by Rosa Liksom
Arisa gulped, was quiet a moment, and then spat in the corner angrily. ‘No one loves the truth.’
The girl got up and left without looking back. She felt anxious, but the feeling faded when she saw the man. She lay down on her bed and let her eyes fall closed.
She thought about Zahar, Irina’s father, a man of love and horror, as Mitka called him, a thin man well over eighty years old. The first time she met him he asked if a man his age should be sent to a camp for cosmopolitanism. Irina had told her that for Zahar the purge of ’37 came in 1934. That was when his oldest brother, who had been an official in the Comintern, disappeared.
The train stopped with a strange bark amid cracked asphalt. They had arrived in Suhbaatar, on the Mongolian side of the border. The girl went into the corridor and leaned on the railing. The carriage door opened and a gust of angry wind rushed in followed by a group of passport inspectors in blue uniforms and cute garrison caps who crowded into the carriage reeking of asphalt, followed by sombre border guards, and then the door closed. The border guards dragged the man out of the compartment into the corridor. He opened one eye, which immediately closed again. The back of his shirt was wet.
When another ritual inspection was over, one of the border guards handed the girl the sketchbook that had been confiscated on the Soviet side, an amused smile on his face. Shadows of train carriages crawled across the platform, a lonely yak walked past the window, against the orange glow of the gritty sheets of ice, and the Soviet Union was left behind, the mineral water vending machines (1 kopeck without syrup, 3 kopecks with), the minibus taxis, the girls in braids and black-and-white school dresses, the unknown land, its backwaters and deep basins, its cities built overnight, district centres, villages, bogs, wetlands, forested provinces, woods, wastes, clearcuts, its poorly retouched photos of Politburo members hung around a central plaza, curious people outside the restricted shops, communal saunas, city-centre department stores, street sweepers, snow shovellers, hotel doormen enjoying their bribes, flavourful vodka, dry Georgian champagne, and the feeling of safety on Soviet streets in the wee hours. The filling café food, slogans painted in white on a red background, queues at theatre ticket windows, ice-cream stands and juice cocktails, folk music, currency bar discos and rambunctious young people at one a.m. among dreary rows of suburban prefabs in the middle of a ruined landscape, are left behind. The Soviet Union is left behind, the Lenin statues and portraits, the watercolour paintings of deserted shores on a foam-flecked, stormy sea, the mechanics, oil workers, wretched men working on kolkhozes, miners, address and phone-number kiosks, the monuments to the Revolution, the dance pavilions in the parks, the old couples swaying to the beat of a mournful waltz with fur hats on their heads, the stair brooms, entryway brooms, cabin brooms, chamber brooms, cellar brooms, pavement brooms, barn brooms, stable brooms, bathroom brooms, front yard brooms, back yard brooms, garden brooms, well brooms, the old ladies wrapped in big, black cardigans with dusty leggings and threadbare slippers on their feet, lackadaisically swinging their wilted brooms. The casual aggressiveness in the trolley-buses and food shops, in kolkhoz cellars, in the dark corners of commune apartments, the gameness, the utopian spirit, the impracticality, the unwillingness to be independent, the self-sacrifice, resignation, constant complaining, legalised loafing, the passive citizenry, whose inventiveness has no bounds. A country where bad luck is interpreted as good luck, left behind. The clocks on the walls in the street lobbies of Moscow’s official buildings, telling the time, the cabinets of experts, the factory party committees, secret gambling dens, clandestine home concerts, art exhibits in artists’ studios, the local committees, sentry booths, blini booths, biscuit booths, patched roofs, houses collapsed under the snow, the millions of peasants who died of hunger, the city dwellers, the workers, the millions in prisons, the loyal citizens broken down by work camps and labour sites who died of cold, the denunciations, the Party tyranny, the choiceless elections, the election fraud, the grovelling and inordinate mendacity, the millions fallen in useless wars, the men, women and children executed at the edges of mass graves, the millions of Soviet citizens that the machine has abused, tortured, mistreated, neglected, trampled, cowed, humiliated, oppressed, terrorised, cheated, raised on violence, made to suffer, are all left behind. The Soviet Union, a tired, dirty country, is left behind, and the train plunges into nature, throbs across the sandy, desert landscape. Everything is in motion: snow, water, air, trees, clouds, wind, cities, villages, people, thoughts.
She thinks about how she’s come to love that strange country, its subservient, anarchistic, obedient, rebellious, callous, inventive, patient, fatalistic, proud, all-knowing, hateful, sorrowful, joyful, hopeless, satisfied, submissive, loving, tough people, content with little. Could she love them both – Mitka and Irina? A boy and his mother.
The night speeds through the dark into dim morning. The morning breaks out in a new, lightless day. Snow rises from the ground up the tree trunks, a hawk perches on an orange cloud, looking down at the slithering worm of train.
When the confusion died down and the baggage handlers had settled back into their places, Arisa and Sonechka dragged the man into the compartment. Arisa cursed to herself. ‘The old goat’s as heavy as a gravestone.’
The man rattled and whimpered, an agonised look on his face. He straightened his back for a moment and stared at the girl, his gaze unwavering, then collapsed in a heap. His face was very old and tired. He looked at her again, sleepily, disdainfully.
‘Where’s my bottle of vodka? Give it to me!’
Arisa looked amused and said in a motherly voice, ‘Shut your trap and get your arse to sleep.’
The man sank into restless sleep. His shirt lay open and his sweaty, hairy chest glistened in the dim light of the very early spring morning.
A MELANCHOLY GREY MORNING LIGHT floated into the compartment and illuminated the man’s languid face. Gusts of wind buffeted the train. The empty tea glasses gazed at the sleeping man. The girl looked out of the window at an entirely new landscape. In the dim glow of the morning sun, beyond the musical staff of telegraph wires, she saw the first hundred-head herd of colourful horses, the thousands of greasy-tailed sheep with black spots on their foreheads, and she thought of that July day when she came back from her summer vacation in Finland and Mitka was at the station to meet her. She thought about how they had gone to the boarding house, run up the nine flights of stairs hand in hand, how the hallway had been filled knee-high with the fluffy heads of dandelions, how they’d run up and down the hallway like children, the dandelion fluff drifting in and out of the windows.
The train slowed its speed at a spot where a village of yurts came right up to the tracks, and soon slid to a side track to make way for a long column of freight cars. She looked out of the grey window at the yurts. There were five of them, with a yard left in the middle. In the courtyard was a long-shafted wooden cart. Next to it stood a young woman in a traditional red Mongolian dress with a small child in her arms. She had a yellow-flowered scarf wound around her head. The woman glanced in the direction of the train; a little boy behind her struggled onto the back of a skinny-legged foal.
The man stirred in his bed. He tossed restlessly, as if trying to shake off unpleasant memories, then lay with his back to her. His back was covered in tattoos: in the centre the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus in her arms, on one shoulder a temple with one onion dome and a star.
BY EIGHT O’CLOCK the train was spitting out its passengers at Ulan Bator’s Soviet-style railway station. Gritty sleet, mud and snow pattered the train window. She was trying to wake the man. A Mongolian tour guide was standing in the compartment doorway – a small, slimly built, beautiful, tense, indignant man.
‘Are you going into Ulan Bator? Do you have a room reserved in the Intourist Hotel? Why are you still on the train? Gather your things and come with me.’
To effect this, he picked up the girl’s suitcase and started to leave. The man was still snoring in his be
d.
She followed him into the station hall. It was filled with a floating, dreamy silence. An unwelcoming stickiness on the stone floor adhered to the soles of her shoes. Half-rotted food scraps, wrappers, gobs of spit, and dog and bird shit lay all around; the sharp stench seeped into her skin.
They walked to the taxi stand on the parade side of the station. There wasn’t a single car there. The tour guide glanced at his Russian wristwatch with irritation and stared fixedly in the direction of the city. The slow sideways drift of snow turned to sleet – gritty, tattered sheets of ice that dropped into the slush like stones. Everything looked grey, limp, drained somehow, a muddy smell of wet earth hovering everywhere.
A taxi arrived, a small metal deer on its hood. The tour guide sat in the front seat and she sat in the spacious rear of the car. The driver was a fat middle-aged man. He was wearing a Russian-style winter overcoat, an extinguished fifth-class Belomorkanal papirosa hanging from his lips, his face scarred and pitted. The car smelled of petrol and old mutton fat.
The road looked like the ones she remembered from the countryside in her childhood. Mud and mire, pothole upon pothole. Whenever they came to a large puddle in the road the driver pressed the accelerator and slammed straight through it, splashing the mud up in an arc onto the people passing by on foot and on various animal conveyances.
It was just a few kilometres from the station to the hotel but the trip took an hour. Every acceleration was followed by a sharp slam on the brakes and another stretch of crawling along at ten kilometres an hour. Now and then the driver came to a complete stop, got out of the car, opened the hood, swore, and took a black steel can out of the trunk, apparently water to pour into the radiator.
The hotel was like any other hotel for Westerners in any other nameless Soviet city. There was a service counter in the lobby, a small, round table next to the high windows, and a sofa for three covered in plastic. Bricks, a cement mixer, bags of plaster, and boards lay in the middle of the floor. Grey construction dust floated over everything.
The tour guide and the receptionist took care of the paperwork while she waited. Finally, the guide asked her to follow him. They climbed the stairs to the top floor. He opened the heavy, pitifully groaning door, and a vast, Soviet-remodelled suite opened before her. A wonderful view of the whole city, all the way to the Gobi Desert, with a spring storm screaming over its sandy hills, was spread outside the window. There were two rooms in the suite. In the living room there was a simple, stylish sofa set, perhaps designed in East Germany, solidly built chairs with Krakow labels on the armrests, and Russian vases on the tables. A large bed filled the bedroom. On the wall facing the bed was a bold reproduction of Repin’s painting of Ivan the Terrible after he killed his son. Madness shone in Ivan’s eyes; the son looked like a children’s Bible picture of Jesus.
The bathroom was spacious, a yellowish fluorescent light sputtered on the ceiling. There was a full-length bathtub, but the plug had been torn off. The shower worked – refreshing cold water came from both taps.
She looked out of the living-room window at the city for a long time. On the left were two thirteen-storey buildings, on the right, a neighbourhood of yurts, and between them a strange conglomeration that reminded her of a Wild West town. Slanted light from the haggard red sun warmed the armchair.
Thoughts galloped through her mind in a tedious circle. The day ended with a frightening sunset, creeping into evening, moonlight illuminating the yards of the yurt villages. The view of the wide sea of desert simmering on the horizon was beautiful, deserted, bleak. She wrapped herself in the down quilt. She thought about Moscow, the last picnic of the autumn with Irina in the English park, where they’d found a garden bench with yellow maple leaves stuck to its wet surface and Irina had called it the Turgenev bench.
The city started to twinkle with faint lights. The lights encroached on a creeping dusk fading into the black of night. A depressing icy darkness squeezed the city small, soundless. She decided she would call the number Irina had given her tomorrow.
A little after eight o’clock someone knocked discreetly on her door. She opened the door and the tour guide was standing there. They went to breakfast together. She ate a Soviet breakfast, he a Mongolian one, which consisted of tea with milk, biscuits that smelled like lamb, and balls of cornmeal. It felt good to sit across from another person. She told him that she’d come to Ulan Bator to see the petroglyphs along the road leading south from the city. He gave her a stern look.
‘Westerners aren’t allowed to leave the city.’
She offered him some dollars.
‘You come here and act like money can buy you anything you want. Our sacred places are not for sale. I’ve written up an official schedule for you. We can visit the sights of Ulan Bator together and learn about the history of the country. We’ll be staying within the city boundary. I’m responsible for your activities.’
He put the dollars in his pocket.
Outside was springlike and warm; the sky was covered in a thick layer of clouds, but the air was still, and no rain was falling. They went to the history museum, the guide always two steps ahead of her. She walked over the slippery waxed museum floor in felt slippers. The guide moved from one glass case to another and spoke in a rote, monotonous tone. In the middle of one verse he raised his voice.
‘The Mongolian Empire formed the foundation for the blossoming of the Soviet Union today. They are greatly in our debt. We Mongols conquered Russia in 1242 and Mongol rule lasted two hundred and forty years. We created a working central government in Russia, and well-organised military and tax-collection systems. We built all of the Russian governing institutions that are still operating in the Soviet Union today. We created a bureaucracy whose task was to serve the government, not the people. We broke the back of Russian morality so fundamentally that they still haven’t recovered. We drove an atmosphere of mistrust into the Russians’ thick skulls. We taught Ivan the Terrible, and he taught Stalin, that the role of the individual is to submit to the group. If an individual makes a mistake, the whole group responds. It’s the world’s most effective means of governance. Before the reign of the Mongols the Russians didn’t even know how to celebrate, they just drunkenly wallowed in pig shit. They learned from us how to enjoy life. The only things Russians invented were unending laziness, cunning, and blatant deceit. The tax structure required a group of Chinese census takers and tax professionals whose efficiency and expertise were already well known at that time. Since Russia was an unsettled and sparsely inhabited country, we decided to use an indirect governing model. In this system, the Russian nobility collected the taxes for the Mongolian khans – they served as our stooges. Later, the high nobility of the Grand Duchy of Moscow appropriated all of our principles and methods of governance without alteration. We rescued Russia from an insidious invasion of Western culture.’
At lunchtime they walked single file to the hotel and after the meal they went back to the history museum. At dinnertime they returned to the hotel again and went to the restaurant, sat across from each other at a table, and didn’t speak. After the three courses of dinner, the guide stood up. ‘The doors of the hotel close at eight o’clock. After that no one can get in or out. Please follow our rules. For your own good. It would be wise to remember that our laws have no concept of rape.’
At the corner near the hotel a skittish dog with a sticky coat looked at her with frightened eyes. Her mood was becoming more and more desolate. The coldness of the surrounding land, the miserable, damp winds and desert nights were getting under her skin. People shivered with cold. There were two Soviet-style shops across the street, one a delicatessen, the other a stationer’s. There was a loudspeaker next to the door of the delicatessen, spewing out a Soviet hit. Shelves nearly empty stared out of the display window. In front of the shop was a cooler filled with a frozen brick of fish and two plastic bags of milk.
In addition to paper products the stationer’s also sold Russian black bread, pies fill
ed with lamb, vinegared pickles, and sculpin in tomato sauce.
There was a post office behind the stationer’s. On the wall of the post office was a map with the migration routes of sheep marked on it. She wrote a few postcards and bought an extra strip of stamps depicting Mongolian industry.
She dodged the puddles of slush, careening wrecks of chubby old Soviet cars held together with screws, and horses pulling disintegrating carts on the main street. A flock of children dressed in colourful winter clothes played in the courtyard of a three-storey building. The lid of a dustbin was torn off and garbage overflowed onto the dirty ice of the yard. Behind the dustbin she caught a glimpse of the lacerated carcass of a young horse.
She returned to the hotel. She thought about her compartment companion, what he had said about the Mongols … how can a nation with such a great history have withered so?
She looked for the number Irina had given her. She called from the hotel telephone for an hour before she got through. A soft, friendly male voice answered. When she’d given him greetings from Irina and explained who she was and why she was in town, he burst into uncontrollable laughter. She eventually got him to agree to come to the hotel with a friend the next day after dark.
She sat on the sofa again. The late light of a feeble sun shimmered heavy over the roofs of the yurts. She turned on the radio, which was tuned to a Russian-language channel. News, reviews, reports on the national elections, and a little Stravinsky.
The following evening at six o’clock, just as arranged, there was a knock on her door. Two tall, giggling men in their thirties stood in the hallway. They sat down shyly on the sofa. She offered them some Black Label whisky. They emptied their glasses in one swallow, she refilled the glasses, and they did it again. They made a promise to show her the real Ulan Bator and the real Mongolia.