You can buy drugs in the camp bazaar along with anything else you need. Zek traders set up stalls outside the barracks and sell envelopes, stamps, tobacco, tea, socks and even tomatoes, potatoes and rice. Some of the Turkmen zeks never use the canteen, preferring to cook their own pilaus on bonfires outside the barracks. You can always supplement your diet with cans of condensed milk, traded for opium by tubercular addicts who have climbed over the fence from the hospital zone.
The Turkmen and Uzbeks swallow their opium with green tea. Sometimes they spear a ball on some wire and heat it over a flame. Then they put their heads under a newspaper funnel to inhale the smoke. When a powerful Turkmen is due for release he cooks up a big pilau and stirs in opium and hashish. Friends take their turns with the spoon in strict pecking order.
An old Turkmen is brought into our cell. As soon as the guards have left he shuffles into a corner, squats down and begins to sing endless plaintive dirges. As he sings he rocks back and forth on his heels, sometimes so violently that he keels over onto the floor. He seems to be a lunatic, but we begin to suspect that the old Turkmen babai is in fact as high as a kite. Everyone racks their brains trying to work out how he got hold of his drugs. He would have been carefully searched so he couldn’t have brought them in from the outside. We keep a close watch on the old man and notice that every so often he breaks off his lament, chews on the sleeves of his caftan, then rolls his eyes heavenwards and resumes his keening. After hours of questioning he confides in another Turkmen zek that he was forewarned of his arrest and so he prepared himself by boiling up opium and soaking his clothes in the solution.
When the rest of the cell discovers the secret of the babai they tear off his caftan, rip it to shreds and eat it. Everyone is off their heads for the next two days. I try a bit but it has little effect on me; I have not acquired a taste for opium.
“Death,” I remark, “it seems the Turkmen can sing for 24 hours a day and about anything at all. If he sees a camel train passing, he’ll sing,
“When the whole train has passed he sings,
“I have never heard one cheerful song. They’re all mournful.”
“Ah,” replies Death, “people say the Italians are the songbirds of the world, but they’re nothing compared to the Turkmen. They don’t speak much; their philosophy is all in their songs.”
Most of Ashkhabad’s inmates have been sentenced for drug-related crime. Almost every Central Asian adult smokes hashish but there are far fewer addicts among them than amongst the Russians and other Europeans. For centuries the locals used hashish and raw opium but widespread addiction only appeared with the Russians.
As most of Turkmenistan is desert, drugs are brought in from Kyrgyzia, which has a more favourable climate for hemp and poppies. Whole villages are devoted to their cultivation. Smugglers also bring in drugs from Iran and Afghanistan. The mafia who control the narcotics trade don’t usually take drugs themselves and mostly employ outsiders as couriers. Although the police are astonishingly inefficient, they have to catch a few smugglers, which makes it a dangerous business. You get five years for a small quantity and 15 for larger amounts. You might even be shot.
A man called Lazarev works on a machine near me. Although he comes from a family of Old Believers[35] he’s been a tramp and an alcoholic for much of his life. Lazarev tells me how he ended up in camp. “One day a guy came up to me at a beer stall and bought me some drinks. We got talking and he asked if I wanted to make some money.
“‘Sure,’ I said, ‘how?’
“‘Take a suitcase to Frunze. We’ll give you your ticket and the key to a locker in the station. There’ll be 1,000 roubles inside.’
“Of course I had a pretty good idea what was in the case but I asked no questions. I hoped that the money would help me clean up and go back home to my wife. The man bought me a new suit of clothes and took me to the barbers. I reached Frunze without being stopped by the police. When I opened the locker I found only 200 roubles and a kilo of opium. I thought I could at least try to sell the opium, so I left the suitcase in the locker and walked out of the station. The police were waiting for me around the corner and I got eight years. The mafia have to throw them a fish now and again.
“It would’ve been worse for me if I’d held on to the suitcase. I didn’t know then that the courier is always tailed, like in a spy story. There’s a lot of money at stake. If a courier runs off he’s followed onto a train and when he goes out to the open platform for a smoke he’s pushed off. The blind Chechen in hut number four had his eyes gouged out. He tried to double-cross the mafia. After they’d finished with him they handed him over to the police.”
Listening to Lazarev I realise I could easily have been tricked in the same way. In Baku I agreed to carry walnuts onto the ship without looking inside the cases. I took tomatoes from Margilan to Tashkent for the price of a ticket. I’ll be less naive in future.
Inside the camp the unfortunate Lazarev became addicted to opium. He needs two balls each day, but he can never earn enough on the sewing-machines to buy them. In his spare time he makes syringes from small glass tubes taken from light-bulbs. The plunger is a wooden stick and the stopper made of rubber cut from the soles of his boots. He buys needles from craftsmen who make them from tin cans in the metal workshop. Syringes are scarce in the camp and Lazarev is in demand. Several times a day an addict comes up to him to prepare a fix. First they put a ball of opium in an empty penicillin container, fill it with water and boil the mixture over a burning wick. When the opium dissolves the needle is inserted and the solution sucked up into the syringe. As the drug is mixed with coffee, clay and all sorts of impurities it is filtered through a piece of cotton wool. Lazarev collects the cotton-wool filters, boils them up and injects himself, weeping in frustration as he stabs the needle into his ruined veins.
Conditions in the camp are so filthy that drug users drop like flies. Addicts share needles with syphilitics and TB sufferers. A night never passes without some deaths. In one night eighteen prisoners die from injecting adulterated drugs. The supplier is never discovered but we all know that the tragedy occurred because the dealer was in debt. Addicts know the risks they run but almost no one comes off the needle.
The most powerful zeks always find out in advance when the son of a Party family is coming in. They wait eagerly for the young innocent, ready to envelop him with care and attention. When he arrives they ply him with tobacco and tea and allow him to win at cards. They stage situations where he is threatened by thugs so that they can step in and save him. They fill him with drugs until he’s convinced of his invulnerability. Then everything comes crashing down around his ears. He loses heavily at cards and his comrades insist he pays up. He writes home pleading for money to be sent in. As long as he can pay he survives. When they have wrung all they can from their victim the criminals leave him without drugs or protection, and he’s lucky if they don’t rape him into the bargain.
35
The Old Believers were a sect that broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century. Members were supposed to renounce alcohol and tobacco.