Frolick - Grand Centaur Station: unruly living with the new nomads of Central Asia

ALSO BY LARRY FROLICK

Splitting Up: Divorce, Culture, and the Search for Real Life (1998)
Ten Thousand Scorpions: The Search for the Queen of Shebas Gold (2002)

Copyright 2004 by Larry Frolick

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Frolick, Larry
Grand Centaur Station : unruly living with the new nomads of Central Asia/Larry Frolick ; maps and illustrations by Steve Wilson.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-517-5

1. Frolick, Larry Travel Asia, Central. 2. Asia, Central Description and travel. I. Wilson, Steve, 1972- II. Title.
DS 327.8. F 76 2004 915.80443 C 2003-906680-0

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

To the memory of my parents,
Stanley Frolick and Gloria Kupchenko

Im the Devil, I have no home.

The Tale of Savva Grudtsyn,
a seventeenth-century Russian folk tale

The attentive reader will no doubt discover many flaming dysphasias, disgruntled participles, and cryptic solecisms running freely through these pages: the culprit stands before you, already bored with the subject, and looking elsewhere for his amusement. No attempt at a definitive account has been made. The transliteration of Cyrillic and other curious alphabets aims only for internal consistency, not the conquest of graduate school. Readers seeking an authoritative text are advised to consult Professor Nestor Malenky-Pupchyks comprehensive ten-volume opus, Ergodynamical Statistical Factors & Micro-Hagiographies of the Post-Soviet Regime, a joint venture of Oxford, Harvard, and Duke of Earl University (Emerald City Campus) due for publication in May 2019.

Its late May, the summer of Central Asia is approaching fast, and the pasty-faced office manager of the Eastern European travel agency is telling me how to avoid getting robbed. In these brave new ex-Soviet democracies, he says the real trick these days is to dress down. Totally.

When I go, I put on my oldest coat, Ihor, whose name would be Igor if he were of Russian descent, not Ukrainian, informs me with the air of an old hand. And real crappy shoes. They never bother me. I pay the local rate for everything instead of the tourist rate. Which can be ten times higher, right?

Judging from his proletarian attire, a shapeless dun jacket and baggy pants, all worn with an attitude of weary insouciance in a shabby office on the bleakest stretch of Bloor Street West, Ihor at the best of times wasnt exactly the Beau Brummell of Eastern European tourism. Dressing down obviously involved full-scale Shakespeare. Bit player, low theatre. The sort of mufti that celebrated hoodwinkers like Sir Richard Burton or Archie Grey Owl wore, when they passed themselves off as Malemuk atamans and Ojibwa shamans. My job was simpler: I merely wanted to look like an apparatchik who had blindly survived the Purges.

Winston Smith with a box camera.

Heres the dough. I hand over a serious bank draft. Ihor doesnt even look at it.

And watch out for the meat, huh? he adds by way of afterthought.

The meat? I stare at my newly minted ticket. Was he talking about real meat or ?

He gives me a significant look.

Yeah, sausages, especially. You can never tell.

My excursion into Central Asia and its awful history began, as most bizarre excursions from ordinary life do, suddenly. In a flash of delirious insight. With a recovered memory

My sister, Christine, was packing up her stuff, leaving the city for good. The Big Smoke had finally won, she couldnt stand it any more, she was headed off for a One-Horse Town. The city traffic, ruthless, the kids in her class swearing like bikers on crack. Im helping with the cardboard boxes, listening, nodding agreeably at her brave assertions, how great Barrie is going to be, cheap tennis and neighbourly barbecues every Sunday. Im also feeling monumentally defeated. Our parents ran like hell from a one-horse town, now their baby daughter is going back for the free parking. Potluck Fridays and snowmobiles, kiss the jazzy riffs farewell.

Im brooding about her stuff too. Its depressing. Her house is a diorama of the familys karma in heavy furniture, a museum of parental endowments. The white five-ton piano, lumpy Persian carpets, tippy Chinese screens, chintz couches, a million vases all the height of the Riverside Drive School of Decorating, circa 1965. Something slides out of the walnut sideboard.

Hey, whats this? A purple watercolour. I pick it up gingerly. Jesus. Chris!

She turns at the sharp spike in my voice. Whats wrong?

This! I remember this picture. Wheres the other one?

The other one?

A pause while the computer in her head whirs away. Oh. Its there too.

I retrieve the other picture, the yellow one, and place them side by side.

Together again. The two pictures that gave me nightmares as a child.

When I was seven, my parents hung these two pictures on our plain, beige living-room walls. Two mesmerizing watercolours. The one over the sofa was a moody scene, two men on horseback, laughing as they galloped past a burning European village at night. The men had slanted eyes and hooded leather caps with jutting earflaps. Laughing ha ha ha. Even their shaggy steeds showed a vulpine joy in the havoc they had just wreaked on everything in sight. The turgid purple sky, the oppressive hinterland, the pall of unmoving smoke. These details spoke a grave warning about the long night of history past, a brutal past that remained unredeemed, sinful, and terrible.

Where was the justice in their savage laughter?

It was out of place, this watercolour, an alien presence in our mock-Tudor house in the Kingsway, sitting quietly on its tree-lined avenue. The familiar cycle of seasonal rites, the burning of oak leaves in fall, the shovelling of snow so pure it stayed blue into late winter, it all kept us safe and happy. Our neighbourhood was a cheerful haven, far removed from the conflagrations of the Old World. We were safe. But that picture, above the brocaded couch.