A Fortune-Teller Told Me (54 page)

She sat on her bed, and indicated that I was to sit on a low stool at her feet. She had a strange way of breathing, continually puffing like someone who feels a hair on his face and tries to blow it away. She picked up a Buddhist rosary and began scrutinizing me very intently, especially behind my ears, as if she were searching for something. Then she looked into a mirror behind me which reflected another mirror on the chest. Gazing into my eyes, she began to speak. My ex-Marxist companion, reincarnation of a lama, translated.

“Your family consists of four persons. You have two children, the first is a boy, the second a girl. Eight or nine years ago there was an important event in your life. I cannot say if that event was a good or an evil, but it changed your life.”
(Excellent: my expulsion from China. It certainly
changed my life, and for a while I myself was not sure if it was good or bad. Only today can I say it was good.)
“Until the end of your life nothing else of that kind will happen to you, nothing bad, no accidents. You will have a long life, very long; especially if you calm yourself and begin to meditate.”
(She too!)
“Give me three numbers under ten.”

“Three, six, nine,” I replied without thinking. She took her rosary, put it around her neck and around her waist, did some calculations, separated a few beads, and then said:
“Your number is eighteen thousand. You must worship this number; you must never forget it. This number will help you throughout your life. If you are in trouble, if you feel yourself in danger, think intensely of this number and all will be well. Remember: eighteen thousand.”

She stood up, took some peacock feathers and fanned the air around me, blowing on me very hard as if to drive away spirits.

“What is your profession?”
she asked.

“I live by words, like you,” I said. Then, fearing that she might take me for a competitor and put the evil eye on me, I added: “I write articles, books.”

“Good. In the year of the pig”
(did she mean 1995 or 2007, I wondered)
“your books will be successful”
(I was about to believe her and feel delighted),
“because in the past your works have been banned, suppressed. But now there is more freedom and it is easier to circulate them.”
(Clearly she was looking not at my future, but at that of a Mongolian writer. Her prophecy, as I had noted in other cases, reflected local conditions.)
“You have a problem with your wife. She is against your profession, she is against your writing, she wants you to stop. But you must pay no attention to her. You must continue. Your wife is very jealous of you because you always travel.”

After a splendid beginning, it seemed now that the woman was reading the wrong book, and that I could expect nothing more of interest from her. She made some more inaccurate comments about my relations with Angela, gave advice as to how my children should marry, and put me on guard against the alcoholism of Folco (poor boy, he doesn’t touch even wine! But in Mongolia alcoholism among young people is one of the worst problems), and continued reciting other banalities I now knew by heart.

But aren’t these the things people worry about most? If their wife or
husband is unfaithful, if their daughter will marry, if their son will find a good job. Who goes to a fortune-teller to ask if the hole in the ozone layer can be repaired, if the world’s population can go on growing unchecked? It has always been so. Even the great oracles of the past were faced with the same questions: “Will I win the battle against my enemies?” Always survival, love, death. Our anxiety is for the immediate, for what closely touches us, our loved ones, our family. Curiosity about world affairs, about collective events, has always been limited.

The witch picked up her rosary, blew on it, put it around my neck, blew on my head as if to drive away dust or evil spirits, and said she would think of me, she would pray for me, and I would live happily to the age of ninety or a hundred.

I was annoyed with myself for having come so far to meet an ordinary soothsayer. In the kitchen there was a great sizzling of oil, and occasionally the aroma of burnt sugar came to my nostrils. I was thinking I would like to eat some of those doughnuts … now there was a powerful thought! A moment later the witch offered us some. The best part of the visit, I thought. But then, perhaps not. How else would I have come to the outskirts of Ulan Bator? How would I have entered one of those many identical houses? The thought consoled me.

I asked the woman if she believed in reincarnation. Of course! When she walked among the graves in a cemetery, she could feel who was reincarnated and who was not. That was a new idea for me—the unfortunate ones who are not reincarnated and have to remain in the putrefying cadaver.
“Therefore one must respect one’s father and mother,”
said the witch.
“They are persons who have helped another human being to be reincarnated.”
That was another thing I had never thought of.

Before I left, she, like the lama, gave me some
arz
wrapped in a little packet to always keep with me for protection. She also presented me with two Chinese bowls to eat from; if they should break I must absolutely keep the pieces. Then, as something even more sacred, she gave me her photo, passport size, one of the old-fashioned ones with deckle edges, to help me think of her from afar.

I had a feeling that the sprig of scented grass drying between the pages of the book must have been pleasing to Ossendowski. It must have
taken him back, as sometimes only odors can do, to the days he had spent in Urga. I would have liked to take another morning walk with him and revisit Hutuktu’s throne room, but I had an appointment with the geologist-taxi driver-head of faculty. He brought along, as interpreter, a stylish young man who spoke excellent French. He worked in the Foreign Ministry, but his dream was to go to a business school in Bordeaux and then become a businessman.

We were headed for the monastery of Ghisir, on the high plateau where the Gandan Temple also stands. Long ago Ghisir had been a school for monastic astrologers and fortune-tellers, and it had just been reopened to resume its old work, training a few young novices in the art of prophecy. “The abbot is one who sees,” said the geologist-taxi driver as he drove along. My young interpreter was very skeptical, and somewhat embarrassed to be part of this expedition. He was wearing a well-cut blue blazer with brass buttons, gray trousers, white shirt, striped tie and shiny leather shoes: all the right gear to mark him as a respectable person, not to be challenged by the bouncers at the doors of hotels where imported products can be bought for dollars. He was an up-and-coming young man with his eye on the international future, and here I was taking him back to the Mongol middle ages.

Practically nothing remained in the two remaining buildings of the old monastic complex. There was not one statue, one painting, one old piece of furniture. Grass was growing on the roofs, and even the stone steps leading to the terrace of the small pavilion where the abbot lived had been removed. It was hard to imagine the place in past times. Only certain sounds, perhaps, were the same as those of old. In a big bare room about ten novices, supervised by an elderly lama sitting on a high chair, were reading some sutras with obsessive monotony, to the rhythmic chiming of cymbals.

My young interpreter found it absurd that the novices were reading in Tibetan, a language they did not understand. The geologist-taxi driver explained to him that lamaist Buddhism is Tibetan, that the originals of the sacred texts are in that language and the Mongol texts had been destroyed. “But it’s crazy,” said the young man. This crazy phenomenon, however, was becoming important: a huge number of young men were asking to be novices, said the geologist-taxi driver, and the temples were reopening “like mushrooms.”

Perhaps here too the failure of socialist modernity has induced a movement back to the origins. Someone who recently returned from the north of Mongolia told me that the few factories in the region were closing for want of raw materials, and many Mongols were happily going back to tend the flocks. It would not be surprising. What has modernity offered them to compensate for all it destroyed? What has it substituted for the beautiful myths and legends it swept away? The myth of a business school in Bordeaux?

We had to wait for a while, as there was a queue of people outside the abbot’s door who wanted to see him. After they had all been received—my young interpreter was annoyed that we did not have priority—our turn came.

The room was small and very dusty. The abbot was a tall, strong man of about forty, with a pockmarked face and eyes like two narrow slits. His skin was very dark, his arms muscular as those of a wrestler, his hands large and oddly shaped, with palms much longer than the fingers and oversized thumbs. He sat at a table on which was a wooden box about two feet long and a foot wide, containing some very fine gray dust: ashes of incense.

I was the first foreigner to have his future read by the abbot. His method was to ask first for my year of birth and then for a number under 109. With a silver chopstick he drew some complicated signs in the ashes, canceled them, and drew some more. He traced a picture of my life that was there one moment and vanished the next, as with a simple movement of the box he restored the ashes to a perfectly smooth surface. I liked his truths because they were more ephemeral than horoscopes written on paper, to which one could later return.

That was precisely the secret, said the abbot: because every calculation was canceled and he had to remember it by heart, he was forced to concentrate and therefore to “see” better. At the end he traced a perfect circle in the ashes, inscribed some signs in it, and went to consult a sheaf of handwritten papers. The original basis of his system lay in the 108 volumes of the Ganjur, the sacred book of the Mongols; but what counted most were the registers with annotations on the events of the past, and those had disappeared. The lamas had reconstructed them from 1940 on, but could not go back earlier than that. Therefore my horoscope was difficult for him to work out.

“Do you have heart trouble?”
he asked me.

“Not yet,” I replied.

He was sure that I would have it sooner or later—not serious, but definitely heart trouble. He said that if I wanted to stay healthy I should never cut down trees.

For the young interpreter all this was madness—and anyway, he had heard talk of a great seer, a blind woman called Vanga. “Where?” I asked, once again ready to set off on the trail.

“In Bulgaria, in a little town on the Greek border,” he said.

I went back to the hotel for lunch. In the dining room I found the usual situation—no free tables. At first I sat at one where an American was explaining something about China to his Mongolian guide. I got up before ordering and moved to a table with a Lebanese who was in Mongolia to sell French telephones. I told him about my morning and mentioned the marvelous seer of whom I had just heard.

“Vanga?” said a young man sitting opposite the Lebanese. “Yes, she really is very powerful. I am Bulgarian, and I can help you get an appointment with her—otherwise you have to wait for months!” He said that the region where Vanga lived was, together with Tibet, one of the places in the world most charged with energy. From this came much of her power. I have heard the same thing said by faith healers in the Philippines.

The Bulgarian gave me the telephone numbers of some of his friends in Sofia, who would help me to find Vanga. One was the press attaché of the head of state. Chance or destiny? What had made me sit next to a man who knew about Vanga?

That evening I studied the railway map. Once I got to Warsaw I could easily turn south to Sofia rather than continue west to Berlin. The side trip would take only a few days.

I
n Ulan Bator the summer sunsets are slow and glorious. The mountains glow with beautiful pastel colors that change from green to blue to violet, like the colors of the silk sashes that Mongolian men and women wear around their waists like belts. I watched it for the last time, absorbing the lofty purity of the sky and the yearning sweetness of the hills. The sun never seemed to disappear, casting longer and longer shadows over the crowd that stood with raised arms to wave at the train, and over the pickpocket who, at the last moment, tried to steal my little Minox.

Unbeknown to each other, each with a good-luck charm to give me, they had all come to see me off: the geologist-taxi driver-head of faculty with a bronze medal of Genghis Khan; the veterinarian-interpreter with a set of little plaster Buddhas glued to a wooden plate; the ex-Marxist reincarnation of a lama with three of the last pills given her personally by the Dalai Lama, to be taken with a sip of water in case of danger. Her husband, the high government official, was the most practical of all: he brought a plastic bag full of a very useful stock of beer and caviar. At such moments one would like the train to leave promptly, but this one pulled out of Ulan Bator half an hour late, prolonging the embarrassed conversation at the window.