On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  My new home was located in a ramshackle security guard’s hut, where I was given a room filled with old tires, car parts, and tools, and decorated with flaking stickers of naked women. In moving in, I had dispossessed Luti’s head mechanic of his love shack.

  To assist in finding a new horse and getting veterinary papers in order, Luti granted me two drivers. One was his loyal assistant, Aleksei, and the other was Edik. The two couldn’t have been a more curious contrast. Aleksei was a tall handsome womanizer from Dagestan, who wore white leather dress shoes and a suit. His hobbies were women, vodka, smoking, cards, and more women, generally in that order. Edik, on the other hand, was a family man who worked as a tractor driver and wore nothing more glamorous than a pair of cheap Chinese-made sandals and threadbare track pants. Aleksei, or “Lokha,” as he was known for short, took charge of finding me a new horse, while it was decided that Edik would look after my veterinary affairs.

  Field trips with Lokha began well. We narrowed the horse search down to a farm 20 km out of town, owned by a proud Cossack named Nikolai Bandirinka. The stables of this onetime secretary of the local Communist Party was home to more than one hundred stud horses—the jewels of which were twenty prize stallions from lines famous for dressage, show jumping, and racing.

  Although Nikolai generally did not keep workhorses, he did by chance presently have one: a four-year-old palomino stallion named Sokol, whose name meant “magpie.” Sokol was about fifteen hands, broad and strong, with a flowing blond mane and an inquisitive nature. Although he had lived his whole life in a stable and had never been ridden, I liked him at once. There was only one problem: it was spring and Kok was a fully-fledged stallion. Luti offered to pay half of the $1,000 to buy the horse, and Nikolai agreed to organize a castration. The deal was agreed to, vaccinations administered, and blood samples taken.

  Solving the issue of my veterinary and customs papers with Edik proved more complex. To get exit permits from Russia I needed cooperation from all levels of bureaucracy, including the regional Timashevsk veterinary and transport authorities, the provincial laboratory, the veterinary department in Krasnodar, federal authorities in Moscow, and the equivalents of all of these in Ukraine. Naturally, this had never been done before by a horseback traveler here, and so I faced the same labyrinth of red tape and confusion I had experienced on the Kazakh border. Edik explained that locals would never go through with such a torturous process—it was far easier to pay bribes. Because I was a foreigner, though, this was tricky territory, since no official wanted to be held accountable for making an error in relation to my case.

  I persisted, and after establishing reliable contacts a semblance of routine developed to my life in Timashevsk. Two or three days per week I was ferried by Edik between the local veterinary department, the horses, and the laboratory in Krasnodar—there were twelve different diseases to be tested for, and for those tests that could not be done in Krasnodar, blood samples were couriered to labs in Moscow. Most days I also visited Luti in his office to fill him in on my progress. He sat in an executive chair, smoking imperiously, as he listened to my latest account. While there were fits of angry phone calls and times when Lokha was being ordered to do this and that, they were interspersed with long periods of silence during which he sat contemplatively, the one small window casting light onto his speckles of silver hair. “Tim,” he would say at last, pulling a rolled-up $100 bill from his top pocket, “take some pocket money and go and buy yourself some cigarettes or something!”

  On days in between the expeditions to Krasnodar, Lokha took me to Nikolai’s farm to train Sokol, whom I had already renamed Kok. The new Kok, as it turned out, was not only unridden but had never even been tied to a fence nor been fitted with a halter, saddle, crupper, or girth strap. Unaware of this initially, the first time I tied him to a fence he panicked, reared, and ended up hanging by his throat with the rope wrapped around his neck. I had four weeks to get him ready to take his place in the caravan.

  Using “approach and retreat” methods that the Watsons had taught me in Australia, I gradually accustomed Kok to my touch until I could rub him all over and he would stand still. The next step was to familiarize him with a girth strap. After initially taking it well, he let fly one afternoon with a fit of bucking and pig rooting, rearing up and punching his front hooves into the air. I had little experience with stallions, and he had a power and will that frightened me.

  During the second week of training, Kok underwent castration. With his legs bound and Nikolai standing on his neck, his testicles were clamped and then twisted around until they sheared off. As Kok struggled in agony, Nikolai laid a fist into his nose to distract him from the pain. I went home feeling sick.

  Despite also witnessing the castration, Lokha was unconcerned and had other things on his mind. The trips to Bandirinka’s farm doubled as reconnaissance missions to find venues for the infamous weekends of debauchery he shared with his boss. Earlier that day he had discovered a suitable sauna retreat nearby and couldn’t wait to get back to Timashevsk to share the news with Luti. “Oh, Tim. What more could you ask to relax? A good sauna, sex, drink, and sleep!” he said, one hand moving restlessly over the steering wheel, the other deftly pinching a cigarette. He and Luti were regularly sampling prostitutes, and conversations with Lokha generally orbited around this subject.

  He had already invited me along for the weekend and, unhappy that I had declined, turned to me. “What are you resisting for? You can have your pick of the women, eighteen-year-olds, twenties, younger, whatever you please!” His pointy leather shoe drove downward on the accelerator, and we swerved out around a truck and zoomed ahead.

  I was having difficulty coming to terms with the fact that Lokha, who indulged so openly with prostitutes, was also a family man with a wife and children. My discomfort with the subject surely reflected my upbringing in Australia, but in truth, I’d also never felt completely at home in a culture of masculinity in its more extreme forms. As a result, there was a part of me that felt out of place with the company I was keeping.

  Whatever the reason for my feelings, the awkwardness with which I reacted to Lokha’s offers frustrated him. This boiled over one day when I was explaining my deep reservations about a suggestion from Lokha that I should try to export Sokol to Ukraine on Kok’s passport. “This is Russia!” Lokha expostulated. “This is the way things are done here! Listen to me and you will get your horses through without trouble! You should quit worrying and have some fun with some girls while the offer stands! Sometimes you think too much!”

  A month went by, Sokol’s wound healed, the air in Timashevsk grew thick and warm, and all around the wheat and barley crops began to bulge. Lokha raved about the coming summer, which would be filled with a good harvest, barbecues, drinking, and romance. Quite apart from getting the horses ready for the border, I found every minute of my day occupied. The industrial base that had become my home was a thoroughfare for workers, mostly drunken, who all had stories to tell.

  Take, for instance, the security guard who worked night shifts from the shack where I slept. He was a balding man in his fifties, whom they all called Lisi, “Baldy.” Security watch for Lisi meant a night away from his wife, drinking a bottle of vodka and having sex with a string of women in the hut’s kitchen. All night he could be heard laughing hysterically as the level of vodka in the bottle went steadily down, then groaning and creaking as he made love on the tea table. One night I caught a glimpse of his lover storming out after a fight, pulling her dress on as she ran barefoot into the murky hues of the pre-dawn hours. Having let her go, he broke into my room, pulled me up by the arms, and, drawing his face close to mine, showered me with spittle as he said, “C’mon, Tim! What are you waiting for? Let’s go to the highway!” When I protested sleepily and asked why, he shook me in a rage. “To get prostitutes, of course!”

  I wasn’t the only one who had to endure these tirades, although I was probably the only one who found them the least bit curious. Shar
ing the hut with me was Yura, an illegal immigrant from Georgia who worked at the tile factory. His passport and visa had long expired; afraid of what might happen at the border, he hadn’t been home to see his family for four years. His situation had recently become more tenuous because of the deteriorating relations between Russia and Georgia. The nightly TV news was filled with stories condemning Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who was drumming up support for Georgia to join NATO. Moscow had just banned all imports of Georgian wine, cut off diplomatic relations, and halted cross-border postal services. During the dead of winter a mysterious explosion on the gas pipeline had left the population of Georgia’s capital, Tbilsi, freezing, and Georgia had accused Russia of sabotage. Georgians such as Yura who lived and worked illegally in Russia found themselves the focus of unwanted attention from authorities.

  Yura’s story would have resonated among hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in Russia who had come from former Soviet republics to work but were stuck with expired documents and cut off from family with no support or legal protections. Like everything in Russia, citizenship could be bought at a price, but few could afford the going rate, which apparently was around $5,000.

  To make matters more complicated, Yura’s girlfriend—a girl from a nearby village—had become pregnant, and he was doing his best to set up his shoebox of a single room as a family home. Yura was philosophical. “Life is different for everyone. For some it’s easy, for others hard; some are rich, some are poor. At least when you are poor you have nothing to fear. If you are rich, the law means nothing—but for that, people will try to kill you,” he said.

  He often spoke of his dream to set up a car detailing business, raise a family, build a home in Timashevsk and live with a sense of normalcy. Every night when I came home he would greet me with his round, boyish face, some Georgian wine, and stories about his home on the Black Sea coast. On weekends he would lie on his humble little sofa bed with his girlfriend and watch TV programs ranging from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to the Russian version of Big Brother—shows that portrayed a life in Moscow that might have well been on another planet.

  As days stretched into weeks in Timashevsk, it seemed that no matter whom I talked to, if they weren’t being strangled by bureaucracy or in the thrall of prostitution, then they were certainly tangled in corruption, voluntarily or otherwise.

  Chaika—the farmer who had hosted my arrival feast—said to me one day with a jaded look, “A couple of months ago the state prosecutor turned up to my farm and told me that I had broken some environmental laws. He offered me a choice, saying, ‘If you want to take me to court, then you are more than welcome. But I can guarantee that you will lose, because I am the court! The fine will be three hundred thousand roubles’—about $10,000. ‘But if you want, you can pay me thirty thousand roubles now and I will forget about it.’”

  Chaika’s muscular old body moved restlessly in the chair. One could sense the honest toil that had made up a good part of his life. Unlike Luti, whose transition from a collective farm director to big farmer was murky, he had built his farm up from scratch with hard work. He took a sip of his tea and continued. “So what am I supposed to do? If I don’t pay, then he is sure to bankrupt me and sell off the machinery cheaply to his friends.” Chaika, like so many other Russians, accepted as a given that the law was largely a tool for those in power to extract bribes and provide a pretext for convicting anyone the authorities pleased.

  My only time out from the intense swirl of events and people in Timashevsk was when I was alone with Sokol. After three weeks of circle work inside the compound at Bandarinka’s, I had finally been game enough to ride him. On the first attempt he bucked me clear and bolted back to the stables, but gradually he learned to trust me. During rides along a river out back of the farm I could feel his body bristling with wound-up energy as he moved nervously along, pausing and sniffing at flowers, grass, puddles, and trees. Unlike any other horse I had ridden, he had no problem negotiating fences, gates, tractors, even wire and steel, yet he was petrified of birds, the river, and the reeds that rustled in the wind. He was most at ease in his stable and around the roar of farm trucks. This couldn’t have been more contrary to horses of the steppe, which were petrified of anything remotely unnatural. His behavior, like that of the people in Timashevsk, were simply a reaction to the world into which they had been born.

  After nearly six weeks in Timashevsk, the feeling of tranquility and effervescence that I had had right after my arrival had faded. The constant battle with bureaucracy, on one hand, and the flagrant disregard for law, on the other, mingled with the culture of masculinity among my companions, had worn me down. One evening over a drink with Luti and Lokha my spirits bottomed out. They had been discussing Luti’s only son, who was set to be married in just a couple of weeks’ time. With a look of resignation Luti took a deep drag of his cigarette and eyeballed first Lokha, then me. “Yes, no matter how you look at it, it’s true. Wives over time inevitably become just friends, partners. You are yet to learn this, Tim, but it is a true fact.”

  I returned that night alone to the grimy mechanic’s shack where everything was imbued with the stench of alcohol and diesel. I felt as far away from the steppe as I had ever been on my trip. It was time to get back in the saddle and move on—a luxury that people living here did not have.

  The next morning I had a meeting with the priest of Dyad’kovskaya, whom I had originally met in the fields all those weeks before. The derelict state of his church seemed symbolic of the spiritual condition of the people I’d been meeting. In fact, the church where he held services was an abandoned Soviet-era school hall where cardboard posters of saints, Mary, and Jesus Christ were stuck to the wall with Scotch tape. Although in his grandfather’s day there had been three churches and a thriving attendance, his regulars at the Sunday service amounted to three old pensioners.

  “The original churches were torn down by the Bolsheviks, and my church has become a three-day church,” he said philosophically. “The only time people come to church is for baptism, marriage, and death. Money is the problem—if only people like Luti could give more generously, then I might be able to resurrect a sense of spirit in the local community.

  “You see, Tim,” he continued, “we are still suffering the destruction of the Soviet era. Modern-day Cossacks grew up as nonbelievers, and everything connected to ethics, morals, and spirituality takes a long time to resurrect. This is how I think of it: A wound on the body heals fast. A wound in the spirit might take ten years to heal. But if a wound is in the spirit of an entire people, it can take a hundred years. And what we experienced during the Soviet revolution wasn’t just a wound—it was a killing blow, a death of the soul and spirit. I would like to think that Russia could again be great in more than just the size of its territory, but at the moment it doesn’t seem to be the case.”

  I came away from my talk with the priest with my faith in the ability of people to transcend their social and political realities anything but restored. The truth was that the deeply penetrating corruption and the coping mechanisms of alcohol and prostitutes had personally affected me. It wasn’t that any of this was unique to Timashevsk, of course; in fact, they were realities that I had witnessed throughout my horseback travels. At this stage of the journey, though, two years after setting out, I felt less able to step back into the role of an observer and more a part of society. Particularly because I was traveling by horse, I depended on the generosity and goodwill of people of all walks of life, and so I was both a victim and beneficiary of corruption. This left me feeling conflicted.

  On the upside, the priest had got me thinking. Within the context of the upheaval of the twentieth century, there was a sense of cohesion among Luti’s men—a genuine care for one another—that had endured through these times and was perhaps incorruptible. Some, like Luti, could to some degree create their own rules. But even then, whether it was Luti, Edik, or Yura, they were all people eking out their precarious
lives the only way they knew and casting aside worries about the morrow they could not control. It was an attitude I could no doubt benefit volumes from.

  When finally my documents were in order, I gave Utebai to Igor Maluti at the metal recycling factory, who in turn donated him to a local riding school for children. Bandirinka gave me a royal send-off, dressed up in Cossack gear on one of his stallions, and Luti paid a visit to congratulate me on getting everything done.

  Two weeks after departing, I found myself riding through the crisp air of morning watching the sun splinter through fractured clouds, turning the reeds by the roadside a luminous green. On the horizon I could see ships floating idly on the silky gray sheen of the Azov Sea.

  I was a few kilometres shy of the ferry port of Kavkaz, where, if all went well, I was hoping to catch a ferry with my horses out of Russia and across the narrow Kerch Strait to Crimea. But I was under no illusions about my chances of getting through customs and immigration. Among other things, my unregistered visa remained an unresolved issue, and to reach the border I would have to pass through a police checkpoint.

  As the boom gate, police cars, and a watchtower crept into view, I had the terrible feeling that my whole journey was about to unravel. When I reached the border crossing, the guards failed to appear, and I thought for a moment they might let me pass. But then a door opened and a large man sauntered out, machine gun dangling loosely against his belly. “Tie them up and come inside!” he ordered.

  My passport was taken away by the superior officer, who went to run a check on their computer. He returned shaking his head. “What are we going to do with this lawbreaker?” he said, looking at his colleague. He was referring to the lack of the required registrations that would cover each day of my stay.

  I started to explain the circumstances that had prevented me from getting the proper documentation, but after a while the boss pulled me aside. “Look, I’ll tell you what to do. You see that registration date from the hotel in Elista that expired more than two months ago? Take this pen and put in today’s date.” He paused awkwardly. “Usually, for permission to write that, it would cost you eight hundred roubles …”