Riding the Iron Rooster (8 page)

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 carrots, 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.

All Mongolian aggression is turned against the Chinese. The rockets and tanks and cannons are directed at the Chinese border, and the Chinese are portrayed as torturers and imperialists. (The Chinese reply by calling Mongolia an example of "rampant and reactionary hegemonism.") In its military and political guise this aggression takes the form of Russian divisions patrolling the edges of the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Its simpler expression is stone throwing.

There was one Chinese sleeping car on the train I took from Ulan Bator to the border, and moments after leaving the station an enthusiastic Mongolian standing by the track flung a stone and broke a window. The Chinese—who can be nags and bores about the sanctity of state property—stopped the train, made a scene and demanded immediate restitution. They would not proceed unless the Mongolians swore that they would hand over a window. The Mongolians promised.

When I went to look at the broken window, Morthole was already outside the train. But he wasn't looking at the window.

"I'm trying to find that stone for my collection," he said.

He found one, but a policeman told him to put it back on the ground.