Behind the Door

KHARKHORIN, Mongolia – Traveling, to some extent, is about limits, journeying to the edges of the Earth and seeing if it is possible to cross thresholds hidden in our home communities. On this trip I have done many things that I previously thought too complicated, foreign or illegal to consider. But here I found the place where even I will not venture, my line in the sand: a fern green door covered with deep scratches in its thick hardwood.

The door lies in a part of Mongolia I am sure my hosts would rather I not see. I found it by wandering off, going on another "walk" that confuses the Mongolians so much. After my companions and I arrive at the ger camp in the mid-afternoon, we are not interested in sitting around the cast-iron stove and drinking salty milk tea. Instead, Caleb, Myriam and I excuse ourselves after just one cup (rather than the customary five or six) and set off for the town. Bobby, increasingly in-tune with our need to meander, looks at her watch and declares that we can go, as long as we are back in precisely two hours. It might be a strange request coming from someone who on this trip has shown a lax regard for puncuality, but we promise to return in time for more milk tea and steamed mutton dumplings.

Our accommodation is an enclosed ger in the middle of a string of fenced lots running on an east-west axis. The ger entrances face south, toward the town of Kharkhorin. For a front yard, the half-dozen or so families that live here have a kilometer-wide zone of boggy meadow between them and the town. There is no established road leading toward town, so the three of us walk the shortest course available: a straight line.

As we walk, looming to our east is a decaying flour factory, a reminant of the country's attempted industrialization. In the post-war period, when Stalin and Krushchev's Five Year Plans pushed the Soviet Union to recover through massive expansion of heavy industry, the regime's puppet rulers here in Mongolia tried to do the same thing on the steppe. They encouraged nomadic Mongolians to cluster in agricultural communes and newly constructed communities and export commodities to other Soviet republics and allies. For fairly obvious reasons, it didn't work. Fercriously independent people accustomed to packing up their house and moving every few weeks did not take kindly to sixteen hour shifts in an airless factory, grinding grain for the Ukrainian Youth League.

After the Communists lost power in 1991, the suddenly sponsorless factory shuttered its doors, leaving most of the people in the town unemployed. A grant from the Japanese government allowed it to reopen several years later, but there is no sign of activity among the rust covered pylons and smoke stacks caked tar black from decades of grime. I cannot believe that this complex produces a basic food staple. I imagine any flour that comes from this place to be inedible, laced with carcinogens and additives.

We press on. The late afternoon sun is intense, even in the middle of the winter, and I am forced to unzip my bulbous down jacket and remove my scarf. Today, for the first time in weeks, there is water mixed in with the thin crust of snow on the ground. Approximately halfway between the ger and town, we encounter a sheep train. Two herders, both young men in dirty deels, solemnly march back toward a fenced in era to our north after a day of grazing in the mostly barren fields. The sheep seemed well accustomed to humans, and do not baa or complain in any nonverbal way as we snake through the herd.

These few animals are the last sign of natural life we will see on this walk, for Kharkhorin appears to a Hollywood post-Apocalyptic set brought to life. The first building we pass in the town proper is a prison, decaying like every other structure here. Thankfully, no inmates are about, the only sign of life is a couple bare light bulbs glowing in the middle of a window. There is no fence around the building, as if there is nothing worthwhile about the place for people locked up inside to escape.

The prison is one of the more solidly constructed places in town. The streets, all unpaved and filled with slushy potholes, are lined with cheaply constructed buildings of concrete. Some are shops, others small homes. The residences are designed in the same style as in Tsesterleg: square lots, fenced in with mismatched hardwood pickets, with a ger or tiny house placed in the middle. Many lots have a latrine in the back, and I suspect no running water inside.

As soon as I arrive in the town, I realize that we have no reason for coming here. We have plenty of provisions back and dinner waiting in the ger, and there are no tourist attractions or museums on the town's few streets. Every business we pass is shuttered, presumably for the Mongolian New Year, but perhaps because the owners have fled someplace nicer.

Kharkhorin is a blot of the beautiful landscape of Mongolia. It is an argument against urbanization, for here there are not enough people for an interesting, vibrant gathering of people, but enough so that the combined waste and pollution of several hundred families can congeal into a bloody mess. This is perhaps the most depressing place I have ever visited, sadder than the Killing Fields of Cambodia or the KGB Prison in Lithuania, for here the despair does not seem to be improving.

With no other plan, the three of us walk a rectangle around town, with each small street more depressing than the next. We walk mostly in silence. I am amazed at how forlorn this place is; it is so down that it seems beyond a cheery joke or two. Just as we are about to make our third right turn, and begin the last segment of the rectangle, a small building catches my eye. It appears to be a small bagoda, but there are no windows to peer inside. But under the scratched door I see a light.

I want to go inside. I want there to be a point, some redeeming value in this ugly place. But as I make a move to go in, Myriam stops me.

"Wait," she says, and I reconsider. What is behind the door? And why do I need to go inside?

In all probability, there is just a gaunt, frail Mongolian man on the other side of the door with a small selection on canned goods. But I realize there is no reason for me to found out, nor do I want to take the risk of endangering my friends by going inside. The entrance is closed, and there is no sign I can tell that the store is open. This, it appears, is my limit.

The Buddha on the Hill

TSETSERLEG, Mongolia - Caleb stares, one hand on his forehead to shield the midday sun, with unusual intensity at the small rocky hill, just above us. Strangely, he ignores the most prominent object in his line of sight, a 20 meter statue of the future Buddha, Maitreya, carved out of white rock. Instead, his eyes scan the rocky crags of the hillside.

"I'll be back," he said, and he goes off into the wilderness to exorcise his demons.

There are many ghosts in this place. In the year 1706, Zanabazar, a Mongolian warlord, picked this spot to build a temple to the Buddhist Goddess Tara. A holy man, Zanabazar studied for many years in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa before returning to his native land and taking up the sword. When the sage died nine years later, his body was mummified in a lotus position and placed in a stumpa, a Buddhist holy relic, on the site. Generations passed, and the monastery prospered. At its peak in the early twentieth century, more than 2,000 monks studied here, making it one of the largest and most powerful monasteries in the country.

Then came a murder. In 1931, Mongolia's new Communist government feared the monastery's power: Tsetserleg and the holy men were said to support anti-government movements. One night, to counteract the perceived threat, the Communists killed the abbot, who was known as the Sixth Zaya Pandita. They also leveled the monastery, leaving only two temples, one of which was turned in a fire station. In the purges that followed, hundreds of former monks were tortured or killed.

But Caleb's nostalgia is from another time. Two years ago, on leave from teaching English in Ulaanbaatar, he and a fellow teacher rode out here, crammed into a battered van with a dozen other Mongolians. They took over half a day to arrive, and when they did, they found the town closed for Tsagaan Sar, the Mongolian New Year. The only open hotel had no heat and only sporadic cold water, hard mattresses and dim lighting. At the first opportunity, they went outside.

They walked to the monastery, past the statue of Maitreya, over the small hill and into the valley below. It was cold, but they walked at a steady pace, descending into a wooded glade. After a of couple hours, frozen perspiration on the edges of their hats, they decided to turn back. By then the sun hung low in the sky, and was about to disappear behind the hills above and end the short winter day. Soon the two hikers were surrounded by darkness, hopelessly lost. They had few supplies, and none of the warm layers of fur the nomads rely on to buttress themselves from the cold nights.

They kept walking. There was no other choice, really, except to lie down and accept a slow death by freezing. Sometime in the night, they heard a noise, the crunching of footsteps in the crusty snow. The footsteps were those of a passing herder, out with his flock of sheep. With customary Mongolian courtesy, he pointed the lost adventurers in the direction of Tsetserleg, and not long afterwards they found themselves back at the dingy hotel, cold, damp, and tired but alive.

Now, back in town for the first time since that night, Caleb runs in the direction of his misfortune. He scampers toward the top of the hill. I watch his progress from the statue's base, as he pauses briefly and then heads down into a col. Just a moment later his appears, the wind snapping his checkered black and white scarf as he lunges from boulder to boulder toward the peak. He reaches the top and then is suddenly out of view.

Sometime later, as I shoot pictures of the town's distant gers and crumbling schools, Caleb returns. He says nothing, but I take his tranquil expression to mean that by returning here, he has made peace with this haunted valley and the chilling time he almost became one of its ghosts.