Authors: David Mitchell
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, Mom?” 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, Mom?” Oyuun started chopping the onions.
“Well, for one thing, he smells of yogurt. 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 asshole. You tell him that from me.”
Gunga shook her head. “No, it was like a kid playing tag. He just touched my hand with his thumb, and was gone, out of the kitchen. Or like he was casting a spell. And please don’t spit inside the
ger.”
Buyant ripped off a gobbet of bread. “A
spell
, ah yes, that must be it! He was probably trying to bewitch you. Woman, sometimes I feel it was your grandmother I married, not you!”
The women carried on preparing food in silence.
Buyant scratched his groin. “Speaking of marriage, Old Gombo’s eldest boy came around asking for Oyuun last night.”
Oyuun stared steadily into the noodles she was stirring. “Oh?”
“Yep. Brought me a bottle of vodka. Good stuff. Old Gombo’s a buffoon horseman who can’t hold his drink, but his brother-in-law has a good government job, and the younger son is turning into quite a wrestler, they say. He was the champion two years running at school. That’s not to be sniffed at.”
Gunga chopped, and the onions made her nostrils sting. Oyuun said nothing.
“It’s a thought, isn’t it? The older son is obviously quite taken with Oyuun.… If she gets Old Gombo’s grandson in the oven it’ll show she can deliver the goods
and
force Old Gombo’s hand.… I can think of worse matches.”
“I can think of better ones,” said Gunga, stirring some noodles into the mutton soup. A memory passed through of Buyant visiting her in her parents’
ger
, through a flap in the roof, just a few feet away from where her parents were sleeping. “Someone she loves, for example. Anyway, we’ve already agreed. Oyuun will finish school and, fate willing, get into the university. We want Oyuun to do well in the world. Maybe she’ll get a car. Or at least a motorbike, from China.”
“I don’t see the point. It’s not like there are any jobs waiting afterwards, especially not for girls. The Russians took all the jobs with them when they left. And the ones that they left the Chinese grabbed. Another way foreigners rip us Mongolians off.”
“Camelshit! The vodka took all the jobs. The vodka rips us off.”
Buyant glared. “Women don’t understand politics.”
Gunga glared back. “And I suppose men do? The economy would die of a common cold if it were healthy enough to catch one.”
“I tell you, it’s the Russians—”
“Nothing’s ever going to get better until we stop blaming the Russians and start blaming ourselves! The Chinese are able to make money here. Why can’t we?” Some fat in a pan began to hiss. Gunga caught a glimpse of her reflection in her cup of milk, frowning. Her hand trembled minutely, and the image rippled away. “Today is all wrong. I’m going to see the shaman.”
Buyant thumped the table. “I’m not having you throwing away our togrugs on—”
Gunga snapped back at him. “I’ll throw my togrugs anywhere I please, you soak!”
Buyant backed down from this fight he couldn’t win. He didn’t want the neighbors overhearing, and saying he couldn’t control his woman.
Why am I the way I am? I have no genetic blueprint. I have had no parents to teach me right from wrong. I have had no teachers. I had no nurture, and I possess no nature. But I am discreet and conscientious, a nonhuman humanist.
I wasn’t always this way. After the doctor went mad, I transmigrated around the villagers. I was their lord. I knew their secrets, the bends of the village’s streams and the names of its dogs. I knew their rare pleasures that burned out as quickly as they flared up, and of the memories that kept them from freezing. I studied extremes. I would drive my hosts almost to destruction in pursuit of the pleasure which fizzed along their neural bridges. I inflicted pain on those unlucky enough to cross my path, just to understand pain. I amused myself by implanting memories from one host into another, or by incessantly singing to them. I’d coerce monks to rob, devoted lovers to be unfaithful, misers to spend. The only thing I can say for myself is that after my first host, I never killed again. I cannot say I did this out of love for humanity. I have only one fear: to be inhabiting a human at the moment of death. I still don’t know what would happen.
I have no story of a blinding conversion to humanism. It just didn’t happen that way. During the Cultural Revolution, and when I transmigrated into hosts in Tibet, in Vietnam, in Korea, in El Salvador, I experienced humans fighting, usually from the safety of the general’s office. In the Falkland Islands I watched them fight over rocks. “Two bald men fighting over a comb,” an ex-host commented. In Rio I saw a tourist killed for a watch. Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous. That is why I no longer harm my hosts. There’s already too much of this poison.
• • •
Gunga spent the morning at the hotel, sweeping and boiling some water to wash sheets. Seeing Caspar and Sherry again from the outside was like revisiting an old house with a new tenant. They paid and waited until their rented jeep turned up. I bade Caspar good-bye in Danish as he slung his backpack in, but he just assumed Gunga was saying something in Mongolian.
As Gunga made the beds, she imagined Caspar and Sherry lying here, and then thought about Oyuun, and Gombo’s youngest son. She thought about the rumors of child prostitution spreading through the city, and how the police were being paid off in foreign money. Mrs. Enchbat, the widow who owned the hotel, stopped by to do some bookkeeping. Mrs. Enchbat was in a good mood—Caspar had paid in dollars, and Mrs. Enchbat needed to raise a dowry. While Gunga was boiling water for washing they sat down and shared some salty tea.
“Now Gunga, you
know
that I’m not a one for gossip,” began Mrs. Enchbat, a little woman with a mouth wise as a lizard’s, “but our Sonjoodoi saw your Oyuun walking out with Old Gombo’s youngest again yesterday evening. People’s tongues will start wagging. They were seen at the Naadam festival together. Sonjoodoi also said Gombo’s eldest has got a crush on her.”
Gunga chose counterattack. “Is it true your Sonjoodoi’s become a Christian?”
Mrs. Enchbat considered her reply coolly. “He’s been seen going to the American missionary’s apartment once or twice.”
“What does his grandmother have to say about that?”
“Only that it proves what suckers Americans are. They think they’re making converts to their weird cult, they’re just making converts to powdered milk—whatever’s the matter, Gunga?”
A riot of doubt had broken out in my host. Gunga knew I was here. Quickly, I tried to calm her. “No. Something’s wrong. I’m going to see the shaman.”
The bus was crowded and stuck in first gear. At the end of the line was a derelict factory from the Soviet days. Gunga had already forgotten what it had once manufactured. I had to look in her unconscious: bullets. Wildflowers were capitalizing on the brief summer,
and wild dogs picked at the body of something. The afternoon was weak and thin. People from the bus trudged their way past where the road ran out to a hillside of
ger
s. Gunga walked with them. The giant pipe ran along on its stilts. It had been a part of a public-heating system, but the boilers needed Russian coal. Mongolian coal burned at temperatures too cool to make it work. Most of the locals had gone back to burning dung.
Gunga’s cousin had gone to this shaman when she couldn’t get pregnant. Nine months later she gave birth to boy twins, born with cauls, an omen of great fortune. The shaman was an adviser to the president, and he had a reputation as a horse-healer. It was said he had lived for twenty years as a hermit on the slopes of Tavanbogd in the far-west province of Bayan Olgii. During the Soviet occupation, the local officials had tried to arrest him for vagrancy, but anyone who went to get him returned empty-handed and empty-headed. He was two centuries old.
I was looking forward to meeting the shaman.
I have my gifts: I am apparently immune to age and forgetfulness. I possess freedom beyond any human understanding of the world. But my cage is all my own, too. I am trapped in one waking state of consciousness. I have never found any way to sleep, or dream. And the knowledge I most desire eludes me: I have never found the source of the story I was born with, and I have never discovered whether others of my kind exist.
When I finally left the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain I traveled all over southeast Asia, searching the attics and cellars of old people’s minds for other minds without bodies. I found legends of beings who might be my kindred, but of tangible knowledge—I found not one footprint. I crossed the Pacific in the 1960s.
Remembering my insane doctor, I mostly maintained a vow of silence. I had no wish to leave behind me a trail of mystics, lunatics, and writers. On the other hand, if I came across a mystic, lunatic, or writer I would sometimes talk with him. One writer in Buenos Aires even suggested a name for what I am:
noncorpum
, and
noncorpa
, if ever the day dawns when the singular becomes a
plural. I spent a pleasant few months debating metaphysics with him, and we wrote some stories together. But the “I” never became a “We.” During the 1970s I placed an advertisement in the
National Enquirer
. The U.S.A. is even crazier than the rest of humanity. I followed up each of the nineteen replies I received: mystics, lunatics, or writers, every one. I even looked for clues in the Pentagon. I found a lot of things that surprised even me, but nothing related to
noncorpa
. I never went to Europe. It seemed a dead place, cold in the shadows of nuclear missiles.
I returned to my Holy Mountain, possessing knowledge from over a hundred hosts, but still knowing nothing about my origins. I had tired of wandering. The Holy Mountain was the only place on Earth I felt any tie to. For a decade I inhabited the monks who lived on its mountainsides. I led a tranquil enough life. I found companionship with an old woman who lived in a tea shack and believed I was a speaking tree. That was the last time I spoke with a human.
“Come in, daughter,” said the shaman’s voice from inside the
ger
.
Sun-bleached jawbones hung over the door. Gunga looked over her shoulder, suddenly afraid. A boy was playing with a red ball. He threw it high into the hazy blue, and watched it, and caught it when it fell. There was an
Ovoo
, a holy pile of stones and bones. Gunga asked for its blessing and entered the smoky darkness.
“Come in, daughter.” The shaman was meditating on a mat. A lamp hung from the roof frame. A tallow candle spluttered in a copper dish. The rear of the
ger
was walled off by hanging animal skins. The air was grainy with incense.
There was a carved box by the entrance. Gunga opened it, and put in most of the togrugs that Caspar had tipped her the day before. She slipped off her shoes, and knelt in front of the shaman, on the right-hand side of the
ger
, the female half. A wrinkled face, impossible to guess the age of. Gray, matted hair, and closed eyes that suddenly opened wide. He indicated a cracked teapot on a low table.
Gunga poured the dark, odorless liquid into a cup of bone.
“Drink, Gunga,” said the shaman.
My host drank, and began to speak—the shaman halted her with his hand.