Forgotten Exiles

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Turkmenistan has long been a place of compulsory exile for poets, revolutionaries and writers. Over the years, countless thousands of Poles, Russians, Germans, Chechens (and other nationalities) have been forcibly deported to this distant corner of the Soviet empire to silence their voices and suppress their activities. With the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the old Soviet Union, they are (at last) able to return to the lands of their ancestors if they wish; and most of them have done so. Only the Poles remain, abandoned by the International Community (and their own Polish Government), stranded in the most repressive and isolated of all the former Soviet Socialist republics.

Once the most far-flung, southerly region of the Russian empire, Turkmenistan still has the air of being somewhat on the periphery of the world. Its capital, Ashkhabad, is a soul-less city of Soviet concrete with a distinct feeling of impermanence about it (the result no-doubt, of the 1948 earthquake that demolished the city). There are few cars on the broad tree-lined boulevards. The ever-present dust of the great Karakum desert hangs oppressively over the city, turning the air at times into a soup of suffocating sulphur. This is a place that has long since resigned itself to the despair of barrenness, and only waits expectantly for the next chapter of its history to be meted out.

Waiting for me at the airport is Pani Irena, an elderly member of the Polish community in Ashkhabad. She was deported here in 1946, a victim of the Soviet-engineered wave of arrests that awaited many Poles who chose return to Poland after the war.

Although she has never seen me before, she picks me out from among the crowds at the arrivals gate and calls out to me (by name).
“How did you know it was me?” I ask, when I finally reach her. Her smile is broad and infectious, revealing a prominent gold tooth. “Who else could you be but you?” Her logic is unassailable. She speaks in a luxurious, old-worldly accent that is found today only among the oldest members of émigré communities. She hands me a small bouquet of wild flowers with the dewdrops still clinging to them like living pearls, and embraces me as if I were a long-lost member of her family. I am humbled and made silent by the gesture.

Security in the arrivals hall is surprisingly tight in what is, by European standards, just a small provincial airport. The boys in smart suits are eyeing me intently from the entrances, and I feel out of place among the colourful Turkoman crowds bustling around me.

“They are always suspicious of everything”, Irena explains in a low conspiratorial tone as we head for the taxi. “Nothing very much has changed here since the Soviet era.”

Her voice, I realize, is the only thing about her that is still young. She is matronly, composed of rounded forms, but comfortable and loose in her own body. Her hair, stained with an immensity of grey, is drawn up tightly on her head in a neat bun. Her unnaturally pale cheeks are veined in a watered ink. I wonder how old she can be. Seventy? Eighty? It is difficult to tell.

As we drive through the rambling assemblage of suburbs, shadows are already beginning to tug at the corners of buildings, and the sun is low over the Koppe Dag (the mountains that separate Turkmenistan from its turbulent southerly neighbour, Iran). Despite being on the edge of one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world, the city is remarkably cool and green at this hour. There are narrow irrigation channels criss-crossing the roads at regular intervals, and old established trees line the boulevards, giving welcome shade from the sun. One cannot, however, escape from the Orwellian presence of the nation's eccentric president-for-life, Turkmenbashi Saparmurat Niyazov, whose image is reproduced everywhere. “We even have a statue of him made of gold”, Irena tells me dryly. “It revolves in a full circle every 24 hours so it is always facing the sun…..He is supposed to be the light of our nation, you see!” She laughs sardonically.

There is a bitter edge to her laughter. During the Soviet era, no one was permitted to speak of the mass deportations to Turkmenistan. Even today, no one does so openly. Freedom of speech is non-existent here. There’s no right of assembly, no right of association. Every organization has to be registered with the state. The country has been slow to throw off its old Communist habits.

Once arrived at her apartment on the second floor of a modest housing block, Irena draws the curtains and (at last) begins to breathe more easily. Tomorrow, she tells me, she will introduce me to her circle. But in the meantime, I must be hungry.

She begins to take over the kitchen, as women often do, and asks me to help her chop some vegetables. I bow to her authority. We dovetail splendidly: I cut, and she prepares. The luxury of exotic cooking smells begins to infiltrate my senses and I know we are going to get along famously. Within an hour, we are eating our our “plov” (a local rice dish) by candlelight, the Turkish coffee is served, and we begin to talk.

“The first wave of political prisoners came here from Poland in the mid nineteenth century”, Irena explains. “They were revolutionaries, sentenced to hard labour for taking part in the 1863 Polish Uprising, which was bloodily put down by the Russians. They were forced to make the journey on foot. Hundreds of them perished during the building of the 700 km railway across the Karakum desert from Ashkhabad to Krasnovodsk. Later, other groups joined them, in 1903, 1921, 1935, and 1948. At one time, a tenth of the population of Ashkhabad were Poles”.

Irena knows her dates from memory. The still, deep river of her heart hoards its images and reflects them in a language that is simple, but powerfully effective, because still raw. Here is a woman whose life stands for something. For 15 years, she has devoted her energies to documenting and preserving the names and histories of the exiled. Her stories are without number. She keeps scrawled notes in faded children's jotters, hidden from prying eyes between the volumes of Russian Poetry on her bookcase. She brings them out and we go over the manuscripts together, correct references, peer myopically into maps sprawled across the living room floor

“No-one knows how many of us are left, because all archival material is considered secret. Any information we have has had to be passed by word of mouth. Hardly anyone, for example, has even heard of the mass deportations here in 1921, even though they were some of the largest. They occurred just after the Polish-Russian War when borders were established for the first time between the two countries. Poles who found themselves on the Soviet side of the border were deported to Kazakhstan, Uzbekhistan, Turkmenistan, Siberia - god knows where else. Most of their names are lost. We don’t know what happened to them”

Hours pass, talking of distant, but not-forgotten wars. Irena brings out sepia photographs, more coffee-and-cream than black-and-white, and enlarged to ridiculous proportions. We talk of the millions who lost their lives during Soviet and Tsarist eras, their names unregistered in any account book, buried without ceremony or marker in mass graves all over Russia. “If we do not remember them,” she says, “who will”?

She is a religious woman. But it is a faith expressed less in words than in the silences between them. She has nothing with which to confront the events of those years except her simple faith in a god, she says, “who betrayed them”. She uses the word “betrayed” with strong emphasis. “One day”, she adds, “God will take them into his arms and beg forgiveness for having forgotten them”. She looks directly into my eyes. “You and I will remind Him”
“What kind of God do we have who can be so... unjust,” I ask delicately?
She thinks for a moment. “You are talking about a God ‘up there’ in Heaven judging people’s actions in accordance with human concepts like Justice. That’s a naïve notion. That kind of God doesn’t exist. It’s enough for me to remember the millions who have died and been murdered to know that God exists… and is not just. It is we who must be just.”

She releases the hair from the bun on the back of her head and it fans out freely around her. The glow of a distant youth begins to emanate from her presence. She must have been beautiful in her youth.

What are her chances of repatriation to Poland? She makes a gesture of despair with her hands. “It’s possible only if a county or a district (in Poland) invites you over, offers you a place to live, and a job, and social security... before you can even think of applying. Who’s going to do that? It's hopeless. And we can’t travel anywhere else abroad because our wages are too low. She points to a photograph on the bookcase of two beautiful women with dark hair and poppy coloured lips. “My daughters. I am too old now, of course. But I would like my daughters to have a better life. We would even go to Russia if we could. But you have to show a birth certificate proving that you were born or have relatives there".

In the bloom of the candles, she looks young, even girlish, but is now visibly fading. In an effort to raise her spirits, I begin to tell her stories of my journey to Ashkhabad: exaggerated anecdotes involving lost companions, mysterious visitors and confiscated hand luggage in Istanbul. She begins to smile, and we are soon both transformed into schoolchildren, giggling and rocking against one another. I continue in the same vein for a few minutes. But when I look up, I find her fast asleep on the sofa, a cushion cradled in her arms like a child, her mouth slightly open.

I acknowledge my affection for this remarkable woman, forty years my senior. I feel a great spaciousness of soul in her, and a purity of being which I recognize but cannot convert into terms of my own reality. The varieties of love are so manifold that we do not possess the words to define all of them.

I cover her with a blanket, blow out the candles, and wander off to my room. Dawn is already in evidence. From my small window, the Persian mountains across the border hang weightless and rosy in the fresh morning light. It has been a very long day.

© Ryszard Antolak