Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

  “Hi, my name is Nara,” a young Mongolian woman said in English, smiling at me and holding out her hand. She was short and plump, with chubby cheeks and a pug nose. “Why have you come here to my country?”

  I’d been standing in the provisions shop that the ger owners ran, looking at pictures of Julia Roberts and her film crew, who’d produced the documentary about the Przewalski horse, hanging on the wall. “She stayed here long time, you know,” Nara confided before introducing herself to Tobie and Evan.

  “I work at Mongol Televit,” I said to Nara, using the Mongolian colloquialism for the network. Shaking her hand, I explained that I’d come as an intern and would be in Mongolia for the rest of the summer.

  “Thank you for coming to my country,” she said, as if I were the one doing Mongolia a favor, rather than the other way around. “I invite you and your friends for special Mongolia drink in my ger,” she said, gesturing to Evan and Tobie. In return, we purchased a bottle of vodka from the provisions shop and followed Nara to where she was staying.

  Just a few doors down from our own ger, Nara was bunking with a French woman. Their ger was spartan, one of a few reserved for travelers on a longer stay than just a weekend. Ducking inside the tiny doorway, Nara made room for us to sit down. There were just two single beds along the wall and a wooden desk with a couple of matching chairs. A table lamp shone brightly at the back of the ger, an obtrusive spotlight in an otherwise cozy evening. Without all the colorful furniture and the third bed, Nara’s ger seemed quite spacious. She sat down at the desk across from her roommate and motioned for us to sit on the bed.

  “I am guiding Valerie,” Nara said as she introduced us to the French woman, who was about my age. Tobie, Evan, and I sat together, facing Nara and Valerie. “Valerie has come from France to work with the takhi in Khustain.” Although it was difficult to hear over the pounding thump of a small but powerful stereo on top of the desk, Valerie told us her story. She had goldilocks blond curls and big blue eyes that seemed more melancholy than bright.

  “I came here to track the horses,” Valerie said quietly, explaining that there was a volunteer program that allowed foreigners to spend three weeks in the Khustain steppe, recording the movements of takhi. From the way she described it, the benefits of the program were a two-way street: the person tracking the horses got a chance to spend several weeks in solitude in the Mongolian countryside, and the administrators of the Khustain takhi program got a free researcher who would manually record coordinates of the horses’ locations and daily migration patterns.

  But still, I was intrigued by the reason Valerie had come all this way to Mongolia. She was thirty-two years old, and, like me, she’d been in the middle of a successful career in the corporate world. Why had she too left all that behind? I asked her, but she didn’t look as if she knew the answer anymore.

  “Because? I’m not sure,” she said in an alluring French accent. “What is expected of me as a woman? It is babies and a husband. I am not sure if this is all I want from life.”

  Valerie said this in a matter-of-fact way, but she said it with sadness. Even so, I understood just what she meant. Living life in the shadows of other people’s expectations is not quite living at all. But still, I wanted to understand specifically why she seemed so unhappy. After all, it scared me to think that someone could follow her dream and get it all wrong.

  “So how have you found the experience?” I pressed. If nothing else, I was simply amazed by her tenacity to remain in solitude. Valerie would spend three weeks entirely alone, walking through the steppe in silent contemplation. Her only conversation would be with Nara, who came weekly to check on her and bring any needed supplies.

  “It’s been the loneliest time of my life,” Valerie said simply, almost regrettably. Evan and Tobie were silent, and Nara seemed to sense that her party was fizzling. I’d have to find out more about Valerie later.

  “Patricia, have you tried airag?” Nara asked, offering me what looked like a saucer of milk.

  “What is it?” I asked as I brought the saucer to my nose. The smell was utterly overpowering, like sour-smelling steamed socks.

  “You will try it,” Nara ordered. “It is a Mongolian favorite. Very, very good,” she added as Evan let out a cavalier whoop, suggesting he knew otherwise.

  Airag and arkhi are two of the most popular alcoholic beverages in Mongolia. Made from fermented mare’s milk, the only difference between them is the amount of time spent in fermentation, and the fact that one tastes more like socks than the other. Pumped partially full of the mare’s milk, wooden barrels are sealed shut for just a few weeks to produce a vintage as rich or as weak as time allows. Like moonshine in America or table wine in southern Europe, airag and arkhi are common enough to be found in unmarked bottles. Absolutely everyone in the country drinks it, even my teetotaling Mormon host family.

  Tipping the saucer to my lips, I bared my front teeth as a filter to the milk skin that had grown and now stretched over the top of the brew. Flecks of coagulated, lumpy cheese bobbed to the surface and I sipped delicately at the sour, milky mixture that was surprisingly fizzy. It was certainly unique, like a cheese-flavored soda, and I can’t say that I loved it. In fact, I knew precisely why I didn’t love it.

  Years earlier, when I’d lived in Japan, I’d made a culinary commitment to try absolutely everything on every menu I came across. “Eating local” in any country is always an interesting adventure, especially if you grew up in the midwestern United States, knowing seafood only as Mrs. Paul’s frozen fish sticks and cheese as the American, orange, plastic-wrapped slices. So eating local in Japan, where seafood is religion, can be a little overwhelming at times.

  And so it was one night while on a date with a Japanese-speaking American man. He had treated me to a very posh restaurant, the kind of place that has perfectly dimmed lights, a sushi bar crafted from scrubbed sandstone, and chefs speaking to patrons in hushed tones.

  Aside from serving so-called ordinary items such as bowls of sea urchin (exquisite when fresh but tastes like a wet orange sponge if eaten stale), puffer fish sashimi (deadly poisonous if prepared incorrectly), and natto (a surprisingly tasty fermented, gluey soybean mucus that’s served over steamed rice), the restaurant offered delicacies considered exotic even for their seasoned Japanese clientele. Leaning forward to speak in a barely audible whisper, the counter chef and my date conversed in Japanese for a long-enough time to suggest that something serious was about to happen.

  “Would you like to try a rare delicacy?” my date asked, translating for me what the chef had asked him.

  “Absolutely,” I said, assuring him that I would love to, as long as he didn’t tell me what I was eating before I finished. At that point, my date issued a disclaimer.

  “A word of warning,” he said. “What they’re offering you is something I would never, ever eat.”

  “Even better!” I said, growing a little hesitant. But still, I was curious, and I refused to walk away from this moment knowing I’d been a culinary coward.

  “Thanks,” I said enthusiastically as my date nodded to the chef to bring whatever-it-was to me.

  Moments later, a small dish of grayish-white chunks arrived. Bland and slightly fishy, it had the look of a bowl of tiny tubular oatmeal. I ate it quickly, making certain to swallow the soft, lumpy substance without lingering too long.

  “So, what was it?” I asked after I’d finished.

  “Whale sperm,” he answered a bit triumphantly.

  Unlike the airag Nara had offered me, whale sperm was actually tolerable because it tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted before—a bowl of fish oatmeal. Although the texture was definitely peculiar, the flavor itself was completely unfamiliar.

  Airag, on the other hand, was completely familiar. It tastes like nail polish remover smells, and smells like bleu cheese tastes. In a word, it was interesting. And it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever put in my mouth. That spot has always been reserved for liquid American ch
eese that squirts out of a canister.

  “You like it?” Nara asked, giggling, surveying my reaction carefully.

  “Yep,” I said graciously, still unsure.

  Nara passed the bowl of airag to Tobie, and I nodded encouragingly at him.

  “It’s or-full,” Tobie said candidly after he’d sampled it, handing it right back to her.

  “Patricia likes it,” Nara giggled appreciatively, returning the cup to me.

  Actually, not just yet, so I passed the cup to Evan. “This is good music, Nara,” I said to her, changing the subject to what the stereo was pumping out.

  “You like Mongolian hip-hop?” she asked.

  “I definitely do now!” Although I’d never heard Mongolian hip-hop before, there was something very captivating about the jaunty beat and the poignantly clipped tone of the lead singer. He sounded like Eminem, if Eminem were to rap in German or Turkish or any other language with an awful lot of consonants.

  “He is Quiza,” Nara said. “Top hip-hop artist in Mongolia.”

  “He’s great,” I said, and I meant it.

  “He’s my brother-in-law,” Nara said simply. “You would like to meet him?”

  It’s funny; sometimes, maybe every time, when you throw caution to the wind to follow a dream, you find that fate goes to work for you. Nara’s invitation to meet her husband, who was Quiza’s manager, and Quiza himself, would completely alter the tempo of the rest of my experience in Mongolia. And not in a way I could have expected.

  Catching Tobie’s eye, I didn’t need to ask what he was thinking, because it was clear we were both thinking exactly the same thing: feature story.

  “I’d love to,” he and I both said simultaneously.

  “Good,” Nara said, looking as pleased with herself as she was with us.

  Valerie had to get up early the next morning to track the horses, so Evan and Tobie and I left her behind with Nara to turn in for the night.

  Back outside, the night sky had come to life. It was as if someone had switched on thousands and thousands of night lights, tiny white pinpricks studding an enormous canvas of deep, black curtain, pulled taut over the ends of the horizon. Long, textured strips of diamond-dusted galaxies wrinkled into the curtain’s folds. There were more stars than I’d ever seen, and they created the effect of a shadow box, where we all were the subjects of someone else’s musings.

  With my neck craned backward at a ninety-degree angle, I stood in awe. And so did everyone else. One by one, dressed in pajamas and overcoats, guests were spilling outside and gasping at the wide-open space above them. Together, Evan and Tobie and I stared in silence until finally, Evan spoke.

  “Drink at our place?” he said, and Tobie took his cue to head back to his own ger, alone. Obviously our recent conversation was on Evan’s mind too.

  Inside, he lit a fire in the stovepipe and we sat across from each other at the little wooden dining table in the center of the ger. Backs to each other, modestly, we’d quickly changed into our pajamas.

  “Vodka?” he asked. We’d run out of drinking water, so neither of us had much of a choice.

  “Got anything to water that down?” I asked.

  “Orange soda,” he said with a smile, and mixed our drinks in two makeshift tumblers crafted from two empty water bottles whose tops had been sliced off.

  Almost mechanically, we meandered through myriad topics only ever discussed when two people are trying to avoid tackling the obvious. From my experience in banking and his in law school to the obscure subject of the history of North Korea’s leadership, we managed to cover pretty much everything. By the time there wasn’t much else left to say, we’d had a little bit too much to drink. Of course, it was at this point that the only thing left to discuss was us.

  “The thing is,” Evan said, “you are just not the marrying kind.”

  He’d said it abruptly, apropos of nothing at all. For a long time, I was speechless. Evan had made one of those staggering remarks that seems to all but stop time. Worse, he went on. With steepled fingers, he provided proof for this newfound wisdom.

  “You are just a fantasy, an adventurer,” he began again, suddenly and didactically pointing a swaying finger in my direction. “You are the woman men think they want to be with, but in the end, men don’t want adventure. Men choose wives and mothers, not fantasies.”

  Numbly, I stared at him and still said nothing. He could hardly know how prophetic his statement was, at least in my mind.

  Months before I’d left for Mongolia, before I’d even quit my banking job, I’d met a man. Not just any man, but a cliché—the kind of guy you warn your friends about. Handsome, successful, and witty, he was engaged. To the wrong woman, of course, as he put it.

  “It’s complicated,” he’d explained to me one night over dinner. He said it as if I didn’t already know what that meant. “Give me one year,” he begged, promising me that he’d untie the knot he’d already promised another woman that he’d tie with her, permanently. Ironically, we were having dinner at the very restaurant where the fortune-teller worked who would later tell me I’d meet a man named E.

  “I’d like to read your tarot cards,” the fortune-teller had said that same night, abruptly interrupting our dinner. He was standing impatiently at our table as if he were a waiter with a food order to take.

  “Sure,” I said. “Pull up a chair.”

  “No,” he’d said. “I must talk to you alone,” he’d insisted.

  “Forget it, then,” I’d said, pointing to the engaged man. “I’m on a date!”

  A week later, unable to dismiss the urgency of the fortune-teller’s offer, I returned alone to the restaurant to seek him out. Not only did the tarot cards reveal that Evan was supposedly my future husband, but they signaled I’d met this engaged man for no other reason than to learn a lesson about myself.

  Then, one day, the engaged man said it, preempting what Evan would say just months later: “You are simply a fantasy to me.”

  Obviously, the fortune-teller had gotten it all wrong about Evan. And so had I. But like Pimples, Evan had hit a nerve. And Evan had been the last person I’d expected to hit such a nerve. After all, I’d been told I’d fall in love with him, which didn’t look much like it would happen soon, or ever.

  Like Valerie, the French horse tracker, I could not settle for just any life, for just any man who wanted whatever a “wife” was supposed to be. I wanted more, and I wouldn’t stop at Evan to try to find it. If it took remaining single for the rest of my life, then so be it. Besides, I hadn’t come all this way to Mongolia to meet the man of my dreams. I’d come all this way to fulfill my own dreams. They weren’t fantasies, and neither was I.

  With that, I went to bed. I said nothing and instead just crawled under the covers. Even if I’d had a retort, I wouldn’t have used it. Some moments are best left without an explanation.

  What seemed like a very short amount of time later, there was a tap at the door. “Breakfast!” someone announced from behind it. Inside the ger, it was dark as night. Fumbling for my clothes, I dressed as quietly as I could. Evan was still asleep, and it was probably best he stay that way. I laced up my boots and opened the creaking wooden door to reveal spectacular sunshine in another day as bright and blue as a robin’s egg.

  Blinded, I shielded my eyes from the blazing rectangle of light coming from the doorway and headed to the mess hall. Nursing a dull hangover headache in what felt like a rapidly shrinking skull, I set off to find its antidote. There, at the mess hall, I found Valerie finishing her breakfast, and she invited me to join her. Most of our group was there, tucking into plates of eggs and mugs of hot coffee, laughing jovially and reminiscing about the night before. Nara had left earlier that morning to return to her husband and son in Ulaanbaatar, and Valerie was at a table by herself.

  “You would like to join me for a walk in the steppe?” she asked. Valerie had to make her rounds with the horses, but I could tag along beforehand. I finished my breakfast, and we s
et off.

  “And what about you?” she asked as we ambled over rocky plains in the rosemary haze of the endless steppe. “What we talked about last night, what do you think about marriage and children and”—she hesitated a moment—“and expectations?”

  “I don’t think I’m cut out for any of that,” I said succinctly as we sat near a stream. I felt strangely relieved as I said it, as if, finally, I’d committed to the real me instead of the person I sometimes thought I should be.

  Here and there, dotting the hillside around us, were the remains of animal carcasses, their bones picked and bleached completely clean by predators and the sun. In such a vast and empty setting, they looked like pieces of discarded and overturned furniture scattered across a desolate ranch.

  CHAPTER 16

  As Bold as Breasts

  The Mongolian government has decided to enact financial reform in order to reduce budget expenditures. The finance minister tells us that structural changes will need to be undertaken. A special working group has begun to examine the manner in which these reforms can be initiated.

  —Lead story, MM Today broadcast

  “I am Bold, bold like breasts.”

  Back in Ulaanbaatar, Nara made good on her promise to introduce Tobie and me to her husband, Bold, the manager of one of Mongolia’s hottest hip-hop stars, as well as his brother, Quiza, the hip-hop star himself.

  “Breasts?” I repeated, confused. With brooding black eyes in a chiseled face with high cheekbones and a square jaw, Boldoo, nicknamed “Bold,” seemed too handsome to have a sense of humor.

  “Breasts?” he repeated back to me, an embarrassed shade of pink setting first into his jaw and then climbing into the arched peaks of those cheekbones. “Ha! No!” he quickly retracted. “I am Bold, as bold as brass! Not breasts!” Laughing self-consciously at his misfired joke, he tripped over his words as he explained, apologizing for the mistake. Bold had a good-natured laugh, the easy kind that you find yourself joining. For the first time since I’d met him, Tobie let out an infectious belly laugh of his own.