Ghostwritten (21 page)

Ulan Bator was much bigger than the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain, but the people we saw here lacked any sense of purpose. They just seemed to be waiting. Waiting for something to open, for the end of the day, for their city to be switched on, or just waiting to be fed.

Caspar readjusted the straps on his backpack. ‘My
Secret History of Genghis Khan
did not prepare me for this.’

That night Caspar dug into his mutton and onion stew with relish. He and Sherry were the only diners in the hotel, which was actually the sixth and seventh floors of a crumbling apartment building.

The woman who had brought the food from the kitchen looked at him blankly. Caspar pointed at it, gave her a thumbs up sign, smiled and grunted approvingly.

The woman looked at Caspar as though he were a madman, and left.

Sherry snorted. ‘She’s about as welcoming as the customs woman at the border.’

‘One of the things that my years of wandering has taught me is, the more impotent the country, the more dangerous its customs officials.’

‘When she showed us the room she gave me a look like I’d run over her baby with a bulldozer.’

Caspar picked out a bit of fleece from a meatball. ‘Service-sector communism. It’s quite a legacy. She’s stuck here, remember. We can get out whenever we want.’

He had some instant lemon tea from Beijing. There was a flask of hot water on the sideboard, so he made a cup for himself and Sherry, and they watched the waxy moon rise over the suburb of gers and campfires. ‘So,’ began Caspar. ‘Tell me more about that Hong Kong pub you worked in. What was the name? Mad Dogs?’

‘I’d rather hear more stories of the weirdos you met during your jewellery-selling days in Okinawa. Go on, Vikingman, it’s your turn.’

So many times in a lifetime do my hosts feel the beginnings of friendship. All I can do is watch.

As my infancy progressed, I became aware of another presence in ‘my’ body. Stringy mists of colour and emotion condensed into droplets of understanding. I saw, and slowly came to recognise, gardens, paths, barking dogs, rice fields, sunlit washing drying in warm town breezes. I had no idea why these images came when they did. Like being plugged into a plotless movie. Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path.

Something was happening on
my
side of the screen of perception, too. Like a radio slowly being turned up, so slowly that at first you cannot be sure of it being there. Slowly, I felt an entity that was not me generating sensations, which only later could I label loyalty, love, anger, ill-will. I watched this other clarify, and pull into focus. I began to be afraid. I thought
it
was the intruder! I thought the mind of my first host was the cuckoo’s egg, that would hatch and drive me out. So one night, while my host was asleep, I tried to penetrate this other presence.

My host tried to scream but I would not let him wake. Instinctively, his mind made itself rigid and tight. I prised my way through, clumsily, not knowing how strong I had become, ripping my way through memories and neural control, gouging out great chunks. Fear of losing the fight made me more violent than I ever intended. I had sought to subdue, not to lay waste.

When the morning brought the doctor he found my first host unresponsive to any form of stimulus. Naturally, the doctor could find no injury on the patient’s body, but he knew a coma when he saw one. In south-west China in the 1950s there were no facilities for people with comas. My host died a few weeks later, taking any clues of my origin that may have been buried in his memories with him. They were hellish weeks. I discovered my mistake –
I
had been the intruder. I tried to undo some of the damage, and piece back together some of the vital functions and memories, but it is so much easier to destroy than it is to re-create, and back then I knew nothing. I learned that my victim had fought as a brigand in bad times or a soldier in good ones in northern China. I found fragments of spoken languages which I would later know as Mongolian and Korean, but he had been illiterate. That was all. I couldn’t ascertain how long I had been embryonic.

I assumed that if my host died, I would share his death. I turned all my energies to learning how to perform what I now call transmigration. Two days before he died, I succeeded. My second host was the doctor of my first. I looked back at the soldier. A middle-aged man lay on his soiled bed, stretched out on his frame of bones. I felt guilt, relief, and I felt power.

I stayed in the doctor for two years, learning about humans and inhumanity. I learned how to read my hosts’ memories, to erase them, and replace them. I learned how to control my hosts. Humanity was my toy. But I also learned caution. One day I announced to my host that a disembodied entity had been living in his mind for two years, and would he like to ask me anything?

The poor man went quite mad, and I had to transmigrate again. The human mind is so fragile a toy. So puny!

Three nights later the waitress slammed a bowl of mutton down in front of Caspar. She had turned and gone before he had a chance to groan.

‘Mutton fat for dinner,’ beamed Sherry. ‘There’s a surprise.’

The waitress cleared the other tables. Caspar was experimenting at using mind control to make his mutton taste like turkey. I resisted the temptation to help him succeed. Sherry was reading. ‘Get this for Soviet doublespeak. From the nineteen forties, during Choilbalsan’s presidency. It says, “In the final analysis, life demonstrated the expediency of using the Russian alphabet.” What the author says this means, is that if you used Mongolian they shot you. Oath, how did people
live
under a master race like that, and why—’

The next moment all the lights in the building died.

Dim light came from the window of smoke stars, and a glowing red sign in Cyrillic beyond the wasteland. We had wondered what the sign meant, and we did again now.

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.’

‘They can’t be as weird as those Hungarian trade unionists who used to come. The ones they flew in the orchids from Vietnam for.’

Gunga knew how to blot out her husband’s presence. ‘That Danemark man, he tips all the time, and he keeps smiling like he’s touched in the head. But last night, he touched my hand.’

Buyant spat. ‘If he touches you again I’ll twist his head off and ram it up his arsehole. You tell him that from me.’