The Lunatic Express (21 page)

She wrote. But it was the visa, or my lack of it, that I was worried about. She opened my passport. Thumbed through the pages. Looked at me. “What bus number?”

I shrugged. She wrote something down. Picked up a stamper and, clunk, stamped my passport. Fifteen minutes later we were in Zamyn Uud, Mongolia, on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

There was nothing in Zamyn Uud, Mongolia. There was dirt and ice and snow and three restaurants and a train station, a lot of yurts, a couple of general stores. It was 42 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. A pool table lay dead in the town square, its felt covered with a layer of white. On the edge of town stood two boxcars, from which frozen horse hides, like sheets of plywood, were being unloaded onto trucks. My hotel, which was not the Zamyn Uud Hotel, had no hot water. When darkness fell the sky was nothing but stars, a dusting of snow sparkling like broken glass. I felt far away from everything. Nisa called from Delhi, sobbing. Lindsey sent me a note that hinted of a new, budding relationship; apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt we had grown apart. On my way to the restaurant for dinner I ran into wandering yak. And found a man lying on the snow. He wore a fur cap and knee-high leather boots and had gold teeth and his legs were scrambling but he was getting nowhere. He could not rise. He was hopelessly drunk. I did my best to lift him to his feet, but he was big, solid, and he clutched me tightly, weaving, slipping. He had no gloves. We slipped and slid and skidded to a bench in the square, by the pool table dusted with snow, where I left him. I wanted to hang out, to talk, to just sit and watch the world and meet people, but that was impossible when it was 42 degrees below zero. People rushed past in thick winter coats; if I paused for more than a moment the cold cut through my clothes as if I was naked. What would have happened to Schneebaum’s adventure if those Akarams had ignored him?

In the restaurant it hit me: I was starting all over again. I knew not a word of Mongolian, and the menu was in Cyrillic. Bring me anything, I motioned. We struggled. Being me in such situations was like being a wiggling minnow on a line cast from a dock; if there was an English speaker within a half-mile they’d find me.

So it was: “What is your problem?” said a man who swept in through the thick blanket covering the doorway. “Meat,” he said. “In Mongolia we eat meat.”

“Perfect,” I said. “I want meat.”

He barked an order, sat down with me, and we shared a beer. His name was Tsedee. He was in his late twenties and spoke Mongolian, English, German, and Russian.

I saw my opening. Tsedee was driving to Ulan Bator in a twenty-ton truck hauling propane. It wasn’t exactly playing by the ludicrous rules of my crazy idea—there was no history of propane trucks blowing up in Mongolia—and I’d been taking buses, boats, trains, and planes that you could buy a ticket on, but I wanted more. More adventure. More risk. More conversation. The train from Zamyn Uud to Ulan Bator didn’t promise anything new. I filled his mug. Looked at him. Said, “I have a strange and serious question for you.”

“What?” he said.

“I want to ride to Ulan Bator in your truck.”

He looked at me. “The road is very bad,” he said. “Not a little bad, but very bad. It is very rough. It is freezing. The truck’s heater is broken. It will take thirty-six hours to drive 350 miles. It is like torture.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Can I come?”

He looked me up and down. Said, “You will see camels and yurts and the Gobi Desert.” Took a swig of his beer. “Yes.”

I waited for three days, the last in a one-room house with two beds and no running water, heated with a coal stove, while Tsedee waited for his Chinese propane man to call him on his cell phone; and I worried that it would all fall through and that I would freeze to death.

The truck stood outside, wooden beams under its front axle, with no left front wheel. There would be Tsedee, a driver named Batbillq and me. Batbillq didn’t want me to come. “Too cold,” he said. “And there is no room.” I climbed in the truck. A single bench seat and in the middle, where my legs would be, an auxiliary heater balanced on the floor, connected to the electrical system with bare wires. The cab was a mess. Oil-soaked rags, trash, furs, a toolbox, were haphazardly strewn everywhere. It would be tight. But Tsedee texted me that night, finally: “You are welcome to ride with us and I am in Erlian and will be back tomorrow afternoon.”

“Bayarlalaa,”
I said to Tsedee. “Thank you.” And the next morning I went to breakfast.
“Bi husej buuz baina,”
I said. “I would like some meat dumplings.”

W
E DIDN’T LEAVE
until almost 10:00 p.m. that night. In the cold of forty below zero, everything was sharp. Tsedee climbed into a long-haired fur jumpsuit that made him look like a Yeti, and pulled a jacket over that. Batbillq had felt boots an inch thick. I had basic hiking shoes. The moon, one day from being full, was big and luminous and so clearly defined it looked like you could slice your finger on its edges. It hung over the darkness of the desert, glowing just enough to see a horizon that didn’t end. The wind cut like a razor; it sliced and burned, and ran through four layers of polar fleece and down like I was wearing a cotton T-shirt. The snow, blown across short brown grass, was so dry it was like talcum powder. Tsedee had been right; it was torture. We lurched and jolted at five and ten miles an hour over a frozen, rutted dirt road that turned into no road at all, just tire tracks across the desert, and that punched my kidneys like George Foreman. The sclerotic auxiliary heater pumped its best, though my feet got cold after an hour. The cracked windshield fogged.

We had three flat tires. The first came around midnight, and quickly felt like a nightmare. The tires were big, heavy; they had tubes, and we had to patch the first one, which we did in the glare of the headlights. It took almost two hours. We drove on. Passed nothing; no other cars or trucks or yurts or camels. Not a bush. The second flat hit at first light. We fixed that one. In late morning we ran out of gas, and that really might have killed us, because the heater, such as it was, wouldn’t work if the engine wasn’t on, and a wind had kicked up. But, strangely, the engine died literally across the dirt from a gas station in one of the few villages we passed—a jumble of small wooden houses in the middle of nowhere. Still, it was an ordeal. Batbillq had to hike in the wind to the pump and we had to lift the cab up three times while he fiddled with the engine to get it going again as the cold sliced and cut. We drove for thirty-six hours straight. I watched Batbillq fall asleep at the wheel and drift off the road and I didn’t have to say a word, because there wasn’t really a road and there was nothing to hit, so we’d just drive until he woke up and headed back to the path. We did take one break, pausing for three hours in the middle of nowhere—an unbroken horizon stretching in every direction—for lunch and a brief nap. Tsedee rummaged behind the seats and produced a propane tank, a single burner, and a pot. Batbillq wedged himself in a corner and started snoring, while Tsedee boiled
buuz
, meat dumplings, in milk and salt and water. The broth was full of fat and oil, salty and rich, and we gobbled it down.

W
E DIDN’T TALK A LOT
. Or maybe we did, and thirty-six hours was just a lot of time. I learned a bit about the gas business and growing up in Mongolia. Gas was cheaper in China than in Russia—which had a road from Ulan Bator—so Tsedee made the trip a couple of times a month. He’d been raised by his grandmother, had been sent off to school in Moscow at fifteen, had spent a couple of years in Berlin. He was smart, worldly, ambitious; with his language skills and willingness to make these epic journeys, I imagined he’d be rich in no time at all.

I learned how cold cold could really be. We came across only one camel, sleeping on its knees by a yurt, and we saw a lot of tiny mice and several antelope bounding across the headlights. On the second night we had our third flat, and this time had no more patches, no more spares. We stood around the tire in the dark, scratched our heads. Took the wheel off and tied it to the truck and just climbed back in. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” laughed Tsedee, slamming the door shut. “We will just pray we make it with only nine tires!”

Had it been months ago, I would have asked a lot more questions, but I’d now traveled three-quarters of the way around the world. I’d already been across South America and Africa, Bangladesh, India, and Afghanistan. Instead I just settled in, cranking the bad tire back into its place with a wrench in the darkness and dirt and cold, munching on my buuz, watching the nights and day pass by in a country that had one-half a person per square kilometer. It was a measure of how far I’d come, how deeply I’d gone, how long I’d been away. I was stripped bare, totally open to the world and at home with two descendants of Genghis Khan and the truth was, I was a little bit bored. It was time to go home. Time to complete the circle. Travel was only worthwhile when your eyes were fresh, when it surprised you and amazed you and made you think about yourself in a new way. You couldn’t travel forever. When you stopped seeing, when you lost your curiosity and openness to the world, it was time to return to your starting point and see where you stood. In everyone, I suspect, lay a tension between the need for otherness and home. We all want security, we all want adventure, the familiar and the new always jockeying for control. But when otherness began to be normal, home itself begin to seem like the other, perhaps even the exotic. Even Schneebaum had finally stumbled out of the world of the Akaramas and back to New York, “going out to look for the same self that I always was.” Thesiger and T. E. Lawrence left behind their beloved Arabia for London. Plus, I had been avoiding things for far too long. I needed to start making amends.

After a night and a day and a night of nothing, the lights of Ulan Bator appeared as if we were coming in from the sea. It was 7:30 a.m. and dawn was breaking in a world of steam and ice, not unlike a morning in March when I’d arrived in Toronto after my first all-night bus ride. I could barely keep my eyes open. We stopped at a corner, and in a flash Tsedee shook my hand and was gone. We drove a few more blocks, to the gas depot, and as Batbillq shimmied over a wooden fence to unlock the gate, I shed the big felt boots he’d loaned me, grabbed my stuff, and hailed a taxi.

F
ROM
U
LAN
B
ATOR
to Vladivostok by train took four days. Long days of rolling, rolling through snow and naked brown trees and under white skies, and over frozen rivers, a landscape without end that never changed. “Nature,” Albert Golod said, gazing out the window at it. “Russian nature!” He was seventy, strong and straight, both paternal and childlike in his quest to show me the delights of Russia. He was on his way to a sanatorium in Vladivostok for three weeks, and had long white hair and a white beard. He spoke Russian, German, Hebrew, and English, and he’d had two careers, first as a radar engineer and later as an archaeologist working and living in Tajikistan. He insisted I visit with him over tea and cakes, briefly every evening. “This is Russian tea,” he’d say. “This is a Russian cake.” Then he’d send me on my way again.

After the green warmth of the Amazon, after the passion and colors of India, after the blue seas of Indonesia and the hot crowds of Bangladesh, after the danger and exoticism of Afghanistan, the Russian landscape seemed oppressive, Russians proud and incurious. There was nothing glorious or grand about it save its length and breadth and its snow and unending cold bleakness. Yet Golod wasn’t the only one who looked at it with awe, with yearning. A young soldier talked to me one afternoon and the first thing he said was, “Look! Russia is so beautiful!” I looked. Snow. White sky. Bleakness.

There was also nothing dangerous or crowded or dirty about it, which was disappointing to me. The Russian visa I’d waited for in Delhi expired by the time I got to Ulan Bator, and there, if I didn’t want to wait another three weeks, my only option was a transit visa, and a prepaid train ticket. I asked for a third-class seat, but there were no seats at all on this train—it was only compartments.

Still, this was a piece of the Trans-Siberian Railway and, as Peter Fleming wrote in 1934, en route from London to China in
One’s Company:
“Everyone is a romantic, though in some the romanticism is of a perverted and paradoxical kind. And for the romantic it is, after all, something to stand in the sunlight beside the Trans-Siberian Express with the casually proprietarial air of the passenger, and to reflect that that long raking chain of steel and wood and glass is to go swinging and clattering out of the West into the East, carrying you with it.” I loved that description, even more because I was standing Fleming’s image on its head, heading east from the East itself, all the way across the Pacific toward home and the West. But the whole journey had felt that way, a raking chain of steel and wood and glass and rubber and aluminum snaking from Washington and wrapping around the world.

The train rolled on. One afternoon I was dragged into a compartment steaming and sweaty and packed with seven men. They were hooligans, tough guys. “Vodka!” they shouted. “Russian vodka!” Empty bottles slid across the floor. A greasy chicken carcass dripped on the little table. They had full sets of gold and silver teeth and were covered with tattoos—spiders on their hands, crosses inside the spiders’ abdomens. It was like being in a rugby scrum. We were packed in that compartment and they pawed and hugged and clutched each other and me with drunken abandon, and a physicality that American men are too insecure ever to display. They held my hand. Draped arms around me. Hit me and hit each other. It was full contact and the vodka shots rained and chicken parts flew and Patap, his eyes on fire, his metal teeth glinting inches from my face, gripped my hand and kissed it and put it to his forehead and punched me in the thighs, hard, and talked, talked, talked in my face. I punched back. And I talked back; we spoke without understanding but every word hit home. We were sure of it. Yes, yes, yes! The steward tried to drag me out; he was worried. “Bad men,” he said. But nothing could be done. We were a tangle of bodies and sour breath and simmering brutality inches from getting out of hand and I don’t know how long it lasted. I lost track of time. We pushed and shoved and Patap flipped and waved his sharp knife and poured another shot and thrust a piece of chicken skin at me and finally, somehow, I ended up in my own compartment utterly spent, dizzily gazing at a landscape that looked bleak enough to kill a smile. As I lost consciousness I heard thumps and barks; the gangsters were still at it, hugging each other and beating each other up.