Ghostwritten

by David Mitchell

  It was the early hours of the morning. The mother’s labor had been long and hard. I dulled her pain, put her into a deep sleep, and set about helping her unstitched body repair itself. As my host slept I had time to wonder where I had been since Suhbataar shot my previous host. Had I hallucinated the strange ger? But how could I have? I am my mind—do I have a mind I don’t know about within my mind, like humans? And how was I reborn in Mongolia? Why, and by whom? Who was the monk in the yellow hat?

  How do I know that there aren’t noncorpa living within me, controlling my actions? Like a virus within a bacteria? Surely I would know.

  But that’s exactly what humans think.

  The door opened and an autumn sunrise came in, with the baby’s father, grandparents, cousins and friends and aunts and uncles. They had slept in a neighboring ger and now crowded into their home, excited and eager to welcome their newest relative. When they spoke I had great difficulty understanding—I had a new dialect of Mongolian to learn. The mother was glowing with tired happiness. The baby bawled, and the elders looked on.

  I left the mother and transmigrated into her husband as they kissed. His tribe was known to Baljin as the reindeer people. Reindeer are their food, currency, and clothing. They are seminomadic. A few of the men visit Zoolon several times a year to exchange meat and hides for supplies, and to sell powdered reindeer antler to Chinese merchants who market it in their country as an aphrodisiac. Other than this there is little contact with the rest of the world. When the Russians were busy making a proletariat in this nonindustrial country to justify a socialist revolution, the reindeer people had proved impossible even to conduct a census among. They had survived when the local Buddhist clergy was being liquidated.

  My host was only twenty, and his heart was brimming over with pride. I’m rarely envious of humans, but I was now. I am, and always shall be, wholly sterile. I have no genes to pass on. For my new host, the birth of his offspring was the last bridge into true manhood, and would increase his status with his peers and his ancestors. A son would have been preferable, but there would be other births.

  I noticed his name, Beebee. He lit a cigarette and left the ger. I envied the simplicity of his expectations. He knows how to ride reindeer, and how to skin them, and which of their organs, eaten raw, assist which aspect of human physiology. Beebee knows many legends, but not three who think about the fate of the world.

  The night ebbed away, the dawn dripped into a pool of light, and the shadows in the pine trees around the village murmured with gray. An early riser’s footfalls crunched in the heavy frost. His head was hooded, and his teeth shone. A shooting star crossed the sky.

  Well, what now?

  Nothing about my quest had changed. Bodoo was still the only lead I had. I had to get back south, to the town of Bayanhongoor. If I could access the museum network, it should be fairly easy to track him down. Three months had passed since he had fled Suhbataar. This setback would cost me time, but immortals don’t lack time.

  I told Beebee’s grandmother-midwife that Beebee had some business in town that day. I hated to separate the young father from his baby daughter, but the grandmother gladly shooed us out. Men get in the way.

  Beebee and his eldest brother rode through forests, between hewn mountains, along narrow lakes. Fishing boats, willows, and wild geese flying up and down the morning. An ibex stood on a hillcrest. I learned from Beebee about the moose, elk, and lynx, about the argali sheep, wolves, and how to trap wild boars. We saw a bear fishing in a river thrashing with salmon. Sharp rainbows, misty sunshine. There are no roads here, but the cold weather had firmed the mud and so the going was easy.

  Beebee and his brother discussed the new baby, and how she should be named. I wondered about kinship. For all my Mongolian hosts, the family is the ger, to be protected in, to be healed in, to be born in, to make love in, and to die in. A parasite, I could experience all of these, secondhand, but I could never be of these.

  Unless, perhaps … This hope kept me going.

  Zoolon was another decrepit town of wooden buildings, concrete blocks, and dead lorries rusting in shallow pools where dogs drank. A power station churned smoke into the perfect sky. Another ghost factory with saplings growing from the chimney stack. A few squat apartment blocks. A crowd gathered around the small corrugated shack that served as the town’s only restaurant. Bee-bee usually drank there after seeing the owner of the tannery.

  “Some foreigners in town,” a bearded hunter told Beebee. “Round-eyes.”

  “Russians from over the border? Anything new to trade?”

  “Nah. Others.”

  Beebee walked into the restaurant, and I saw Caspar poking at something on his plate with a fork, and Sherry poring over a map with a compass.

  “It’s good to see you!” I spoke before I thought. Townsmen in the restaurant stared, amazed. Nobody knew this nomadic herder could speak any language other than a reindeer-flavored dialect of Mongolian.

  “G’day,” replied Sherry, looking up. Caspar’s eyes were more guarded.

  “How are you enjoying their country?” This was very indulgent. I had to dampen and then erase Beebee’s shock at hearing himself speak in a language he’d never learned.

  “It’s beautiful,” Caspar and Sherry said at exactly the same time.

  “Full of surprises. Anyway. Enjoy the rest of your stay. But I’d advise you to get somewhere warmer before winter sets in.… Somewhere nearer the ocean. Vietnam can be beautiful in November, up in the hill country, at least it was.…”

  Beebee sat down and ordered a plate of food while waiting for his brother. His tribe exchanges reindeer meat for credit with the restaurant owner. I picked up the three-week-old newspaper from Ulan Bator. Beebee was illiterate: his dialect has no written form, and his tribe has no schools. There was little news, much whitewashing, and a belated report on the national-day festival. None of it meant much to Beebee, who rarely left his tribe, never left the province, and never wished to.

  I was turning past the obituary page when an article caught my eye: DOUBLE TRAGEDY FOR MONGOLIAN CULTURE.

  Bodoo was dead.

  I rarely feel despair; I forget how it gouges.

  Both brothers had died in the same week of a heart attack, which I knew from Suhbataar was one of the Mongolian KGB’s favorite ways to dispose of political liabilities.

  This tragedy was made all the more poignant by the imminent publication of the late professor’s lifework, a comprehensive anthology of Mongolian folk stories. Out of deference to this anthropological giant, we include one story below, retold by the late professor.

  I should have sent Suhbataar over a cliff. Damn him. And damn me.

  A hand slapped down on Beebee’s shoulder. My host’s hand slid to the hilt of his hunting knife. The drunk man swayed. His breath made Beebee flinch. “What are you pretending to read the newspaper for, Reindeer Man? And what’s this about you speaking arsey foreign languages? Where were you when I was fighting for democracy? That’s what I want to know.” His pupils were huge, and his eyelids red. “You can’t read Cyrillic. You can’t read Mongolian. And it sure ain’t written in reindeer. Where were you when I was fighting for communism? That’s what I want to know. Go on, read for me, then, antler-head.” Then he bellowed: “Oy! Bring me some frigging vodka! It’s story time.…”

  I was back to where I had started. I was frustrated enough to transmigrate into this wino and hurl him through the wall, but what would be the point? I read the story. I owed it to Bodoo.

  In a lost spring of the Buriat nation, Khori Tumed, a young hunter, was roaming the southernmost shore of Lake Baikal. Winter was melting from the silver birches, drip by drip, and Khori Tumed gazed at the turquoise mountains beyond the lake.

  As he rested, the hunter saw nine swans flying from the northeast, low over the water. Khori Tumed grew uneasy—they flew in a circle, and silently. Fearing enchantment he hid in the hollow of a gnarled willow. And sure enough, as the swans alighted on the
strand, each transformed into a beautiful girl, each with pale skin, slender limbs, and jet-black hair, and each more radiant than the last. The swan-girls disrobed and draped their garments on the very willow tree that concealed Khori Tumed. The hunter’s limbs grew heavy—not from fear, but desire and love. Very carefully, when the girls were swimming a little way from the shore, he stole one of the robes.

  The swan-girls returned from their bathing to the willow tree. One by one they slipped into their robes, and rose as silent swans, circling out and away over Lake Baikal. The ninth swan-girl—and the most beautiful—searched frantically for her missing robe, and called out to her sisters, but the swans were already vanishing towards the northeast.

  With a thump, Khori Tumed jumped down from the tree, gripping her robe.

  “Please! Give me back my dress! I must follow my sisters!”

  “Marry me,” said Khori Tumed. “I will dress you in emerald silk when the summer comes, and the fur of black bears will keep you warm when the snows fall.”

  “Let’s talk about it—but please give me back my robe for now.”

  The hunter smiled gently. “That I will not do.”

  The swan-girl watched her sisters disappear from sight. She knew that she had no choice—either accept the stranger’s hand in marriage, or freeze to death that very night. “Then I must go with you, mortal, but be warned—when our sons are born I shall not name them. And without names, never shall they cross the threshold into manhood.”

  So the swan-girl returned to Khori Tumed’s ger and became a woman of his tribe. In time, she even learned to love the precocious young hunter, and they lived in happiness together. Eleven fine sons were born to them, but the swan-girl was bound by her oath, and Khori Tumed’s sons were never blessed with names. And in the evening, she looked longingly to the northeast, and Khori Tumed knew she was thinking of her homeland beyond the winter dawn.

  Years arrived, years saddled up and rode away.

  One day at the end of autumn when the forests were dancing and dying, Khori Tumed was gutting a ewe while his wife sat embroidering a quilt. Their eleven sons were away, hunting.

  “Husband, do you still have my swan’s robe?”

  “You know I do,” replied Khori Tumed, carving the sheep’s midriff.

  “I would so like to see if I can still fit into it.” He smiled. “What do you take me for? Some kind of marmot brain?”

  “My love, if I wanted to leave you now, I could use the door.” The swan-girl got up and kissed his neck. “Let me.”

  Khori Tumed’s resolve melted. “Very well, but I’m going to bolt the door.” He washed his hands, unlocked his iron-bound chest, and gave the robe to his wife. He sat in the bed, watching her undress and wrap herself in the magical garment.

  A wild beating of wings filled the ger, and the swan flew up through the gap in the roof, the chimney-flap which Khori Tumed had forgotten to seal! In despair Khori Tumed lunged upwards at the swan with a ladle, and just managed to hook the swan’s foot with its handle. “Please! My wife! Don’t leave me here without you!”

  “My time here is over, mortal. Love you I always shall, but my sisters are calling for me now, and I must obey their call!”

  “Then at least tell me the names of our sons, so that they may become men of the tribe!”

  And the swan-girl named their sons, as she hovered above the tent: Caragana, Bodonguud, Sharaid, Tsagaan, Gushid, Khudai, Batnai, Khalbin, Khuaitsai, Galzut, Khovduud. And the swan-girl circled the encampment of gers three times to bless all who lived there. And it is said that the tribe of Khori Tumed were such people, and that the eleven sons became eleven fathers.

  The drunk’s eyes had closed, and his face had drooped into his plate of lukewarm meatballs. Everyone in the place was silent. Three young children sat on the other side of the table, entranced by the story. Beebee remembered his new daughter. I looked at Bodoo’s picture in the newspaper, and wondered who he really had been, this man I had only known through the memories of others.

  The restaurant was emptying out, and the conversation reverted to recent wrestling matches. The sight of two round-eyes eating was only gossipworthy for so long. I watched the way Sherry whispered something to Caspar, and I watched the smile spread over Caspar’s face, and I knew they were lovers.

  This venture was futile. To look for the source of a story is to look for a needle in a sea. I should transmigrate into Sherry or Caspar, and resume my search for noncorpa in other lands.

  The bearded hunter walked in with his gun. The memory of being shot flashed back, but the hunter leaned the rifle against the wall, and sat down next to Beebee. He started dismantling it, and cleaning the parts one by one with an oily rag.

  “Beebee, right? Of the Reindeer Tribe of Lake Tsagaan Nuur?”

  “Yes.”

  “With a new baby daughter?”

  “Arrived last night.”

  “You’d better return to your tribe,” said the hunter. “I met your sister at the market just now. She’s looking for you, with your brother. Your wife’s hysterical and your daughter’s dying.”

  Beebee cursed himself for coming to town. I wanted to beg his forgiveness. I thought about transmigrating into the hunter, and from him back into Caspar or Sherry, but my guilt made me stay. Maybe I could help with his baby’s illness if we got back in time.

  I’ve often thought about that moment. Had I transmigrated at that time, everything would have been different. But I stayed, and Beebee ran to the marketplace.

  Dusk was sluggish with cold when we reached Beebee’s encampment. The breath of the yaks hung white in the twilight. From far up the valley we heard the wind. It sounded to me like a wolf, but all reindeer people know the difference.

  Beebee’s ger was full of dark shapes, lamps, steam, and worry. A bitter oil was burning in a silver dish. The grandmother was preparing a ritual. Beebee’s wife was pale in her bed, cradling the baby, both with wide unblinking eyes. She looked at Beebee. “Our baby hasn’t spoken.”

  The grandmother spoke in hushed tones. “Your daughter’s soul has gone. It was born loose. Unless I can summon it back she will be dead by midnight.”

  “At the hospital back in Zoolon, there’s a doctor there, trained in East Germany in the old days—”

  “Don’t be a fool, Beebee! I’ve seen it happen too often before. You and that mumbo-jumbo medicine. It’s not a matter of medicine! Her soul’s been untethered. It’s a matter of magic!”

  He looked at his limp daughter, and began to despair. “What do you intend to do?”

  “I shall perform the rites. Hold this dish. I need your blood.”

  The grandmother pulled out a curved hunting knife. Beebee was not afraid of knives or blood. As the grandmother washed his palm I transmigrated into the old woman, intending to transfer into the baby to see the problem for myself.

  I got no further.

  I found something I had never seen in any human mind: a canyon of another’s memories, running across her mind. I saw it straightaway, like a satellite passing over. I entered it, and as I did so I entered my own past.

  There are three, says the monk in the yellow hat, who think about the fate of the world. I am a boy aged eight. I have my own body! We are in a prison cell, smaller than a wardrobe, lit by light from a tiny grill in one corner, the size of a hand. Even though my height is not yet four feet, I cannot stand up. I’ve been in here a week and I haven’t eaten for two days. I have become used to the stink of our own excrement. A man in a nearby box has lost his mind and wails through a broken throat. The only thing I can see through the grill is another grill in a neighboring coffin.

  It is 1937. Comrade Choibalsan’s social engineering policies, a carbon copy of Josef Stalin’s in distant Moscow, are in full swing. There are show trials staged every week in Ulan Bator. Several thousand agents of the impending Japanese invasion from Manchuria have been executed. Nobody is safe. The minister for transport has been sentenced to death for conspiring to cau
se traffic accidents. The dismantling of the monasteries is well under way. First the taxes were sent skywards, and then began “reeducation.” I and my master have been found guilty of feudal indoctrination. We were told this yesterday by the hand that brought us some water. I think it was yesterday. The lids of nearby coffin-cells have been pried off and their helpless occupants hauled off.

  “I’m afraid, master,” I say.

  “Then I shall tell you a story,” says the monk.

  “Will they shoot us?”

  “Yes.” It hurts my master to speak. His teeth were rifle-butted into spiky fragments.

  “I don’t want to die.” I think of my mother and father. I can see their faces. My mother and father! Lowly herders, who worked their knuckles to the bone to bribe their son’s way into a monastery: five years later their ambition signed his death warrant.

  “You won’t die. I promised your father you wouldn’t die, and you won’t.”

  “But they killed the others.”

  “They won’t kill you. Now listen! There are three who think about the fate of the world.…”

  The sky is thick with crows. Their noise is deafening. Stones are being broken. I, my master, and about forty other monks and their novices are taken over a field littered with naked corpses. The ground is blotched with crimson. Those who cannot walk are dragged. Beside a copse of trees the firing squad is waiting. The soldiers are a roughshod band: this is not the regular Red Army. Many of them are brigands from the Chinese border, who become soldiers when times are lean. There are some children, brought here to dig mass graves, and to watch the executions of us counterrevolutionaries as part of their socialist education. My own brothers and sisters have already been dispersed all over Mongolia.