At lunchtime they walked single file to the hotel and after the meal they went back to the history museum. At dinnertime they returned to the hotel again and went to the restaurant, sat across from each other at a table, and didn’t speak. After the three courses of dinner, the guide stood up. ‘The doors of the hotel close at eight o’clock. After that no one can get in or out. Please follow our rules. For your own good. It would be wise to remember that our laws have no concept of rape.’
At the corner near the hotel a skittish dog with a sticky coat looked at her with frightened eyes. Her mood was becoming more and more desolate. The coldness of the surrounding land, the miserable, damp winds and desert nights were getting under her skin. People shivered with cold. There were two Soviet-style shops across the street, one a delicatessen, the other a stationer’s. There was a loudspeaker next to the door of the delicatessen, spewing out a Soviet hit. Shelves nearly empty stared out of the display window. In front of the shop was a cooler filled with a frozen brick of fish and two plastic bags of milk.
In addition to paper products the stationer’s also sold Russian black bread, pies filled with lamb, vinegared pickles, and sculpin in tomato sauce.
There was a post office behind the stationer’s. On the wall of the post office was a map with the migration routes of sheep marked on it. She wrote a few postcards and bought an extra strip of stamps depicting Mongolian industry.
She dodged the puddles of slush, careening wrecks of chubby old Soviet cars held together with screws, and horses pulling disintegrating carts on the main street. A flock of children dressed in colourful winter clothes played in the courtyard of a three-storey building. The lid of a dustbin was torn off and garbage overflowed onto the dirty ice of the yard. Behind the dustbin she caught a glimpse of the lacerated carcass of a young horse.
She returned to the hotel. She thought about her compartment companion, what he had said about the Mongols… how can a nation with such a great history have withered so?
She looked for the number Irina had given her. She called from the hotel telephone for an hour before she got through. A soft, friendly male voice answered. When she’d given him greetings from Irina and explained who she was and why she was in town, he burst into uncontrollable laughter. She eventually got him to agree to come to the hotel with a friend the next day after dark.
She sat on the sofa again. The late light of a feeble sun shimmered heavy over the roofs of the yurts. She turned on the radio, which was tuned to a Russian-language channel. News, reviews, reports on the national elections, and a little Stravinsky.
The following evening at six o’clock, just as arranged, there was a knock on her door. Two tall, giggling men in their thirties stood in the hallway. They sat down shyly on the sofa. She offered them some Black Label whisky. They emptied their glasses in one swallow, she refilled the glasses, and they did it again. They made a promise to show her the real Ulan Bator and the real Mongolia.
At eight o’clock there was a stern knock at the door. Before she had time to get up, the door opened and three sturdy men walked in. Her guests’ faces turned suddenly yellow and all five men were gone in an instant. Their steps echoed in the empty hallway. She realised what had just happened and who the three strangers were. She lost all strength in her legs; she felt cold and weak. She tried to go to sleep but sleep wouldn’t come. She remembered a January Moscow night.
She and Mitka were standing in front of the Red October metro station cursing because they’d missed the last train. They’d spent a long evening at Arkady’s place, a lot of wine and cigarettes. They were cold and had been trying to stop passing cars. Finally a blue Lada stopped. Behind the wheel sat a small dark hairy man who said he would take them home. On the way he asked Mitka if he would like to buy some quality cloud. Soon they were far from home, in some seedy suburb. She and Mitka followed the man into an unfurnished flat. There were a couple of dirty mattresses on the floor, cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles. Mitka made the deal, and just as they were leaving the driver grabbed an axe from behind the door and swung it at Mitka, knocking him unconscious. She didn’t have a chance to scream before the man had grabbed her by the neck and was squeezing so hard she couldn’t breathe. The man was drinking heavily, and in the wee hours he passed out and Mitka was able to drag himself, covered in blood, into the hallway to call for help.
The girl opened her eyes. There was no sound but the quick beat of her heart and the two-note tick of the clock. She snatched up the clock and put it in her suitcase. She lay awake waiting for sleep to come and free her from herself and her fears. The Mongolian sky was filled with stars; they were bright and near, lighting up the blackness of the sky like summer lightning, but she couldn’t see them from under the covers. The hotel was quiet. Ulan Bator was quiet. The silence of the universe was so deep that all she could hear was the hum in her ears. Terror came and went; sometimes she was filled with fear, then anger, and then something else, something she had to let go of, and finally nothing but a great regret. The darkness pressed down on her head so hard that it turned transparent. Finally the harsh night began to lose its meaning and gradually made way for the weak glimmer of morning.
She sat impatiently on a sofa in the hotel lobby waiting for the guide. She wanted to talk to someone about everything that had happened the evening before. She heard a strange groan from the direction of the elevator, and when she turned to look, she saw the same three security service workers. They were dragging her guests, beaten unconscious, bruised beyond recognition, across the lobby towards a Lada that waited outside. Blood and dirt smeared over the construction dust on the marble floor. One of the security men glared at her, another grimaced, the third didn’t even look at her. The hotel receptionist continued flipping through papers behind the desk and didn’t see anything.
When the yellow Lada had disappeared into the bright Mongolian morning, a Mongol granny wrapped in a big black woollen coat and carrying a Latvian tin bucket came up from the basement, cleaned the floor, and went back downstairs.
At breakfast she told the guide about her guests and how they were taken away and what she had just seen.
When she had finished, the guide smiled drily and said he didn’t want to hear about the matter again.