Brenda and the F Word

Like the Bedouins, the laws of hospitality are still considered sacred in Mongolia. In entering a ger, for  instance, a certain etiquette must be observed. According to what I’ve read on the interminable train journey from Moscow, this etiquette has remained unchanged for centuries. 

Never touch other people’s hats
Never whistle or walk in front of an older person
Don’t spill milk or turn your back to the altar at any time (unless leaving the ger)
Don’t point your feet towards the hearth
If you, accidentally, step on anyone or kick their feet, shake their hand, immediately. 
And always remember…There is a male and female side of a ger. Saddles, leather milk bags, and slabs of mutton are kept on the male (that is, the left or west) side. Cooking utensils and water buckets on the female (the right or east) side.

Alas! We have the luxury of our own private gers. So I am unable to put these customs into practice.
But everything else about the ger is totally authentic. A perfectly self-contained world: the bright painted wooden door, chests, and two hand-carved wooden beds with stacks of rainbow colored woolen blankets, the iron stove, soft felt carpets, and tiny vanity with shallow sink. (With a a jug of cool river water for brushing teeth and washing face and hands.) There is no electricity, of course. Just candles or flashlights. And no in-ger shower or toilet, either. The outhouse, another brightly painted wooden structure, sits on top of a nearby hill. Trekking up that hill on a  moonless night is like walking blind-folded through a haunted house. The screech of owls, barking dogs, creaking ropes, and occasional belch from a yak takes some getting used to. 

There is a young, ten-year old boy, always smiling at my daughter who pulls us towards his family ger on that first afternoon to show us a litter of brand-new puppies. Still shaky on their feet, they stumble around, blindly, in the grass, licking hands. N. is in love. 
“Cute,” I think to myself, knowing full well that dogs in this country are not kept as pets but as protectors.
Which is why one never knocks on the door of a ger but shouts (in Mongolian) “Hold the dog! Or “Hold the fucking dog!” depending on one’s fluency in the native language.

With walls of canvas and felt, two supportive wooden columns inside (painted orange in honor of the sun), a collapsible wooden frame, pegs and ropes, a ger can be taken down and packed up in a single morning. The hole in the roof (covered with a felt flap in heavy rains and snow) funnels smoke from the stove, located in the center or heart of the ger. Extraordinarily practical, lightweight, and flexible, the ger is an ideal form of housing for ever wondering nomads. (It would also be an ideal form of housing for AIG employees and bankers on the run.) In fact, should we ever succeed in unloading the money pit in the country, I might seriously considering owning one. 

“Evolution intended us to be travellers,” says Bruce Chatwin. I can’t remember in which book precisely but he then detours to talk about the new Global Village. The mobile encampments and culture of the ultra-rich. Their rootlessness. Their tax havens. Dispossessed in the sense they no longer have a single home or country to call their own but many, they miss the true beauty of life as a nomad. A life in which all of one’s belongings can be carried away at an hour’s notice on the back of a cart. I think of my children’s generation, too. A generation of locationless communicators, hopelessly tied to the incessant demands of their wireless universe.

Compelled to move in order to fulfill their basic needs and only at home in the open, the Mongols are the only society or culture in the world that refuses to build walls. Not around their cities or towns or even small family communities. Historically, walls were perceived as signs of weakness not strength; of vulnerability and defensiveness not courage. I find real poetry, even hope, in such convictions. 

When I wake up on my second morning after a stuporous sleep (more on that stupor later), I dunk my head in a sink of glacier cold water, stoop down (doors are extremely low), step outside, and BREATHE. Deeply. I’m blissfully alone. Then my  head snaps around at the sudden neigh of horses. 

There on the crest of the hill is a band of Mongol horsemen. These men look as if they’ve leapt straight out of the Matrix. Steel rimmed, silvered sunglasses, black leather breeches and cuffs that stretch from elbows to the tips of their fingers. The lines on their faces have been carved out of sun and wind. They are as formidably silent as the hills that surround them. No one is smiling. As I approach, timidly, they flick their reins, turn around, and vanish with the sound of thundering hooves. “Take me to your leader,”I whisper and grin to myself. No wonder the Chinese built the Great Wall to keep these guys out.

But this hallucinatory vision of horsemen reminds me of a passage in The Bloody White Baron (I mentioned it in a post a week ago). This is a biography by James Parker about Baron Ungren, a sadistically depraved White Russian whom the Mongols, briefly, embraced as their savior in the 1920’s. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, Mongolia’s borders were so porous, the Whites came seeking refuge and revenge. With the Chinese fleeing in droves and the Reds, the Communists, not yet arrived in force, Mongolia came vertiginously close to independence. Here, a paragraph describing the first impressions of the Mongols as Ungren gallops through a countryside, not far from where we are. 

“Imagine a nomad family in Northern Mongolia in the autumn of 1920, making their camp. There are probably seven or eight people in the family and their nearest neighbor is an hour’s ride away. Over the course of the past year, they have seen, at most, one hundred people….
Away from the gers and the herd…there is only the sound of a falcon breaking the stillness. But not today. Now they hear the familiar sound of horses approaching, but in numbers never yet conceived. At first, only a few scouts break the horizon, then dozens of horsemen, then hundreds, riding two abreast. This is the great army…The holy northern force that will liberate the country for Buddhism.”

Far from liberating the country, Ungren became a dictator, enslaving, imprisoning, torturing and killing them instead. But that’s another story. Tomorrow…the Big Sleep and the most unforgettable shower on the planet. 

P.S. Forgive me if the writing seems a bit stiff today. I’m working on my first new computer in fifteen years and my thoughts, not to mention fingers, keep stalling. 

In a Ger
(a/k/a yurt)

It took a while to get there. Like six days on a train and five hours in a bus. But my, oh my, was it worth it. Because there is nothing on earth like sleeping in a Mongolian ger.After quick showers (quick as there is no hot water and only a trickle of cold ) in a crumbling, cement, Soviet era hotel, our bus driver picks us up. All gold teeth and grins and as tan as Valentino, he revs the engine, impatiently. I’m a bit hesitant–at first. I have never ridden in a vehicle that looks like the inside of a casket. The whole interior, including the ceiling, is upholstered in greasy, powder blue, tufted leather. Kind of like what I imagined they buried Elvis in. Our driver strips through a few gears then hauls ass –sorry but that is the best way to describe it— through town and onto the highway. Which we are on for approximately twenty minutes. He then hangs a hard left. No signs, of course. No signs of anything, actually. No humans or horses or gers. Nada. 

The road gets rougher. We bounce over potholes, abrupt dives right and left, dodging large boulders, clutching at leather straps. Our heads bump into the cushioned ceiling. “Ahha!’ I think. “That explains it.” Again, there isn’t much to see. Short, stubby grass, gentle hills, and leans-to’s surrounded by stone walled fences. (For protecting livestock in the winter.) The Tula River gleams like the silver blade of a dagger below us. Eventually, or so I assume as we have lost all sense of time by now, our driver hangs another hard right. Who the hell knows why. I mean, he could hung a left and I can’t imagine it would have made much difference. 

As recently as 1930, when America was thumbing its nose at Prohibition and drinking bootlegger’s whiskey from coffee cups, the Danish explorer, Henning Haslund, galloped through this same stark, desolate steppe. He was enroute back to Ulan Bator. At that time, the price of commodities such as butter and tea (the Mongolians are still obsessive tea drinkers) was determined not by the actual cost of the commodity but by freightage; by the transport costs and the effort it took to get these commodities to such far flung destinations. Corpses were still disposed of through exposure, eaten by wild dogs and birds. The woods were full of wolves, lynx, bears and nomads worshipped shamans. “Here where they still live face to face with rude forces of nature,” says Haslund, “Where they live without conventions, it is to the Shaman’s black magic that they turn in the hour of danger and need.” 

Our road has turned into a rutted dirt track and we’re climbing. Were he alive today, Haslund would have no troubling recognizing this landscape as nothing appears to have changed. Suddenly, I feel something crack open inside. I’m laughing. I recognize from previous experience that this laughter is a signal, a symptom of surrender. Surrender of control, of expectations, of all knowingness. I’ve let the nomad loose inside and I’m faint with joy. My family, of course, thinks I’ve lost it. As the tears stream down my face, I stab my finger out the window. There in the middle of this infinite nowhere is a fucking basketball hoop. A basketball hoop! I gasp as we continue to climb a final hill. Sheltered by mountains, on top of this hill, is  a meadow full of insanely bright, wild flowers and twelve white gers. Women swaddled in calf length brown tunics and jewel toned sashes stand, smiling, next to a cart pulled by yaks. 
We’re so high, I think it must be heaven. The sky is a blistering blue. No clouds. Nothing between me and the roof of the world. 
Except for 12 year old daughter. “OH  MY  GOD!” she whispers, slowly enunciating every syllable. “SIX DAYS,” she says. “And this is it?”
“Yep!” I reply, giggling.”That’s how long it takes to get nowhere, N. You’re gonna love it.” Grabbing her hand, we follow alongside the cart as it leads us towards our new homes.
 
More tomorrow.

The mention of cockpit in my post yesterday unmoored another very funny memory. About China. A friend’s experience flying the too friendly skies. This must have been shortly after Genghis Khan. I mean, my friend was working and living in China, for months at a time, twenty five years ago. Anyway, domestic air travel was a bit iffy back then. Sort of like America now. So he’s sitting in a folding bridge chair (no seat belt, of course) up in the front of the cabin when the captain and co-pilot step out of the cockpit. They’re smiling.. My friend isn’t particularly nervous. Yet. Then the captain isn’t just smiling. He’s grinning. He’s also trying to open the cockpit door. “Surely not,” my friend thinks to himself. ” The captain could not possibly have FUCKING locked himself out of the cockpit” He is then joined by the co-pilot who also proceeds to twist and turn the door handle. He, too, is grinning. “Jesus Christ!” my friend thinks to himself. “Jesus Christ!”  Ends up the captain and co-pilot take turns with a fire axe, breaking down the door. The crew never stopped smiling. 

“That’s how you know when something’s wrong in China,” my friend later told me. “They’re smiling. It’s like when gorillas grin right before they attack.”

Next week: Mongolia

You reach a certain age (uhoh) or stage/phase in life when you hesitate to ask old friends what they’re doing. Professionally. Maybe because you and they have been doing it so long, it’s too boring or too dangerous to talk about. With ambitions and dreams fulfilled or thwarted, the force of desire, somewhat, diminished, and disappointment discreetly (or not so discreetly) dealt with, there seem so few surprises left. 

But occasionally, old friends do surprise you. In the case of R., they ambush you. R is an art historian. A tenured professor. As guileless as she is both charismatic and tactless (in five different languages), she is a woman who lives in her head but whose energy could probably light up a city in a black-out.

Last night, she lit up a lecture room at the old B.Altmans on Fifth Avenue. First, there was the pleasure of seeing a friend so at home in her own milieu; in a field that remains as impenetrable to me as the farthest regions of Kyrgyzstan. Second, there was the pleasure of seeing a friend in such total command. (Like that pilot, Sully Sultzberger, whom I suspect was paid millions by publishers not for his poems but because he,too, was a man in command.)

R wasn’t exactly landing a plane in the middle of the Hudson River. Thank God! R. drives a car like she talks. Recklessly, very fast, with both hands in the air. The thought of her anywhere near a cockpit is horrifying. The point is, she held her audience, utterly captive. She owned the room. 

The subject was Vanishings: Italian Art 1943-1973. I only understood half of it. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was her fearlessness and the fact she carried us all along on the tidal wave of her own enthusiasm. One of those rare academics who, happily, careens away from facts and into the realm of outrageous opinion, she even had us laughing. “Achh! Lichtenstein! An awful, awful painter married to an even worse ceramicist.” When the lights went up, nothing about R had dimmed. I hugged her and left. Gazing up the Empire State Building across the street, I found myself grinning; revelling in her triumph. 

“His name is Ulysses,” my friend, the doctor tells me. “He’s taking care of me now.”
I laugh out loud. “My God! Where did you ever find a man named Ulysses?” 
“He worked at the gas station, Brenda. He’s only a boy. Nineteen years old.” 
I laugh again. “Talk about mythical connections, huh?”
“Indeed,” he says. “Indeed.” 
“So how are the hawks? Are you watching them?”
“Too tired, too much pain,” he says, succinctly. “Hard not to think of anything but the pain.”
“Are you on anti-depressants,” I ask.
Now it’s his turn to laugh, weakly. “I am the last human in this country NOT on anti-depressants.” 
“No,” I, quickly, reply. “There are two of us.”
“I’m going to sleep,” he says. “Can’t talk anymore.”
“I’ll call tomorrow,” I say, softly hanging up the phone.

But I don’t. Call. I don’t call the next day. Or the day after that. I’m a coward. And then when I do, it’s too late. “The dead are as silent as women in adultery,” says Joseph Roth. But not this man. He isn’t silent. I hear his old-school phrases, the ones that reminded me so much of my own father. “She has a first-class mind,” he would say. Or “It’s too pedestrian for words.” When I asked him once why he had become a collector, he said: “Because I don’t believe anything should have to live alone.”

His executor tells me there are no plans for a funeral or memorial service. “He wanted a garden party,” he says to me. “So we’re throwing the grandest and the only garden party this town has ever had.” 
“I’ll be there,” I say. “I’ll wear a hat.” I hang up, smiling at the thought of a boy named Ulysses, Homer’s great traveller, bringing my doctor home. 

6 30 AM Saturday

It starts with honking. Not like a car honking. More like when you squeeze the nose of a clown. One short honk. Two quick honk honks. Followed by one ear splitting loooong honk. I put the pillow over my head. Next, it’s a low zzzzz sound. Zzzz. Zzzz.
“R, Your phone. It’s vibrating.”
Snoring
Gentle nudge. “R, pick it up. Can’t you hear it?”
R’s hand feels around the bed side table. Eyes shut. “S’not the phone. S’not here.” 
Snoring.
I thrash around and whip out of bed. Peering, bleary-eyed, through the window, I see our neighbor. He’s up and at it with a fucking buzz saw. Probably chopping up his wife. And standing right below me is the biggest wild ass turkey I’ve ever seen.
“Shhhh!” I yell, quietly. (To the turkey not the man with the vibrating buzz saw) “Get outta here!” 
Nothing. It just sits there. Preening. Honking.
 
By 7 o’clock, the hills are alive with the sounds of sawing, chipping, digging, grinding. And I’m not just up, I’m wired. What IS it with these guys and their urgent need to make noise? First sign of spring and dawn and they’re switching on everything from power saws and jackhammers to bulldozers and wood chippers.
But this is the best. By 8 30, they’re done. Finished. There isn’t a sound for miles.
Except for my husband who, while I’ve showered, has raced through his morning ablutions like road runner, grabbed the battery from my super sized Dustbuster, and plugged it into his own portable chain saw. He’s out there whacking away at bushes and branches like Saladin versus the infidels.
And what am I doing? I’m looking at what looks like a mug shot of our realtor in the local paper.

The truth is, I don’t hate this place. How could I? It’s a safe house. Safe in the sense it’s sole purpose is pleasure. Safe in the sense that there is nothing in it that reminds us of our other other lives. No ghosts, no souvenirs, no accumulation of objects.  There’s something almost pristine about being in it. Sure, I call it a dump. The money pit. And no, I don’t want to grow old (er) here. Not unless I end up in Witness Protection. Speaking of which, I wonder how you go about selling a house to the WPP?

In the meantime, a friend and valiant supporter of this blog suggested at dinner last week that I learn how to embed. Apparently, this is not something that entails wearing a helmet or a flak jacket. But really… I can not for the life of me figure out how you get this link thing under a word that isn’t even in bold-faced type. It seems downright sneaky. Of course, so did the whole idea of embedding journalists in Iraq. Sound sneaky, I mean. Nevermind.

You make me feel so young
You make me feel like spring has sprung
Everytime I see you grin
I’m such a happy individual!

Sing it, N.

When I, finally, arrived home after seven hours of train rides to and from Old Saybrook, there was a message from my  friend.
“Where are you, Brenda? I’m waiting with a bottle of Veuve and French toast.”
I called. “I’ll be up this weekend,” I say.
“You’ll be too late,” he replies. “I think I’m dying.” 
I clutch the phone as tightly as if it were his hand. “I feel as if I’ve abandoned you,” I say. “I was so close…”
“That’s alright, Brenda. I’m tired now. Please promise to call me tomorrow.”
 Why is when talking to the dying one feels as if every word should be significant?
I remember when he told me about the diagnosis in September.  
“I know how to die,” he said. “I’m a doctor.”
Yes. But he wasn’t just any doctor. He was my doctor, a man whose quiet demeanor and sly sense of humor always reassured me. And I left him waiting, a man with so little time, without even a phone call at the station.

——————————————————————————————————–

“She tells me I’m having a bad day.”
 ”No, I’m not,” I say to her. “I’m dying. Why can’t people let me be honest?”
“Because they’re afraid,” I reply. “They’re terrified.”
“So am I,” he chuckles. “But you don’t catch death like the flu.”
I can hear him struggling for breath.
“Yesterday was my last day out of the house,” he adds, matter-of-factly.
I push this impossible thought away, this idea of never going outside again.
“So tell me about the view,” I say.
“Ah!,” he replies. “It’s magnificent. I’ve been watching a hawk all morning. He’s hunting for food for his family, I think.” 
I’m silent, as if my tongue were caught up by the talons of this bird that, unlike myself, defies gravity. Why can’t I think of something funny or profound or poignant to say?
“I want you to know how much your family has meant to me.” He’s filling in the blank for me. ”Most of my patients were old like me. Knowing you and your husband and boy. Well, it was cross generational. And you are a joy, you know. All of you.”
“Thank you,” I say, stupidly. “Thank you.”
“Call me tomorrow. I’m tired now.”