Rough Magic

by Lara Prior-Palmer

  It will be helpful if you can pretend on your horse to be cavalry, wrote my friend Iona in an email before I left the city. I can pretend anything! I replied, pretending.

  Travelers can go out into the world with their devices and prejudices intact to smooth their journeys. Yet, etymologically, a traveler is one who suffers, I think—or at least, one who works (travail). The traveler forgets she’s going home, and forgets herself, too.

  We are damp animals. Sleepy and thirsty. Submerged beneath the day. And then: alone on the plateau, a ger. Patrolled by men of many ages. As we roll in, relief settles my rising shoulders.

  I’m about to swing off to ask if we can stay when I realize these are the people who beeped their motorbikes when we passed an hour ago. It is easy for me to place trust in strangers, but I can’t help noticing there are only men here.

  Before we are close enough for them to welcome us in, my instinct overrides my need to sleep. I tack the pony and we trot away into the falling dark, minutes to go until the cutoff time. He braces himself beneath me. Thank goodness he burns so brightly; I’m deadweight at this hour.

  The rain slows near Battsengel, where we find another camp we passed earlier. A little girl splashes over in a pink dress. When I get off she turns and runs, her plaits flapping on her back, and returns with a teenage girl who seems to say I may stay. I grin and find it hurts.

  The girls eye the pony and me as we walk to the gers. He is my steed and we are a package; around the world your horse is often seen as a reflection of your character.

  Beside the ger I reel out my evening word, “Tsütsan.” Tired.

  The circle of faces around me understands what I say, and that understanding awakens me a little, except for my feet, which went to sleep hours ago. My legs are carrying them as you would carry sleepy children. I lead the pony to the lines, where two men take over. One has hunched shoulders, the other a rapid, limping walk. I wish I could greet them with something proper like “I hope your cows and goats are fat.”

  When I ask where the toilet is, the teenage girl giggles. I ask again and she sweeps her hand through the night, nothing but darkness at the ends of her fingers. She leads me out onto the plain until I understand I should go anywhere, so I squat while she stands and we both cock our necks up to scan the sky, dark indigos mining the spaces between the clouds. At the bottom of the sky is a singular line traveling insistently sideways. It marks the beginning of the mountains. I watch them awhile, intent on the giant secrets sitting behind them.

  For me, newly arrived and soon to go, the steppe is sometimes romantic. But later I will think back to the girl next to me and ask myself if it’s monotony for her. I write about my own little path, but what about the people I meet such as her? People less transient than I am. I wonder whether she would recognize any of the Mongolia I have written about. How many possible Mongolias are there?

  Other than for conquering (territorially, economically, or psychologically), I’m not sure why we ever try to get an idea about countries as a whole. We find our own countries too complicated to define, and that must be the truth about other countries, too: imaginary and secretly borderless, they bleed into their neighboring seas and lands, impossible to fully catch.

  I suppose we can all be prone, at times, to trapping certain countries in their distant, exotic pasts, ignoring their presents. I pluck out stories from the era of Chinggis Khan, but what I should really do is relinquish the authoritarianism of this narrative and ask everybody I meet what they think of the Khan today, or whether they think of him at all. Without speaking decent Mongolian, I haven’t a hope.

  Many history books in the West build him out with facts—a boy, born around 1162 to a humble family, who grew up to unite the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian plateau before conquering huge chunks of Asia and China, creating what would become, by the time his descendants expanded as far as Poland and Vietnam, the world’s largest land empire. At their peak, the Mongols controlled between 11 and 12 million contiguous square kilometers, an area about the size of the African continent.

  Later I will read of how Chinggis Khan is as much an ancestral spirit as a historical figure in Mongolia, the statistics no more important than his lineage and presence. He’s the patron of the nation.

  I hoist up my itchy trio of underwear, shorts, and jodhpurs, smiling the stranger smile. We lumber back to the gers. It’s raining again. Each step I take costs me. My muscles and ligaments have retired, their goodwill abused by racing. They cling to the driftwood of my bones. There are layers of grease in my hair and on my skin. I dread my eventual cleanliness like I used to dread the start of a new school year.

  The teenage girl, whose height I share, is talking with cheer, channeling absolute concentration into her few English words. Muddy striped socks peek out from her blue sandals. She says her name is Balorma and I say mine is Lara, doing so with all the enthusiasm I can muster—but the conversation dies down. I find I’m limited to one impulse: riding horses out in certain directions.

  When we pass the pony on the line, I send him a sideways whisper. I’ve run out of words. His mane is bowed down towards a puddle. You are grieved this evening, he replies.

  Inside the ger, I am rescued by my body. It quiets the flight of my mind as it drops, horizontal, into bed. I listen to the rain and watch the ceiling, where shadows of the fast-dying fire are playing. The grandmother murmurs to the baby, lullabying a little. Wrinkles route their way around her face—years of hard work and weather. I wish I could talk to her or just sit with her but my eyes are reeling me into sleep. I feel I’m a goose who’s meant to be migrating but can’t be bothered this year. About to snooze forever instead. The smell of butter, dirt, and horsehair drifts off my fingertips.

  Dear Ma,

  I’m not yet halfway. . . . I feel a bit sick knowing there are 513 kilometers and many days all still untouched. In the morning I will leave behind a pink shoelace and a retractable clip, apparently sought after. Kirsten gave me a supply since I have no gifts of my own. I’m not sure who will wear the lace. The girl has worn only sandals. Perhaps the boy can wear pink. Maybe they don’t have gendered colors here. I hope so, for the sake of the shoelace, for the sake of color.

  No one will forget how you dressed my brothers in pink until I was born because you wanted a daughter. Didn’t you carry on putting Arthur in dresses even after I arrived? Maybe I wasn’t much good at wearing them. I must’ve been a tomboy, though no one used that word. I cut my hair to match the boys and tried to join their games in the darkened attic. At six I learned the trumpet, the farting noises of which delivered a pleasing headache to all. Subtler gains away from their realm included riding lessons and a hamster I could talk to, gifted by you.

  Deep into my hatred of pink, I never considered the search for a sister in between my brothers. I only felt someone missing when we were all together and wonder now if she was an imaginary sister I’d suppressed or let run off.

  One day this year after I’ve been away a long time, you reach out of a car journey’s silence to mutter you think I’ll end up in Ireland. London looks to be crying through the rain-dropped windows. Conversations like these tend to take place in cars because I can’t catch you still enough elsewhere. Like Lucinda, you’re often in that hurry-rush—what for, I don’t know. Even when my legs were short you never adjusted your pace. I had to trot to keep up in Sainsbury’s.

  Ireland, Mum? I protest your placing. In country psychology, Ireland is your category for the confusings. You tell me you wouldn’t have wanted me any other way, but I know that means you’re aware of other ways for daughters to be. Perhaps you wish I would brush my hair more or run closer to your social circles.

  I guess we’re not alike. But we bridge our gap by laughing breathlessly and muttering “It’s fiiine,” by talking to the hearts of horses and, back in the day, doing the wellington-boot race, too. How we trained for that race no one else gave a toss about, Gaga’s old boots slipping on and off oh so well. My. Compet
itive even for the silly occasions.

  Turns out my attempts at training for this race have been of little use. I’ve steadily been getting faster, relying on the Derby to teach me as I go along. This evening though, I got completely lost. Whenever you and I used to wander bogs or empty paths, my main sensation was calmness, even and especially when we’d lost trace of where we were. You seemed blissed out by disorientation and I learned to respond to it in the same way. Tonight, though, I just cried instead—the same tears as when I’d lose you in the supermarket. I know when we’re at funerals you rub our backs and remind us it’s good to cry, but alone in the middle of nowhere, it felt so daft.

  Travel writers return from journeys abroad to write of their movement from location to location—naming each place, describing each path—but I question whether foreigners ever really know where they are, or whether our journeys are just stumbles through dis-locations.

  You also say it’s good to laugh, but laughing alone feels wrong too. So I lie on the bed like a blank-faced bean, flattening my emotion. Dad, your solid man, might be proud. Ma, you are being silent again. Is there a spirit standing on your toes and muting you?

  Chloe’s illness is really doing the rounds. Maybe I’m immune thanks to your Reduced Section raids in Sainsbury’s. It’s penicillin, you would say, as we spat out the moldy food weeks later. It’s fine, you would say—good for you. We didn’t believe you but we didn’t not believe you. Maybe it made us resistant?

  Maybe you made us resistant.

  Speaking of which, isn’t it disappointing that my resistance has always revolved around really futile matters—teachers, etiquette, Mongol Derby positioning. Why can’t I get angry about the sad news in the papers? Seems I have to be able to see it and touch it, and then I can’t resist resisting it. Like when the headmistress went tyrannical and we donned long dresses to act out a slapstick version of her downfall. Pitiless, pointless, my favorite day at school.

  The steppe escapes such London memories. I know there are quotes that tell you happiness lies within—“no need to search outside”—but I must’ve needed to come here. Like the ocean you so love, it’s a land open and bare, a land that lets me be.

  XXVII

  What if my horse goes missing overnight? I have a premonition that he will. Deep in sleep I’m scared of such news. My mother’s habitual fears are not dissimilar, cast in dreams of escaping chickens and flailing children. She’s watching the race at home and growing unwell.

  For the chivalrous in medieval Europe, and maybe for Chinggis Khan’s soldiers too, “bravery” was equated with acts of strength. Back home in the car with Mum, I said I’d keep riding if I were to break my collarbone.

  But my real fears aren’t the broken bones or the missing ponies. My real fears are long-term affairs like school, marriage, and jobs. Anything requiring a commitment longer than a ten-day race. Maybe because millions of people manage these commitments, they go unnoticed. Ordinary jobs and relationships—spread over humdrum time—are rarely thought of as brave or strong.

  And How brave, people will exclaim at drinks parties back home, to ride across Mongolia alone.

  Three and a half years down the line, kind people will write cards saying how brave, how tough you are when I undergo a summer of chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I’ll find it hard to reconcile the word “brave” with simply living through the disease life has given to me. Bravery won’t feel like a choice. And what does “tough” mean? That I won’t cry? Because I will, through London streets, up and down the swimming lane, around the fields of Appleshaw. Spreading my salt like a combine harvester.

  XXVIII

  It surprises me that the family has taken me in with such ease. On my journey I never hear sorry, no room in the inn. I guess I wouldn’t turn down a lone visitor at night, but in the parts of England I’ve lived, people don’t seem to come knocking. The gers have always been a network of support among rural Mongolians, who are often traveling around the steppe themselves and need places to stay. I presume this latest family is used to hosting passing anyones, from foreigners to shamans and prophets.

  Molon Bagsh, a traveling prophet born in 1768, is still a household name in the Buryat region. He used to park his ox and cart and wander up to gers in his shabby clothes. People would take him in out of pity and look on as he settled by the fire, spread his hands over his face, and began spewing about the future.

  It is said that as Molon Bagsh sat in each new ger, he found himself bestowed with a series of visions. I like to think that his placelessness, his lack of attachment, lent him the freedom of mind to receive these visions. And if bewilderment helps to bring up intuition from the unconscious, then perhaps there was nothing more bewildering than a new home or landscape every day. Shamans in Mongolia sometimes foretell the future by interpreting the cracks that open up in the shoulder blades of burnt sheep, or by reading the sky.

  Well before the appearance of airplanes, Molon Bagsh predicted that metal birds would fly in the sky. He envisaged iron snakes encircling the world a few decades before the Trans-Siberian Railway, or indeed any other Mongolian railway. Spider webs, he surmised, would one day cover the entire earth—this transpired to be telephone wires—and abstract voices would be spoken into homes—enter the radio, some years later. People say the horses’ feet he predicted sticking out of houses are the metal chimneys that came after his passing.

  Some of his prophecies are yet to be realized. At the end of time, human bodies will be no higher than a person’s arm and horses will be the size of rabbits.

  Bagsh isn’t the only known prophet—prophecy is a calling of its own in Mongolia, known as “future history” or “future talk.” In a way it’s just as important in the UK, where people predicting financial crashes are deemed sages. They merely replace the word “prophecy” with the sciencey-sounding “prediction.” Prophets in Mongolia are often referred to as üzmerch, “someone who sees.” Some of their predictions are listed in the newspapers.

  One of the most famous of contemporary prophets is Dashtseren, who began making predictions at the age of three. In the 1990s, his premonitions often made politicians uncomfortable. A year after he predicted one of the three state leaders would die, the head of parliament was killed. Dashtseren also foresaw a terrible disaster approaching the United States in the year before 9/11. He has even managed to locate oil in Mongolia where experts concluded there wasn’t any.

  “I do not understand myself,” Dashtseren has said in an interview. “I do not know how I know things. Even science cannot work it out.”

  When I wake, there’s bad weather inside my head. Fog rising, lost feeling. I think my head crashed through mountain tunnels in the night. For the first seconds of day I’m a train tricked into going the other way—rewinding, drawing back into darkness, tucking into the underside of time, delving out of the onwards motion to see what lies beneath, behind, around, and between. Deep inside I must be tired of the straight-knit line. Some force arrives to kick me upwards and leftwards. My dreams slip from my body as I bend out of the tent, bubbling short thoughts—the types you’d find in a washed-up goldfish. I raise my face to the cold and start surfing the day.

  My fear wasn’t wrong. The pony’s not tied to the line. I’ve a career in fortune-telling ahead, I swear—until I spot him grazing on the near side of the ger. The men must have decided he was hungry. They’ve tied hobbles around his ankles to stop him straying off. I stare at him. When he curls around to itch his back leg, I think, horse, who formed you in a miracle? You lift your leg like a tent hook, light and free. You say nothing, yet in conversation with yourself, you fly.

  Breathing again, I head back inside and haul into the morning ritual. Lift toothbrush to mouth, give up. Roll sleeping bag, stuff into cover; fail, try again. Remember how fighting men carried their equipment—horsehair lassos, cooking pots. Collect your torch. Shoes, can you really put feet in them, will you do it. Also, place soggy Winnie-the-Pooh diary in slightly less wet p
lace. Cherish the leaky blue sentences swimming through her soaked pages, because when the race finishes, they’ll keep you out here at steppe. Earlier advice drops into ears. “Do not take your saddlebag off. Riders were bucked off last year when the saddlebags touched ponies’ backs.”

  Methodically tighten saddlebag; wind rope around and around. Despise the iron discipline. I have no discipline. What gave me discipline? A journey of my own.

  Outside, someone has retied the palomino to the line. He leans on his rope, dormant as a merry-go-round creature. The family has disappeared so I pick a toilet spot behind the ger and crouch. Not one of the nearby herd of goats lifts a head to consider me. Each is tearing her mouth at the grass with the zeal of a child new to an ice-lolly, yet this grazing business has been their work for years. It crosses my mind that if I were resigned to riding 140 kilometers every day forever, I might also be enjoying it more. It’s the prospect of escape that turns the joy to agony: it will end. I could even quit right now.

  I hope it ends soon. I hope the pain goes. I rarely think so overtly but such ideas swarm me unformed. Some scholars say the modern idea of hope only entered European history when trust in continuity faded, just before the Renaissance. In the race there’s no jumping between scenes, no valley corner unseen. We ride continuous paths. You are here on this earth forever. Nobody seems to tell you this.

  Two men emerge and shrug goodbyes, tipping off the plain behind the pony and me as we canter away. I feel proud the pair of us has somewhere else to be. At last night’s turning point, we find the flood still lingering and, far into the dead water, a crew camper van turfed at an angle. Its wheels are bogged down. I’m surprised to see a splinter of the Derby community out here on the water-sucked flatlands.