by Dina Bennett
Out of the corner of my eye I notice three tall Mongolian women striding through the crowd. They’re dressed in claret silk dels, the traditional, loose-fitting Mongolian tunic buttoned on the right shoulder, the neck a high-fitted collar, the fabric falling in folds to the calf. Each wears a red silk and velvet ceremonial skull cap, perched low over her glossy long black hair. On their feet are leather boots with pointed upturned toes, richly decorated with bold-colored appliqués and embroidery. They’re heading for a small raised platform and to make it through they hold their instruments above the crowd. The evening’s entertainment has arrived.
What Women Do
KHARKORIN-BAYANHONGHOR
Next morning, when I see James sitting in his convertible, a hot flush of shame rises at the memory of his dismissal. It’s a beautiful morning, sun smiling, air bright, and I don’t want to begin this day in a bad mood. I could walk right by him, but instead persuade myself to do something I’m normally disinclined to do when my feelings have been hurt: forgive. I smile and say, “James! That champagne last night was so wonderful. You really were generous with that, you know. You made a lot of people happy.” Which is the truth, and it makes me feel good to say it. James looks at me. He doesn’t exactly return my smile, but I detect a slight crinkle around his eyes that suggests he just may be pleased.
With a seemingly easy day ahead, we decide to leave at our assigned time of 10:30. This gives us a chance to visit the monastery we passed yesterday. We enter through an open gate in the expanse of crenellated, whitewashed walls that guard the sacred interior. Inside, scattered as if by some immense divine hand, are small wood and stone temples, each on its own raised patio. Though faded, I can detect remnants of what once must have been vivid yellow and red paint adorning each building. Now, only faint strips of color remain, the rest having been blasted by centuries of wind. Apparently neither the Mongolian government nor any NGO feels this monastery is worth saving, and there are too few monks to keep the place up. Amidst the echoing silence, we wander along stone paths blackened with lichen. I step onto one of the temple patios, careful not to crush the few blades of grass and an occasional wilting flower that have managed to grow there. Splintery temple doors are locked, broken windows boarded over, so we walk the temple’s perimeter, inspecting faint carvings on the weathered exterior. It’s quiet, so quiet I can hear the faint whistle of a light breeze. Despite this, the empty grounds resonate with an ineffable spirituality, as if to say, “You can tear us down, but you can’t destroy us.”
It’s a glorious day to drive, sunny and bright with that crisp clarity you get at higher altitudes. We’re back on the road when, with the monastery walls still in view, we make a left turn, cruise up into third gear, and the shock absorber mount gives way. Eight hours of work in UB have come to naught. We circle back to Kharkorin, the village we thought we’d said goodbye to five minutes earlier. “Car repair?” I shout out the window to a guy on an idling motorbike. He nods and makes a large circular wave with his arm, indicating “Follow me.” We inch down narrowing lanes, passing tin shacks with babies sitting in the dirt out front, guarded by the family cur. Our guide points through a gate to a littered yard in which reside a few engines and motorcycle carcasses. Our repair shop. As Bernard backs Roxanne in, a thin, dark-skinned Mongolian in shorts and sandals stands up, a shock of black hair falling over his face. He drags on a cigarette dangling from his lips. Next to him sits his personal version of a welding torch, exactly what we’re hoping for. Bernard sets about using hand gestures and sand drawings to explain what’s needed. Soon there are several men leaning against their motorbikes, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, contributing their advice.
I’m half inclined to vent some of my frustration by stomping around a bit. We’re only a third of the way through Mongolia, with 1,120 miles to go before we even get to Siberia. There’s been something so endless, so daunting about the landscape, so remorselessly punishing about the roads, that I feel undone. What I want is to do some serious emoting, but without offending any of the polite people here who have so willingly dropped what they were doing to help us. Bernard doesn’t understand this sort of reaction.“What’s the big deal,”he’d say, fixing me with a steady gaze.“Why worry about what hasn’t even happened? Who cares?”
Luckily, I’m cast a life line by a slim woman with a very bad haircut, her black hair sticking every which way from her head. She peers from the repair shack door and motions me in. Stepping across the greasy, littered threshold I enter her personal space, part office, part home, all in a narrow room six feet wide and twelve feet long. At the back, next to the small desk and twisted chair, both signs of prosperity, there’s a two-burner hot plate. I love to make myself at home in people’s kitchen, puttering about with the lady of the house, pulling out cookies and mugs to make a tasty hot beverage. Not knowing the formalities here, I spin around aimlessly, not sure whether to get to work at the desk or insert myself in the cramped space by the burner for some repair shop bonding. I feel a hand on my shoulder, see another gesturing to the ground, as my hostess politely but firmly insists I sit on a thin mattress piled with pink and floral quilts. Once I’m safely ensconced on the floor, we’re both silent as she fills a tin kettle with water from a jug. I have all the time in the world to wait for that water to boil. She makes tea, tossing a few handfuls of leaves into a chipped tea pot. I watch. She hands me a small plastic cup. The brew is hot and strong, with a generous spoonful of sugar stirred in. Not speaking each other’s language, we pass the time as women do the world over. She shows me dog-eared photographs of family. I ooh and aah. We laugh at our inept communication. I kick myself that I haven’t brought photographs to share. Together we sip, compare wedding rings, analyze our shoes, smile, and so the minutes tick away until Roxanne is ready to carry us forward.
On the road again two hours later, we drive along in silence. I stare out the window. The landscape is still brown. Sometimes I have the impression that perhaps we haven’t moved at all. It’s hard to believe that the countryside could be even emptier than before, but it is. We’re still far from the true peaks of the Altai mountains, but there’s definitely snow melting somewhere. Occasionally, by which I mean once every few hours, we reach a small stream of clear running water, which we cross on yet another rickety plank bridge. Each one looks the same, a collection of splintered boards, board fragments, and gaps where boards used to be, these last perhaps the result of someone needing firewood more than they needed a safe bridge to cross. The bridges are musical, thunking like a drum as the loose boards seesaw under Roxanne’s tires. I trust in their soundness for one simple reason: there are no toppled Rally cars in the stream below us. Near every bridge, and therefore near the water, there’s inevitably a solitary ger. They’re still simple affairs, but thanks to the increased water, they now have a tiny garden and a few stick-figure trees.
Bernard stops Roxanne every ninety minutes or so to check what’s going on underneath. After one such inspection, he emerges with bad news. Roxanne’s leaf spring has cracked further. I know what a leaf spring looks like because I saw one when we were rebuilding Roxanne. It’s made of gently curved, heavy steel, with a little curlicue on each end, which is how it’s held in place under the rear end of the car. It’s a part I assumed had redundancy built into it, as it seemed to me there were always several leaves included in one spring. My assumption was, if one cracked there would be a couple of leaves remaining, to pick up the slack so to speak. I thought this was quite clever, a bit like our dual fuel pumps.
Seeing the furrows creased into Bernard’s brow, I can tell we’re in more than a bit of a pickle and that my assumptions about leaf springs were incorrect. I suspect that, if the leaf spring cracks through, then what I promised Roxanne would not happen, will. We’ll be stuck in the Gobi, unable to drive out. I devolve to a response that I adopted when I was five years old and that even then didn’t serve me well. I say nothing, believing that if I ignore the situation, it will go away. Just
like then, by not speaking about my worry, my insides start to churn in turmoil.
Like me, Bernard now does what he does best. He relaxes in the face of looming disaster, one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on the storage compartment between us. I follow suit. What’s happened, happened. Wailing over it won’t change it. I’m not resigned about this. It’s more like I’m in the center of the hurricane, where it’s preternaturally calm.
Bernard’s eye is better now, but his face is starting to look drawn and etched with fatigue. I reach across to caress his rough, stubbly beard, remembering its brownness when we first met, noticing its distinct salt and pepper coloring now. With his free hand he covers mine and we drive on like that, his left hand on the steering wheel, my right hand on the route book, our two hands together in between.
Circus Elephant
BAYANKHONGOR-ALTAI-KHOVD
As we approach the towering Altai mountains, it becomes clear to me that the interaction we had with people in China, modest though it seemed at the time, is a thing of the past; that the P2P, which is taking us through such extraordinary country, is not going to yield the connection with the local populace of which I’d dreamed. On the positive side, this stokes a disproportionate delight when I finally see a Mongolian on horseback. There he is, a young man on a small but well-fed black pony. His blousy cotton shirt, cinched with a wide belt, billows in the ever-present wind. A long, willowy stick with a lash of string at its tip, with which he moves his goat herd, rests lightly on his shoulder. He’s like a centaur, my own personal myth come true. After driving for hours through landscape that doesn’t change, seeing anyone at all is cause for delirious joy. To see both a person and a horse at the same time? Well, I’d given up hope. He’s a beautiful sight, a man and his horse in landscape that suits them both. We stare at each other. Out here in the true middle of nowhere, we’re as astonishing to him as he is to us.
On the negative side, my tiredness each day is mounting, and the more spent I feel, the more of a struggle it is to maintain cheeriness. I’ve always been moody, the child described by puzzled adults as perpetually having a dark cloud over her head. One of the tasks I’ve set myself for the Rally is to put extra effort into being a good sport. Luckily, I have good people to learn from.
That evening in Bayankhongor, we join Robert and Maddy for dinner. “How was your day today?” I ask Robert, setting my dinner tray on the table. He ignores my question and says instead, “Let me get you a beer,” and leaves. When he returns he plunks the chilled bottle on the table, gives my shoulders one of those squeezy little massage things, sits down, and bestows on me a devilish grin. “My day, you asked? Awful! Terrible! Right Maddy?” and he laughs so hard I’m not sure what to make of it.
She smiles broadly and elaborates, “We had six flats today.” Robert is now wiping tears from his eyes, running his fingers through his dustcoated hair and mussing it into startled spikes.
“Six flats!” he echoes her. “I’m a lucky man.”
“You are?” I ask, utterly lost.
“Yes. Because I brought seven spares.” He howls with merriment.
Maddy bestows an affectionate, bemused glance on Robert. “Didn’t that drive you crazy?” I ask her.
“What for? It gave me time to be out of the car and rest.” Her hair, too, is sticking up in spikes, but on her it’s fashionable, aided by the touch of lipstick and tight-fitting white T-shirt she’s put on for dinner. I make a mental note to buy a sexy white shirt, ignoring that there are no shops to buy anything in, even if I did have time to do so.
I’m not the only one struggling. The web of anxiety in which I’m often entangled has snagged others as well. The atmosphere in the camp’s dining tent at night is no longer as convivial as it used to be. Laughter is scarcer. People slump over their plates, eyes staring unseeingly at their carrots, too worried or tired or frustrated to talk. The whole tone of the Rally has changed. I hear that one of our early friends in Beijing, Ralph, is so lost that even GPS coordinates can’t locate him for rescue. As I learn later in Russia, he and his son will spend two days sipping warm orange Fanta and nibbling severely rationed crackers before a local truck drives by and rescues them, after which they complete a superhuman 72-hour drive, without sleep, to catch up to us. A tiny Fiat has disappeared. No one knows where they are or even how to find them, let alone make contact. I figure it’s only a matter of time before Roxanne has a catastrophic breakdown in some lonely corner of a lonely corner. I’ll be left there to ration lemon Luna bars, while Bernard’s tiny figure disappears over the far tawny hills to seek help.
The organizers are forever on their radios, trying to find other lost crews, organizing trucks to haul wrecked Rolls Royces. The last time there was a general mood of euphoria was over the champagne in Kharkorin. Tension grips the camp. Day runs into night runs into day. Many teams don’t pull in till midnight; others depart at midnight, fraught with concern that they won’t be able to complete the next day’s distance. The mechanics are inundated with demands for repairs, welds, tows, spares. They catnap in half-hour stretches, running on caffeine and nicotine and nerves. As for their lighthearted promise of taking care of cars in the order signed in? Never happens. Whoever whines loudest gets their attention. Everyone is zombie-like with exhaustion. People quickly gulp a few bites of food and then return to working on their crippled cars. When someone learns of a good mechanic or a well-equipped repair shop in town they guard it like classified information, a national secret not to be revealed.
There’s other bad news. Someone’s had their entire tool bag stolen while working under their car on a village side street. During the day people of course have to work on their car wherever it breaks down. In Mongolia that means a sand pit, a gravely track, a rocky slope. If a Rally mechanic’s van happens by, they stop to ask if you need help. If you do, they give it. If you think you can manage on your own, you give the classic OK sign, tip of thumb and index finger pinched together in a circle, remaining three fingers sticking up in the air. They continue on, looking for someone in worse trouble. I have no worries about things getting stolen while driving the desert. There’s no one around to take anything. At day’s end, when we’re near a village, it’s another story. In villages, people flock to our cars like thirsty goats to a stream. In the case of the stolen tool bag, everyone assumes it was a local, though I’m not above suspecting one of those Rally crews who came equipped with only a screwdriver and a wrench. I find it easy to understand how a satchel full of tools would make a tempting target. People are so poor here that even one tool would be worth a relative fortune. When Bernard works on Roxanne in a town I’m always standing guard while he’s underneath. This job pleases me to no end. I’ve finally found a way to have some face time with the locals.
My outsiderness is engraved on everything about me, from my clothes and shoes, to the quantity of pens stashed in Roxanne’s glove compartment. Even the soft layer of fat around my hips speaks to my well-being and thereby my otherness, though that layer is slowly shrinking thanks to my diet of gorp, jerky, and worry. Then, there’s the small matter of Roxanne. She’s hard not to notice. All this makes me an object of magnetic allure, and when we reach a town and try to accomplish repairs, I instantly draw a crowd. People swarm around like kids to a traveling circus. I’m the three rings and the elephant in a pink tutu combined.
It’s flattering, in an awkward way. I’m not above a few minutes of preening, until I realize the crowds aren’t the least bit interested in me. What they want to see, touch, sit in, is Roxanne. They jostle four deep around her. Every bit of car minutiae is a fabulous novelty that thrills them. Seat belts are tried on, windshield visors flapped up and down, the chunky plastic clips on them unclipped and pinched onto fingers and noses, wipers plucked like stiff guitar strings, plastic storage boxes popped open and snapped shut. Roxanne’s tail lights, fenders, steering wheel, and tires are knocked on, marveled at, twisted, caressed. As I stand aside like a proud mother, happy
that Roxanne is able to offer such pleasure, I can’t help keeping a surreptitious eye on the movable belongings in the car. We need them all.
The towns that we pass through, or where we stop in hopes of more accommodating repair options, are plain and impoverished. I see row upon row of squat concrete houses, many with rebar sticking from the roof like a scraggly mohawk, walls gaping with holes where windows would be. Still, a village bespeaks humanity, and I’ll take a brief sojourn among even the most derelict of buildings when the alternative is fourteen more hours on desert gravel, cresting washboards the size of storm waves, heading straight into the afternoon sun. By culture and custom, Mongolians are a nomadic people, kind and generous when they’re not conquering neighboring countries. They have a fine decorative sense, lining their mobile gers with exquisitely colored and carved interiors. Unfortunately, they’ve been beset by mining interests from China, with its insatiable need for all the minerals that exist under Mongolia’s parched lands. Rich in copper, coal, and gold, the issuance of mining licenses has turned Mongolia’s economy into the fastest growing in the world in 2011, and prompted some citizens to start calling their homeland “Minegolia.” Formerly open grazing lands have been fenced off to protect the new mines, leaving families without enough land on which to sustain their herds. Selling their animals in hopes of securing a job in town, they wind up with neither. Without animals, they can’t return to the countryside as they’d have nothing to live on if they did.