Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell

Author:Tom Bissell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425249
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Five

Sacred Spaces

The Uzbeks are a simple people, with whom one gets most readily acquainted, though they speak in a curious tone of voice, as if they despised or were angry with you. . . . Simple people! they believe a spy must measure their forts and walls; they have no idea of the value of conversation.

— ALEXANDER BURNES, TRAVELS INTO BOKHARA

Our driver’s name was Denis. Denis was half-Russian and half-Tajik, admirably uninterested in his American passenger, and he sped out of Samarkand via the Royal Road at 120 miles per hour blasting Rustam’s Depeche Mode tape. The terrain on the way to Bukhara belonged to the sands of the Kizilkum Desert. The Zerafshan (Gold-Strewn) River was another glacier-fed watercourse that plunged out of Tajikistan’s peaks to expire in Uzbekistan’s deserts. It roughly followed the same winding path as the Royal Road, though only rarely close enough to see it from the highway. Like every resource here, most of them negligibly protected by the government and afforded little if any worth by market mechanisms, this river had been exploited within an inch of its life. The cotton fields we passed were choked and dry, the farmland nothing but dunes, the sand whitish with salt deposits. Along the road’s edges were no American-style “beauty strips” to hide what had been done just over the hills. What was happening to this land was so obvious there seemed scarcely any need for outcry. Environmentalism suddenly struck me as the most obvious philosophy imaginable: Let us not ruin forever where we live and work and breathe and eat. Earth’s future inhabitants will no doubt look upon our current environmental practices—maintained despite all manner of evidence that doing so will result in planetary ruin—roughly the way we look upon eighteenth-century surgery. And that is if we, and they, are very lucky.

Before starting off I had worried that Denis’s prison tattoos might cause checkpoint delays. But Denis seemed to have some acquaintance with these border guards. At each checkpoint, after mutually familiar nods, we were waved through. Ninety minutes into our trip, I had relaxed and was reading Middlemarch. Denis switched off the music, and while I read, he and Rustam chatted in Russian until Denis’s tattooed hand lifted off the steering wheel, his finger thrust toward a fenced encampment gathered atop one of the slopey horizon’s humps. “Tam,” Denis said. There. Rustam looked and nodded, silenced.

I closed my book. “What’s there?”

Rustam shrugged. “That’s where Denis says he was in prison.”

“I thought so. Did he tell you what he was in prison for?”

“Murder. He says the other guy started it.”

A scenario: If I were a psychopath, would not the perfect cover be freelance driver? Would not the perfect place to abduct rich foreigners be a train station? Would not the perfect place to take them be the desert?

“I thought you’d be interested in Denis,” Rustam was saying, “for your book. He was telling me a lot of interesting stuff about prison life, bro.” To Denis: “My American writer friend wants to hear your prison stories.

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