The train slowed its speed at a spot where a village of yurts came right up to the tracks, and soon slid to a side track to make way for a long column of freight cars. She looked out of the grey window at the yurts. There were five of them, with a yard left in the middle. In the courtyard was a long-shafted wooden cart. Next to it stood a young woman in a traditional red Mongolian dress with a small child in her arms. She had a yellow-flowered scarf wound around her head. The woman glanced in the direction of the train; a little boy behind her struggled onto the back of a skinny-legged foal.
The man stirred in his bed. He tossed restlessly, as if trying to shake off unpleasant memories, then lay with his back to her. His back was covered in tattoos: in the centre the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus in her arms, on one shoulder a temple with one onion dome and a star.
15
BY EIGHT O’CLOCK the train was spitting out its passengers at Ulan Bator’s Soviet-style railway station. Gritty sleet, mud and snow pattered the train window. She was trying to wake the man. A Mongolian tour guide was standing in the compartment doorway – a small, slimly built, beautiful, tense, indignant man.
‘Are you going into Ulan Bator? Do you have a room reserved in the Intourist Hotel? Why are you still on the train? Gather your things and come with me.’
To effect this, he picked up the girl’s suitcase and started to leave. The man was still snoring in his bed.
She followed him into the station hall. It was filled with a floating, dreamy silence. An unwelcoming stickiness on the stone floor adhered to the soles of her shoes. Half-rotted food scraps, wrappers, gobs of spit, and dog and bird shit lay all around; the sharp stench seeped into her skin.
They walked to the taxi stand on the parade side of the station. There wasn’t a single car there. The tour guide glanced at his Russian wristwatch with irritation and stared fixedly in the direction of the city. The slow sideways drift of snow turned to sleet – gritty, tattered sheets of ice that dropped into the slush like stones. Everything looked grey, limp, drained somehow, a muddy smell of wet earth hovering everywhere.
A taxi arrived, a small metal deer on its hood. The tour guide sat in the front seat and she sat in the spacious rear of the car. The driver was a fat middle-aged man. He was wearing a Russian-style winter overcoat, an extinguished fifth-class Belomorkanal papirosa hanging from his lips, his face scarred and pitted. The car smelled of petrol and old mutton fat.
The road looked like the ones she remembered from the countryside in her childhood. Mud and mire, pothole upon pothole. Whenever they came to a large puddle in the road the driver pressed the accelerator and slammed straight through it, splashing the mud up in an arc onto the people passing by on foot and on various animal conveyances.
It was just a few kilometres from the station to the hotel but the trip took an hour. Every acceleration was followed by a sharp slam on the brakes and another stretch of crawling along at ten kilometres an hour. Now and then the driver came to a complete stop, got out of the car, opened the hood, swore, and took a black steel can out of the trunk, apparently water to pour into the radiator.
The hotel was like any other hotel for Westerners in any other nameless Soviet city. There was a service counter in the lobby, a small, round table next to the high windows, and a sofa for three covered in plastic. Bricks, a cement mixer, bags of plaster, and boards lay in the middle of the floor. Grey construction dust floated over everything.
The tour guide and the receptionist took care of the paperwork while she waited. Finally, the guide asked her to follow him. They climbed the stairs to the top floor. He opened the heavy, pitifully groaning door, and a vast, Soviet-remodelled suite opened before her. A wonderful view of the whole city, all the way to the Gobi Desert, with a spring storm screaming over its sandy hills, was spread outside the window. There were two rooms in the suite. In the living room there was a simple, stylish sofa set, perhaps designed in East Germany, solidly built chairs with Krakow labels on the armrests, and Russian vases on the tables. A large bed filled the bedroom. On the wall facing the bed was a bold reproduction of Repin’s painting of Ivan the Terrible after he killed his son. Madness shone in Ivan’s eyes; the son looked like a children’s Bible picture of Jesus.
The bathroom was spacious, a yellowish fluorescent light sputtered on the ceiling. There was a full-length bathtub, but the plug had been torn off. The shower worked – refreshing cold water came from both taps.
She looked out of the living-room window at the city for a long time. On the left were two thirteen-storey buildings, on the right, a neighbourhood of yurts, and between them a strange conglomeration that reminded her of a Wild West town. Slanted light from the haggard red sun warmed the armchair.
Thoughts galloped through her mind in a tedious circle. The day ended with a frightening sunset, creeping into evening, moonlight illuminating the yards of the yurt villages. The view of the wide sea of desert simmering on the horizon was beautiful, deserted, bleak. She wrapped herself in the down quilt. She thought about Moscow, the last picnic of the autumn with Irina in the English park, where they’d found a garden bench with yellow maple leaves stuck to its wet surface and Irina had called it the Turgenev bench.
The city started to twinkle with faint lights. The lights encroached on a creeping dusk fading into the black of night. A depressing icy darkness squeezed the city small, soundless. She decided she would call the number Irina had given her tomorrow.
A little after eight o’clock someone knocked discreetly on her door. She opened the door and the tour guide was standing there. They went to breakfast together. She ate a Soviet breakfast, he a Mongolian one, which consisted of tea with milk, biscuits that smelled like lamb, and balls of cornmeal. It felt good to sit across from another person. She told him that she’d come to Ulan Bator to see the petroglyphs along the road leading south from the city. He gave her a stern look.
‘Westerners aren’t allowed to leave the city.’
She offered him some dollars.
‘You come here and act like money can buy you anything you want. Our sacred places are not for sale. I’ve written up an official schedule for you. We can visit the sights of Ulan Bator together and learn about the history of the country. We’ll be staying within the city boundary. I’m responsible for your activities.’
He put the dollars in his pocket.
Outside was springlike and warm; the sky was covered in a thick layer of clouds, but the air was still, and no rain was falling. They went to the history museum, the guide always two steps ahead of her. She walked over the slippery waxed museum floor in felt slippers. The guide moved from one glass case to another and spoke in a rote, monotonous tone. In the middle of one verse he raised his voice.
‘The Mongolian Empire formed the foundation for the blossoming of the Soviet Union today. They are greatly in our debt. We Mongols conquered Russia in 1242 and Mongol rule lasted two hundred and forty years. We created a working central government in Russia, and well-organised military and tax-collection systems. We built all of the Russian governing institutions that are still operating in the Soviet Union today. We created a bureaucracy whose task was to serve the government, not the people. We broke the back of Russian morality so fundamentally that they still haven’t recovered. We drove an atmosphere of mistrust into the Russians’ thick skulls. We taught Ivan the Terrible, and he taught Stalin, that the role of the individual is to submit to the group. If an individual makes a mistake, the whole group responds. It’s the world’s most effective means of governance. Before the reign of the Mongols the Russians didn’t even know how to celebrate, they just drunkenly wallowed in pig shit. They learned from us how to enjoy life. The only things Russians invented were unending laziness, cunning, and blatant deceit. The tax structure required a group of Chinese census takers and tax professionals whose efficiency and expertise were already well known at that time. Since Russia was an unsettled and sparsely inhabited country, we decided to use an indirect governing model. In this system, the Russian nobility collected the taxes for the Mongolian khans – they served as our stooges. Later, the high nobility of the Grand Duchy of Moscow appropriated all of our principles and methods of governance without alteration. We rescued Russia from an insidious invasion of Western culture.’