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weapons sit behind a desk at the stairwell. Every couple of weeks I give them a carton of Marlboros, and now they know me by my first name. The Russian diplomats I pass in the hallway smile at me, not seeming to mind my living in their midst. The bloom isn’t yet off glasnost.
    I’m still struck by the irony of holing up in the back of a Russian embassy. Since its founding in 1947, the CIA spied on the Russians. They were
the
enemy. We spent our lives trying to recruit them as moles, and they us. And now all of a sudden we’re on the same side, in my case I’m practically a roommate. We depend on the Russian division here to stanch the chaos sloshing across the border from Afghanistan. The dumb fear is that if the Russians fail, one Central Asian country after another will fall to the Mujahidin. An Islamic domino effect.
    Still, things are pretty calm these days. The occasional tank rumbling down Dushanbe’s main street is about the only reminder that Tajikistan is in the middle of a civil war. Russia’s 201st Motorized Rifle Division is gradually retaking ground, one village at a time, moving up into the rebel sanctuaries high in the Pamir mountains. But the rebels keep moving up higher and higher. Now it would take a three-day climb just to reach them, too high even for Russian helicopters.
    The Russian soldiers call the rebels the
dukhi
—the ghosts, the same word the Soviets used for the Afghan Mujahidin, who also had a knack of disappearing into thin air. The Russians can’t even tell me who the rebels’ commander is. You know it’s a messy war when you don’t even know who the king of the barbarians is.

    When I first got to Tajikistan, “Central Asia” for me was shorthand for “exotic.” All I had to do was close my eyes, and I could conjure up the steppe empires, the Silk Road, Alexander the Great’s marches up and down the Pamirs. It was here that Alexander found a wife, Roxanne, one of history’s great beauties. Bucephalus, Alexander’s horse, died not far north of Dushanbe, and the myth is that at midnight, if you’re lucky, you will see its ghost running around a certain mountain lake.
    I needed only a day walking around the capital to figure out that I got the “exotic” wrong. There is no old Dushanbe. There’s no trace of the Silk Route, or of Alexander the Great and the other ancient empires that once rivaled Greece and Rome. I drove up to the lake where Alexander’s horse supposedly died. But there wasn’t an epigraph or anything else to mark it. History deleted Central Asia’s empires, and no one more efficiently than the Soviets.
    That’s what I’ve really learned here: what great haters Marx, Lenin, and Stalin were. They hated Central Asian culture, its babel of languages, its religions, and in particular Islam. No doubt they hated the mysterious East itself. The Marxists believed that before they could build their delusional utopia they had to efface from the earth every trace of ancient Central Asia. Over the years, Soviet proconsuls flattened the old Mogul forts, the mosques, the bazaars, and the caravanserai, and turned the ancient cities of Samarkand and Bokhara into cheap theme parks.
    Now the Soviets are gone, but the ex-Communists have kept their grip on Dushanbe. Like the old Soviet apparatchiks, they race around in their Zils and Volgas, tailed by police chase cars with flashing blue lights on the top. They all live in a party compound. In their dull, somber suits they remind me of Brezhnev. I once sat next to the Tajik president at a state dinner. A taciturn, colorless man, he said maybe two words the entire time. I caughthim pouring his vodka into the planted palm behind him so he wouldn’t get drunk like everyone else.
    I’m starting to have my own idea why Dushanbe’s water shuts off, and it has nothing to do with the government’s explanation about routine cleaning and flushing. I suspect deeper machinations at play. In Central Asia, he who controls the water