Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

  “Yes, really.”

  “Thank you!” I said, jumping out of my seat, grasping her hand to shake it.

  “Starting from today,” she began, smiling as she had before, and I sat down again. “You and Tobie will work together on stories for the English news broadcast. You will pitch them to me, and if Enkhtuya and I agree that they should make air, Tobie will produce while you report.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” I cried.

  The English news broadcast aired only three times per week, and the entire show lasted only about twenty minutes. Segments were of standard length, about two minutes apiece, and most of them focused on the English translation of the already-aired Mongolian news features on political and cultural events happening in Ulaanbaatar and around the country. In other words, Tobie and I would have very few chances that summer to get one of our stories aired. So, I wanted some direction on just how to go about increasing our chances of success.

  “What did you think of my reporting on Roaring Hooves?” I asked hopefully. Because Gandima had handpicked the story herself, before I’d even arrived in Mongolia, she obviously already supported the content. And because she’d often asked Tobie to produce, I knew she was happy with his work. But I had only reported for her once, so I needed her opinion of my skills on camera.

  “It was,” Gandima stopped, choosing her words carefully. “It was…okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes, Patricia, it was okay,” she repeated.

  “How ‘okay’?” I pressed.

  “Just ‘okay,’” she responded. “Now then, you should get to work,” Gandima said, ushering me out before I could ask her how to get from “okay” to exactly what she wanted.

  “Gandima, thank you again!” I said, beaming, before I headed back to the office Tobie and I shared.

  This was a moment I’d never forget, and I took my time enjoying it, basking in what suddenly felt like endless possibilities. Just months earlier, I’d been staring at computer screens on a trading floor, mindlessly going through the motions of “just one more year, just one more bonus.”

  For nearly a decade, I’d counted the minutes until the day’s end. And of those days, I reminisced, it was actually Friday that had always been the worst. Finally out of the office and free for an entire weekend, I’d already developed the Sunday blues as early as Friday nights. But here I was, pursuing my dream, and my dream was actually becoming my reality.

  “Tobie!” I nearly shrieked when I’d returned to our office. “Guess what?”

  “I know,” he responded with a genuine smile. Normally economical in his reactions, he looked only a little bit less exhilarated than I was feeling. But he had to get back to work, and so did I. Earlier that week, Tobie had learned about an Irish couple from Dublin with such an unusual story that he’d already confidently pitched it to Gandima, and she’d just as readily agreed to let us produce it.

  With Tobie’s camera gear in tow, together we headed downtown. On the way, he briefed me on what he’d heard about them. And what he’d heard was a story that sounded very familiar to my own.

  On the steps outside of a hotel in central Ulaanbaatar, Anne and Jonny O’Brien told us their story, in their own words. Some months earlier, they began, they’d decided to quit their corporate jobs to follow a dream. Now, this wasn’t your average dream of, say, working in television. Instead, Anne and Jonny hoped to bicycle all the way from Ireland to Mongolia—and that’s just what they did.

  If that had been the conclusion, it would have been interesting enough. But it wasn’t. Midway through their circuitous 20,000-kilometer journey, somewhere in Kazakhstan, Anne discovered that she was pregnant. At this point, it was obvious what they should do; they should quit and fly home. But, they explained, this trip had been their dream, and they were determined to continue on. So Jonny came up with a genius idea. He’d hook Anne’s bike to his and drag her to Ulaanbaatar. A few weeks, and no fewer than 1,000 kilometers of effort, later, they made it. Anne and Jonny’s story practically told itself, and I had little trouble preparing for the interview. In no time, we got started.

  Soft-spoken and heavily pregnant, Anne sat down in front of the camera. She looked comfortable, as if being interviewed for cycling across a continent was just part of a regular afternoon for her. With Jonny and their bikes in the background, I crouched next to Anne and began asking her the same questions I’d asked myself and had only just begun to answer about my own life.

  “Anne, tell me why,” I began. “Why did you cycle from Ireland to Mongolia?”

  Calmly, Anne nodded, but she didn’t answer right away. She seemed to be gathering her thoughts.

  “It was our dream,” she said finally, and went on to explain that their dream wouldn’t end in Mongolia. One day, she told me, they hoped to cycle through North Korea!

  After we’d finished the interview, Anne pulled me aside. “Why are you here?” she asked abruptly, looking at me with the intensity of someone who already knows the answer to the very same question she’s been asked herself.

  “I have a dream too,” I said, and stopped suddenly. I’d gotten a lump in my throat and found I could hardly go on. “I left behind certainty and money,” I said when I could finally continue, “to risk pursuing something I’m passionate about.”

  “That’s amazing,” she said so earnestly and with such sincerity that I really had to fight back tears. It isn’t every day that you share a dream with a pregnant woman who’s just biked across nearly two dozen countries.

  Back at the station, Tobie and I began gluing together his footage fragments with my interview notes. In no time, we’d put the finishing touches on our first piece. That week, our story went on the air.

  After nearly ten years’ working in management consulting, Anne and Jonny O’Brien decided it was time for a change of pace. They laid out plans to embark upon a journey that would last for months, span nearly twenty countries, and ultimately provide for them a new and very unexpected adventure.

  In early 2005, the O’Briens set out from their home in Ireland to cycle here to Ulaanbaatar to raise money for Cancer Research U.K. While spending the winter in Kazakhstan, Anne discovered that she was pregnant. Instead of turning back, Jonny hooked Anne’s bike to his and pulled her the last 1,000 kilometers to the finish line in Ulaanbaatar.

  Upon arriving in Mongolia, the couple realized that their favorite Irish baby name is also the namesake of the Buddhist goddess who represents enlightened energy. In less than three months, Anne and Jonny will bring baby Tara into this world. But their adventure does not stop at parenting. They plan to one day cycle through Japan and possibly North Korea. The O’Briens have so far raised $7,000 for Cancer Research U.K.

  CHAPTER 13

  A “Washing Vagina”

  The team meeting saw the signing of agreements between the ANU Service of Mongolia and the Carbon Financing Company of Japan. The goal of this inaugural agreement is to invest in better development mechanisms in Mongolia. Within this framework, contacts were also signed to provide for the replacement of old steam-boilers and the improvement of greenhouse air quality.

  —Evening news voiceover, MM Today broadcast

  It was time. Meg and I could no longer put it off. Our adventure into the Khustain steppe would begin in just twenty-four hours, and neither of us had any laundry left. I’d dreaded this moment and had avoided it by wearing each pair of undies twice, once inside-out. I simply could no longer in good conscience go on; there’s just no turning back to an outside-in thong.

  While we waited for Batma to wake up, Meg and I revved ourselves with three cups of instant coffee, a stack of Batma’s handmade knots of fried dough, and the Mongolian translation dictionary to look up the words for “wash,” “washing machine,” and “long overdue.” Most important though, we would need to communicate an apology. Batma hated doing the laundry, and she made this plain by deeply frowning. It was the only time either one of us would ever see Batma display any sense of dis
pleasure—and that included the time when, a few weeks later, she cheerfully spent an entire evening pumping my stomach!

  “Sain bain uu!” Batma greeted us with a broad smile. “Eat!” she commanded merrily, placing an extra knot of bread on each of our plates.

  “Batma,” I said, pausing to search for the right words. “We. Clean. Clothes. Need.”

  “Ah,” she said, and her face darkened. Meg and I were ready, even if Batma wasn’t.

  There was a good reason this odious task put Batma in a bad mood. It would’ve put anyone in a bad mood. Slightly archaic, the family’s washing machine was such an old Japanese model that the last person to use it actually might have been the last samurai. It had two speeds: off and rattle. In fact, its very simplicity was what made it complex. With an awful lot of hesitation, the three of us got started. It would be several hours before we finished.

  After unplugging most of the electrical appliances in the apartment in order to feed the upcoming spin cycle, Batma ran an extension cord from the kitchen to the bathroom, plugging the washer into the stove’s outlet. With the entire household on hold and duly inconvenienced, Batma now held up a finger at a time, explaining what we’d have to do.

  Holding up one finger, she pointed at our clothes, which Meg and I had lumped together into a single enormous mound on the living room floor. Holding up two fingers, she pointed at the washing machine. Flipping the power switch, she turned on the motor and helped us insert our first load into the drum.

  Then, holding up three fingers for the third cycle, she hooked a hose extending from the bathtub faucet to the drum and turned the water on full blast. When the drum was about half full, Batma poured detergent in and shut the lid, selecting the swish cycle.

  Once she’d detached the hose from the bathtub’s faucet, she turned on the tap, filling the bathtub with cold water, and held up four fingers. While she waited for the machine to finish swishing, she pawed at her chest and pointed to the cold water in the bathtub, and pawed at her chest again. Either she was suggesting we take an ice-cold bath while our clothes were being washed, or she was demonstrating that we’d have to repeatedly hand-rinse our clothing.

  Moments later, Batma switched the washing machine dial from the swish cycle to the spin cycle. Quite unlike any other spin cycle I’d observed, this particular machine was committed to its task. The floors shook. The walls shook. My teeth chattered and my eyeballs rattled. Ten minutes of violent racket later, Batma shut off the power and peered inside. Pasted up against the walls of the drum, our clothing looked as if it had been transformed into used paper towels.

  One by one, Batma yanked each article out and deposited them into the cold–water bath, creating a makeshift rinse cycle. Following her lead, Meg and I knelt in front of the bath and put our arms into the frigid water up to our elbows, creating an immediate sensation of arthritis. Individually, we rinsed each article of clothing. As soon as we did, the water turned a brackish brown, and we started all over again, from the very beginning. Until, as Batma instructed us, the water ran clear. Hours later, we giddily hung our clothes outside, the fifth and final step.

  While our laundry dried in the late afternoon sun, Meg and I sipped cups of tea and relished the completion of this epic task. During that entire summer, we’d only resort to it twice. The rest of the time, we’d wear inside-out undies, and sometimes even outside-in ones.

  “So,” Meg said, staring into her empty teacup. “Is everyone meeting at the pub tonight?” Was I imagining things, or had she just said “everyone” like she meant “Evan”? As it would turn out, I was imagining things, but it would take me two very long and embarrassing evenings to come to this conclusion.

  Meg and I had never discussed the subject of Evan, and I’d never told her about the fortune-teller, mostly because, by this point, I really didn’t think much of his prediction. Sure, what he’d foretold was astonishing, or could’ve been, but maybe he’d just picked up on the fact that Evan and I would meet, rather than fall in love and marry. In any case, the spark between us just wasn’t there. Well, not until right at that moment when Meg intervened. There’s nothing quite like jealousy to turn indifference into desire, if only temporarily.

  “I’m not sure who will be there tonight,” I lied. Of course, I knew exactly who would be there; I’d been the one to make the plans with Evan. At the time, it had been a platonic afterthought of an arrangement, just a few friends getting together to flesh out the details of our pending adventure to the wilds of Khustain. But now, as my mind raced, I wondered if it was actually something more.

  “Well, we should leave soon,” I said, excusing myself to get ready. It was a Friday night in June; temperatures had risen steadily to guarantee warm summer evenings and nights out at the few bars and restaurants that featured patios. From the clothesline, I chose the only shirt that had dried, and it was perfect: lacy and sweet and low-cut sexy. Whatever Meg’s intentions toward Evan, I’d been the first one to meet him. And, of course, with the fortune-teller as a backdrop, I did have a modicum of serendipity on my side. Obviously, I would pull rank.

  In my bedroom, I shut the door behind me and stopped for a moment to gather my thoughts. Was there something more to my feelings for Evan? After all, it isn’t often you meet someone whose dream to go to Mongolia is so important to him that he spends two years in Turkmenistan as a consolation prize. And it’s exactly never that you meet someone who goes countries out of his way to cook up an inedible curry. Since I’d arrived in Mongolia earlier that month, Evan and I had spent an awful lot of time together and shared an awful lot of otherwise-intimate moments—cappuccino dates, quiz nights, lunches, dinners; we’d even taken in a museum or two. Had I been missing something all along? But then again, if I had been missing something, I hadn’t been the only one to do so. In any case, there was only one way to find out.

  I slipped my pièce de résistance over my head, which had been transformed in the vigorous spin cycle from gleaming to a shade of drab. But still, it was perfect enough. Just as I was deftly applying a third coat of mascara, there was a tap at my door.

  “Are you there?” Meg’s voice asked from behind it.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said, quickly applying a squirt of perfume to my nape. “Hold on just a sec,” I stalled, surveying myself in the mirror with satisfaction. I was ready.

  “Hi,” I said as I opened the door, and stopped short. Meg looked radiant. Flecks of amber peeked out from her roaring red tresses like softly glowing embers. As she stepped from the dark hallway into the brightness of my bedroom, sunlight kissed her freshly scrubbed face, as if light itself had been created for her.

  “Wow, you look great,” I said, and meant it. It was the first time I’d seen her wear makeup, and she was more beautiful than ever.

  “Thanks,” she said sheepishly. “But my shirt looks terrible. Do you maybe have one I can borrow?”

  She was right; her shirt did look terrible. But I wasn’t about to dress her in something that improved on that. Instead, I rummaged through my closet until I found a shirt that would … fit.

  “Thanks,” she said, tugging it self-consciously over her head and smiling. “It’s perfect.”

  Together, we set off to meet Evan downtown.

  Every day at dusk, the Gandan Khiid monastery reinvents itself. The morning is hustle, as if the glare of bright daylight were itself a call to action. Monks briskly sweep the stone pavement outside the temple grounds; resident pigeons flutter nervously in their flock, preparing breakfast from yesterday’s crumbs.

  By afternoon, an ambling serenity sets in with the waning light. Businessmen and nomads pass each other by, the businessmen in smart-looking suits, the nomads dressed in vivid silk robes cinched at the waist with brightly colored sashes. Sporting dark sunglasses, the businessmen look a little bit like gangsters. Sporting fedoras, the nomads look a little bit like businessmen—but only from the neck up.

  And finally, as the day relinquishes its own spotlight, dusk descends in
to evening in Gandan Khiid, meeting halfway with the curvaceous rooftops of the temples themselves. The effect of this handshake between light and dark creates a visual sensation of vibration.

  Absorbing the electric dusk, Meg and I cut through the monastery in complete silence. I still wasn’t sure if she had designs on Evan, but I was sure about one thing: I’d decided I did.

  “So,” Evan was saying to the crowd gathered on the outdoor patio of a local pub as Meg and I arrived. “My friend described the wine as ‘perky’ but never ‘insouciant.’ In the middle of recounting another legend, he caught my eye as Meg and I arrived and looked at me a little longer than I’d expected him to. “And then,” he concluded sotto voce, still staring at me as if it were the first time he’d ever seen me, “we agreed it was ‘busy’ yet not ‘precocious.’”

  As he slowly drew out the words embellishing the wine he’d drunk, everyone laughed. No matter how pedestrian his tale, Evan never failed to get a laugh out of his delivery.

  “Have a seat,” he offered us solemnly, making room for just one of us on the bench next to him. I sat down next to Evan and glanced at Meg for just a split second. I had to acknowledge it was still entirely possible that I was imagining our sudden rivalry. Still, I didn’t want to take any chances.

  “Zuhn gram vodka,” Evan said to the waitress, and held up two fingers, ordering a pair of shots for us. Saying nothing, I caught Meg’s eye once more as she ordered her own drink.

  “Cheers,” she said with her usual equanimity, which was now maddening, once our drinks had arrived. Raising her glass to mine, she smiled genuinely.

  “Cheers,” I said in return, reluctantly and guiltily.

  Hell must have a table reserved especially for the manufacturers of vodka, and ex-Communist-nations’ vodka, in particular. Abrasive, raw, and biting, it’s like drinking nail polish–flavored rocket fuel. And we all know a thing or two about rocket fuel—it’s strong enough to power a rocket. And like rocket fuel, Mongolian vodka burns your nose before it even touches your lips. You’re as likely to sip it as you would be to sip lighter fluid. Holding my breath, I downed the acrid poison in a series of nervous, jagged gulps. Feeling like I’d just swallowed a lit match, my eyes bulged and watered.