on the stage. Floating in the upper right-hand corner of the screen was a logo showing the face of President Turkmenbai, as though he spent all his time looking into the homes of his citizens.

The credits for the folklore programme included a rolling title of the national pledge of allegiance. ‘Let my hand be struck lame in the hour that I raise it against you, O Turkmenistan/ Let my tongue fall dumb in the hour that I speak ill of you, O my beloved fatherland/ Let my breath cease in the hour that I betray you, O Turkmenbai.’

*

I had begun my trip to Turkmenistan in an almost ecstatic daze. After months of reading and floundering about, I was bound at last for the scene of Paustovsky’s Kara Bogaz, for the remains of the harbour abandoned in 1939 and the salt-water fountain at the quayside. Would anything of all that remain?

I planned to carry out my own archaeological research, to find out where the Soviet experiment, both literary and physical, had gone sour. And although Ashgabat lay hundreds of kilometres from my goal on the Caspian coast, I felt buoyed up by my first victory over the Turkmen authorities: after a month-long telephone barrage, their consulate in Moscow had granted me a visa.

Turkmenistan was wary of foreign journalists, assuming without exception that their newspaper or TV station credentials were a cover for their real task: the gathering of strategic military information. It was an old Soviet reflex, and one President Saparmurat ‘Turkmenbai’ Niyazov had kept very much alive. ‘Turkmenbai’ was the honorary title this modern-day pasha had awarded himself. It meant ‘Chief of all Turkmen’ and it matched the metamorphosis undergone by Comrade Niyazov, former Communist Party leader of Turkmenistan: as soon as the Soviet Empire collapsed he had annexed the desert country as his private fiefdom. He replaced the busts of Lenin with statues of himself; Karl Marx had made way for Kemal Atatürk; overnight, he had abolished the Cyrillic alphabet adopted in 1940, which the Turkish-speaking Turkmen had gone to great pains to learn. And these days Turkmenbai made even the Russians, to their amazement and indignation, queue for a visa to visit Ashgabat.

The Turkmen consulate in Moscow was a bureaucratic bulwark: the consul was so terrified of making mistakes that he would have preferred to issue no visas at all. On the day in September 2000 when I arrived to submit my written application, I had to provide an almost hour-by-hour description of where and with whom I would be staying in Turkmenistan, and how I planned to travel.

From behind the window at the counter, a functionary watched as I completed my form. When I added Cape Bekdash, the chemical town on the bay at Kara Bogaz, to my list of destinations, an alarm went off in his head.

‘Bekdash, I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ he said.

My provocative ‘why not?’ only deepened his suspicion. He responded with a childish ‘because I said so, that’s why not’, and asked what business I could conceivably have at Cape Bekdash.

Deciding to lay my cards on the table, I mentioned the name of Konstantin Paustovsky. I told him that I wanted to visit the locations described in Kara Bogaz.

The functionary never flinched, but I saw him thinking: ‘A spy! Standing here before me is a spy with a threadbare story.’

Week after week I phoned to hear if there was any news of my visa. The expurgated version, void of all planned excursions to the Caspian coast, was being evaluated in Ashgabat – or so I was told each time. But from Ashgabat came not a word. In the end, the functionary began switching on his fax machine as soon as he heard my voice.

‘Good morning. This is…’

Tuuweeeeeeeet…

I regretted having mentioned Cape Bekdash. On my application I had listed Amansoltan Saparova as a reference, in her capacity as chemical historian. She had written to assure me of her hospitality and helpfulness. But was it a good idea to have mentioned her? If they checked her credentials, a second line to Kara Bogaz would be established immediately: her thesis on the history of sulphate extraction.

Was I being paranoid? Probably: five months later, in February 2001, I suddenly received news that my visa had arrived. Armed with my passport, three passport photos and ninety dollars in cash, I hurried through the freezing cold to the consulate.

Click-clack! The stamped insignia of the Republic of Turkmenistan – conspicuously lacking the prefixes ‘Socialist’ or ‘Soviet’ – gave me the right to spend no more than ten days in Ashgabat. Beneath the heading ‘Destinations outside the capital’ was written in block capitals: NONE.

After this awkward start – which only increased my resolve to reach the bay at Kara Bogaz – I was surprised to see Turkmenbai looking so benign. His state portrait graced the Turkmenistan Airways Boeing on the flight from Moscow to Ashgabat. He had the cheeks of a trumpet player, bright eyes, well-groomed eyebrows – arched as if to express amazement. Shortly after take-off his name resounded from the loudspeakers as well. The pilot reported on our cruising speed and altitude, then went on in the same breath to state that all Turkmen, more than four million in total, loved Turkmenbai deeply.

His portrait looked extremely friendly. Like a benevolent uncle. Could he really, I wondered, be the kind of vain potentate people described? Our next encounter, however, told me he probably was: the duty-free trolley passing by at an altitude of 10.5 kilometres bore only Turkmenbai paraphernalia. It rattled with bottles of Turkmenbai wine and vodka (under the brand name Serdar, meaning ‘ruler’). For the collectors on board there were Turkmenbai cufflinks and Turkmenbai wristwatches (with his portrait on the dial). And, as though it were the most normal thing in the world, the stewardesses peddled bottles of cologne and perfume in the scents Turkmenbai (for men) and Gurbansoltan (for women).

‘Gurbansoltan?’

‘Our president’s mother. She died in the great earthquake of 1948.’

I studied the face of the woman on the package. Gurbansoltan looked pious and chaste, like a saint in a devotional picture, not the kind of woman to be associated with a frivolous scent. ‘Eau de toilette,’ the label read. ‘Specially formulated under commission from His Excellency the President of Turkmenistan, Turkmenbai. Produit de France.’

I bought 200 ml of Gurbansoltan.

As soon as we had flown over the Volga, the forests and fields of snow made way for a landscape of dull-yellow steppes with the occasional caramel-coloured stripe. Three hours from Moscow, a metallic disc glinted on the eastern horizon: the remains of the Aral Sea. Far below us I made out the tangle of veins and capillaries which formed the Amu Darya. The river’s legendary elusiveness was explained to me at a glance: its beds were flowing with milky coffee – the water was exactly the same colour as the surrounding sands, discernible only by the lines it traced in the landscape. I was reminded of one of the nomad proverbs Amansoltan had told me about in Moscow: ‘No one knows where the Amu Darya will flow tomorrow.’ Each spring, as it reached the lowlands of the Karakum, she had said, the sediment-rich meltwater from the Pamir glaciers threw up new sandbanks around which the river was forced to twist and turn.

While the Amu Darya disappeared from sight, a ridge of tawny rock, the southernmost border of the former Soviet Union, rose in the distance before us. The pilot began his descent, but only in the lee of that mountain range did the first buildings become visible. Fields slid by, what looked like enormous plots of land, and none of them green. Around the clay-coloured villages I saw strange-looking dots. What they resembled most were square haystacks.

‘Bunti,’ the stewardess explained as she came to check my seatbelt. ‘Bunti, for storing cotton.’

The lower we came, the more bunti I saw. Most were still covered in tarpaulins, but beside some of them lorries were parked and being filled with pressed fluff.

The Boeing danced on the thermals, ever more skittishly. When I looked out of the window again I was struck by a kind of film across the fields. The ribbed soil was covered in something white. Cotton fluff? A layer of artificial fertiliser left undissolved by the drought?

‘Salt,’ Amansoltan told me when I asked. ‘Not a single blade of grass will grow there any more.’

Sitting on the little wooden bench beside her well, she told me how the cotton industry had descended on Turkmenistan and other Central Asian republics ‘like a plague’. The caution I had noted during our meeting at the Moscow salt conference had disappeared.

‘Cotton was always presented to us as a blessing, but in fact it was pure exploitation.’

‘Colonialism,’ I said.

‘Yes, cotton colonialism,’ she agreed. ‘But you absolutely couldn’t talk about it in those terms. If you used the words “colony” or “conquered land”, you risked being fired, or even imprisoned.’

Amansoltan told me that her lecturers in Marxism-Leninism at the Mendeleyev Institute had never avoided a term such as ‘conquered land’; but they applied it only to the overseas territories of European robber states, whose scouring the seven seas for riches was symptomatic of ‘the terminal stage of capitalism’.

The selective nature of Soviet vocabulary fascinated me more and more. One was not allowed, of course, to speak of ‘imperialism’ or ‘expansionism’ in connection with the dictatorship of the proletariat; hence the Turkish- and Persian-speaking peoples were said to have been ‘liberated’ by the Red Army. As fraternal nations, they were being given the technical means needed to conquer their backwardness. ‘Onwards to Cotton Independence!’ ran one of the slogans of the First Five-Year Plan. The logic behind it was clear enough: as long as the soldiers of the Red Army still wore uniforms made from Texan cotton, the USSR could never call itself a true superpower. In Central Asia – the only patch of Soviet territory where the fibrous plant would flourish – everything and everyone had to yield to cotton. And the programme was successful: by 1937 the Union was able to meet all its domestic requirements. But not a word was breathed about the flipside: the total cotton-dependence of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

Autarchy was a great good. If one wished to construct an entirely new society – as the Soviets did – one had to limit outside influences to a minimum. And within that experimental plot ringed by watchtowers, it was not enough to build colossal trade union halls, community centres and gigantic hydroelectric plants. The task awarded to the ‘engineers of the soul’ was every bit as important: they gave shape to the new order by naming the world anew. Starting from scratch, like Adam in paradise.

Rab (‘slave’) became rabochy (‘worker’). Gospodin (‘gentleman’) became tovarishch (‘comrade’), while the lone individual who turned his back on the collective was a vrag naroda (‘enemy of the people’). What you saw depended on what you called it – that was the pivot on which socialist semantics turned.

That verbal revolution was led by the writers. In the press and the literature, the seizure of private property was to be called kollektivizatsiya, and anyone opposing that deserved to be ‘rehabilitated in the socialist school of labour’ (sent to a work camp). For each and every brand of misery the liriki found a fitting euphemism. Chlopok (‘cotton’) became beloye zoloto (‘white gold’). A cotton-picker whose daughter and granddaughter worked beside her in the fields had established a dinastiya (‘dynasty’) of cotton-pickers – one’s greatest possible wish. And kolkhozes that yielded a million roubles a year were proclaimed kolkhozmillioneri. The members of such sterling enterprises were paid a bonus in pots and pans.

Of all the Soviet newspapers, Pravda indisputably had the most binding lease on the truth, a claim echoed in its name. Day in and day out, the publication’s masthead included that year’s slogan. ‘When our kolkhozes prosper, everyone prospers!’ Repetition, relentless reiteration, served as a hypnotic stylistic device. A precondition, however, was that the masses should be able to understand the sloganising: hence the campaigns to stamp out illiteracy. The language of Lenin allowed Turkmen, Tadzhik, Kirghiz and Uzbek alike to absorb the slogans and to reproduce them.

Along with the launch of the 1929 cotton plan, a contest was announced among the newly lettered: who could write the best play about the ‘the state campaign to cultivate more cotton’? The winning entry described the unmasking of a gang of saboteurs, consisting of engineers and wealthy farmers, who hoped to ruin the harvest by wasting water.

The new literature (featuring titles such as Springtime at Victory Kolkhoz) had the task of breaking the resistance of those farmers horrified to see their little parcels of land devoured by a vast cotton plantation. They had no desire to exchange their hovels of clay and reed for life in one of the concrete ‘rural settlements of urban design’. But the Kremlin’s ukases were unrelenting: the ‘technical crop’ cotton took priority over all the rest. Food crops such as millet, sunflower, pomegranate and tomato had to make way for the production of textile fibre. Anyone who remarked: ‘But you can’t eat cotton balls!’ was guilty of anti-sovyetskaya agitatsiya, or rabble-rousing.

Apricot and peach orchards, whose shade had offered protection from the heat of the sun, were savagely uprooted. Not because they occupied much space, but because fruit trees competed needlessly for the little water available.

The greatest suffering, however, was caused by the felling of the mulberry trees. It was only on the silvery-green leaves of this tree that the silkworm could reach maturity. The celebrated nurserymen of the Fergana Valley knew that their profession would be lost along with the mulberries themselves. Cotton dresses and trousers became increasingly common in the government shops lining the Soviet section of the Silk Road, but after a time silk was no longer to be found.

At harvest time, in September, October and November, the cotton-pickers swarmed out over the fields. They sang:

We need no sun

The Party lights our path

We need no bread

Come on and give us work!

After stooping down ten to twelve thousand times a day, they would reach their quota. The heavier their aprons, the more bread they could give their children; the brigade leader waited at the end of every furrow with his scales and notebook. He jotted down the number of kilos picked by each individual worker, and paid them proportionally in wheat flour. ‘The kolkhoz workers are to be given grain in strict proportion to the amount of cotton produced,’ the Party ordinance decreed. This system was not ‘feudal’ or ‘colonial’; instead, it was seen as an expression of ‘rational optimisation’.

The cultivation of increasingly large stretches of desert required longer, and above all more gluttonous, irrigation canals. Those wishing to grasp the expansion of the irrigation network under Soviet rule could visit the permanent exhibition centre in Moscow, which displayed the ‘attainments of the Revolution’. In the Uzbek pavilion, opposite the Friendship of the Peoples Fountain, hung a painting depicting the construction of the Great Fergana Stalin Canal: standing on the left, in the foreground, are Russian overseers with binoculars and maps; to the right, the canvas is filled to the horizon with a jumble of bare-chested Uzbek workmen. They hack at the soil like men possessed, their skin glistens with sweat. Here was ‘Oriental despotism’ to the nth degree. Karl August Wittfogel had based his hydraulics theory in part on the ancient civilisations along the Amu Darya (the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva) and the Syr Darya (the Fergana Valley). The area between those two rivers had produced men of consequence, like Tamerlane, the 14th-century warlord who combined unparalleled cruelty with a refined taste in architecture – as witnessed by the mosques and Koran schools of Samarkand and Bukhara.

Collective irrigation systems, Wittfogel had argued, not only went hand-in-hand with tyranny, but also with the rapid development of the exact sciences. Mathematics in particular: anyone wishing to predict river drainage needed to keep statistics, and anyone wishing to distribute the available water over the fields learned of his own accord to think in fractions and ratios. It was hardly a coincidence, Wittfogel said, that Samarkand of all places had brought forth the astronomer Ulugh Begh, a grandson of Tamerlane’s, who, using an ingenious observatory of his own making, had calculated the precise duration of the sidereal year.

Grim parallels existed between the Central Asian tradition and the practices imposed by the Soviets. In 1939, for example, the full 270 kilometres of the Great Fergana Stalin Canal were dug by 180,000 ‘volunteers’ within the space of forty-five days, ‘in accordance with the people’s construction method of gozyar’. Gozyar referred to collective labour for the common good, a practice institutionalised by the Kremlin on a national scale in the form of the subbotnik, or volunteer Saturday. Soviet leaders, it seemed, had embraced without question the very ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic’ model that Marx had characterised as ‘despotic’ back in 1853. Not only in terms of the mobilisation of (slave) labour, but also in the proliferation of the system’s very foundation: large-scale waterworks. Within a few decades they had built a latticework of irrigation canals across the Fergana Valley, across Kazakhstan’s Hunger Steppe, the Karshi Steppe in Uzbekistan and, lest we forget, the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan – with, as its main artery, the 1,150-kilometre-long Lenin Canal.

The dark side of this achievement, the drying-up of the Aral Sea, had been predicted and accepted by the planners. All progress had its price. The rigorous siphoning of the desert rivers caused the Aral Sea to become undernourished, the estuary of the Syr Darya ran dry, and the reduction of the Amu Darya to a meagre stream made the Aral recede rapidly. Ultimately, all that was left of an inland sea once rich in fish was a shallow puddle. The carcasses of the fishing fleet lay beached in the dunes, sacrificed to the Party slogan, ‘Achieve the Cotton Plan – no matter what the cost!’

Now that she was in her sixties, Amansoltan considered herself too old to become angry about that. Once the certainties of her Soviet upbringing and education had evaporated, all she felt was ‘a kind of emptiness’.

‘All I want to do these days is hoe the garden, make cuttings, prune the fruit trees – that sort of thing.’

I asked about her work as a consultant to the Ministry of Chemical Affairs.

There was nothing happening on that front either: she had retired two months earlier.

The switch to the Turkmenbai era had been too much for her. Most of the Party nabobs had simply changed course, trading in Communism for Islam.

‘Watermelons,’ was what Amansoltan called such opportunists. ‘Green on the outside, red on the inside.’

She had more or less abandoned her own ambitions. All that mattered now was her grown-up children and what became of them. She had given all three a plaited camelhair talisman with a smooth pebble woven into it, a neatly divided heirloom from her grandmother. Hanging the charm inside the kibitka (or on the door) warded off bad luck. So far, that had worked well for her and her offspring. Her eldest son was attending the police academy in Istanbul; he planned to come back and serve his country as a detective. The youngest was a civil servant – his job had something to do with transportation – and lived with her, along with his wife and child.

The pride of the family, however, was Amansoltan’s daughter: her only girl. She had been married off at an early age, but not to just anyone. Turkmenistan, I needed to realise, had always been a tribal society; the nomads, the herdsmen in their tents, were regarded as the barbarians of the desert. Of higher standing was the farming population of the oasis of Mary, the ancient city of Merv, with its centuries-old irrigation system. The distributors of water – the rulers – among the Turkmen belonged to the dominant Teke tribe. And of course, what else would you expect; Turkmenbai was a Teke.

Amansoltan, a woman of nomadic descent, had succeeded in marrying her daughter to a Teke. But that was only part of the story: the girl’s father-in-law was the chairman of the Turkmen Academy of Sciences. He was also head of the Desert Institute, and had been for the last forty years: as her professor, it was he who had admitted Amansoltan to her degree as a doctor of chemical history.

Dr Agadyan Babayev was the highest-ranking dignitary she knew. Her family ties gave her access to him and, if I was lucky, the Teke connection meant he had access to the household of Turkmenbai. If anyone could secure me a transit visa to the Caspian coast, he was the one.

Amansoltan had arranged a meeting: I was to report to the Desert Institute at nine o’clock the next morning.

She wrote down the address. Or tried to write down the address. I saw her struggling with the pen. She drew each letter separately, with childlike concentration. What appeared on paper were curls and squiggles, but nothing legible. She apologised. Searched for her reading glasses. But even with her glasses on, she was incapable. I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was an educated woman, wasn’t she?

‘It’s impossible,’ she said at last. Biting her lower lip, she fought back the tears. ‘I can’t make those Roman letters. Do you mind if I write it in Cyrillic?’

At the tattered edge of Ashgabat, close to the hippodrome, I saw my first camels. Stepping slowly, without a keeper, they were crossing a vacant car park where the occasional clump of tumbleweed had rolled to a stop, rocking to and fro in a pothole. This field was also covered in white precipitate, making the animals look as though they were moving in single file through a surreal winter landscape.

The Desert Institute stood on the road to the brand-new, German-built Turkmenbai Airport. Director Agadyan Babayev, who had been warned of my arrival, was dressed in an inappropriately warm suit. On his lapel he wore a subtle Turkmenbai badge.

When the professor spoke, it was in ciphers and statistics. Hectares, cubic kilometres, tons per annum. Hands folded on the blotter before him, he talked about his specialism, desert studies. If only I knew how much damage sandstorms caused in a country like Turkmenistan! Railways covered in drifting sand, lambs blasted to death by the gritty winds, entire villages buried on occasion. It cost the state millions of manat each year. The Desert Institute measured the drifting sand in grams of solid matter per volume-unit, and the density was sometimes extreme.

As soon as I could, I asked Babayev a question to which no quantitative answer was possible: how did one become a desert scientist?

That helped. Babayev slid aside a paperweight and told me that his ancestors came from Merv. ‘All Turkmen geniuses come from Merv,’ he said. ‘That is the birthplace of algebra. Did you know that?’

At the age of seventeen he had gone to Ashgabat to study geology. On that accursed October evening in 1948, when the earth began to shake with the force of 8.9 on the Richter scale, he was in his second year at university. He had leapt from the second-floor window of his dormitory a few seconds before the entire brick structure collapsed, and broke his ankle. He would never forget the cries of the wounded, and the fires that had broken out spontaneously. ‘The survivors lit torches and went looking for other survivors among the ruins.’

I asked him whether what the stewardess had told me about the president’s mother having died in the quake was true.

‘She wasn’t the only one,’ the professor said. ‘Both his brothers were killed as well. Gurbansoltan fell to the earth, and could shield only her youngest son with her own body. Our president was raised by the Party as an orphan.’

Babayev himself had lost twenty-two of his twenty-six classmates. The four remaining geology students were sent to four different universities. ‘I ended up in Leningrad; my professor took me there with him. He was the only desert scientist in the entire USSR, and he had decided that I should continue his work.’ That was how it had been, and he had no desire to wax sentimental about it. ‘But tell me,’ he said good-humouredly, ‘what can I do for you?’

Babayev listened quietly to my story. He grimaced when I mentioned the name Paustovsky.

‘Did you know that the statues of Turgenev and Pushkin in Ashgabat were recently pulled from their pedestals? We’re not talking about minor writers here. But they were Russians, you see? Like Paustovsky.’ Even without mentioning Paustovsky’s name, the professor predicted, it would not be easy to obtain a propusk (he called it a ‘special visa’) for Cape Bekdash.

But, I suggested, in a country that was four-fifths desert, the head of the desert institute must be a powerful man?

‘I’m afraid you’re wrong there,’ he said, pushing himself back from his desk with his fingertips. ‘In a country that is four-fifths desert, it is the water institute that wields the most power.’ What followed was an account of how dewdrops here were popularly referred to as ‘nuggets of gold’, and of how the headquarters of the Ministry of Hydraulic Engineering were larger and more solidly built than those of the Ministry of Finance. The facade at the Ministry of Hydraulic Engineering, he told me, resembled a wall of rushing ‘water’ dozens of metres high; it was built of reinforced concrete, and could therefore withstand even the most severe quake.

As though his point could only be clinched with an arithmetical proof, he added that his institute had 150 employees, while tens of thousands worked at Hydraulic Engineering.

But didn’t he have contacts there?

He grinned widely. But of course he did! Dr Babayev, it turned out, had married off one of his six daughters to one of the five deputy ministers of Hydraulic Engineering. The professor promised to check and see whether I might be eligible for a ‘Bekdash visa’.

I thanked him heartily, but hesitated. Was I supposed to do something in return? Did he expect me to slide a pile of manat, wrapped in elastic bands, across the desk? Or a dollar bill? Or should I, in a Muslim country, have a bottle of whisky delivered to him? While trying to arrange my thoughts, it occurred to me that I already had a festively packaged present with me: the little bottle of Gurbansoltan.

I pulled it out and put it on the desk. ‘Would you be so kind as to give this to your daughter? As a token of my gratitude?’

I walked back to my hotel beneath a canopy of plane trees. I was struck by the neatness with which the streets were swept, the parks raked. Even the dishevelled drivers playing backgammon in the shade of their Kamaz lorry did so without the customary Central Asian squabbling. At a playground I saw women in brightly coloured skirts stoking a little clay oven. They baked flat loaves in it and sold them to passers-by.

The large blocks of flats were covered in a dull veil of Bolshevik uniformity, but straining towards the sky in the centre of town were golden domes, obelisks and minarets. Old, worn-out buildings had been fitted with mirrored-glass facades, and on Independence Square there glistened a television screen several metres high, eternally tuned to the government-run channel. Spelled out across the front of a modern-looking bank building were the words ‘The Twenty-First Century Shall be the Century of Turkmenistan’.

Pending Babayev’s intercession, I phoned Dzyamar Aliyev, a celebrated biologist whose number I had been given in Moscow. Aliyev was an Azeri; that placed him above inter-tribal Turkmen politics, and protected him from the disfavour into which Russians had fallen these days. Ever since the 1960s he had been an irritant to the Soviet fiziki, primarily because of his (correct) prediction that the desiccation of the Aral Sea would ruin the relatively moist microclimate along the Amu Darya. What I hoped to hear from Dzyamar Aliyev was how the Soviet hydrologists had been able to go about their business unchallenged for all those decades.

‘So, if I understand correctly, you are an engineer?’ he asked on the phone.

‘An agricultural engineer,’ I specified.

The line was quiet for a moment, then I heard him say: ‘Poor fellow. In that case I pity you greatly.’

I had no immediate reply. Aliyev was eighty years old, and in Turkmenistan seniority counted for a great deal. As one would expect of a gerontocrat, he tolerated no backchat.

‘Where are you now?’ he asked at last.

‘Hotel Nissa.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m coming to get you.’

Dzyamar Aliyev looked like a yoga teacher; sinewy and bald, but with a trimmed fringe of beard. He arrived in a moss-green Lada jeep with a huge steering wheel. Or perhaps it only looked huge; the elderly biologist was almost too small to see over the rim.

‘Hop in,’ Aliyev said, slapping the seat beside him. ‘I’m going to show you the legendary Lenin Canal.’

Above the overhanging trees lining the street I could make out the pale summits of the Kopet Dag range. In the morning they stood out clearly against the blue sky, but now that the sun had reached its zenith they seemed to be dissolving in milky light.

At the edge of town, where the buildings made way for the sands of the Karakum, ran the Trans-Caspian Railway, which links the Central Asian republics with Siberia. Aliyev steered his Lada over a level crossing and soon pulled up at the edge of a pontoon bridge. ‘There you have it,’ he said. ‘The longest hydraulic-engineering project in the world.’

Sunk into the landscape was a channel of brownish water; the banks were thronged with waving reeds and the occasional cat’s-tail spike. Where we were standing, close to kilometre marker 809, the canal was easily twenty metres across.

Aliyev served up the standard facts and figures for me. ‘… built by the common efforts of thirty-six Soviet nationalities… with technical donations from more than two hundred Soviet cities… in solidarity with the Turkmen people…’

There was a sentry post and a lone sign warning drivers not to veer off into the water. ‘Turkmenbai-Kanali,’ read the letters underneath.

‘But I thought this was the Lenin Canal,’ I said.

‘It was,’ Aliyev replied. ‘But it’s been renamed, like everything else in this country.’

Tapping a sandal against the concrete canal facing, he pointed out to me how the murky water bubbled amid the stalks of reed two metres below us. The bubbling was what interested the biologist: ‘Do you see that? It’s not a static pool. The water is actually moving along quite rapidly.’

And that, Aliyev said, was all there was to see. Turning on his heels, he led me to a prefab just past the sentry post. The windowless, zinc-plated trailer, it turned out, served as a caravanserai. That term, once reserved for resting places along the Silk Road, now applied to any remote place of refreshment, even a solitary petrol station selling karakul-mutton shashlik. There was nothing ostensibly attractive about this particular caravanserai, but inside it was pleasantly cool. The walls and floor were hung with carpets in various wine-red hues. We sat down on cushions and, without prompting, a waiter served us bowls of tea which he topped up after every sip. The tin samovar was the only Russian object I saw.

My host ordered fish; no real surprise, his specialism being ichthyology.

‘You know, hydraulic engineers rarely understand me.’ Aliyev straightened his back; he was sitting opposite me in the lotus position.

‘I don’t know where you went to school,’ he continued, ‘but I assume that your teachers did their best to convince you that water is the oxide of hydrogen? That they told you that water freezes at zero degrees centigrade, and boils at one hundred? That water is colourless, odourless and tasteless?’

I nodded almost imperceptibly, more out of courtesy than agreement.

‘Water is transparent, yes? Clear?’ Dzyamar Aliyev averted his eyes despondently. He apologised for his bitterness. As secretary of the Academy of Sciences, he wanted me to know, he had spent his life among agronomists and hydraulic engineers. He had read their reports and seen their blueprints; he knew what he was talking about.

‘You have been trained in hydraulics?’ It sounded more like a reproach than a question. ‘Then you believe that water always seeks the lowest point. You are able to calculate rates of flow on the basis of gradient. You can determine the capacity of an irrigation canal from its dimensions.’

Aliyev did not, he insisted, blame me personally for possessing such skills. ‘But our tragedy is that people like you are so numerous, and so powerful.’

The fish arrived, coated in breadcrumbs and fried in cottonseed oil. Tasty, but bony. Our conversation – in so far as one could call it that – continued by fits and starts. From time to time one of us would suddenly stop chewing and stare into space, something sharp having wedged between palate and gullet.

The unforgivable mistake made by generations of Soviet engineers, Aliyev stated, was that of being correct in theory, but not in practice. Water was transparent. ‘But precisely because it allows light to pass through means that photosynthesis can take place. It means that algae can grow in it. It accumulates bi-o-mass.’

‘And then the current stagnates,’ I surmised.

‘Then you get swamps instead of canals.’ Aliyev looked relieved; despite his advanced age, he was still eager for converts.

I nodded understandingly, but the biologist felt I was being bumptious: I had no idea at all how widespread this misconception really was.

‘You were taught that there are organic and inorganic substances, and that water is inorganic,’ he went on. ‘But water is neither; it is life-giving. Now I hear you thinking: of course, that’s how an ichthyologist would see it. But I wish agronomists and hydraulic engineers would see it that way as well. Perhaps then they would stop building senseless ponds in the desert.’

Aliyev had watched in 1947 as the Soviet engineers laid out the Main Turkmen Canal. The project was intended to lead all the waters of the Amu Darya back to the old riverbed, the Ushboy Gorge. ‘There were no villages or towns there, no roads or telegraph poles, but nobody saw that as a problem: they simply projected them onto the landscape.’

I told him that Paustovsky, in Kara Bogaz, had written about that very project back in 1932. About the ‘day of great triumph’ when the waters of the Amu Darya flowed into Ushboy, ‘and the sand did not steal a single bucket of it’. Had Paustovsky actually seen fifteen years into the future?

‘It depends on how you look at it,’ Aliyev said. ‘The diversion of the Amu Darya to the Ushboy Gorge never succeeded.’

At the time, he told me, the excavation work had fallen under the supervision of a major general from the NKVD who also ran the penal colonies. ‘I knew him,’ Aliyev said. ‘He was a hardened soldier, a man who thought the desert could be conquered by attacking it with a division of slave labourers armed with picks and shovels. If they succumbed to dehydration and didn’t come back, he would simply send in a new army.’

The 1948 earthquake put a halt to the excavations, and after Stalin’s death the building of the Main Turkmen Canal was dismissed as an insane plan (‘contributing insufficiently to the national economy’).

But the alternative, the Lenin Canal, Aliyev said, was no less ill-advised. The projected route ran parallel to the Kopet Dag range. It had the advantage of linking the existing towns and settlements, but, because there was no natural riverbed for the canal to follow, every kilometre had to be hewn from the earth’s crust.

‘Every schoolchild used to know the story of bulldozer-operator Bitdy Yasmukhamedov, who lifted the first shovelful of sand from the Karakum in 1954,’ he explained. ‘And it’s true, Bitdy and his comrades did dig the longest canal in the world. The official opening was performed by Nikita Khrushchev himself, with plenty of pomp and circumstance. But what happened afterwards remained a secret for years.’

To the horror of the Turkmen canal managers, the water paid absolutely no heed to their theoretical flow models. The canal’s profile corresponded perfectly with the drawings; that was not the problem. But despite the drop of one and a half metres per kilometre, the water refused to budge. Instead, the Amu Darya sank into the sand, mingled with the water table and saturated the desert soil. The ponds and lakes that formed were soon choked with algae, duckweed and water hyacinth.

‘And do you know how the hydraulic engineers reacted?’ Aliyev asked, still struck with disbelief. ‘They denied it. They said it was impossible that the water could be backing up like that. And if it was backing up, it was because the bulldozer operators hadn’t stuck to the plans.’

Engineers called in to inspect the situation began succumbing to inexplicable fevers. With the temperature around 50 degrees centigrade they shivered, their teeth chattered, they broke out in violent sweats. None of them had taken quinine before leaving for Turkmenistan; malaria, after all, was unknown in the heart of the Karakum. What they hadn’t foreseen, however, was that the anopheles mosquito had found an ideal habitat in the swamps their colleagues had created. Malaria forced them to recognise the problem, Aliyev said, but their painstakingly formulated solutions proved only more disastrous.

Their first move was to design tractors equipped with dredging arms and dragnets, to drive along the banks of the canal and remove the algae and other water plants. ‘The nets filled every sixty seconds,’ Aliyev said. ‘And, as soon as they moved on, the whole thing just grew thick again. And then to think that they still had 1,150 kilometres to go…’

After that it was the agronomists’ turn. They had at their disposal a powerful defoliant called bischofite, which was used in cotton farming. It was sprayed over the fields by crop dusters and caused the leaves to fall and dry up. The cotton could then be harvested by vacuum-powered picking machines.

‘That was in Khrushchev’s day. As you’ll recall, Khrushchev was a mineworker who had only attended the Party school; he knew nothing about how plants grew but he did believe in chemistry. He called for the chemical reform of agriculture.’

Aliyev had stood by watching in wonder as leading agronomists dumped bischofite into the Lenin Canal. In the sense that the algae and duckweed died and the water began to flow, it had worked. But the herbicide proved almost non-degradable, and the concentrations that ultimately reached the irrigated fields also caused the cotton plants to wither and die.

Aliyev had proposed a solution of his own, but his field of study was not particularly prestigious. No one listened to a lone biologist in those days. The years that followed were consumed by chopping and changing, with chemotherapy making way for systematic dredging and dragging, and vice versa.

‘And that was only the start of the misery,’ Aliyev said. ‘No one had bothered to think about catchment in the fields, so they hadn’t even built drainage ditches.’

‘Which means the irrigated fields were never flushed out,’ I chimed in.

‘And so salts accumulated…’

‘… and chemical residue.’ It felt as if I was taking an oral exam. So if the soil had actually turned white, I concluded, hadn’t the harvests deteriorated quickly as well?

Aliyev glanced up from his bony fish. ‘Aha!’ he said, raising his index finger. ‘And what did the gentlemen agronomists do then? They tried to compensate for that by using even more artificial fertiliser.’

‘But you can only do that when there’s sufficient drainage,’ I recalled from my days at college. ‘Otherwise it’s counterproductive.’

‘Exactly,’ Aliyev said, regarding me for the first time with a hint of satisfaction. Wiping his mouth and beard with a hairy hand, he said: ‘Today, nothing at all will grow on half the land that was cultivated then.’

After lunch, Aliyev drove me back into town. The asphalt was melting in the sun, the tyres made a tearing sound as we rolled along. I picked a bone from between my teeth… and realised at once what my host had been getting at all along. Fresh fish in the desert: the only place it could have come from was straight out of the canal. And it hadn’t found its way there on its own.

‘So you introduced a species of fish that cleans the canal!’ I crowed.

Aliyev looked triumphant as he swerved around a pothole. ‘Hypophthalmichthys molitrix,’ he said. ‘Also known as the silver carp.’

In 1972, after all other remedies had failed, he had been given the chance to unclog the Lenin Canal. At the junction with the Amu Darya, where the swamps had formed, Aliyev released his silver carp. ‘They’re sturdy fish that graze the bed of the canal. They don’t disturb the reeds, but they see to it that the water keeps flowing.’

At the end of his carefully stage-managed tour, Dzyamar Aliyev reached around to the back seat and handed me a document. It was a copy of Ordinance 898, dated 29 December 1972 and signed by Leonid Brezhnev himself. My eyes scanned the solemn phrases in which the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR ordered silver carp to be released into the Lenin Canal ‘in accordance with the biological maintenance method developed by Dr D. Aliyev’.

The next day, from my room at Hotel Nissa (earthquake-proof, Turkish-built), I telephoned Professor Babayev at the Desert Institute to ask if he’d heard anything. Time, I explained, was running short; my visa was only valid for ten days in all.

Babayev replied in his friendliest tone: ‘We struggle beneath the weight of a ponderous bureaucracy, like a camel beneath its packs.’ He was sorry; he might be able to help me out, but I needed to think in terms of months rather than days.