Riding the Iron Rooster

May the sun shine in the sky forever

May the sky be blue forever

May my mother live forever

May the world be peaceful forever

A big pictorial banner was paraded past, showing Lenin and Suhe Bator in 1921. Suhe had a big, bony skull and wore a traditional dresslike gown. Lenin wore his train-conductor's cap. The caption on the banner was Unforgettable Meeting.

There was another portrait, of the Mongolian cosmonaut, Gurragchaa who in 1981 went into space in a Soviet rocket and produced a detailed study of Mongolian topography.

Warsaw Pact for Peace, one banner said; and another: We are Followers of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party.

"What does that one say?"

The guide translated the banner, "Congratulations to Workers in Capitalist Countries."

"That's us," Rick Westbetter said.

That was the end of the parade.

At Mongolia's only working monastery the next day, listening to the monks in the watchtowers blowing conch shells as a summons to other monks to pray, I reflected on this country. Once there were 2000 monasteries, the monks all Buddhists of the Yellow Sect. Now there was only this wooden wreck of a place behind an apartment house. Once, Mongol armies had conquered the world. Now there was no army. Mongols had been Chinese emperors—the Manchus were a Mongol dynasty. That had ended. Once, these people had lived on the plains and in the mountains. Now they lived in two-room apartments in this lifeless and stark city. They were in every sense a subject race, and in this—one of the largest and emptiest countries on earth—they lived cheek by jowl. They lived out of the world, almost totally cut off. It had not made them angry. It had kept them innocent in many ways. There was something very sweet about the Mongolians.

Perhaps that was the whole point about Mongolia: that after a Soviet-inspired revolution in which everything was destroyed and swept away—religion, the old economy, the army, the social order—the country was so changed that it could not function without Soviet help. The Mongolians had been reduced to a state of infancy. All their old habits and institutions were gone. The Soviets stepped into this vacuum: they brought Soviet buildings and urban structures, Soviet railways and roads, Soviet schools, and the Soviet ideology displaced Buddhism. The Mongolian script was abolished and the Russian Cyrillic alphabet introduced. The old Mongolian hatred of the Chinese was whipped up, and the Mongolians gladly accepted forts and garrisons and Soviet missile installations until a simple town was practically unknown in Mongolia: every settlement of any size is a military establishment manned by Russian soldiers cursing their luck in having been posted there.

All this Soviet authority, meddling, advice and financial aid had a profound effect: it turned the Mongolians into children. It is hard to imagine a more dependent and helpless people. And they are dependent on the Soviet Union in a sort of frantic way, because they cannot be dependent on anyone else. They have no other friends in the world, no family ties. The very country that turned them into orphans adopted them and—since one of the grimmer features of the country is the permanence of the Soviet presence—won't let them grow up.

All Mongolian aggression is turned against the Chinese. The rockets and tanks and cannons are directed at the Chinese border, and the Chinese are portrayed as torturers and imperialists. (The Chinese reply by calling Mongolia an example of "rampant and reactionary hegemonism.") In its military and political guise this aggression takes the form of Russian divisions patrolling the edges of the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Its simpler expression is stone throwing.

There was one Chinese sleeping car on the train I took from Ulan Bator to the border, and moments after leaving the station an enthusiastic Mongolian standing by the track flung a stone and broke a window. The Chinese—who can be nags and bores about the sanctity of state property—stopped the train, made a scene and demanded immediate restitution. They would not proceed unless the Mongolians swore that they would hand over a window. The Mongolians promised.

When I went to look at the broken window, Morthole was already outside the train. But he wasn't looking at the window.

"I'm trying to find that stone for my collection," he said.

He found one, but a policeman told him to put it back on the ground.