Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

  “When will they be back in Ulaanbaatar?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe September,” the uncle said, and hung up.

  September? “But it’s only July,” I said into the dead receiver.

  Saturday morning, right on schedule, the family returned to the apartment. Hoisting a heavy and unwieldy sack through the front door, Badaa deposited it on the kitchen floor. Without an explanation of where they’d been, the family began to quickly pack up the last of the bones in the refrigerator. After the apartment was emptied of absolutely everything, even the television and pots and pans, they unwrapped the sack that was still lying in the middle of the floor. Skinned, it was difficult to tell what it was, but it looked as if it had been a goat.

  With a cleaver, Batma hacked at the carcass until she had divided it into quarters and separated its limbs from its body. Gathering the animal’s remains, she loosely retied the sack and made her way back out the front door.

  Shrugging our shoulders in disbelief, Meg and I did as we were told and packed overnight bags. It was the weekend, and we were both off from work. Although I’d landed the anchor title, I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to fill the role. Following Batma and Badaa outside to their car, we put our sleeping mats and quilts in the trunk. On top of them, Badaa emptied the raw contents of the sack of goat.

  “Za, okay, let’s go,” Batma said. Sometimes the very best thing about traveling is having no idea why you’re doing what you’re doing, especially when you don’t even know where you’re going to be doing it.

  Seven of us piled into their red Chevy sedan. The old grandmother, now in her traditional gold-and-green silk deel, the same one she’d worn that first day I’d seen her in the apartment courtyard, glowered at me and squeezed onto my lap. Batma and Badaa’s two children squeezed onto Meg’s.

  Before our road trip officially got under way, Badaa stopped the car outside the headquarters of the Mongolian Mormon mission in Ulaanbaatar. We’d known he was an important man at the church, but we didn’t know he was part of the top brass. The whole family got out of the car—and that’s when we realized what this weekend trip was all about. We were headed into the countryside for a picnic with the Mongolian Mormon Church and their American missionary hosts.

  Now this was going to be interesting. Already, Sister Baker, one of the missionaries from Utah, had made a point of officiously introducing herself to us and her boss, Loren, whom she told me was the American head of the Mormon mission in Mongolia. He’d appreciatively nodded when he’d met us, assuming, as he put it, that we were his two newest Mormon “investigators” in the country. As far as decorum was concerned, we were skating on thin ice.

  “Did Batma give you a Mormon Bible?” Meg whispered to me in the car, after Sister Baker had left to board one of the buses.

  “No,” I said, pondering Batma’s choice of Meg over me for salvation.

  Just then, the family returned to the car and we were off, trailed by several yellow school buses full of church members. About a half hour into our drive, Badaa stopped the car. On the side of an especially desolate and deserted part of the road, sitting in a lawn chair, was a leathery old man. Beside him was an enormous barrel with a tin lid, and hanging from the barrel was a little saucepot.

  “Two,” Badaa grunted, handing him a pair of empty two-liter plastic water bottles, as well as a fistful of small tugrug notes.

  Slowly, as if he were creaking inside, the old man removed the tin lid, stood, and bent into the barrel, dipping the saucepot deep inside. Little by little, in shifts, he raised himself back up again, and ladled the cloudy white mixture he’d collected in the saucepot into Badaa’s water bottles. It was airag, the fermented mare’s milk I’d sampled for the first time weeks earlier with Evan and Tobie.

  Not long afterward, we arrived. Badaa parked the car in the shade of a grove of trees, and the buses followed suit. One by one, we clambered out. The grandmother hoisted herself off my lap, looked around at her fellow Mongolian Mormons, and scowled deeply. Like a lot of old people, she had an almost theatrical way of silently voicing her displeasure, although it was anyone’s guess what was bothering her.

  In the cool shadow beneath the canopy of trees, the women set out blankets and thick, heavy rugs to sit on. There were dozens of children, who immediately scattered, racing to the top of a nearby hillock and then back down again. The Mongolian men gathered and built a fire.

  Meg and I stood on the edge of all this, wondering how we should participate. Just then, Loren, the American head of the Mormon mission, ambled over. He was tall, had a shock of thick white hair, and appeared to be permanently sunburned.

  “Afternoon, young ladies,” he said affably, even a little curiously. “Anyone looking after you here in Mongolia? I mean, it’s not always safe in this country, you know. Perhaps I can offer you the services of two male escorts from the church?”

  Beside me, I could feel Meg bristle. I would’ve bristled too, if it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d referred to both of us as “young.”

  “So, what do you say?” Loren pressed.

  Meg was cautiously quiet, so I spoke up. It was unusual to see her lose her cool, and it made me uneasy.

  “Well, we’ve done okay so far,” I said evenly. “But thank you anyway.”

  “Now, Patricia,” Loren went on. “I understand you work for the television station in the capital, is that right?”

  Loren sure did know a lot about me; I don’t know why he was looking for more “investigators,” as he’d mistakenly referred to Meg and me earlier. After all, he seemed to be doing a pretty good job himself of investigating.

  “That’s right, I do,” I said.

  “Have you considered working for a Christian station?” Loren asked.

  I admitted I hadn’t, although I had heard of such a TV station back in Ulaanbaatar.

  “They hire their staff based exclusively on acceptance of Christ as the savior,” Loren went on, referring to the station back in the capital.

  I was at a loss for words; I didn’t want to insult my hosts, especially the Mongolian ones, but I didn’t exactly want to engage the head of the Mormon Mongolian mission on my job prospects. Obviously my employment situation was complicated enough already without adding Jesus or Joseph Smith into the picture. Anyway, Loren didn’t seem to notice my discomfort and went on. In fact, he went on for quite some time, telling me and still-silent Meg in great detail about the Mormon Church’s activities in Mongolia, including their donation of wheelchairs to every single aimag, or province, in the country. He also talked about their positive impact on maternal mortality, and the evils of the World Bank in impoverishing underdeveloped countries.

  “You know what?” Loren said suddenly. “You should tell Mongolia TV to do a story on the good work the Mormon Church is doing here,” he said.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that his pitch would have to get in line behind a host of others that were still awaiting Gandima’s approval. Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to. Just in the nick of time, Batma arrived.

  “Patricia, Meg,” she said, beaming. “You must drink the airag now.”

  Extending her right arm, left hand poised politely at her right elbow, Batma offered me a saucer of airag.

  “Thank you!” Meg and I both declared gratefully, accepting the airag and sipping leisurely. Eventually, Loren left.

  Across the meadow, Badaa and the other Mongolian men had hauled the goat carcass from the trunk of the car, and were clipping it into serving-sized pieces. They were about to make a meal of grave historical significance, and I pulled up a seat ringside. There is nothing more exciting than watching history resurface, many centuries later, especially when the history might lend a clue as to how Genghis Khan himself used to cook. In Mongolia, there are many legends, and even recipes are part of local lore.

  Eight hundred years ago, when Genghis Khan and the Mongol horde roamed the steppe, the constant threat of conflict made it foolish to use fire to p
repare dinner. Fire caused smoke, and smoke alerted enemies. In order to avoid sending these smoke warning signals to enemies, the troops would only build fires when they felt they were roaming through areas of relative safety. When in need of food during the rest of their expedition, even in areas deemed dangerous, they figured out a way to make use of the fire, even after it was put out.

  After depositing large stones into the flames, they’d leave them to heat. While they waited, someone had the unenviable task of stripping a goat of its head and scooping out its internal organs through its open neck. Then, into the hollowed-out carcass went the red-hot rocks, and while the animal cooked itself from inside out, the fire was extinguished. Whole and mostly intact, the bloated creature must have looked like its own piece of carry-on luggage, and it surely traveled well. Called boodog, this recipe invites you to also experiment with marmot.

  Without the threat of imminent war, this cooking method has changed somewhat over the centuries. For starters, Badaa was preparing khorkhog, pronounced “whore hog,” a riff on what surely is the more ancient boodog. He was neither preparing it in secret nor was he risking serving us a marmot infected with the plague. The only downside, of course, was that I wouldn’t get to see him burn the fur off of a goat; one of the technological developments adopted in boodog cooking is the use of a blowtorch to singe off the animal’s fur.

  Removing dozens of stones from the heat of the fire, Badaa stuffed them and the meat hunks into tall tin milk canisters. He shut the lids tight and we all waited patiently for a very long time. About two hours later, Badaa unsealed the containers, tipping the contents of bones, cooked goat, and stones onto a cutting board. While he carved the meat into bite-sized pieces, Batma distributed the hot, greasy rocks.

  “Watch,” Batma said to me, rubbing one of the stones between her hands, onto her face, and over her arms and legs.

  “You take,” she said, putting the hot, greasy rock into my outstretched palms, encouraging me to do what she’d done. “Good for skin,” she explained. Not only is this practice supposedly good for keeping a youthful face, but Mongolians also believe that cooking stones transmit energy to the human body. Whatever the case, the smell of hot meat was making my mouth water energetically.

  Just then, Loren called everyone to prayer. Gathering in a loose circle around the smoldering fire, the Mormons and Americans prayed first in Mongolian, led by Badaa, and then in English. Not invited to join them, Meg and I stood a short distance from the group and bowed our heads.

  “Makh,” Batma said after they’d finished praying, and handed me a paper plate with three pieces of steaming hot goat on it. Consummate hosts, the Mongolians had served their guests first. And they’d also served us the largest portion.

  “Eat, eat,” Batma said before serving the others. Tender and salty, the khorkhog tasted like a slow-cooked and succulent brisket. After everyone had finished eating, we rested on quilts the Mongolian women had laid out in the steppe, gazing up at the late afternoon sky.

  “Yellow horse,” Batma said in Mongolian. She’d suddenly begun collecting our belongings and packing them into the trunk of the car. Pointing off in the distance, she repeated herself, and Meg and I simply shrugged and did as she instructed. We got back into the car and drove for a short time to a low, shallow valley. In it were nestled hundreds of tiny cabins. It looked like a small town made up of farmyard barns painted almost exclusively in bright, primary colors.

  “Yellow horse,” she said a second time, pointing at the village of Shar Mori. The family owned a summer home here in the little vacation town of Yellow Horse.

  We unpacked our overnight bags, and Batma set up a tent in the front yard. Next to the tent was the freezer that she and Badaa had transported from the apartment in Ulaanbaatar. And beside it was most of the living room furniture that had been missing all summer. While Meg and the children kicked a soccer ball around, the grandmother sat on the front porch and stoically glared straight ahead. On a rug Batma laid out for me, I lay down and watched the dimming light of early evening fade into dusk.

  “Batma, where is the bathroom?” I asked.

  “Za, za,” she responded, putting her shoes back on.

  Walking down a dusty road as dusk deepened into night, we shared the comfortable quiet of familiarity. Pointing at a wooden shed a few blocks from the cabin, Batma directed me to the community outhouse. While she waited for me, I could hear her talking and laughing with neighbors in that sociable way you do in the still heat of a summer night. I couldn’t help but wonder where all my friends and family were at that moment. What was Netta doing, and Meghan, and my brothers and parents? What had their summers in New York and Ohio been like? Suddenly, I was overcome with nostalgia and homesickness, and I took far longer than I needed to in the outhouse, pulling myself together. Outside, Batma just waited patiently, chatting with her neighbors.

  Back at the cabin, the grandmother was gone. Dipping below the horizon, the sun had also left for the day, and the air was growing chilly. Out of the trunk, Batma retrieved our sleeping mats and blankets. Spreading out two beds for us inside the tent, she instructed Meg and me to lie down and wait for her. A few minutes later, she was back, clutching a small guitar.

  Mongolians are real romantics. Considering the country is one of the least populated in the world, it isn’t difficult to imagine that a lot of relationships start out as long-distance love affairs. With an average of one person living in a space of four square kilometers in one of the least densely populated countries on Earth, Mongolians spend a lot of time pining, and their music certainly reflects this.

  Batma began to strum, and then she sang. Slowly, almost sadly, she drew out the notes and the syllables, enunciating at every turn a lullaby about the sweet sorrow of loss. I drifted off to sleep. Hours later I woke up, and she was still there.

  CHAPTER 24

  Anniversary Crashers

  Locals in the Nailakh district bleakly joke that the hardest thing to find here is a job. An area housewife tells us that she prays every day for her husband and grown children, who are illegally working in the now-closed mine.

  —Voiceover, MM Today broadcast

  “Tem, please, please call me back,” I said, leaving a message on my TV5 boss’s voice mail. “It’s urgent.”

  Back at home in the capital, Meg and I had returned to our routine. Sometimes the family was there; sometimes they weren’t. Ulaanbaatar was buzzing with excitement. It was the weekend before Naadam, the country’s most famous festival.

  For weeks, Tobie and I had been strategizing a plan to get into the Opening Ceremony, but so far, we weren’t having much luck. Tickets, just ordinary ones, had sold out long ago. Even counterfeit tickets had sold out when the counterfeiters had run out of paper. As for press passes, which is what Tobie and I were after, they, too, were long gone. Journalists from all over the world were flying to Mongolia for this summer’s annual Naadam, marking the eight-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Mongol Republic.

  Because Tem had offered Tobie and me a shot at producing our own talk show, we thought we were a shoo-in for press passes. After all, a talk show debuting around the same time as the historic anniversary of Naadam could not have been better timed. But, none of our big interview requests, like the American ambassador, had panned out yet.

  Tem had begun to avoid us in the hallways and wasn’t returning our telephone calls. He seemed to have lost interest in me, in particular, and I wondered if this was because I hadn’t been able to deliver the money he’d been hoping for. None of my old clients had ever responded to the e-mail I’d sent about the investment potential.

  Weeks earlier, before things had thawed with Tem, while Tobie and I had been waiting for Ambassador Slutz’s office to respond, we pitched a backup story to him in the hopes of making our case that we belonged with the press corps at Naadam. Pitching a feature on the cultural and historical significance of the festival seemed a no-brainer. The TV5 piece would air only internationally
, thereby abiding by Gandima’s and MNB’s requirement that I not appear on air locally in Mongolia. Much to our delight, Tem seemed to love our pitch and immediately agreed to grant us press passes to cover the event.

  But, he’d added, he’d only issue us the passes on one condition. With that, he had listed several conditions. Ticking off a list of a dozen administrative tasks that are approximately 100 percent impossible to complete quickly in an ex-Communist bureaucracy, Tem seemed to be stalling. But he was no match for our determination.

  Working with the tenacity of two people who need tickets to the most exciting event in Central Asia since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Tobie and I were dogged in our attempts to accomplish every near-impossible task on Tem’s list. Begging secretaries to forward paperwork, forwarding paperwork ourselves to carefully copied Cyrillic-script addresses, clandestinely offering a few bribes—and finally, our application was complete. Even Tem had seemed surprised. Somewhat begrudgingly, he agreed to meet us the next morning to issue our passes. It would be just in time; the Naadam celebrations began at noon the next day.

  As it turned out, we’d never hear from Tem again about Naadam, and I’d never hear from him again at all.

  In the meantime, Tobie and I were suspicious of Tem’s begrudging reaction. Our hunch was that he didn’t have any passes for us. And if he didn’t have any passes, Tobie and I would miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime event. And so, we did what anyone would do who was hoping to gain entry into a historic event in a foreign country: we forged our own press passes. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures.

  Swearing each other to secrecy, Tobie and I divided up our responsibilities. I would source glossy photocopy paper, colored markers, plastic sleeves for the finished product, and scissors to cut perfectly sized passport photos to paste onto them. Tobie would be responsible for actually creating the passes from scratch. He’d happened to see a few of them lying around the newsroom at TV5, and he’d covertly photographed them to use as a guide. Everything we bought had to be an identical match for the actual passes, or we’d risk getting caught.