“Nik-Nik!” I cry.
Because, you understand, I was left alone with this piece of wood, in some strange situation, incomprehensible, really, suspended in an indefinable place, for beyond this piece of wood was darkness, no point of reference whatsoever by which to determine my coordinates, no chance of taking a few steps, lighting a cigarette, calmly considering what next; above all I didn’t know what to do with this piece of wood, and in this way I remained, stuck in the dark, idiotic and senseless, until I heard Nik-Nik’s voice, somewhere above me, in another region of the galaxy.
“Did you see it?” panted Nik-Nik, who was long ago lost from sight. Only now did I look down, although with great trepidation because I have a fear of heights.
I saw the city.
It is nothing strange to see a city, even country people are accustomed to the sight today, but I saw a city on the open sea, on a stormy, turbulent, vast sea; it was one hundred kilometers from this city to the nearest land.
I saw the city’s lights, its streets, which disappeared over the horizon, the bustle downtown, people seemed to be coming out of the movies, I myself had gone there the previous day to see the Polish film Boomerang, in the center of the city neon lights flickered, buses were running, a café shone brightly, shops and apartment windows glowed. A tanker stood in the harbor, for there is also a port here, two ports even, and an airport. Very far away I could see the derricks over the oil wells, buzzing like beehives, although this was barely audible from here, the night shift was at work up in those towers. This city never really sleeps, not even toward morning.
Below, underneath the city, the sea surges.
The sea pounds against the rows of steel piles upon which the city stands, pours itself into the labyrinth of metal constructions that keep its streets, squares, and houses above water. But the city stands motionless, resting on mighty pillars planted firmly in the seafloor. Let’s put it another way: it is a city built on mountaintops, only these mountains lie underwater.
An underwater mountain range connects the eastern and western shores of the Caspian Sea. The mountains stretch from Baku to Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan. In these mountains, along their entire length, are rich deposits of oil and gas. When the sea is calm one can see in certain places the peaks of this underwater chain. From crevices, from under rocks, here and there oil is leaking. That is why these rocks were called the Oil Rocks, and it is from this that the city built in the middle of the sea got its name.
TURKMENISTAN
Ashkhabad, a peaceful city. Now and then a Volga passes along the street. Now and then a donkey’s hooves tap against the asphalt. They are selling hot tea in the Russian market. One potful — twenty kopecks. But can the value of tea be measured in this way? Here, tea is life. An old Turkman takes the teapot and pours two small bowls — one for himself, the other he passes to the little yellow-haired boy. “Nu,” he says to the boy. “Oy, Diadia,” the little one answers, “I’m always telling you that you’re supposed to say na, not nu.” Diadia laughs, perhaps at the same thought that occurs to me: that he can no longer be taught anything. A Turkman that has lived long enough to have a gray beard knows everything. His head is full of wisdom; his eyes have read the book of life. When he got his first camel, he learned what wealth was. When a herd of his sheep died, he learned the unhappiness of poverty. He has seen dry wells, and so he knows what despair is, and he has seen wells full of water, and so he knows what joy is. He knows that the sun brings life, but he also knows that the sun brings death, which no European really understands.
He knows what thirst is and how it feels to have one’s thirst quenched.
He knows that when it is hot one must dress warmly, in smock and sheepskin, and not strip down to the bare skin, as some men do. A dressed man is thinking, an undressed one — no. A naked man is capable of committing every stupidity. Those who created great things were always dressed. In Sumeria and Mesopotamia, in Samarkand and Baghdad, despite the diabolical heat, people walked about dressed. Great civilizations arose there, which neither Australia nor the African equator, where people walked naked in the sun, can boast of. All you need do is read the history of the world.
It could be that this old man knows the answers to Shakespeare’s great question.
He has seen the desert, and he has seen the oasis, and in the final analysis it comes down to this one division. There are more and more people in the world; the oases are becoming overcrowded, even the large oasis that is Europe, not to mention those of the Ganges and of the Nile. Will not mankind, which was born in the desert, as all the sources attest, have to return there to its cradle? And then to whom will he turn for advice, this sweaty urbanite, with his broken-down Fiat, with his refrigerator and no place to plug it in? Will he not start searching for the Turkman with the gray beard, the Tuareg wrapped in a turban? They know where the wells are, which means that they know the secret of survival and salvation. Their knowledge, devoid of scholasticism and doctrinairism, is great, because it serves life. In Europe they have the habit of writing that people of the desert are backward, even extremely backward. And it doesn’t occur to anyone that this is no way to judge a people who have been able to survive millennia under the most dire conditions, producing a culture that is most valuable because it is practical, a culture that allowed entire nations to exist and develop while during that very same time many sedentary civilizations fell and disappeared forever from the face of the earth.
Some think that man went into the desert out of poverty, because he had no other choice. But it was exactly the opposite. In Turkmenistan only those who had herds could go into the desert, and thus only the rich; nomadism was a privilege of the wealthy. “A sojourn in the desert,” says Professor Gabriel, “is an honor, the desert is the chosen ground.” The transition to a sedentary life was for the nomad always a last resort, a sign of failure in life, a degradation. One can settle a nomad only by force, by economic or political coercion. For him, the freedom that the desert gives has no price.
Can one even begin to imagine human civilization without the contribution of the nomads? Take the Golden Horde and the state of the Timurids. They were the greatest empires of the Middle Ages. The longest epic in world literature, which is called Manas and numbers forty volumes, is the national epic of a nomadic people — the Kirghiz. Take the flowering of Indian art under the rule of the nomadic dynasty of the Great Mogul. And one must not forget Islam, a phenomenon that has influenced world events for thirteen centuries, a religion whose following is still growing, with members across the great sweep of the globe, from Senegal to Indonesia, from Mongolia to Zanzibar.
But above all, in the course of those millennia that did not know the airplane, and still earlier did not know the steamship, the nomads were the only people who had mastered the magnificent and dangerous art of conquering dead space; simply in the course of their continual wanderings, they created what was truly the world’s first global system of mass communication, carrying from city to city, from continent to continent, from one extremity to another, not only gold, spices, and dates, but books and letters, political news and reports of discoveries, originals and copies of great works of learning and of imagination — which made possible, in those ages of dispersion and isolation, the exchange of accomplishments and the development of culture.