All Is Given

by Linda Neil

  He talked about his plans as we watched the ger take shape. Of course I want to go to America one day to study like my sister. She went to study politics.

  You want to live there eventually? I asked. The home of hip-hop?

  If you don’t mind me correcting you, he ventured shyly. But to me and most of my Mongolian friends, hip-hop is a world language, not just American. And if I, or we, go to America, it is still our duty as young Mongolians only to study there, to study and learn as much as we can to help our country. We must return to build Mongolia. It used to be when my parents were students that most Mongolians who went abroad travelled to Moscow to study; the Russians were generous with scholarships and help with education. But when Russia couldn’t do it anymore, America and other western countries offered to help. But you know it is always at a price. And we have to be careful we don’t offer too much of ourselves in return for their help. We have to remain independent.

  I was moved at how articulate he was about his country, its recent past and its immediate future. I couldn’t imagine boys back home feeling things so deeply. They would be channelling their energies into sport or computers, enjoying the freedoms of their boyhood, while their parents shouldered most of their burdens.

  I asked Temujin what he felt about the Russians.

  You’d think that we would hate the Russians, he mused. I know that the Americans think we should. But my parents don’t hate the Russians. They speak Russian. And in some way they miss the Russians.

  They miss the Russians? I asked, betraying my prejudices. What do they think about all the monasteries destroyed and the monks killed?

  It was one of the first things that came up about Mongolia when researching the country’s twentieth-century history in western sources: how the Russians killed more Buddhist monks and destroyed more monasteries than the Chinese were purported to have done in Tibet.

  I don’t really know, Temujin answered after a few moments. Perhaps they believed what the Russians told them – that they were trying to modernise Mongolia, to stomp out the superstitious practices and the power of the religions. Which may not have been such a bad thing. People were so frightened of the spirit world that they couldn’t make decisions for themselves. Science has got to be part of the equation even for us in Mongolia. But I know it wasn’t only Buddhism that the Russians tried to stamp out. They also tried to wipe out shamanism and that’s the religion my parents’ ancestors practised.

  A couple of the Mongolian workers approached Temujin for advice on where to position the ger. The area that had been initially chosen was proving to be unsuitable and the ger would have to be moved a metre or two. He went back towards the construction site with them and was soon surrounded by a group of men, with whom he conversed animatedly in the melodic local language.

  I imagined Temujin as a young Genghis Khan reborn into contemporary Mongolia, not to lead a group of men into battle and destruction, but to direct them to construction and charitable work. Times had changed, I thought, and young Temujin, with his hip-hop posse and his IT degree, would be the new warrior of Mongolia, adept with language and thinking, ready for the modern world.

  After the new placement for the ger had been decided, he returned with a self-conscious smile.

  And you? I asked, picking up our conversation. What do you feel about religion?

  I don’t practise any religion, he replied. But I do believe in honouring our ancestors and our past as the shamans do. I think sometimes to look forward we have to look back. I don’t mean to the Russians, although according to my parents it’s thanks to them that we have a city like Ulaanbaatar with buildings and roads and transport. But further back to when we built our great empire. All the young people are doing now is trying to survive and build the country up again. We became very weak and broken, like an old diseased man. Now we have to get well again.

  I was hesitant to probe further. I felt a bit like the western companies in search of the riches that lay deep under Mongolian ground. I shouldn’t dig too deep, or take too much, and instead honour what he had offered me freely without demanding more. But I couldn’t help asking another question; I was curious as to how a Mongolian boy saw himself in today’s world: as an Asian or a Eurasian. Did he feel more closely aligned with China or with Russia, or halfway between the two?

  I know my parents – and me too – are more worried about China than Russia. China already has outer Mongolia and naturally assume they have a right to us too. Soon they will be in a position to do something about it. And like I said my parents feel grateful to the Russians for modernising Mongolia.

  They think it was worth it?

  He looked at the ger, then lifted his gaze to the hills around us and the rows of nomad homes dotting the ridges.

  You know, he said, we see the past differently to the westerners. We don’t see the world divided that way. We see things in long interconnected streams, as part of nature, as part of the sky. The idea of division is a man-made concept. Here we are, Russians to our north and China to the south. We don’t want to be their best friend perhaps, but we don’t want to be their enemy either. Now the Americans want our coal and our riches under the ground but we don’t want to be aligned with anybody. It is time for Mongolia to be strong again. To be respected and perhaps even a little feared … just a little, he laughed, as it once was.

  I notice you see things differently here, I told him. I got a surprise when I flew into Ulaanbaatar and saw the airport was named after Genghis Khan.

  To us he is a great leader and a god and it would be good if someone like that rose up again in Mongolia.

  He turned to go. He’d been called away again. The workers were now stringing flags across the entrance of the demountable home and wanted him to participate in the traditional blessing. To call the spirits of the ancestors to bring good fortune to the ger and all those who would live in it. Afterwards, he would head back into town to go to class. And after that he might spin his records for the young, hip nightclub crowd.

  Temujin shook my hand as he said goodbye.

  You know even in China they worship the original Temujin as a saint. Yet I know to you he is a monster.

  It wasn’t the first time I had been chastised for not understanding that western narratives of history aren’t the only ones, and that, as he said, there are many ways to tell the story of our collective past. I watched him walk away, a young man with a purpose in this vast country. To wait for a leader like Genghis Khan to return and make Mongolian men feel strong again. I wondered what a strong man would look like – or sound like – in contemporary Ulaanbaatar. Perhaps he wore hip-hop pants and carried a microphone and rapped about history while a boy like Temujin worked the turntables, a warrior of the nightclubs and back streets rather than a horseman of the wide plains.

  After the ger was blessed, our group was taken on a tour of the Blue Skies village. Most of these gers housed groups of children. I felt like an intruder as the kids opened their school books for us to peruse. If they weren’t staring at the floor, they smiled shyly as we chatted to them, and replied to our mimed questions with soft giggles. The children were all gorgeous and looked well fed. But their insecurity was apparent in their eyes, which darted uncertainly to their carers from time to time.

  As the CIS students played with the Mongolian children, I walked along the ridge at the perimeter of the village. I encountered Rory, the school’s science teacher, who had accompanied our group as a chaperone. We stood together for a while and surveyed the barren hills around us. Blades of grass, and even a few tiny pink flowers, peeked out from under small rocks and mounds. I noticed, suddenly, the absence of things growing.

  It had been an eventful, emotional day and I felt overwhelmed by the country’s landscape with its unimaginable winters, where the temperatures dropped to –30 and sometimes –40 degrees Celsius. This was the centre of one of the first and largest world empires.
How would it survive as a newly lawless Russia and the growing might of China pressed in around it? And I continued to be haunted by another question: when modernity finally overtook Mongolia, where would be left for its nomads to go?

  Rory was a tall, well-built Scottish man with wild white hair and beard – a mountain man himself. He had a pragmatic view of the world.

  What is the meaning of Mongolia? I asked him, half joking.

  You mean existentially? Or philosophically? He didn’t seem surprised at all by my question.

  I don’t know what I mean, I conceded. I guess you wonder how a country like this survives. I mean, nothing much seems to grow here at all.

  You talk like an Aussie, he laughed, with your endless bright summers. You take for granted that places are fertile, that suns shine, that waves roll on beaches. I notice Aussies also sometimes don’t see the meaning or value in darkness or sadness. In the northern hemisphere, we survived for centuries in the cold, the dark, the barren, the bleak and unsmiling.

  He spoke without rancour. I had noticed that too, the tyranny of smiling, of upbeat brightness in warm countries. I wondered whether our giddays and bewdy mates were sometimes received as an affront by those like Rory, who might read our cheer as a denial of other, equally valid things.

  We fell silent and stamped in tandem. I could tell that Rory found the cold bracing while I found it, mostly, wearing.

  So no, don’t worry about Mongolia, he continued thoughtfully. It’s on the rise, no question. It’s like nature. There are peaks and low points, deaths and resurrection. The Soviets brought infrastructure, and at the same time they destroyed the superstition that gave Mongolia its old shamanic spirit, but which also kept it what we in the west would call backward. It’s always a push and pull between extremes until things settle in their balance. But, if you are asking the question from a geographical angle …?

  I was thrown by the passion of his answer. But I was also beginning to understand that this trip to Mongolia was going to continue to upend my preconceptions.

  I guess that’s what I mean … perhaps.

  Then Mongolia has great meaning for the rest of the world. Especially for the hot countries. Even if nothing ever grew here, it would still play its vital role. Because the permafrost under the ground here is what’s keeping the earth cool enough for our continued survival. Without the big barren freeze of Mongolia we’d all be burned out … literally.

  We drove from the Blue Skies village to a boys’ prison, where I interviewed a fifteen-year-old charged with murder. The CIS students then gave an impromptu concert for the inmates, who reciprocated with some traditional folk songs. The jail was harsh: concrete floors, iron-bar windows and an absence of nature.

  In the evening, we walked across from our hotel to a rundown building where a group of artists presented a cultural showcase. We sat enraptured as young men and women danced Cossack style while a young woman dressed in blue struck the guqin. Afterwards, Mongolian throat singers astounded us with their depth and sonorous dexterity. I was moved to tears. It seemed amazing that such talent and artistry could exist in these impecunious circumstances. But there it was: brilliant and surprising.

  That evening, in our hotel room, I surreptitiously took three strawberries from the punnet my sister had left in the fridge. It was pure thievery, but I needed something sweet and succulent to balance out the drama of the day.

  *

  The schedule on our final day in Ulaanbaatar was as full as the others had been. But in the late afternoon I found time to catch a taxi to Jack’s office, in an inner-city cul-de-sac. I wanted to meet the two colleagues he had recommended I speak to. They greeted me warmly and introduced themselves: Gerel, an elegant mature woman, had lived in Mongolia her whole life, while Sarnai, a vibrant, talkative young woman, had recently returned from postgraduate studies in the States. They both spoke impeccable English. We discussed the problems of contemporary Mongolia – how to raise its GDP, how to negotiate a more equitable mining agreement with western companies – for a quarter of an hour or so before Gerel surprised me with a story that revealed exactly what it meant when the Russians left Mongolia.

  I was working in a university in the west of Mongolia. Like many people of my generation, I had studied Russian literature, and I was a professor of that literature at the university. My husband also worked there and we had just had our first baby. I remember it was a bitter cold winter and we all relied on our central heating to stay alive. The day the Russians left, all the electricity was turned off, and the gas. Everything suddenly went cold and dead. And there I was, with a young baby, wondering how we would survive. I know the west regarded it as a liberation. But in those freezing days, for us it was a catastrophe. Literally everything shut down. And that was our freedom.

  After Gerel finished this story, there was a long silence. Sarnai broke the quiet with a laugh and, in her deep melodious voice, said: Freedom means many things.

  The clock was ticking loudly, and I realised I needed to start making my way back to the hotel. Our flight to Hong Kong was at midnight.

  I thanked Gerel for sharing her stories. We hugged, though in reality we were still strangers. Sarnai offered to share a taxi into the city with me. You haven’t experienced peak hour until you’ve experienced peak hour in Ulaanbaatar. I’ll get the driver to get a move on.

  As we waited for the cab, I told Sarnai how my sister had packed fresh strawberries to take with us to Mongolia because we had heard it was difficult to find fresh fruit. In return, when we were huddled inside the taxi, Sarnai told me about her own family, who remained practising shamans after years of being outlawed, persecuted and even killed during the Soviet era. It’s in our blood, she said. And what’s in the blood can’t be easily destroyed.

  But you are wrong about the strawberries, she continued, as the car zigzagged through the twilight chaos of Ulaanbaatar’s peak-hour traffic. If you go up in the hills, just before spring, you’ll find the richest, sweetest strawberries growing in the wild by the mountain streams. It’s a very clear sign to every Mongolian who understands nature. Those wild strawberries tell us that the harsh winter is slowly coming to an end, that the ice will thaw and flowers will bloom again. You’ll never taste anything like those wild strawberries. They don’t sell them in shops. They don’t export them to places in need of sweet fruit. But they are there, and a Mongolian wild strawberry is the juiciest you’ll ever taste. She laughed, abundant with the joy of her story, imagining perhaps that we were sharing those wild things in the back of the taxi.

  The CIS kids sang all the way to the airport that night. I sat at the front next to Cathie and pressed my face up close to the window so I could see the shapes and silhouettes of the city we were leaving as we passed into the night. I felt the enormity of the city’s story, the magnificence of the country’s heritage, and the bitterness of its loss. I also felt the hope of its future and the echoes of the hundreds of amazing stories it would tell.

  Garbo Laughs in Paris

  The distance between the two banks of Tallebudgera Creek was not insurmountable. But it still took me a number of years, from the time I was about eight to when I was nearly twelve, to finally cross it.

  My father had taught us all to swim. He believed, I think, not just in the physical act of swimming but in its meaning as well. Although I had been determined to cross Tallebudgera Creek unaided like my father – who swam with only a pair of dark blue speedos and slatherings of zinc cream – I often wore snorkels, large goggles and a pair of flippers. My father was teasing when he said I looked like an alien stick insect, but as I glided across the top of the water, inspecting through my goggles the green-blue world below the surface, I felt as if I truly was an amphibious explorer from outer space.

  Tiny golden red guppies swam past me; below, seaweed swayed like reed-thin performance artists with wildly flexible joints and an absence of bone.

  I s
till have the piece of paper on which I wrote those words for a school essay. As a child I often experimented and over-reached with language, and I remember the exhilaration of making up phrases while in the water. Words were sensual, visceral, experiential – wet like the creek, warmed in globular sunlight. Despite my ambition, though, I would never dare to use such words when I described the crossing to Dad. He may have physically demonstrated his technique while teaching us to swim, but he also often talked in cryptic ways about the importance of balancing yourself in the water, of understanding the importance of graceful, regular movements and finding a symmetry between the rhythms of the arms and the feet. I don’t know if he would have supported my exaggerated imaginings of the world beneath my gliding, gangly body. For him, the aesthetics and the form of a thing always seemed more important than its emotion and passion, which for me were primary. Still, despite the clumsiness of my efforts – in both swimming and using words – the swim was a high for me. After that summer, things changed and such primal achievements became less meaningful.

  The year I crossed Tallebudgera Creek was also the year I got my first, and worst, case of sunburn. It was the result of lingering too long in the water, dreaming of the darkness underneath. Whites like us aren’t made for the sun, my fair-haired, porcelain-skinned mother often admonished me. Nevertheless, as we approached teenage-hood, many of us persisted in that hopeless quest of getting a tan. My friend Helen Myerstown slathered cooking oil all over her skin before sunbaking one summer, thinking the subsequent burning would provide the illusion that her oddly shaped freckles had joined together to make her the right shade of brown. Instead she turned so red she had to be rushed to emergency, where she was lectured by several doctors about skin cancer. We live in a country where the sun can kill you. And that’s a fact, the doctor told Helen. That is a fact.