The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
. . .
sixty minutes and thirty-two seconds later, Abulfaz/Ostrov and Murat
wedged themselves into the backseat of a purple Lada. Murat’s cousin, a
huge man with a beard so thick and sprawling that it seemed to sit spherically
on the lower half of his face, extending equally in every direction, drove the
car in a manner consistent with his belief that fate was the exclusive determinant
of human destiny. Willpower, industrial glue pilfered from a Soviet air
base, and the occasional rubber cord kept vehicular entropy at bay. Abulfaz,
who had driven in worse places with worse drivers, was not scared, but
Ostrov would be, so he tensed his muscles and produced visible drops on his
bald head and half moons beneath his arms. Murat and his cousin chatted
animatedly in a patois of Turkmen and Russian; the latter man frequently
turned fully around in his seat and gesticulated at his cousin with both hands
while he steadied the steering wheel between his knees.
As they rounded a bend—driving, of course, as fast as the car would go—
they nearly smacked into the back of a filthy gray truck whose flatbed was
filled with sheets of color, rich colors of every hue in patterns such as you
see on the insides of eyelids when you turn squinched-shut eyes toward the
noon sun. The cousin sounded the horn and swore. Carpets, hundreds of
them, gathered from the pages of fairy tales and forgotten songs and loaded
onto a rickety old vehicle in this dusty and forgotten corner of a crumbling
country. Abulfaz rubbed his eyes; Murat laughed.
“Beautiful, Comrade Professor, yes? Turkmen carpets, the finest in the
world. This is what you are here to see?”
“Beautiful,” Abulfaz agreed.
in the desert afternoon, the market shimmered into view, but once
they were inside, Tolkuchka quickly shed its desert-bazaar pretensions and
became a Soviet market: car parts, single hand-rolled cigarettes, and shapeless
beige clothing. Repetition and a surfeit of useless goods fostered an illusion
of plenty.
Murat instantly became a guide, protector, hawker, and translator for
229