A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  To get from Xian to Lanzhou I took train No. 44, famous for the mafia that controls it. The “Chief of Chiefs” was sitting in the restaurant car. I introduced myself and explained my problem: “I have a ticket for the hard seats, but as you see I am tall, and I would like to stretch out to sleep.” No problem: for fifty yuan I obtained a place in the “soft” carriage. As he also controlled the kitchen, for a couple of extra dollars I also enjoyed a good dinner, served most exceptionally on a white tablecloth rather than the usual plastic ones, sticky with the remains of previous meals. However, shortly afterward, one of my cameras disappeared. Part of the tip? No use talking to the police. They might have been the ones who took it.

  Or was this the robbery I had been told to expect? “This year you will be the victim of a theft. You will lose something very dear to you,” the fortune-teller of Phnom Penh had said. He had not predicted the massacre of one or two million people in his country, but he had predicted the theft of one of my cameras on a Chinese train! Still, if I wanted to rhyme fact with prophecy, this was made to order. After all, I do not remember having suffered another theft in my whole life.

  Gradually, as the train rattled along northward, I slowly forgot the new, vulgar, aggressive chaos of the cities and rediscovered the ancient, soul-restoring order of nature, worked for thousands of years by man. We crossed Gansu, one of the most backward regions of the country. The earth was yellow, the fields small, the donkeys thin, and the peasants, as always, bent to work. This was still the old, poor China which does not make news, which does not have impressive rates of development and where no one goes to invest. On the walls of the mud houses you could still read revolutionary slogans, and red flags still fluttered on the roofs. Seen from the train window, this was a China in which Mao might still have been alive: men and women still wore blue trousers and jackets, and the streets were swarming with bicycles. It was as if Deng Xiaoping’s reforms had never reached these parts.

  How long can it all last? My two traveling companions were sure that soon the contradictions would explode. One of them, a major in the Liberation Army, spoke of a possible civil war: province against province, the coastal regions against the interior, peasants against city dwellers. He was not the only one in the army to think that way, he said. The other man was an old Party cadre, now retired. In his opinion the whole system established by the Communists after 1949 was about to collapse. “The teachers go to the market instead of to school because they earn more by petty trading than teaching. The policemen no longer catch thieves because they themselves have become gangsters. How can a country go on like this?” He spoke loudly enough for all to hear. Such freedom of speech would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. “The only way of preventing anarchy,” he concluded, “is for the army and the security forces to take the country in hand and reimpose order by force.” China, he believed, would soon become a fascist country. The major seemed to agree.

  For a whole afternoon the train ran through the Gobi Desert, and then for a whole day alongside the Yellow River. The natural environment was very poor and wild, but man had tamed it and made it bear fruit. An endless line of electricity poles stretched to the horizon; for hundreds of miles the railway was protected by wide borders of tenacious grass planted to keep the sand from burying the tracks. Everywhere I saw dikes, bridges, irrigation canals, and incredibly long palisades of green poplars, planted to defend distant Peking from the murderous dust storms. All these works were realized with the collective labor of the last forty years. Who will carry out such projects in the future?

  At Huhehot, where my train turned east toward Peking, I got off to take the northbound express train to Mongolia.

  I stayed in Huhehot for a day and a night: time to wash my clothes, grimy from the journey, and to sleep in a real bed. Time to walk, not in a narrow corridor but in the streets of a city full of people, bicycles, cars, old carts pulled by donkeys and others pulled by men. I listened attentively to the sounds, comparing them with those I remembered from the past. I still constantly heard that word qian, which had greeted me on my arrival in China. A man at a market stall kept shouting it as he displayed a pair of women’s underpants. I did not understand why, and went to look: they were special panties with a secret pocket in the front in which to hide money.

  When the station windows opened at six in the morning the tickets were already sold out. I paid double price for one on the black market, and climbed aboard the express for Ulan Bator.

  At last a train where one could walk in the corridors, and use the toilets without people constantly banging on the door. The few passengers were mostly Mongolian, and I enjoyed watching their maneuvers. One took a screwdriver out of his trousers, opened the ceiling of the compartment and shoved in a cardboard carton; another, with a long iron rod, started fishing in the belly of the train through a small trapdoor in the corridor. I had heard of a Mongolian drug route from Yunnan to southern China and Ulan Bator, then across Siberia and Poland to Germany. Was I observing its couriers?

  There were very few Chinese on the train. They have no reason to go to Mongolia, where they are still feared and viewed with hostility. Mongolia is vast, but with only 2.5 million inhabitants it naturally feels threatened by the gross overpopulation of China. As the descendants of Genghis Khan see it, the Chinese have already seized a big slice of what was once their country—the province of Inner Mongolia, whose capital is Huhehot. It was as a defense against Peking that the Mongolian Republic chose to become a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

  Until a few decades ago the Mongols were a nomadic people, and anything modern they have today is copied from the Soviet Union. Even the gauge of their railway tracks is a meter and a half, like that in the USSR. For that reason my whole train was taken to a shed at Erliang, the last Chinese station, and the Chinese wheel trucks were replaced with wider ones of the Soviet type. The operation took five hours, which the Chinese turned to account by selling mountains of merchandise to the Mongolians. In the center of Erliang they had set up a big market where all the main Chinese consumer goods were on display. The Mongolians filled their sacks with clothes and food. Bottles of beer were sold in clusters of ten, tied together with plastic cord. When the train started again it was more a goods train than a passenger train.

  China ended symbolically with an imposing triumphal arch and a turret with a big red star. The low barbed-wire fence that marked the border was lost in the green, deserted plain. As soon as we crossed the border the Mongolian passengers began making merry. They were home, and celebrated with one bottle of beer after another. When a bottle was empty they threw it out the window, and the night crackled with the continuous sound of glass breaking on the tracks. In the silver light of the moon, the infinite expanse of the prairie was like a quiet sea, and the train like a ship. Now and then we stopped at places that seemed to consist of just a couple of houses. I seldom saw a human figure, but in the night we passed great herds of horses and oxen, and hundreds of camels.

  The sun rose on a monotonous green plain that stretched as far as the eye could see. It began to play with the train, casting shadows that grew longer and shorter, as if in a distorting mirror, as they snaked along beside us. That enormous space, without a soul in it, was a great relief after China—always so suffocatingly full of humanity. The horizon was a slender thread of gold in the distance. Nothing else could be seen, absolutely nothing but the immense green surface. It was not the jade green of the rice fields or the dense dark green of a jungle, but a pale, lifeless green. Not a hill, not a river, not even the distant form of a mountain, no point of reference but the track itself and the endless thousands of electricity poles alongside it, all exactly the same. What does this monotony do to the mind? People who live, reproduce and die in this universe which is all the same, what can they dream of if not demons?

  Meeting the Mongolians as a group for the first time, I found it hard to recognize in them the progeny of those conquerors who put half the world to fire
and sword, and who governed China for over three hundred years. Only in their physical beauty was there still a suggestion of greatness.

  Entering Mongolia, the train had lost its identity as a modern machine and become like a caravan, with no timetables and no need for punctuality. Now and then it stopped for no apparent reason but to let a passenger drop in on a relative in a nearby yurt. At sunset on the second day we stopped for two hours to wait for a train coming the other way. All the passengers got off to watch the flaming orb of the sun as it sank beneath the horizon, and people and dogs came out of the four houses at the nearby “station” to see what was going on.

  I had been longing to arrive in Ulan Bator of the steppes, but as we approached I saw in the distance not the golden roofs of its famous Lamaist temples but the smoke of its socialist chimneys. Our entry into the station, eight hours behind schedule, was like a party. Relatives and friends helped the passengers unload their enormous sacks and boxes of Chinese goods and the few bottles of beer left over.

  At last we were there! Yes, we were there, for I had not come to Ulan Bator alone.

  21/WITH MY FRIEND THE GHOST

  He had been with me for years without my realizing it. Then one day, by chance—the chance that seems to rule every-moment of existence—I noticed him. I became fascinated by his story, and I promised him that together we would go to Ulan Bator. For me it would be the first time, but he had been there long ago when the city was called Urga; he would be my guide. He had passed through the city while fleeing from his enemies, struggling to reach freedom, with death always lying in ambush, and in Urga he had had the strangest experiences of his life. Afterward he had continued his journey and finally reached what he thought he desired, then spent years of fame and banality waiting to die. But isn’t life always like that? You go running after something with high hopes, and then once you get it you find it is never as good as the running and hoping. Even in my quest for fortune-tellers, it was the search that meant the most to me.

  Ferdinand Ossendowski, born in Poland at the end of the nineteenth century, was an officer in the Russo-Japanese War and professor of industrial geography at St. Petersburg University. He had ended up as a mining engineer in Krasnoyarsk, deep in Siberia. In the winter of 1920 the Bolsheviks were advancing in that region. Knowing himself to be on their blacklist, he fled. At first he headed south, hoping to reach India via Tibet; then he turned east and zigzagged through Mongolia toward Peking. Throughout Asia it was a time of upheaval, with armies pursuing each other and bandits terrorizing the populace. Ossendowski’s flight lasted nearly two years, during which he was constantly involved in battles and ambushes, and his life was always in danger. On one occasion his death was announced, his papers having been found on a corpse half devoured by wolves in a forest. But Ossendowski himself had killed the man, a Bolshevik commissar, and exchanged documents to assume a new identity and thus fool his pursuers.

  That epic flight through one of the most mysterious regions on earth, over the mountains and plains of “the land of demons,” as Mongolia was then called, against the background of the Russian civil war and the fighting in the heart of Asia, led to Ossendowski being called “the Robinson Crusoe of the twentieth century.” The story of his adventures, published in New York in 1922 with the title Beasts, Men and Gods, became a best-seller.

  I had bought an old copy of that book for $2 during one of my summer visits to London, and for years it had languished unread on the shelves at home. Then one day, at the beginning of my flightless year, I was attracted by the title and began thumbing through the pages. I read how in May 1921 Ossendowski met Baron Ungern von Sternberg and traveled with him to Urga. He was present when Ungern was told by two different fortune-tellers on a single night—a lama in the Temple of the Prophecies using dice, and a woman burning bones in a fire—that he had only 130 days to live. And in fact at the end of September Ungern was betrayed by some of his officers and handed over to the Bolsheviks, who killed him. Exactly how and when he died has never been clear, but it was around the 130th day after the prophecy, and his death must have been horrible, as predicted.

  Ungern was a strange, controversial figure. A former officer in the Russian navy, born into an old aristocratic Baltic family whose forebears included knights and crusaders, pirates and brigands, he had converted to Buddhism and become one of the fiercest and most notorious warriors against the Red Army as it moved east. Ungern was sure that the Bolshevik Revolution was the “Great Curse” foretold by certain seers, and that the war between whites and reds was the clash between the forces of Good and Evil forecast by several religions. He saw himself as a man of destiny; obsessed by his mission to save humanity from the “depravity of the revolution,” he threw himself into the fight with a determination and cruelty that made him famous. His troops were a motley horde of Russians and Mongolians, visionary idealists and psychopathic murderers; when they passed through a village or town, anyone suspected of Communist sympathies ended up, at best, hanged from a lamppost.

  In Bolshevik propaganda Ungern was portrayed as a monster, and perhaps he was; but to the old Mongols he was a hero, a new Genghis Khan, the reincarnation of the God of War—because, among other things, he fought to preserve Mongolia as an independent republic, not a satellite of either Peking or Moscow as it later became.

  Ossendowski depicts Ungern as a tragic figure who bravely accepted the prophecy of his death, steeped as he was in Mongolian mysteries and legends. For Ossendowski too these were a source of endless fascination. He writes of an old lama who caused his wife, who had remained in Europe, to appear before him; and of another who resuscitated a man who had just been beaten to death. Ossendowski, a scientist and member of the French Academy, explains these phenomena as the products of hypnosis practiced on him and his companions, who saw exactly the same things. But how is one to explain the fact that the landlord of a Mongolian inn where he stopped one night, on reading Ossendowski’s future in a sheep’s bone burnt in the fire, warned him of an ambush from which, thanks to that prophecy, he managed to escape?

  And so it was that I promised to go to Ulan Bator with him. I wanted to search for the traces of that story, to find a link with those fortune-tellers of long ago. I traveled light as always, but I had with me my yellowed old copy of Beasts, Men and Gods. On the train I read and reread the book, and it was under my arm as I got off at Ulan Bator. I stayed there a week, and we were not apart for a moment. Ossendowski described places he had known long before, and together we revisited them. He spoke of prophetic rites, and together we looked for someone to perform them anew.

  It was not easy. Over seventy years had passed, and the revolution against which Ungern had fought in vain had changed the face of the land and the people. Urga, when Ossendowski was there in 1921, was like a vast encampment lying on the banks of the Tola River among densely wooded hills and mountains. It was the seat of Hutuktu Bodgo Khan, the Living Buddha—the third most important reincarnation of Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama and the Tashi Lama. The Urga of those days no longer exists. The hills and mountains are bare. Of the hundred or more monasteries, only three survive—and these are officially classified as “museums.” Of Urga’s thirty thousand gold and bronze Buddhas only a few dozen remain, no longer on the altars but locked in glass cases. Even the gigantic gilt bronze Buddha who sat in the lotus position at the center of the ancient Gandan Temple on the high plateau is gone: he was donated to the Soviet motherland to make cannons in the Second World War. Ossendowski tells us that Ungern never liked that statue: it was of recent origin, and its face had not come to wear those tears of sorrow and joy which only time can bestow. How right he was, that bloodthirsty but cultured baron! New things lack that ballast of history which always adds to the pathos of an object.

  The sixty thousand lamas of Ossendowski’s day have dwindled to about a hundred. Some of them are old men, recently returned thanks to the new policy of liberalization; the others are young novices. Even trying to find t
he old places is problematic. The city has been completely rearranged, the names are different and the new generations have no memory of the past. All they have been told is that the past was the cause of Mongolia’s underdevelopment and backwardness. The revolution had taught the Mongols to despise their past, to be ashamed of their ancient culture and to dream of becoming “modern,” like the Soviets who had arrived with the revolution. The symbol of modernity was the city, and so even the Mongols—nomads, shepherds, men of the steppe used to living in yurts—had to have one. The Soviets prescribed a city of enormously wide streets lined with massive yellow and white buildings, a mausoleum for the national hero—in the same marble, the same shape and orientation as Lenin’s tomb in Moscow—a museum, public buildings full of columns supporting nothing, a Palace of Culture like a sort of Parthenon on top of a Colosseum, blocks of flats lined up row upon row, and supermarkets with empty windows and shelves, exactly the same as the Soviet ones.

  On my first morning in Ulan Bator, I went out at dawn for my daily run. In the huge Red Square with its grandiose socialist buildings a lone uniformed road sweeper was scratching away at the vast emptiness. Suddenly from behind one of the numerous columns on the deserted square, a man appeared before me and said in perfect English: “Please don’t laugh, but would you like to buy a wolf?” Before I could tell myself he was mad, he dived back behind the column and brought out a splendid fur coat. I took the opportunity to ask him the way to the old residence of Hutuktu, the Living Buddha. Then it was he who thought he was talking to a madman.

  When I got back to the hotel, I began making telephone calls. I had been given a few contacts, but as soon as I asked about the Temple of the Prophecies or the dalchin—the technique of reading the future in fire—there were strange silences at the end of the line. In the end I gave up and decided to rely on my best contact: chance. And so, with Ossendowski always under my arm, I went strolling around the city like a tourist.