A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  One of the first things that struck me was that clearly the practice of telling the future had not died out, or else it had come back into fashion with the recent liberalization. At the central bus station, among the drunks lying on the ground I saw an old Mongolian telling a soldier’s fortune. On a red cloth with geometric patterns he dropped a handful of white pebbles. He divided them into pairs and groups of three and four, moved them about and gathered them up again while murmuring formulae that sounded like poems. An old system: one reads the future in the way the stones fall, as with cards, with the advantage that stones can be found everywhere on the plain, and the squares and circles can be drawn on the ground. In front of one of the new department stores I saw another old man calling out to the passersby, offering to read their future by burning some arz, the scented Mongolian herb which is dried and ground to a fine powder.

  In Gandan, the old complex of temples and monasteries, all that remains are the empty shells of a few structures. There I saw an old woman sitting at the foot of a pole around which people circled clockwise, praying. She told the future by means of a Buddhist rosary, wrapping it three times around her wrist and then dividing the beads into twos and threes. I asked her to do it for me. Her words were translated by a drunken Mongolian who had approached me and offered in French to be my guide:

  “You are a good and generous man,” she said. “A good future awaits you, and your life line is straight. At the end of this journey a great success awaits you.”

  “Is that all?” I asked my interpreter.

  “They’re all crooks who take advantage of tourists! Now we’ve got freedom and they’re all over the place,” he replied. I asked him if he knew someone who could perform the dalchin. He had no idea, but with the help of Ossendowski’s description he was able to direct me to a small unadorned tower that had two rows of prayer wheels in front of it. Inside it was empty, but the walls, darkened by time and the shadows of long-gone furnishings and statues, attested to the history of the place. Monks sat on wooden benches, feeding flocks of pigeons, but none of them knew what that history was. This was once the Temple of Prophecies—the place where the lamas, throwing a handful of dice on a low table, had counted the number of Ungern’s remaining days: 130. As I stood there rereading Ossendowski’s words, with my feet on the same stones, I seemed to see the temple restored to life, with everything in its place. As if in slow motion I saw the baron walk toward the altar with the small stone statue of the Enlightened One, brought from India, and kneel to pray before it.

  After that visit to the temple Ungern, with Ossendowski beside him, went to ask a final blessing from the Living Buddha. I retraced their path, but when I arrived the “museum” was already closed. A guard saw me peering through a crack in the door and let me in. He wanted to sell me some small Buddhist paintings taken from an old manuscript; I wanted to visit the place alone. In the easy language of gestures and money, we came to an understanding.

  A vast, deathly peace reigned within the enclosure. The grass grew tall and uncut, releasing a sweet smell as my feet pushed through it. I picked a few flowering stalks and laid them between the pages of the book to please Ossendowski: the same grass he had known, the same scent. I walked from one pavilion to another, and entered the room where Ossendowski and the baron were admitted to the presence of Hutuktu. Perhaps because the Mongolian Communists wished to show something of their past, especially to foreign guests, this place was preserved intact—a neatly arranged museum, empty of life. From a high window a thin ray of light from the setting sun found its way through the shadows of banners and tankas hung from the ceiling to reveal strange figures of painted gods and animals, golden forms of Buddhas, smiles and grimaces of demons lined up along the walls. At the far end, on a raised platform like an altar, the golden throne stood empty. Not a candle was lit, not a stick of incense burned; but the smell of yak butter, used for centuries, had permeated every piece of wood and fabric and still hung in the air to remind me of the past.

  On impulse I put Ossendowski on the ground and sat cross-legged before the throne to speak to him. “I’ve kept my promise. We’re here.” The air was motionless; then a breath of wind, stirring the fillets of colored silk hung beside a tanka, seemed to conjure a vision of other times. I felt the presence of Hutuktu on the throne, the presence of Ungern and Ossendowski, with others, behind. Of course in seeing and hearing these things I was playing a game, but it brought home to me how easily suggestion can work on a receptive mind, and how places and objects have a hidden life that opens before those who know their history.

  I would gladly have gone on playing at being in the past, at living for a few moments in that other time, to which I have so often felt I belonged more than to my own. But I remembered the guard, who would soon come to see what I was doing; and suddenly I heard the sounds of today, hooting buses far away on the road, and the vision dissolved.

  Only Ossendowski was still with me. With my intense interest, I had redeemed his book from death, made it something more than a mere object. Was that not how the Malaysian kris acquired a soul? Was it not also the message of a Tibetan story told by Alexandra David-Neel? A merchant goes to India, and his mother asks him to bring her a relic. He forgets. On his next journey he forgets again. The third time, when he is about to return home yet again without the relic his mother desires, he pulls a tooth from a dog’s skeleton lying by the roadside and brings it to her, saying it belonged to a great holy man. The mother is delighted, and venerates the tooth; other women come to pray before it, and in the end they all see rays of light emanating from that “relic.” Hence the Tibetan proverb: “If there is veneration even a dog’s tooth gives forth light.”

  I was tired, and decided to make an exception to my usual rule and have dinner at my hotel. But in the large socialist dining room there were no free tables.

  “Do you smoke?” I asked a Western gentleman sitting alone.

  “No.”

  I sat down. He was an American meteorologist.

  “Ah,” I said, “you are interested in the prediction of the weather, I am interested in the prediction of the future.”

  The man was taken aback, and could not see what we had in common. He told me his science had almost reached the limit of its possible development. “At present we can predict the weather with 99 percent accuracy for the next three days. The last step will be to master the theory of chaos. With that we’ll be able to make exact predictions for two or three years ahead,” he said.

  “But if one can predict the weather that way, why can’t one predict the future of a person? What’s the difference? We too are made of air, solids, clouds, dreams … and depressions,” I said.

  The meteorologist appeared sure he was dealing with an unbalanced person, and perhaps, from his point of view, he was not entirely wrong.

  In the next few days chance came to my aid several times.

  I stopped on the street to have my shoes cleaned by a barefoot man who sat on the ground on a piece of newspaper. He turned out to be a veterinarian specializing in the artificial insemination of cows. He had studied in East Germany, and said he had a friend from school—the most brilliant of his class—who had become a monk and might be able to help me in my search for the dalchin.

  One morning I took a taxi and learned that the driver was the head of the faculty of geology, trying to eke out his salary by driving a friend’s car. He took an interest in the history of his country, and had heard of an old temple, just reopened, where novices were again studying the mysteries of prophecy.

  And through the hotel manageress I met a woman who for years had been a member of the Communist Party and a government official. Now she was interested in religion, and could take me to the most famous fortune-teller in the city.

  The first to reappear was the vet, who telephoned early one morning before I went out running. Was I willing to pay for a sheep to be slaughtered before me, its scapula removed and burned? Of course!

  In a couple of
hours we were in a sort of two-storeyed wooden convent on the outskirts of the city, not far from the Gandan Temple. The vet said this was where the government housed all the lamas who returned from the countryside. A strong odor of cooked mutton wafted from the open doors, from which women and children peered to watch the unusual spectacle of a foreigner climbing the dusty, rickety stairs. The lama awaited us in a tidy room where I recognized all the tokens of Central Asian prosperity: a Chinese thermos, an alarm clock, a small radio. The only furniture was a large bed covered with a carpet, on which he sat to receive his guests. He was a tall, thin man with a handsome open face, a dark red tunic, dirty hands, black fingernails. He said he had learned to perform the dalchin from his father, a shepherd, who in turn had learned it from a lama who had also taught it to Hutuktu Bodgo Khan. That may not have been true, but I didn’t want to know—this wonderful story formed the last link in the chain of coincidences that connected me with Ossendowski and the baron, the chain that had guided me to that room.

  My lama knew the past well. He knew that it was Hutuktu who first forecast von Ungern’s death. The two were very close, he said, but not even Hutuktu could alter the baron’s fate. “He was a strange one, Hutuktu,” added the old lama. “He could make rain. He would take a shirt, hang it on a line, and its shadow would soon become a big cloud full of water.” After the civil war Hutuktu went to the United States, where he lived to a great age. His reincarnation was now living in Russia.

  Talking about the past had put the lama at ease. “When Hutuktu was born, a hunter saw a great fire in the valley—the yurt of his friend burning down,” he recounted. “The hunter was alarmed for his friend’s wife, who he knew was pregnant, and ran to help. When he arrived the fire was gone and the yurt undamaged. Inside was the mother with the newborn boy. But the fire? Then everyone understood: it was a sign that a special person had been born. Soon afterward the child was recognized as the reincarnation of the Living Buddha.”

  The lama said he was eighty years old. He was born in the year of the rat, 1912. “I don’t have much time left now,” he said, as if he were late for an appointment. I asked him if he was afraid of death. “I am weary of this life, and long to enter the next. I know it will be better, much better, and without suffering,” he said, laughing. He never once used the word “death” in all our conversation.

  The dalchin had been prepared in the courtyard of a house some distance away. We walked for half an hour through a maze of lanes between endless wooden fences, behind which lay the gray sprawl of Mongol dwellings, all identical: a green or brown door with white designs on it led to a yard of trodden earth with a mud-brick shack on one side, and on the other, as a constant reminder of the nomadic past, a felt yurt blackened by time.

  The sheep was bleating amid a group of curious children who had come to watch. The old lama entered the yurt, sent all the others out, and began to pray. I saw a ritual knife, curved like a half-moon, pass from his hands to those of a young novice. There was a commotion behind the house, and soon the novice returned, carrying a flat fan-shaped bone the size of a hand. “This is the shoulder blade,” said the lama, and with another knife he began to scrape off the remaining fragments of meat. Then he took a cloth and vigorously rubbed the bone until it was spotless, almost gleaming with a buttery whiteness like that of old jade.

  “Material purity is reflected in spiritual purity,” said the lama, interrupting his litanies. “On this purity depends the quality of the prophecy.” The preparation of the bone took at least an hour. The time passed slowly, punctuated by the murmur of prayers and the clatter of knives and basins behind the house where the sheep, my gift to the family whose guests we were, was being skinned and quartered.

  Holding the bone before his eyes like a priest holding up the ciborium, the lama rose and went into the yurt. Only I and my veterinary interpreter followed him. It was vital for him to concentrate, so no one could be near him who might communicate, even involuntarily by thought, the answers he was to give.

  We sat on the ground by a brazier made of an old petrol can. The fire burned slowly, fed with small round cakes. “Excrement of cows,” said the vet. Into the brazier the lama threw a small handful of arz which filled the yurt with gray smoke and a dense, agreeable smell. He apologized for not being a great fortune-teller: all he could do, he said, was look in the bone for the answers to my questions.

  “How many days do I have to live?” the baron had asked his lama. I asked mine the same thing. He gazed intensely into my eyes, brought the bone to his lips, and in a whisper repeated the question. After some further prayers, he laid the bone in the fire with two metal chopsticks like those the Mongols use for eating. It slowly turned black. He took it out, blew off the ashes and studied its surface for a long time. Finally, in a solemn voice and in what the vet said was a literary and sibylline language, he said:

  “According to where one is born, one believes in different gods. But you, though born elsewhere, have your life here. Buddhism will help you more than any other religion. Your vital sign is very strong, and if you follow the path of Buddha for which you are made, that sign will become even stronger. The paths of the future are open to you.” He threw another handful of arz onto the fire.

  “Do you see no obstacles in the time ahead of me?” I asked.

  Slowly the lama took up the bone again, whispered, prayed, again scrutinized the veinings made by the fire, and said: “There are no mountains to cross, there are no precipices to conquer, only a level road.” (What a bore!) “You must only be careful in traveling by ship, especially if the voyage has to last for some days.”

  I thought of my plan to return from Europe to Asia by sea, and asked what I could do to protect myself.

  “I will give you a mantra which is excellent for you and which you will recite whenever you feel in danger. Here it is. Write:

  “Om Dadid Ada

  Om Dadid Ada

  Om Muni Mujni

  Maha Muni Ye’soha.”

  The session went on for some time longer, with other questions and other answers of little import. The whole ceremony had left me cold and disappointed. Not for a moment had I felt the mystery which had so fascinated Ossendowski, and me too as I read his book. Perhaps it was because his was a time of great events, when people lived and died more dramatically; but whatever the reason, that rite performed for me in a yurt in Ulan Bator had lost all the meaning it had had for him in the old city of Urga. The procedure, the gestures, formulae and invocations were probably the same. What I missed was all the rest: the collective consciousness of a people, its fear, its faith in the occult, its hope for some kind of salvation. My dalchin lacked the spirit of the time.

  The Mongolia of 1921 was a different country from that of 1993, and in the interval the Mongols had become a different race. There, as in Tibet, the previous government was an oligarchy of monks, headed by Hutuktu, who was at once god and king, priest and feudal lord. The lamas had all the power: they were the administrators, the doctors, the fortune-tellers, the generals, the magicians and the judges. Life was pervaded by great uncertainty, death was a constant companion. For the Mongols, legends and myths were as true and real as the rising of the sun. A lama could send hundreds of ill-equipped soldiers into battle simply by conjuring before their eyes, with a wave of his hand, a glorious vision of the future: opulent yurts, fields with huge flocks, women dressed in silk and covered with jewels. The soldiers believed it all, and really saw that world for which they went to their death.

  Nature was animate. Every mountain was the refuge of a god, every ford the lair of a demon. The whole immense land was a realm of mystery, strewn with the bones of ancestral shepherds and conquerors and the ruins of ancient cities like Karakorum, swallowed up by the sand. From that land salvation would come. The Mongols in 1921 lived in the certainty that even if the whole world were doomed to destruction, beneath their feet the Underworld would survive. It was populated by an ancient tribe which had vanished sixty thousand
years before, ruled by the King of the World who had meanwhile penetrated all the secrets of nature. In that Underground Kingdom there was no more evil; there science had developed not to destroy but to create; there men and women were the possessors of all that was knowable; there the destiny of all humanity was written. When Ossendowski arrived in Mongolia he was told that barely thirty years before, the King of the World had made a brief visit to a monastery near Urga. When he arrived all the altar candles had lit spontaneously, all the braziers had begun burning incense; and he, the mythical King of Agharti, described for centuries in the sacred texts, had sat on his throne before an assembly of the most important lamas of the time and forecast the future of the world. He began with the words: “More and more shall men forget their souls, and care only for their bodies …”

  The Mongols of 1921 believed all this and lived by it. In Ossendowski’s Urga—a place of mystery and horror, but also of great fascination—incredible things could happen. Now, no more. Modernity has swept away that universe of faith. It has “liberated” the Mongols from the slavery of their legends and their lamas, but at the same time it has emptied their temples, destroyed all the meaning of their ceremonies, and in so doing impoverished their lives. The prophecy of the King of Agharti has been amply borne out: men no longer think of anything but their bellies, and in their world there is no more room for poetry.

  Before leaving I asked the lama how he read the answers in the bone. It all depended, he said, on the veining brought out by the fire. The bone has two sides, of which one is held facing the person performing the dalchin and the other toward the person inquiring about his future. If the veins appear on the outer face the answer is positive, if inside it is negative. The other criterion is the direction of the veins: the best are those that radiate from the center of the bone to the edge. Veins that go up are a sign of good changes, those that go down are bad.