Riding the Iron Rooster

The BBC news sounded like Orson Welles' version of The War of the Worlds. After the initial report that high radiation had been detected in Finland and Denmark, more reports were broadcast of radiation in Germany and Switzerland. And then came the news a day later of a nuclear reactor on fire near Kiev. The disaster occurred on a Friday. Saturday was confusion. Sunday the news was still muddled and alarmist. I listened to a summary—this was on the Monday—of the British Sunday newspapers. They spoke of as many as four thousand people dead, of the mass evacuation of Kiev, of casualties in the tens of thousands and the fire out of control. These suppositions were modified on subsequent days, but it was clear something terrible had happened.

All this time travelers were arriving from Irkutsk. I asked the Russians what they knew of Chernobyl. They knew nothing; they said I was listening to propaganda, and a week later, when everyone in the west knew about the disaster, a Russian just arrived in Mongolia said that the news on Soviet television was that a nuclear power plant was being moved from Kiev.

I found it depressing that no one in Mongolia should know anything of Chernobyl, especially when they themselves had the same sort of nuclear power plants. It was bad enough that they had been colonized and occupied by the Soviets, but it was much worse that this paternalism was taken so literally that they were treated like children and not told anything. They were in the dark. And their conception of communism was very old-fashioned, typified by the thirty-foot bronze statue on the main street, of Joseph Stalin.

I joined the tour to the Mongolian State Museum and saw dinosaurs that looked like none I had ever seen before—with beaks and horns and claws—and huge simple monsters suggested by an eight-foot bone: 'That is its pelvis."

In a room filled with stringed instruments, the Mongolian guide said, "This we call morin huur. Its name comes from a very ancient story about a man who had a wonderful horse. He loved the horse very much. He rode the horse all over Mongolia. He loved the horse more than his family! He treated the horse as you would a loved one or a family. But eventually the horse died. The man was very, very sad. He was so sad he cut the horse to pieces and took out its bones and carved them into a sort of shape like a violin. The horse's tail he made into strings, and he made a bow as well, from bones and from the horse's hair. And he spent the rest of his life playing the violin and thinking of his horse. That is the meaning of morin huur—violin of the horse."

An air of palpable isolation hung over Mongolia. With half the population living in Ulan Bator—the easier for them to be regimented—the countryside was practically empty: it was wilderness, wolves and bears, dinosaur bones and scattered nomads. Ninety percent of the Mongolians outside Ulan Bator lived in tents, and the terrain was so barren—so like the landscape of New Mexico and Arizona—that East European countries made cowboy movies in Mongolia. The Yugoslavs had recently finished shooting Apache—a political cowboy movie, about exploitation.

On May Day, the entire population of Ulan Bator turned out for the parade—not to watch it but to join it. It was a Mongolian custom for everyone to be in the parade. The only spectators were tourists—some Finns and us: Kicker, Bud, Morris, Miss Wilkie, Wilma, Morthole, Ashley, the Gurneys and all the rest. I stood behind Blind Bob.

"Who are those people with the flags?"

They were the round-shouldered wrestlers from the train, but this time wearing their medals. There was something simian in their posture and in the way they walked. It seemed so sad that Blind Bob's last visions on earth should be the messy thaw in Poland, the dreariness of Russia, Siberian hotels and Mongolian wrestlers. Stepping off the sidewalk for a closer look, he tripped and fell.

"I'm all right!" he cried, rubbing his knee. "No harm done! My own darn fault!"

There were thirty people marching in a row, and a row passed me every two seconds. The parade lasted one hour and fifteen minutes. That was 450,000 Mongolians. They carried flags and banners; they dipped these when they passed the mausoleum, like Lenin's, of their leader from the 1920s, Suhe Baator.

There were no soldiers, no uniforms, no weapons at all—how inconvenient it would have been for the Soviets if the Mongolians had had an army. The faces on their banners were Marx, Engels, Lenin, Suhe Bator and Gorbachev. There were large banners bearing the likeness of (so I was told) Chairman Batmunkh, of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party, head of the Great People's Assembly.

Over a loudspeaker, a man howled, "May the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party prosper!"

The parading people cheered and repeated this slogan.

Children wearing fur hats marched by, beating drums and singing.