Night stole over the land again, dissolving it in shadows and blue. Every ten or twenty miles tongues of campfire licked the darkness.
Caspar’s mental clock was several hours out, so he decided to turn in. I could have adjusted it for him, but I decided to let him sleep. He went to the toilet, splashed water over his face, and cleaned his teeth with water he disinfected in a bottle with iodine. Sherry was outside our compartment when he came back, her face pressed against the glass. Caspar thought, ‘How beautiful.’ ‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello.’ Sherry’s eyes turned towards my host.
‘How’s the War and Peace? I have to admit, I’ve never read any Russians.’
‘Long.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Why things happen the way they do.’
‘And why do things happen the way they do?’
‘I don’t know, yet. It’s very long.’ She watched her breath mist up the window. ‘Look at it. All this space, and almost no people in it. It almost reminds me of home.’
Caspar joined her at the window. After a mile had passed: ‘Why are you here?’
She thought for a while. ‘It’s the last place, y’know? Lost in the middle of Asia, not in the east, not in the west. Lost as Mongolia, it could be an expression. How about you?’
Some drunk Russians up the corridor groaned with laughter.
‘I don’t really know. I was on my way to Laos, when this impulse just came over me. I told myself there was nothing here, but I couldn’t fight it. Mongolia! I’ve never even thought about the place. Maybe I smoked too much pot at Lake Dal.’
A half-naked Chinese toddler ran up the corridor, making a zun-zun noise which may have been a helicopter, or maybe a horse.
‘How long have you been travelling?’ asked Caspar, not wanting the conversation to lag.
‘Ten months. You?’
‘Three years, this May.’
‘Three years! Oath, you are a terminal case!’ Sherry’s face turned into a huge yawn. ‘Sorry, I’m bushed. Being cooped up doing nothing is exhausting work. Do you think our Austrian friends have shut up the casino for the night?’
‘I only hope they have shut up the joke factory. You don’t know how lucky you are, not speaking German.’
Back in their compartment, the Austrians were snoring in stereo. Sherry bolted the door. The gentle sway of the train lulled Caspar towards sleep. He was thinking about Sherry.
Sherry peered over the bunk above him. ‘Do you know a good bedtime story?’
Caspar was not a natural storyteller, so I stepped in. ‘I know one story. It’s a Mongolian story. Well, not so much a story as a sort of legend.’
‘I’d love to hear it,’ Sherry smiled, and Caspar’s heart missed a gear.
There are three who think about the fate of the world.
First there is the crane. See how lightly he treads, picking his way between the rocks in the river? Tossing, and tilting back his head. The crane believes that if he takes just one heavy step, the mountains will collapse and the ground will quiver and trees that have stood for a thousand years will tumble.
Second, the locust. All day the locust sits on a pebble, thinking that one day the flood will come and deluge the world, and all living things will be lost in the churn and the froth and black waves. That is why the locust keeps such a watchful eye on the high peaks, and the rainclouds that might be gathering there.
Third, the bat. The bat believes that the sky may fall and shatter, and all living things die. Thus the bat dangles from a high place, fluttering up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again, checking that all is well.
That was the story, way back at the beginning.
Sherry had fallen asleep, and Caspar wondered for a moment where this story had come from. I closed his mind and nudged it towards sleep. I watched his dreams come and go for a little while. There was a dream about defending a gothic palace built on sand flats with pool cues, and one about his sister and niece. His father entered the dream, pushing a motorbike down the corridor of the Trans-Siberian express with a sidecar full of money that kept blowing away. Drunk and demanding as ever, he asked Caspar what the devil he thought he was playing at, and insisting that Caspar still had some very important videotapes. Caspar had become a half-naked little boy and knew nothing about them.
My own infancy was spent at the foot of the Holy Mountain. There was a dimness, which I later learned lasted many years. It took me that long to learn how to remember. I imagine a bird beginning as an ‘I’. Slowly, the bird understands that it is a thing different from the ‘It’ of its shell. The bird perceives its containment, and as its sensory organs begin to function it becomes aware of light and dark, cold and heat. As sensation sharpens, it seeks to break out. Then one day, it starts to struggle against the gluey gel and brittle walls, and cannot stop until it is out and alone in the vertiginous world, made of wonder, and fear, and colours, made of unknown things.
But even back then, I was wondering: Why am I alone?
The sun woke Caspar. He had dried tears in his eyes and his mouth tasted of watch-straps. He badly wished he had some fresh fruit to eat. And the Austrians had already beaten him to the bathroom. He slid out of bed, and we saw Sherry was meditating. Caspar pulled on his jeans and tried to slip out of the compartment without disturbing her.
‘Good morning, and welcome to Sunny Mongolia,’ Sherry murmured. ‘We get there in three hours.’
‘Sorry I disturbed you,’ said Caspar.
‘You didn’t. And if you look in that plastic bag hanging off the coat hook, you should find some pears. Have one for breakfast.’
‘So,’ said Sherry, four hours later. ‘Grand Central Station, Ulan Bator.’
‘Strange,’ said Caspar, wanting to express himself in Danish.
The whitewash was bright in the pristine noon sun. The never-silent wind blew on over the plains, into the vanishing point where the rails led. The signs were in the Cyrillic alphabet, which neither Caspar nor any of my previous hosts knew. Chinese hawkers barged off the train, heaving bags of goods to sell, shouting to one another in familiar Mandarin. A couple of listless young Mongolians on military service fingered their rifles, thinking of where they would rather be. A group of steely old women were waiting to get on the train, bound for Irkutsk. Their families had come to see them off. Two figures hovered in the wings, in black suits and sunglasses. Some youths sat on a wall, looking at the girls.
‘I feel like I’ve climbed out of a dark box into a carnival of aliens,’ said Sherry.
‘Sherry, I know, erm, as a young lady, you have to be careful of who you trust when you’re travelling, but, I was wondering—’
‘Stop sounding like a Pom. Yes, sure. I won’t jump you if you don’t jump me. Now. Your Lonely Planet says there’s a halfway decent hotel in the Sansar district, at the eastern end of Sambuu Street... Follow me...’
I let Sherry take care of my host. One less thing for me to worry about. The Austrians said goodbye and headed off to the Kublai Khan Holiday Inn, no longer laughing. The Israeli team nodded at us and marched off in another direction. Caspar had already forgotten about the Swede.
Backpackers are strange. I have a lot in common with them. We live nowhere, and we are strangers everywhere. We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for. We are both parasites: I live in my hosts’ minds, and sift through his or her memories to understand the world. Caspar’s breed live in a host country that is never their own, and use its culture and landscape to learn, or stave off boredom. To the world at large we are both immaterial and invisible. We chew the secretions of solitude. My incredulous Chinese hosts who saw the first backpackers regarded them as quite alien entities. Which is exactly how humans would regard me.