Zuud (dream)

Züüd (dream) (Altaan Els. 22.08.08)


When time does not matter anymore every moment is eternity.
Days here are so filled with wonder, beauty and revelations that from morning to night there are no hours, no clock, only the depth of each moment.
I feel like a gold collector, but the river is teeming with ore. I am overwhelmed. I have no choice but to shoulder this load of almost overpowering gratitude to the world, with too many words to write, too many pictures to take, so many moments of bewildered happiness that I stumble into each new day like a sleepwalker.

Mongolia is a land of deserts and mountains, of temperatures shifting more than eighty degrees in just over a few months, yet every few kilometres brings you to a place entirely different from the one you have left behind, a place where once again no matter which way you look, you will be left speechless by the indescribable beauty of the landscape.
Mongolia is a land where people are some of the poorest in the world, yet never have I encountered such generosity, such candour and nobleness of spirit.

In spite of its vast emptiness, you are never alone in Mongolia.
Somewhere, barely visible against the green rolling hills will be a ger, a herd of goats, a friendly face.
A ger is a refuge, a symbolic home where one is always welcome, simply, without fanfare, just as one of the family.

How to face the world after Mongolia?
How to return to a world where one must forever apologise, be little, be needless, be alone? In Mongolia there is room for everyone, for every faith, for every character.
In a land where mere survival entirely depends on co-operation, on assisting one another naturally, there is no place or time for chicanery. Mongolia is one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. For month on end, families shelter together in tiny, circular, privacy-less little felt tents. There is no place for isolation. Here isolation is death. Love prevails, tranquil, unconditional love.

Inside a ger there is a whole world, a world built around fire and family.
I often thought that Mongolia is a child’s paradise. Here small children never have to be separated from their parents. There is always someone to snuggle against, someone to provide entertainment. Life is simple, understandable. Perils are simple to understand and unchangeable: a deep well, a high cliff, the hooves of a horse, a hot stove. The world is full of smiling faces and welcoming arms. A toddler can see his mother milking a cow and he understands where the milk comes from. He will see a sheep being slaughtered and know where meat and fur for his winter coat comes from. His family is always around him. In almost every ger three or four generations are represented, with in nearby gers other members of the family.



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The smoothly undulating hills have been replaced with sharp, angry rocks.
The horizon is full of rocky needles pointing straight at the sky. Here weather has played havoc with the land, shaped it with some kind of fury.
The ground is sandy, made of pulverised mountains. Erosion has shaped the windward side of the sand dunes into abrupt, rock-pitted toboggans. At the bottom of the unstable cliff runs a swift flowing river, thick with ice.

It is only late august but already the sun has been bleached of all warmth.
A very old lady wrapped in a dusty del is making her way slowly towards us across the barren plateau, hunched against the stiffening breeze.
Her grandsons are running ahead like a flock of playful birds, their cheeks red with cold.
She stops at the bottom of our ladder. ‘Sain-baino!’ we call to her. ‘Come in!’
She lifts her smiling face towards us and only then do I realise that she is blind.
Her vacant eyes resemble the milky eyelids of the eagle I held on my arm a few weeks ago. Her face is shaped by wind and laughter, covered in hieroglyphic wrinkles; the same fine, strong, but gentle creases that define the mountains around her. Her slightly hunched but still stately posture does not denounce her blindness. Neither does her step, slow but unhesitant among the stones and thorny bushes.
Her children are her eyes. And the mountain that she knows so well does not deceive her. Thorny bushes are preceded by their sharp scent. Large stones had been there since her childhood.
She cannot climb into the truck. So we make hot, sweet tea from the fragrant herbs that grow around our camp and stood outside with her, arched against the wind, holding our steaming bowls with both hands to keep warm. She looked around at our invisible faces. She smiles and nod with inner satisfaction. Her grandchildren sit on their haunches in the red sand; sucking on the handfuls of boiled sweets we gave them. They observe us and converse softly, only ever lifting from us their intent gaze to rest it for a moment on their grandmother, as if more than a few instants without seeing her might suddenly allow her to disappear, leaving them defenceless among us strange people.
Behind us the rustle of the river seems to gather in substance. Snow-laden clouds converge against the already whitening mountain slopes.
We drink our tea in silence, smiling at each other above our steaming bowls.
We have no words to share, no language, so we share in the moment.
It is simple. Beautiful.
Time trickles peacefully and the scene gathers pigments in the colouring-box of my memories. Silence allows for details to emerge: three berry-shaped glass buttons at her shoulder, stitched with tiny brass bells; the glint of a silver thread running along the hem of her scarf. On her feet she wears thick leather riding boots, Russian army-style, several times too big for her. On her ears flash little heart-shaped diamante earrings, of the kind you would find on a little girl, perhaps a present from a granddaughter. I feel a lump in my throat.
She is too beautiful for words.
She drank her tea with her eyes down, in noisy, appreciative slurps.

Then, as if summoned by an invisible clock, the family pile up their bowls and touch their heart.
The old lady holds our hands together in both of hers. ‘Bayar-tai’, she says.
Her words of goodbye sound like a riddle. Her voice also, has the clarity and innocence of a little girl.

They walk away pushed by the wind, the littlest boy holding his grandmother’s hand. Together they thread carefully among the stones.
Ahead his older brothers chase each other in the red sand, carried by the sound of their own laughter.

NAIRAMDAL (Friendship) (Tsengel. Mongolia. 07.08.08)

The song rose in the darkness, pure like the crystal river that flowed past.
The girls held us by the hand and we walked six in a row among sleepy horses, drunk on the magic of their voices and the ethereal splendour of the starry sky.
I close my eyes for an instant and led myself glide over this moment.
To feel so small, so light, so insignificant and yet so deeply happy; a smiling, tiny buoy bobbing up and down in a sea of gentleness. The girls sang their melodious Kazakh songs, speaking of winters and warm summer winds, of fattening sheep and blissful weddings, of abundant milk, celebrations and life.
In the moonless light we made out the soft, welcoming shape of a Ger. The girls’ hands tightened over ours, hot and dry, pulling us toward the painted wooden door of their home.
‘Tsai!’ they said. ‘Moloko! Come and eat’
The door opened and we were pushed in, caught in the tide of singing girls.
Inside we blinked in the sudden light, lost for a moment in a swirling world of warmth and colours, the permeating smell of milk.
The Ger was a tempest of crimson and bright orange, volutes of cotton coils and twirls chasing each other in a voluptuous dance all around the circular walls. Every surface was decorated with plump, embroided felt, each of the little brass bed lining the inside perimeter covered in rich woollen blankets. A neatly pressed suit hung on a pink plastic coat hanger next to a yellowing picture of a patriarch. An old women breastfeeding a toddler stood up as we entered, greeting us with a gaping smile, her face a furrow of lines that seemed to converge toward her eyes like rivers, filling them with light and wonder. Her baby suckled as she spoke and gestured to us toward a small table near the hearth, his one visible eye darting curiously at us, glinting like a dark stone in a riverbed. The girls sat next to us all talking at once, while the oldest rushed around the tent, collecting here and there food for her guests: a bowl of dried curds from a large cotton bag, a large bread from a pillowcase, a giant kettle filled with hot yak milk, a jar of cream. The table disappeared beneath piles of butter, sugar, yellow cheeses in waxy shells. We looked at each other and began to eat, dipping our buttered bread in milk, smiling above our steaming bowls as they looked on with cheer joy at our appetite. A group of red-cheeked children burst in, bringing with them the scent of the night. They sat near the door, laughing and murmuring in each other’s ears. Their hands, like the hands of their older sisters, always busy touching each other’s hair, hands or shoulders, giving and receiving love and tenderness in the most natural way in the world, like a mother touches her child.
‘Sisterrrr! Sisterrr!’ they called, bursting into laughter when we smiled in return.
We had no language to communicate, but mirth and gratitude need no words. They are written in irrepressible smiles and the warmth of a glance, the touch of a hand.
We sat in this world of joy and colours, of love in a million multicolour stiches sewn into a home and the riches of all this food they had conjured up with their work, skills and care for their animals.
Outside bullets of parching winds shook the few, ragged trees, sending twirls of spiralling dust high into the air, blurring the stars.
Of Mongolia there is too much to tell. Where to begin?
But if all had to be said in a few words… it would be that one has never known what genuine, unbounded friendliness and unadulterated human spirit truly was, before encountering the Nomads of Mongolia.
These people are a miracle, yet do they know how precious their mere existence is in this nuclear world of eight billion lonely souls?