Riding the Iron Rooster

  "Isn't there anything they can do about it?" Miss Wilkie said pleadingly.

  "I'd like to take an axe to that thing," Kicker said.

  They petitioned the Mongolian attendant, a tough-looking woman, who waved them away—a don't-bother-me gesture.

  "Maybe she doesn't have the knob," I said. "In which case, you're in luck. Because if you turn it off she won't be able to turn it back on."

  A ducklike voice ranted from the loudspeaker.

  "It's driving us nuts," the Westbetters said.

  I made myself very popular with the group by showing them how to shut it off. I wrapped a rubber band around the metal stump and this rubber offered enough of a grip to shut the thing off. The beauty of it was that I could then take the rubber band away, and so it stayed off.

  We crossed the Selenga, and it looked as though the wilderness went on forever. Mountain streams coursed out of the forest, and chunks of ice as big as cars floated on the river. The earth was brown and dusty, and though it was very cold, there were tiny buds on the trees. The Soviet city of Ulan-Ude sprawled in the wide, flat valley—low wooden houses and tall electric poles, and a marshaling yard full of freight cars loaded with tree trunks. It was a region of lumberjacks and trappers, though no one of this description boarded the train. In fact, from what I could see the train carried a great number of young Soviet soldiers.

  Leaving the Trans-Siberian route and heading south, the train climbed the bare, brown hills and in the brown valley below was the river clogged with muddy ice and the hideous city smoking on its banks. Just a few miles south of Ulan-Ude the land is arid and desertlike, the gobi that is more or less changeless as far as China: big bushes rather than trees, and rough grasslands beaten by sand, and a few settlements, but even those few are sorry places. In many empty places, watching the train go by, was a man in a brown fur hat and padded jacket, smoking a cigarette. He was motionless and solitary, almost emblematic. How had he gotten there?

  The great dune-shaped hills were covered with dust and yellow grass. There were no trees. Black goats browsed near some isolated cabins, and horses were tethered. The people did not show themselves. It seemed to me that almost nothing is known of these settlements—no foreigner is allowed in them, they produce no writing; they are mute. They were places of utter simplicity, too—their water came from holes in the ground, their heat from the firewood stacked against the cabin. It was a desolate part of the Soviet Union. It was as though we had already entered Mongolia. Outside the larger settlements were graveyards, each grave surrounded by a rectangle of fence, to prevent—what? Probably wolves from digging up the corpses.

  At midnight we reached the Mongolian border, and spent several hours on each side going through formalities. The Russians and the Mongolians were equally rude. They searched luggage, they took beds apart and lifted the floorboards of the sleeping car.

  "English books? English magazines?"

  I showed them what I had, but they were not interested. Their great search was for pornography, I was told, which they considered vastly more dangerous than political propaganda. The Mongolians in particular felt pornography was evil.

  Perhaps accustomed to outsiders not speaking their language, the Mongolians went about their business silently, hardly gesturing, only occasionally muttering—but when they muttered they did so in Russian. Mongolian men and women alike had boyish faces.

  That was why I almost jumped out of my skin when the fierce attendant barked at me early the next morning. I had locked my compartment, but she had a master key. She knocked and an instant later whipped the door open and went "woof-woof!" She made me understand that she was saying Get up in her language. She wanted the bedding. But we hadn't been able to go to sleep until two in the morning—that was the hour we had left the frontier. It was now seven. We were due in Ulan Bator (Red Hero) at nine-thirty. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Then this Mongolian attendant did an amazing thing—the sort of trick that clever adults attempt at children's parties. She reentered the compartment, barked softly, and seized the edges of my bedding in both hands. And in one swift maneuver ("Woof!") she jerked my bedding off me—sheets and blankets—leaving me shivering, and she hurried away on bandy legs.

  We were traveling on long, straight tracks through the enormous expanse of grassland, among bulgey hills and smooth slopes. In sheltered and shadowy places there were crescent patches of snow. There was the occasional horseman, bundled up against the wind, making his way in the emptiness—no roads, no tracks, nothing but the circular tents known as yurts (the Mongols themselves call these ghurrs). It was an extraordinary landscape—pale yellow, under a blue sky—extraordinary because it was not a desert, but rather the largest pasture imaginable: here and there a herd of horses, here and there a camel, or a man, or a tent. It was inhabited, but with a sparseness that was impressive.

  The Mongols reached the eastern limits of China. They rode to Afghanistan. They rode to Poland. They sacked Moscow, Warsaw and Vienna. They had stirrups—they introduced stirrups to Europe (and that made jousting possible and perhaps started the Age of Chivalry). They rode for years, in all seasons. When the Russians retired from their campaigns for the winter, the Mongols kept riding and recruiting in the snow. They devised an ingenious tactic for their winter raids: they waited for rivers to freeze and then they rode on the ice. In this way they could go anywhere and they surprised their enemies. They were tough and patient, and by the year 1280 they had conquered half the known world.

  But they were not fearless, and looking at these great open spaces you could almost imagine what it was that spooked them. They had a dread of thunder and lightning. It was so easy to be struck by lightning here! When an electric storm started they made for their tents and burrowed into layers of black felt. If there were strangers among them they sent these people outside, considering them unlucky. They would not eat an animal that had been struck by lightning—they wouldn't go near it. Anything that would conduct lightning they avoided—even between storms; and one of their aims in life, along with plundering and marauding and pillaging was propitiating lightning.

  As I was watching this wilderness of low hills, the city of Ulan Bator materialized in the distance, and a road hove into view, and dusty buses and trucks. My first impression of the city was that it was a military garrison; and that impression stayed with me. Every apartment block looked like a barracks, every parking lot like a motor pool, every street in the city looked as though it had been designed for a parade. Most of the vehicles were in fact Soviet army vehicles. Buildings were fenced in, with barbed wire on the especially important ones. A cynic might have said that the city resembled a prison, but if so the Mongolians were very cheery prisoners—it was a youthful, well-fed, well-dressed population. They had red cheeks, they wore mittens and boots: in this brown country they favored bright colors—it was not unusual to see an old man with a red hat and a purple frock coat, and blue trousers stuck into his multi-colored boots. But that way of dressing meant that the Russians were more conspicuous, even when they weren't soldiers. I say the city looked like a garrison, but it was clearly not a Mongolian one—it was Russian, and there was little to distinguish it from any other military garrison I had seen in Central Asia. We had been passing such big, dull places all the way from Irkutsk: barracks, radar dishes, unclimbable fences, batteries, ammo dumps, and surely those mounds that looked like tumuli were missile silos?

  The hotel was bare and smelled of mutton fat. That was the smell of Ulan Bator. Mutton was in the air. If there had been a menu, mutton would have been on it. It was served at every meal: mutton and potatoes—gristly mutton and cold potatoes. The Mongolians had a way of making food inedible or disgusting, and they could transform even the most inoffensive meal into garbage, by serving it cold, or sprinkling it with black carrots, or garnishing it with a goat's ear. I made a point of visiting food stores, just to see what was available. I found fat black sausages, shriveled potatoes and turnips, black ca
rrots, trays of grated cabbage, basins of yellow goats' ears, chunks of rancid mutton and chicken feet. The most appetizing thing I saw turned out to be a large bin of brown unwrapped laundry soap.

  The shops sold Vietnamese pens (Iridium brand), North Korean teddy bears and toys, Russian radios. A Russian television set that was the size of a clothes closet, with an eighteen-inch screen, cost 4400 tugriks ($1500 at the official rate of exchange, or roughly a Mongolian's annual income). They made their own shoes, and they made lovely boots and saddles. They made holsters. They sold wolf pelts, and mink coats; and ermine, squirrel, sable and rabbit by the pelt. Their lambskin coats were cheap. I bought a sheepskin waistcoat for the cold. Ten dollars; and stamped in the skin, Made in Mongolia.

  "Are you a hunter?" a Mongolian asked me on the street.

  It seemed an odd question, but in fact most foreigners who stay in Mongolia—as opposed to those who are just passing through—are hunters. They rake light planes to the Altai Mountains in the west of the country and ambush bears and blow wolves' brains out and do handsome bucks to death.

  I asked this man about the food—those goats' ears, that mutton. He said his favorite food was candy. Ulan Bator I subsequently discovered was full of candy stores. It was nothing fancy, it was hard candy, boiled sweets, which they sucked—probably because the air was so dry.

  Almost no rain at all falls on Ulan Bator, and Mongolia itself gets only a few inches a year. The skies are eternally blue, and the ground hard and dusty. These people in boots and breeches, dressed for the desert, seemed unlikely residents of barracks. Half the populaton of Mongolia live in Ulan Bator but they could hardly be classified as urban—thirty-five percent of the city dwellers still live in tents.

  The members of the tour had become travel weary—tired and grumpy and on each others' nerves. They did not complain out loud; they muttered their regrets. The Americans couldn't understand why there was so little to buy, the Australians hated the food—"Prison food," the Gurneys said; the French quarreled among themselves; the English people said "Mustn't grumble," and Miss Wilkie said, "I think I'm going mental."

  I merely listened.

  The BBC news sounded like Orson Welles' version of The War of the Worlds. After the initial report that high radiation had been detected in Finland and Denmark, more reports were broadcast of radiation in Germany and Switzerland. And then came the news a day later of a nuclear reactor on fire near Kiev. The disaster occurred on a Friday. Saturday was confusion. Sunday the news was still muddled and alarmist. I listened to a summary—this was on the Monday—of the British Sunday newspapers. They spoke of as many as four thousand people dead, of the mass evacuation of Kiev, of casualties in the tens of thousands and the fire out of control. These suppositions were modified on subsequent days, but it was clear something terrible had happened.

  All this time travelers were arriving from Irkutsk. I asked the Russians what they knew of Chernobyl. They knew nothing; they said I was listening to propaganda, and a week later, when everyone in the west knew about the disaster, a Russian just arrived in Mongolia said that the news on Soviet television was that a nuclear power plant was being moved from Kiev.

  I found it depressing that no one in Mongolia should know anything of Chernobyl, especially when they themselves had the same sort of nuclear power plants. It was bad enough that they had been colonized and occupied by the Soviets, but it was much worse that this paternalism was taken so literally that they were treated like children and not told anything. They were in the dark. And their conception of communism was very old-fashioned, typified by the thirty-foot bronze statue on the main street, of Joseph Stalin.

  I joined the tour to the Mongolian State Museum and saw dinosaurs that looked like none I had ever seen before—with beaks and horns and claws—and huge simple monsters suggested by an eight-foot bone: 'That is its pelvis."

  In a room filled with stringed instruments, the Mongolian guide said, "This we call morin huur. Its name comes from a very ancient story about a man who had a wonderful horse. He loved the horse very much. He rode the horse all over Mongolia. He loved the horse more than his family! He treated the horse as you would a loved one or a family. But eventually the horse died. The man was very, very sad. He was so sad he cut the horse to pieces and took out its bones and carved them into a sort of shape like a violin. The horse's tail he made into strings, and he made a bow as well, from bones and from the horse's hair. And he spent the rest of his life playing the violin and thinking of his horse. That is the meaning of morin huur—violin of the horse."

  An air of palpable isolation hung over Mongolia. With half the population living in Ulan Bator—the easier for them to be regimented—the countryside was practically empty: it was wilderness, wolves and bears, dinosaur bones and scattered nomads. Ninety percent of the Mongolians outside Ulan Bator lived in tents, and the terrain was so barren—so like the landscape of New Mexico and Arizona—that East European countries made cowboy movies in Mongolia. The Yugoslavs had recently finished shooting Apache—a political cowboy movie, about exploitation.

  On May Day, the entire population of Ulan Bator turned out for the parade—not to watch it but to join it. It was a Mongolian custom for everyone to be in the parade. The only spectators were tourists—some Finns and us: Kicker, Bud, Morris, Miss Wilkie, Wilma, Morthole, Ashley, the Gurneys and all the rest. I stood behind Blind Bob.

  "Who are those people with the flags?"

  They were the round-shouldered wrestlers from the train, but this time wearing their medals. There was something simian in their posture and in the way they walked. It seemed so sad that Blind Bob's last visions on earth should be the messy thaw in Poland, the dreariness of Russia, Siberian hotels and Mongolian wrestlers. Stepping off the sidewalk for a closer look, he tripped and fell.

  "I'm all right!" he cried, rubbing his knee. "No harm done! My own darn fault!"

  There were thirty people marching in a row, and a row passed me every two seconds. The parade lasted one hour and fifteen minutes. That was 450,000 Mongolians. They carried flags and banners; they dipped these when they passed the mausoleum, like Lenin's, of their leader from the 1920s, Suhe Baator.

  There were no soldiers, no uniforms, no weapons at all—how inconvenient it would have been for the Soviets if the Mongolians had had an army. The faces on their banners were Marx, Engels, Lenin, Suhe Bator and Gorbachev. There were large banners bearing the likeness of (so I was told) Chairman Batmunkh, of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party, head of the Great People's Assembly.

  Over a loudspeaker, a man howled, "May the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party prosper!"

  The parading people cheered and repeated this slogan.

  Children wearing fur hats marched by, beating drums and singing.

  May the sun shine in the sky forever

  May the sky be blue forever

  May my mother live forever

  May the world be peaceful forever

  A big pictorial banner was paraded past, showing Lenin and Suhe Bator in 1921. Suhe had a big, bony skull and wore a traditional dresslike gown. Lenin wore his train-conductor's cap. The caption on the banner was Unforgettable Meeting.

  There was another portrait, of the Mongolian cosmonaut, Gurragchaa who in 1981 went into space in a Soviet rocket and produced a detailed study of Mongolian topography.

  Warsaw Pact for Peace, one banner said; and another: We are Followers of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party.

  "What does that one say?"

  The guide translated the banner, "Congratulations to Workers in Capitalist Countries."

  "That's us," Rick Westbetter said.

  That was the end of the parade.

  At Mongolia's only working monastery the next day, listening to the monks in the watchtowers blowing conch shells as a summons to other monks to pray, I reflected on this country. Once there were 2000 monasteries, the monks all Buddhists of the Yellow Sect. Now there was only this wooden wreck of a place behind
an apartment house. Once, Mongol armies had conquered the world. Now there was no army. Mongols had been Chinese emperors—the Manchus were a Mongol dynasty. That had ended. Once, these people had lived on the plains and in the mountains. Now they lived in two-room apartments in this lifeless and stark city. They were in every sense a subject race, and in this—one of the largest and emptiest countries on earth—they lived cheek by jowl. They lived out of the world, almost totally cut off. It had not made them angry. It had kept them innocent in many ways. There was something very sweet about the Mongolians.

  Perhaps that was the whole point about Mongolia: that after a Soviet-inspired revolution in which everything was destroyed and swept away—religion, the old economy, the army, the social order—the country was so changed that it could not function without Soviet help. The Mongolians had been reduced to a state of infancy. All their old habits and institutions were gone. The Soviets stepped into this vacuum: they brought Soviet buildings and urban structures, Soviet railways and roads, Soviet schools, and the Soviet ideology displaced Buddhism. The Mongolian script was abolished and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet introduced. The old Mongolian hatred of the Chinese was whipped up, and the Mongolians gladly accepted forts and garrisons and Soviet missile installations until a simple town was practically unknown in Mongolia: every settlement of any size is a military establishment manned by Russian soldiers cursing their luck in having been posted there.

  All this Soviet authority, meddling, advice and financial aid had a profound effect: it turned the Mongolians into children. It is hard to imagine a more dependent and helpless people. And they are dependent on the Soviet Union in a sort of frantic way, because they cannot be dependent on anyone else. They have no other friends in the world, no family ties. The very country that turned them into orphans adopted them and—since one of the grimmer features of the country is the permanence of the Soviet presence—won't let them grow up.