The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  The roadside attractions on the way back to the city were few: a couple of molting Bactrian camels harnessed for riding and sulfurous, shaggy vultures waiting for roadkill. The cities were overgrown villages, sprawling at random over the rolling steppe—primary-colored roofs set apart by cement or twig fences, the inevitable acre of windblown trash tossed over a ledge or riverbank (as long as it faces away from the house, even if it’s toward the road). No buildings rose much above a story and a half: just a low factory, and some isolated housing projects that stood like lost Legos across a few miles of field, without access roads.

  To our right was Ulaanbaatar. The name means “Red Hero”—locals nicknamed it “Utaan Bataar,” or “Smog Hero.” Most of the city is still heated by coal or wood, so anyone who can flees to the countryside in the winter to avoid the choking, carcinogenic smoke and soot. To the left was the road to the Gobi Desert: by the nomadic reckoning, a “gobi” is defined as steppe with sufficient foliage to support marmots. The desert proper begins when even a camel can’t survive.

  We turned back toward the city. The traffic was even more impenetrable than the usual four-dimensional game of chicken played by cars, motorbikes, horses, and pedestrians. There were police posted every half mile. Hillary Clinton was visiting, and one main artery was closed and secured for her motorcade. Horns were not so much an alert as a shorthand language unto themselves: “I exist and am present.” “On your left.” “Sweet ride, buddy.”

  “Two hundred thousand cars registered in the whole country, and no roads outside this city,” said Jay. “It’s all the same people, driving from the square to school to the shop and back, all on the same roads.”

  Old women on street corners tended barrels of roasted pine nuts for sale, sifting them with plastic gallon scoops. The badass dudes here looked like cholos, their hair shaved on the sides and long on top under a folded bandanna. All the young children, male or female, got shaved heads when hot weather came. A middle-aged Mongolian rock enthusiast had funded an incongruous and inartistic monument to the Beatles in the middle of a pedestrian mall. George and Ringo were indistinguishable.

  We spent the evening at the state opera house, a pink neoclassical wedding cake that was hosting a performance by the state dance troupe. It was a classic Soviet throwback—a series of five-minute demonstrations of overtone singing, dances from various regions, throaty narration. It culminated in a “Friendship of the Peoples” group dance in which pairs of performers, dressed in “authentic folk garb,” held a kind of dance-off between the styles of the tribes and ethnicities encompassed by the Mongolian state. “Fakelore,” Maria calls it.

  Maria and I can both be grumpy, independent travelers, impatient with tour guides. We decided to take another shot at an Erden-free rural excursion, to the ruined monastery of Manshir Khiid, above the town of Zuunmod. Getting out of town was a wild yak chase. We were directed to a bus station on the west side, from whence buses did not go to Zuunmod. We negotiated a taxi to the bus station on the east side, though as it turned out the driver didn’t know the location of the other station. (Cab drivers have a way, sometimes, of giving you the feeling that instead of paying them for a service, you’ve insulted their mother and then asked them to help you move into a fifth-floor walkup.) He pulled over in an alley and handed us over to two elderly strangers, a retired pharmacist and his wife. They spoke decent Russian—the husband had been in the military in Russia in his youth—and we ended up sharing an hour-long cab to Zuunmod. (An object lesson in contextual pricing: the hotel had quoted this cab ride at T40,000 [US $20], the first cab driver had asked for T80,000, when we shared with locals it was T4,000.)

  The annual Naadam Festival (the “nomad Olympics”), Mongolia’s biggest sporting event, was taking place that week throughout the country. The festival in Ulaanbaatar was the nation’s biggest, but other cities held their own as well, and the pharmacist insisted we accompany them to the horse races in Zuunmod. He gave the cabdriver some directions, and we veered off the road and up some hills to a temporary village of teepee-like tents. Around them stood dozens of horses, tied to stakes like wet laundry set out to dry. He led us inside one tent and introduced us to the multigenerational party inside. The children squirmed, while the adults sat on rugs around a central table. It was piled with sweet breads stacked crosswise in metaphorical layers: the top and bottom layers for happiness, the second for sadness, and so on. On top of the bread tower were stacked homemade cheeses and shortbread cookies. I passed off the ceramic bowls of rice-and-mutton soup to Maria; she, in turn, slipped me the brass bowls of airag (the fermented horse milk that is the national drink) and vodka. They urged me to drink a bowl of vodka before we could do anything else—about four shots’ worth. After I managed it, an old uncle with one tooth laughed and refilled my bowl. Everything was served and accepted with the right hand only, a hygienic tribal custom the world over in places where you eat with the right hand and wash your backside with the left.

  The children played cards from a deck decorated like $100 bills. One young boy had a number strapped across his back that designated him as a contestant in the horse races going on outside. I stumbled out into the still sunny afternoon, woozy with vodka, and headed for the finish line. The whole affair was like a Dakota-territory county fair or rodeo, complete with what you might call midway attractions: burst a balloon with a dart and win a stuffed animal, or dress up in traditional garb and get your picture taken in front of a backdrop with a rainbow and Disney’s Tinker Bell. Young boys aired out their horses in informal races, standing upright in their stirrups in a cloud of dust. Drunks curled up in the middle of a field to sleep it off. People giggled and relieved themselves in a ditch.

  The elderly, as usual in this country, were paragons of style. There was something Bolivian about the dark, weathered faces in bright, primary-colored ranchwear. The men were in cowboy hats, the women in cloches. Both wore long black overcoats with wide sashes in red, yellow, and blue. There was one race left: an eight-kilometer for two-year-old horses ridden by boys (and at least one girl) aged five to eight. We lined up along the race’s last kilometer, behind waist-high string barriers, and a cinematic cloud of dust sprouted over the horizon line. Tiny children on tiny horses began to crest the hill and fly by, hooves hammering, leather whips flogging first one side, then the other, of the animals. The spectators urged them on with a burbling “coo-coo-coo” cheer. Two empty horses had thrown their riders somewhere along the way. One child lost his purchase on his own horse on the far side of the track. A handful of judges scurried out and carried him to an ambulance.

  We caught a taxi from the race site to the ruins of the monastery at Mandshir Khiid, on the upward curve of a great valley chiseled with terraces. The cab dropped us at a parking lot, and we hiked the last two miles. A spray of grasshoppers scattered in front of our every step, as if we were shuffling through grain. A single cuckoo sang in the pine forest to the west, and a pair of hawks patrolled the valley.

  The main temple had been rebuilt in the 1990s but was still surrounded by the overgrown foundations of the old temple complex. Stinging nettles grew where three hundred monks had once lived. An iron cauldron, cast large enough to boil ten sheep at a time, sat protected from communist depredations by its sheer immobility. We hiked farther up the ever-steeper cliff, past a centuries-old rock painting of a Buddha, then past another of a bearded sage. Both paintings wore a kind of skirt of paper-money offerings, bills shoved under rocks to keep them from blowing away.

  The staff was young and seemed put off by the idea of renting a ger to some visitors. It would distract them from hanging out with one another. Some played volleyball; one tended a “museum” of rotting taxidermy. It was a party scene, like a summer Saturday at a state park beach. Kids sang drunkenly a hundred feet up the hill. Cars ascended, honking, from the gate. The other guests at the camp were an extended Korean family settling in for a week or at least a long weekend. They organized a pickup soccer game—no small feat
on a twenty-degree mountain slope.

  To the east side of the camp was a circular, two-story wooden structure decorated in faded cerulean and gold. I went looking for beer and knocked, then entered. The first floor was an approximation of an American rec room, plus a half of a PA system. Upstairs was empty but for some posters of topless Japanese girls. I tried the other building in the camp, which looked like, and turned out to be, a deserted restaurant. The same kid with the put-upon attitude and the giant cold sore who had grudgingly checked us in was behind the small bar, futzing with a Winamp playlist of Mongolian hip-hop. He didn’t look up as I walked over, but he closed a window of erotic—though not strictly pornographic—photos on his computer.

  “Beer, two?” he asked, with two upraised fingers. I nodded.

  He clicked on a walkie-talkie. “The foreigners want beer.”

  Another grinning creep, in a T-shirt reading “Maniac” in the style of the Metallica logo, came in a few minutes later.

  “Beer?” he said, leering and miming drinking with his hand.

  “Yes, beer, two.”

  He signaled that it was OK to serve us, and the first kid produced two bottles from under the counter.

  Maria and I drank them on the stoop of our ger, shelling pine nuts and watching the hawks. When I went to get the second round, Cold Sore and I repeated the whole charade: Winamp, walkie-talkie, leer, service.

  I asked Maniac if he had some firewood and matches for our woodstove. He left, and returned with some sticks and a blowtorch. Despite blasting the birch with the torch, the fire didn’t take, and I sacrificed the first chapter of my Victor Pelevin paperback as kindling. That did the trick, and I thought Pelevin would appreciate the irony. The beds were stiff and flat as sleeping on a floor, the pillows unaccountably hard, and the kids running the place stayed up all night drinking and singing. I was awake at six, listening to the rain and the angry and confused bees who had let themselves get trapped in the ger overnight. We hiked out and caught the local bus back to Ulaanbaatar.

  There are many songs one doesn’t expect to hear crackling through an overextended PA at the nomad Olympics. In our case, it was Aerosmith’s “Mama Kin.” It was no stranger than anything else happening on the stadium’s field. The annual Naadam Festival celebrates the “three manly arts” of horse-racing, wrestling, and archery (which included some truly badass female archers), as well as the manly diversion of sheep anklebone shooting—a kind of aggressive dominoes, helpful for passing the long, drunken winter nights trapped in a ger—which took place in a nearby pavilion. We had bought the tourist-priced tickets to the opening ceremonies, held at the local ten-thousand-seat soccer stadium. Mongol flags, which looked like Muppet wigs on sticks, were marched in and set in stands, the symbolic equivalent of lighting the Olympic torch. The PA announcer had the guttural enthusiasm of a wrestling play-by-play man—appropriate, since the field was filled with giant, hairless Mongolian men wearing light blue Speedos and what I can only describe as a skin-tight shrug: lavender or red decorative arm coverings tied across their bare chests with a bit of string. (At one point in the past, wrestlers wore full shirts. After a woman was found to have competed in a match, the uniform was altered to expose the men’s—in some cases still pretty womanly—chests.)

  Mongolian wrestling is admirably simple. The unmasked luchadors approach, grapple, and spend most of their time trying to trip each other. Whoever hits the ground first loses. A handful of judges in robes and hats, looking like nickelodeon versions of Catholic bishops, milled and hovered and declared winners. The victors then performed a slow-motion, high-stepping victory dance, turning to face all 360 degrees of the crowd with hands held high. It had the lumbering grace and pathos of a dancing elephant in the center ring.

  The bench seats of the stadium were packed, and there was an ugly tension in the crowd. We had already seen a man on the ground being kicked in the face and a cop sprinting by, and it wasn’t even sundown. Maria and I sat in what had obviously been designated as the foreigners’ section, squeezed between two French boys and a Canadian lady. It was while shifting from cheek to cheek to keep my ass from falling asleep that I almost missed the kid walking by in a full Nazi stormtrooper uniform.

  He and his skinhead buddy were making a determined circuit of the whole stadium, glowering straight ahead and daring someone to object. He was in perfect blackshirt drag, cargo pants tucked into boots, red, white, and black swastika armband and all. His friend was a standard-issue boots-and-braces skinhead: red suspenders, white T-shirt, rolled blue jeans, Doc Marten boots.

  “Did you see that?” said Maria.

  Our neighbors stared straight ahead and ignored them.

  Tania Branigan reported in The Guardian on the rise of Mongolian neo-Nazis in 2010, noting that “with their high cheekbones, dark eyes and brown skin, they are hardly the Third Reich’s Aryan ideal. . . . It is, by any standards, an extraordinary choice. Under Hitler, Soviet prisoners of war who appeared Mongolian were singled out for execution. More recently, far-right groups in Europe have attacked Mongolian migrants.” The article described a group of nationalists obsessed with defending the racial and sexual purity of the Mongols, particularly against the “imperialistic, evil” Chinese: “Some believe Beijing has a secret policy of encouraging men to have sex with Mongolian women,” and transgender Mongolians have also been a target.

  Jay, a gay European, managed an expat bar in Ulaanbaatar with the unlikely name of Satchmo’s. It was there we played our one Mongolian show. (I’d gotten no response when I tried to book local pubs via e-mail and telephone, so I posted on the numerous expat forums until somebody put me in touch with somebody else who led me to Jay.) The bar was owned by two mining executives, an Australian and a New Zealander. Most of the bars in UB were expat bars.

  “They’re pubbing up around here for sure,” said the Australian, a ruddy, sunburned man in an open shirt who had bought the place six months ago partly as an investment, mostly for something to do. “A lot of them [are] empty whenever you walk by and you wonder, what’s going on? Then you realize, with all the money-laundering . . .” He gave me a meaningful look. “There have been a lot of changes over the last few years, for the better. It’s not so dangerous, the corruption . . . is still there, but they’re trying to keep a lid on it. Anyway, none of that here—we’re trying to have a nice place, where you can bring your family. Here, take my card . . .”

  His business partner had left New Zealand when he was “twenty-two, never been back. . . . Been here fifteen [years]. It was better before. The politics are so . . . sensitive.”

  Maria pointed out later that the nationalists may have a point about outsiders coming in and exploiting the country, but that they’re wasting time being paranoid about the Chinese—it’s these Western mining corporations that are tearing open the mountains, flooding the political system with money, and filling the Irish pubs that had opened just so politicians could launder their bribes.

  Jay was a barrel-chested loudmouth of a kind of mongrel origin: “Bottom line is I’m Belgian. . . . Hey amigo!” he greeted a Mongolian busboy. He was born in Belgium but is part French, part Native American, part a long list of other things too. “I had a consulting job in Belgium making 12,000 euro a month, with a 7,000 [euro] expense account. I would walk into restaurants and the waiters would say, ‘Oh, welcome, let me get you some champagne!’ But [the firm] was bought by a company with ten thousand employees, and I thought, ‘Who needs it!’ I was working for British Telecom, vice president, flying to London for meetings. The first few times was great, like a movie! But then I thought, ‘What a waste of money.’ My father couldn’t believe it” when he quit.

  He met his current partner twelve years ago, a Mongolian from the Gobi Desert who moved to UB at eleven, became a ballet dancer at the State Theatre, and met Jay while on tour in Belgium.

  “And then you decided to move here?” I asked.

  “God, no! I hated it. You couldn’t get good wine, you cou
ldn’t get toothpaste, you couldn’t get Dove soap. People were always asking me, ‘Can you bring soap?’ . . . It was amazing for me, [coming] from Belgium, a country with 450 people to the square kilometer, to come here, which is completely deserted. I take these trips to the country, it is beautiful, sure, but five hours later it is the same mountain and the same valley! A huge country and it all looks the same. So the mining”—a boom that began in 2006—“they take two mountains, who cares! I say, we could have driven an hour and it would look the same.”

  Jay’s second job was teaching English. “They’ve been taught by the Russian system: read this grammar, copy down everything, the teacher is up here like a god. I said, ‘Put away your notebooks. We will talk.’ They said nothing. So I provoked them: I said, ‘Mongolians are corrupt.’ They said, ‘No!’ I said, ‘Oh yeah? Raise your hand if in the past four years you never gave your teacher a bottle of vodka for a grade.’ And they got so mad—that got them talking! Ten minutes later I said, ‘Listen to yourselves, you are talking English!’”

  His partner, a slim, quiet waiter at Satchmo’s—he had quit dancing after a knee injury—glided up and deposited our food: cheeseburgers with fries, a salad with blue cheese and cheddar. After a week of mutton and airag, American comfort food was more appealing than usual.

  “Well, the airag,” said Jay, ordering more vodka for the table. “You have to understand how it’s done here. You are in a tent all winter, eating nothing but horsemeat, and it blocks you up. Then when the warm weather comes, you have nothing but airag for seven days, ten days . . . it cleans you out.

  “It is very difficult to live my lifestyle here. Even the staff doesn’t know. Two ultra-nationalists followed me into the office last week, they said, ‘It is against nature, the way you live, if you stay here we will beat the shit out of you.’ My friend, a Filipino who manages [a pizza place], he dates a Mongolian girl. They kidnapped him in a car and beat him up, stole his ATM card and PIN number. Another friend got a note pinned to his door saying, ‘The elections are over, now it’s time for foreigners to leave the country.’ I come to work every day with a bodyguard—I don’t need to be beat up and be in the hospital two weeks!”