Sherry chuckled and lit a cigarette. Her eyes reflected little flames. ‘I suppose you paid the power station ten dollars to stage this black-out, just to get me alone in a dark room with the manly smell of mutton.’
Caspar smiled in the darkness and I recognised love. It forms like a weather pattern. ‘Sherry, let’s hire the jeep from tomorrow. We’ve seen the temple, seen the old palace. I’m feeling like a moody tourist. I hate feeling like a moody tourist. The Fräulein at the German embassy reckoned there would be a delivery of gas in the morning.’
‘Why the rush?’
‘The place is going backwards in time. I feel the end of the world is waiting in those mountains, somewhere... We should get out before the nineteenth century comes around again.’
‘That’s a part of U.B.’s charm. Its ramshackleness.’
‘I don’t know what ramshackleness means, but there is nothing charming about this place. Ulan Bator proves that Mongolians cannot do cities. You could set a movie about a doomed colony of germ-warfare survivors here. Let’s get out. I don’t even know why I’m here. I don’t think the people who live here know either.’
The waitress walked in and put a candle on our table. Caspar thanked her in Mongolian. She walked out. ‘Come the revolution, darling...’ thought Caspar.
Sherry started shuffling a pack of cards. ‘You mean Mongolians are designed for arduous lifetimes of flock-tending, child-bearing, frostbite, illiteracy, Giardia lamblia, and ger-dwelling?’
‘I don’t want to argue. I want to drive to the Khangai mountains, climb mountains, ride horses, bathe naked in lakes and discover what I am doing on Earth.’
‘Okay, Vikingman, we’ll move on tomorrow. Let’s play cribbage. I believe I’m winning, thirty-seven games to nine.’
I would need to move on soon, too. Hosted by a Mongolian, my quest in this country was formidable. Hosted by a foreigner, my quest was plainly impossible.
I was here to find the source of the story that was already there, right at the beginning of ‘I’, sixty years ago. The story began, There are three who think about the fate of the world...
Once or twice I’ve tried to describe transmigration to the more imaginative of my human hosts. It’s impossible. I know eleven languages, but there are some tunes that language cannot play.
When another human touches my host, I can transmigrate. The ease of the transfer depends on the mind I am transmigrating into, and whether negative emotions are blocking me. The fact that touch is a requisite provides a clue that I exist on some physical plane, however sub-cellular or bio-electrical. There are limits. For example, I cannot transmigrate into animals, even primates: if I try the animal dies. It is like an adult’s inability to climb into children’s clothes. I’ve never tried a whale.
But how it feels, this transmigration, how to describe that! Imagine a trapeze artist in a circus, spinning in emptiness. Or a snooker ball lurching around the table. Arriving in a strange town after a journey through turbid weather.
Sometimes language can’t even read the music of meaning.
The morning wind blew cold from the mountains. Gunga stooped through the door of her ger, slapping the chilly morning air into her neck and face. The hillside of gers was slowly coming to life. In the city an ambulance siren rose and fell. The River Tuul glowed grey the colour of lead. The big red neon sign flicked off: Let’s Make Our City A Great Socialist Community.
‘Camelshit,’ thought Gunga. ‘When are they going to dismantle that?’
Gunga wondered where her daughter had got to. She had her suspicions.
A neighbour nodded to her, wishing her good morning. Gunga nodded back. Her eyes were becoming weaker, rheumatism had begun to gnaw at her hips, and a poorly set broken femur from three winters ago ached. Gunga’s dog padded over to be scratched behind the ears. Something else was wrong, too, today.
She ducked back into the warmth of the ger.
‘Shut the bloody door!’ bawled her husband.
It was good to transmigrate out of a westernised head. However much I learn from the non-stop highways of minds like Caspar’s, they make me giddy. It would be the euro’s exchange rate one minute, a film he’d once seen about art thieves in Petersburg the next, a memory of fishing with his uncle between islets the next, some pop song or a friend’s internet home page the next. No stopping.
Gunga’s mind patrols a more intimate neighbourhood. She constantly thinks about getting enough food and money. She worries about her daughter, and ailing relatives. Most of the days of her life have been very much alike. The assured dreariness of the Soviet days, the struggle for survival since independence. Gunga’s mind is a lot harder for me to hide in than Caspar’s, however. It’s like trying to make yourself invisible in a prying village as opposed to a sprawling conurbation. Some hosts are more perceptive about movements in their own mental landscape than others, and Gunga was very perceptive indeed. While she had been sleeping I acquired her language, but her dreams kept trying to smoke me out.
Gunga set about lighting the stove. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said, to herself, looking around the ger, half-expecting something to be missing. The beds, the table, the cabinet, the family tableware, the rugs, the silver teapot that she had refused to sell, even when times were at their hardest.
‘Not your mysterious sixth sense again?’ Buyant stirred under his pile of blankets. Gunga’s cataracts and the gloom of the ger made it difficult to see. Buyant coughed a smoker’s cough. ‘What is it this time? A message from your bladder, we’re going to inherit a camel? Your earwax telling you a giant leech is going to come and molest your innocence?’
‘A giant leech did that years ago. It was called Buyant.’
‘Very funny. What’s for breakfast?’
I may as well start somewhere. ‘Husband, do you know anything about the three who think about the fate of the world?’
A long pause in which I thought he hadn’t heard me. ‘What the devil are you talking about now?’
At that moment Oyuun, Gunga’s daughter, came in. Her cheeks were flushed red and you could see her breath. ‘The shop had some bread! And I found some onions, too.’
‘Good girl!’ Gunga embraced her. ‘You were gone early. You didn’t wake me.’
‘Shut the bloody door!’ bawled Buyant.
‘I knew you had to work late at the hotel, so I didn’t want to wake you.’ Gunga suspected Oyuun wasn’t telling the whole truth. ‘Was the hotel busy last night, Mum?’ Oyuun was an adept subject-changer.
‘No. Just the two blondies.’
‘I found Australia in the atlas at school. But I couldn’t find — what was it? Danemark, or somewhere?’
‘Who cares?’ Buyant rolled out of bed, wearing a blanket as a shawl. He would have been handsome once, and he still thought he was. ‘It’s not as if you’ll ever be going there.’
Gunga bit her tongue, and Oyuun didn’t look up.
‘The blondies are checking out today, and I’ll be glad to see the back of them. I just can’t understand it, her mother letting her daughter wander off like that. I’m sure they’re not married, but they’re in the same bed! No ring, or anything. And there’s something weird about him, too.’ Gunga was looking at Oyuun, but Oyuun was looking away.
‘’Course there is, they’re foreigners.’ Buyant burped and slurped his tea.
‘What do you mean, Mum?’ Oyuun started chopping the onions.
‘Well, for one thing, he smells of yoghurt. But there’s something else too... it’s in his eyes... it’s like they’re not his own.’