Crossing Allenby Bridge

by Michael Looft

  “Lesion? Like lung cancer?” I was astounded.

  “Yes. This is not that uncommon,” Mark said, and my heart tumbled into a dark abyss. “The pollution level is so high here during the long winter months and babies are most at risk. In the countryside things are different, and many of the wealthier people send their families out there to ride out the winter, but here it is just too much for their little lungs.”

  “I’ll buy the damned thing and give it to them!” I meant to say in a whisper but wound up almost shouting into Mark’s ear, feeling the anger rise in me. Tsenguun heard me from the other side and I noticed his head lean forward and catch my eye. I’m sure he was trying to warn me that raising my voice in such a manner might put off my host, if not outright offend him. I leaned back in defeat, looking out over these people, not caring anymore what my face looked like. The older woman approached with a teapot and cups on a small tray. She set them down on a small plastic table that Bold had swung over in front of us.

  “Please,” he said in his language and gestured an open hand to the table. I only knew what he said because Mark whispered the translation in my ear.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, the five of us including the old man sipping tea and not saying a word. The more uncomfortable and intrusive I felt, the more Mark seemed to relax into it like he could have stayed all morning. How could he expect to earn a living selling forty-dollar stoves at this rate–sitting around drinking tea with people who couldn’t even afford one? The child continued to shine her eyes on me, and I felt a compulsion to pick her up and hold her. Strange, given I was never much of a baby person, especially after losing the only one my ex-wife ever delivered.

  After the tea, I expected us to bid farewell and head out to the next house, feeling an anxious twinge pulling at me. Instead, Bold brought out a packet of cigarettes, and Tsenguun and Mark accepted his offer to smoke. I couldn’t stand the things after having quit the habit decades earlier. While the four men smoked away, I slid a hand into my pocket and felt for a few large Tugrik bills. I didn’t want anyone to notice me tucking a few of the bills into the cushion behind me. The older woman brought out a large open leather sack and some bowls. Bold and Tsenguun said a few words, and then Tsenguun turned to me.

  “He asks if you want to try the traditional Mongolian drink.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “We call it Airag. It is a kind of milk.” Bold gave an approving nod as Tsenguun spoke, holding a bowl out for me.

  “Well, I don’t want to be rude.” I spent the previous twenty years telling everyone I was lactose intolerant, but after my little outburst I was eager to make up for any offense.

  “Careful.” Mark placed a warning hand on my wrist and spoke in a low whisper. “Just take a small sip. Don’t chug it or you’ll be sorry.”

  I followed Mark’s advice and took a tiny mouthful of the unpleasant stuff and its sourness stayed in my mouth for the rest of the morning. Mark also took a sip, and I wondered if he ingested any of it. This seemed to please Bold, and after a few moments in a grand sweep of his arms he motioned for all of us to stand up and took both of my hands in his. He gave me a deep, penetrating stare and grasped me like we were brothers-in-arms bidding one last farewell before the great battle. This poor man with his rich self-respect beyond what I’d encountered in most wealthy men both intimidated me and inspired my own spirit to rise up.

  Bold’s wife sidled up next to him and I could feel the love woven through the family as Altansarnai looked up at me with those inquisitive eyes. In that moment, I wanted to be Bold. He had it all. Nevertheless, he would soon know the deep grief that comes from losing one’s child, perhaps his only one. Peering into his hopeful face sent a hairline fracture through my heart, and I wanted to go and hide in my dark corner. I left his ger asking Mark if Virgil’s quote about Fortune favoring the bold might come to pass for him. Mark shrugged off my remark without a word.

  The rest of that day was a blur of stepping in and out of gers, most of it lost on me as I couldn’t take my mind off the sweet girl with trusting eyes. She bore a slight resemblance to Mila–that poor little thing that didn’t live past a week. Her eyes still carried a glow with remembrances of the soul’s journey before this lifetime. When I drifted back into Mark’s conversations, I stared at his profile next to me, his head growing distant. Did he feel the same as I did? He’d been doing this for a few months, with hundreds of conversations under his belt. Had those experiences desensitized him to the same pain I felt? If so, where had that pain gone? But he was still young with little life experience and personal hardship, and perhaps these things flew under the radar. I couldn’t know for sure. These musings flew through the sky of my mind without leaving a stain of judgment.

  I nibbled on jerky and trail mix hidden in my coat pocket throughout the day when no one was looking. It didn’t seem appropriate to eat in front of poor people whose ceremonial offerings of tea and sweets taught me a mountain of lessons in hospitality and humility. Between missing lunch and holding nine cups of tea in my bladder, I was ready to return to the hotel by the end of the afternoon. Mark must have sensed that I was a wreck and he patted me on the back and said I did well, as if I were a trainee. Perhaps I was in training.

  Before I left, Mark asked me away for the weekend. Since his crew didn’t receive too many visitors in the winter, he suggested we use the occasion of my visit to head out of town to enjoy the countryside and some clean air. While it didn’t seem like the end of winter from the snowy remnants and frigid temperatures, the weather was “turning nice” as Tsenguun put it. After only a few days in UB and spending the past two seeing the worst of it, I leapt at the invitation to get out of Dodge. I declined both an offer for dinner that evening and another round of ger visits the following day before taking a taxi back to my hotel.

  Later, as I stood in the hot shower, hand propping me up and gazing down at the water flowing through the drain, it was the first time in my life I realized what a luxury that would be for someone like Bold, or the majority of UB, to experience. I could wash away a few of the day’s emotions and step out feeling like a new man. They could not. I could put on clean clothing and enjoy a meal of my choosing from a variety of international cuisines, eating as little or as much as I wanted. They could not. I could visit the kyabakura hostess bar and have slender, scantily-clad young Mongolian women fawning over me, stroking my ego while I drank and sang karaoke songs, trying my best (without success) to lure one of them back to my room. They could not. I could finish out the evening lying down on clean, fresh scented linens in a climate controlled room set to a perfect temperature and humidity levels. They could not. I could sleep all night without hearing a pack of dogs fighting over a dead animal or the sound of a baby coughing up bloody phlegm. They could not. In the morning I would forget it all while reading the Wall Street Journal on my laptop. Some things I could not forget.

  The next morning, I lay in bed for several hours, exhausted. The pitiful gym at the hotel consisted of a single treadmill, a few dumbbells, and some steel contraption that I couldn’t quite figure out. So, between the cold weather, lingering jet lag and whatever workouts I could muster, my descent into sluggish depression arrived swiftly. Heading out into the countryside for a change of scenery might do me some good. Sometime midmorning the dated telephone on my bedside table rang and when I picked it up I heard Elena’s chipper voice bursting out of it.

  “You sound different,” she said after pleasantries and my apologizing for not having called her since I arrived, which she brushed off with a huff. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it? I can feel your heart through the line.”

  “Oh, just a bit of jet lag.”

  “Jet lag? Are you sure it’s just that?”

  Early on in our relationship she had introduced something absent in all my other friendships. These were brief periods of silence, which I accepted after an initial struggle to fill the uncomfortable void with noise. She called them “cent
ering moments”–an opportunity to let our real selves climb out as she put it. At first, I wondered if they were manipulative tactics couched in New-Agey mumbo-jumbo language, but I played along without mentioning anything to her. Yet, as I began to give over to the silence, I felt a calm liberation wash over me. Over time I grew not only to appreciate them to quiet down my incessant mind chatter, but to look forward to the serenity enveloping both of us. Of course, the silence seemed much longer on the phone than in person, and in my mind, became more a test of wills to keep it going rather than break its healing connection.

  A silly thought ran through my head as I sat there on the phone with Elena. I wondered how much an entire minute of silence was costing her. Five dollars? I shrugged it off, realizing we were connecting through the stillness. When I began talking to her, my heart cracked open and the previous day’s events tumbled out in a flurry of words. Elena listened with a gentle ear, and like a midwife she allowed me to give birth to a side of my heart I’d not seen before. I told her about everything: about Mark, about the ger district, about the Indian-Mexican food, about seeing the past reflected in a baby’s innocent eyes. Later, I would identify that conversation as a turning point for me. In fact, it was also the moment when I realized that the world I had known before, the world that was so easy to navigate, no longer became so easy because I had stepped out of it and into another one more alive and real. Nevertheless, this new world provided nourishment to a deeper part of me that had been hungry for a long time. Maybe it would get easier someday.

  CHAPTER 3 | CHINGGIS KHAAN and turtle rock

  Two days and three shiatsu massages later we headed out of town in a gleaming white Land Cruiser on a crisp sunny morning. They picked me up at the hotel after breakfast and as I shut the door on the passenger side, I glanced back to see Stefan and Tsenguun spread out on the bench seat behind me, while Mark and a young woman sat in the rear. It was my first glimpse of Sarah. She had a plain face and gums that showed when she smiled, but her warm glow filled the vehicle as she spoke, like a vortex where all life connected and pulsated through her. She had a down-to-earth quality and a look in her eye that spoke of kindness to the bone. She made people feel good about themselves just by talking to them. At least that’s what she did for me. I wondered if she’d committed Carnegie’s book to memory or won friends and influenced people just by being her natural self. Either way, she struck me as one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met.

  We rode out east of UB. Our driver, a middle-aged Mongolian with aviator sunglasses and the look of a man who did what he was told without much talk. He remained in the backdrop during the entire trip. Once past the peri-urban ger settlements the landscape morphed into sweeping plains. I was surprised to find that aside from the white caps atop the surrounding mountains, little snow lay on the ground, only dust mixed with the hints of new grass. With each passing minute, the country grew more majestic and brimming with beauty. After my experiences in UB the previous week, I had all but written the entire nation off as a cesspool of hungry nomads huddled together to survive an unforgiving climate. In a country with a land area over twice the size of Texas with half of its 2.5 million people packed into a capital that holds the reins to most of its resources, it’s easy to miss its magnificence if one never leaves the city.

  I chatted away with Sarah, learning of her passion for using computer technology to help the poorest of the poor. I also discovered that she was a preacher’s daughter, a fact that helped to explain the heartfelt way she related to others as though she already knew them quite well. Not in a phony way, but rather with the touch of divinity in her every move. I could feel Mark’s love for her in his smiling gaze, and at the same time I wondered if she felt any different for him than anyone else. In another time and place she might have been misunderstood like Daisy Miller for her gregarious personality and general openness to life. In our time she was a rare gem that gleamed with the brilliance of the best humanity had to offer.

  Stefan explained the agenda to us through a mixture of broad strokes and scintillating details, rivaling a seasoned tour guide for his effectiveness in piquing my interest. We would first stop at an enormous stainless-steel statue of Chinggis Khaan an hour outside the capital, which was just completed and stood 40 meters tall. We would then proceed into the vast Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, visiting a place called Turtle Rock, a Buddhist monastery and several other tourist sites before spending the night in a ger tent.

  The drive to the statue was supposed to take an hour, but a few kilometers before reaching it our vehicle veered off the road, engulfed in a fierce sandstorm. Enmeshed in the sand equivalent of a blizzard whiteout, we sat motionless for twenty minutes. I marveled at its ferocity and the ability of nature to grind our plans to a screeching halt with scant warning. Like watching the flames of a roaring campfire, I fell into a daydream, envisioning us trapped inside a capsule propelled through an artery, each grain of brown sand representing a molecule of blood. We could continue to fight against the current, or give in and be sucked downstream into the beating heart. None of us spoke, mesmerized by the piercing sound of sand pellets skittering around our vehicle. Then, after at least a full minute, the light of day began peeking through and in an instant the sand all but disappeared from the sky. Stefan cheered first, and the rest of us soon followed with our own whoops of relief.

  Eventually, we made it to the Chinggis Khaan statue. I wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of it, a gargantuan 250 tons set against the backdrop of a sweeping landscape of snow-capped mountains and little else. Perhaps because it was just completed and still winter, we found the area surrounding it barren save the stone archway at the entrance. We stood under that archway, some distance away from the statue itself. Chinggis himself straddled a shining horse (said to be the largest equine statue in the world), both of which rested on a round building made of stone. He faced eastward, symbolically pointing towards his birthplace. When I asked why the Mongolians chose this site, Stefan answered that legend had it he found a golden whip on this spot. He pointed out that inside contained an elevator that would be able to lift people to the top of the horse’s head, which we should come back for in the summer. Despite its breathtaking enormity, standing on the open plain made us vulnerable to the bitter cold wind and we dashed back into the vehicle.

  After leaving the statue with a storm of dust trailing us, we drove out to Turtle Rock, a massive pile of stones resembling a turtle lifting its head. Despite the cold and a bit of ice that I slipped and fell on more than once, we scaled up to a place inside the shell that served up stunning views of the ger-dotted steppes. This was the Mongolia of brochures! No wonder people were miserable in the city, pining away for a spot in the countryside with its clean air and simple beauty. I later heard that every Mongolian was allotted a small plot of land outside UB, but few people had the money to build anything permanent on it, much less visit it very often.

  After I shuffled my way down to the small vendor encampment below the rocks, I bought a simple painting of a black horse, which still hangs on my wall at home today. Horses figure prominently in Mongolian culture, as long-distance horse racing is one of the trio of celebrated “manly” sports, archery and wrestling being the other two. Tsenguun told me jockeys as young as five participate in those races. I noticed its iconography everywhere, so it was no wonder they decided to put Chinggis on the back of one for the grand statue marking national pride.

  Never a fan of riding horses, I still appreciated its significance in what little philosophy I remember from school. The allegoric image of a charioteer struggling to maintain control of a white and a black horse pursuing separate courses from Plato’s Phaedrus always kept me wondering whether my own passions and desires could be kept in check by a higher reasoning function. I suppose I keep the black horse on my wall as a reminder to pay attention to the demands of my irrational side, but with an eye of keeping it from wresting control of my life. Of course, it keeps me in a constant state of struggle
where some days, like the time with Bold and his family, I feel each horse gaining primacy over the course of a single hour.

  Tsenguun chose to hang back both at Turtle Rock and at our next stop–a long, steep hike up to the monastery. I’m sure he’d climbed both several times over. While curiosity drew me to follow the others up the stairs to the monastery, I reveled more in stretching my legs and feeling the welcome ache of working them out after a week of botched exercise sessions punctuated by tricking myself into believing that deep tissue massage and sitting in a hot pool served as adequate substitutes for self-driven cardiovascular training. The red-roofed monastery didn’t move me as much as the spectacular view of the valley below and the peaceful feeling of perching on top of the world. Aside from a few gers and other small structures, the valley remained untouched and made me wonder how long it would be before big developers moved in to change the landscape for good. Perhaps that might never happen. The empty monastery seemed to be a sign that even the Buddhists got tired of sleeping out in the cold, desolate wind and took shelter back in the city.

  Stefan explained that we were too early in the season to enjoy the archery and other touristy ventures out there. The best thing to do after the slow hike back down the mountain was to find our lodging and settle down to lunch and drinks. He put the emphasis on drinks to remind everyone that it would be an integral part of the weekend. I thought we would be staying in one of the ger settlements near Turtle Rock, but Stefan knew of a more remote place that I’m guessing few people in the country knew about. He also struck me as the kind of guy whose network extended far beyond what satisfied most people, like the scavenging character in prison movies that could get you anything you want. We drove for about an hour through a rough mountain pass and wound up at the edge of a small lake, three gers nestled a few hundred feet away.