A Ger-eat Evening

Grandma's tattered shack had 2 1/2 rooms, the half being the blue "kitchen" partially walled off from the main room. It had a woodstove for heating and cooking, a tabletop over drawers for food preparation and blue plastic water barrel with a large metal ladle laying on its black plastic top. When the front door was open, it obscured a wall mirror, a hanging towel and a small shelf with an oval bar of soap and hair brush. Below was a stool with a basin.

The main room was a bedsitter with two single beds caddycornered, five trunks stacked up like a chest of drawers between them. The top was used as a small Buddhist altar with pictures of Chenrezig, Mahakala and Shakyamuni Buddha flanked by unlit votive candles in silver bowls. The front wall had a metal chest supporting a 36" flat screen TV attached to the satellite dish outside the window. All sorts of wires ran between that TV and the window to the single socket. It provided power for one hanging lightbulb--a swirling fluorescent--and the sewing machine on its own table in that window next to the TV. A low rectangular wood plank table was in the center of the room, surrounded by four of the square painted stools Mongolians sit on.

We were directed to that table as soon as we walked in. In less than a minute bowls of Mongolian tea were passed around. A bowl of wrapped candies was plunked in the center, then a plate of biscuits from a package and a bag of croissant like pastries, which weren't bad once they were dunked into the salty milky "tea." But I didn't get much time to enjoy them because a haphazard collection of bowls large and small was being passed out with our dinner in them. It was the ubiquitous tsuivan, Mongolian noodles stirfried with carrots and tidbits of mutton--and salt. Lots of salt. Everybody was offered chopsticks except me to whom Grandmother proudly held out a fork.

It turned out that Grandmother was the ex mother-in-law of the doctor's wife, actually the grandmother of her only child, a daugher now 24 who had studied in Paris and was working in UB for a French company. The granddaughter loved her grandmother more than anything in the world and came to see her almost every weekend. Her mother had not seen Grandmother for at least a year or two. So there was much to catch up on including, I gathered, news of the former husband, an artist now living in the Czech Republic.

When an elderly couple walked in, and joined us, more bowls of tsuivan magically appeared. "Sixty-nine," the ruddy faced husband said to me, pointing proudly to himself as he squatted on a stool next to me. He took off his black watchman's cap. A chair was produced for his wife. "She has bad knees, two of them, " Amanda's brother explained, and the conversation was suddenly about my last year's knee tear surgery and her upcoming knee replacement surgery and my advice on how she might strengthen her thigh muscles, once I learned swimming was not an option in Mongolia.

Amanda brought out a half dozen bottles of Mongolian beer and two bottles of red wine, her favorite. The beer we drank from bottles, the wine from Grandmother's silver bowls. At some point the elderly couple who had mysteriously appeared got up and disappeared. I didn't notice because the conversation had taken a hard turn: something was apparently said about the fact that Grandmother had lost one of her two sons because Amanda's brother's body stiffened and his voice was loud and harsh. "He lost his son too," Amanda whispered to me, "and he can't get over it." (I later learned the son was a 21 year old university student in pre-med whose evening out with friends turned violent after too much alchohol and one of those friends murdered him with a knife--a not uncommon scenario in Ulan Baator.)

Amanda's brother finally calmed down and the 69 year old re-appeared to reclaim his beer. I don't know what the conversation was about but it seemed quite jolly. Grandmother sat royally erect on her stool removed enough from the table for her to be watching over us in that high neck royal blue gown and those black riding boots, her gray hair pulled tightly back in a bun hidden by a small head scarf that accentuated her small gold hoop earrings. It was 11 PM on Saturday night and as the wine was poured into those silver bowls and those little candies were continually unwrapped, it was really quite impossible not to feel totally content under that single light bulb on those low square painted stools in that tattered shack off the road in the middle of Mongolia.

"Okay," Amanda said eventually. "Now we go to the ger. But first to the long drop. I hate the long drop. Be prepared!"

The "long drop" turned out to be an outhouse. A Mongolian outhouse. The floor had five planks. Planks two and four had a smaller plank nailed on top and plank three was missing so that when you put your feet on planks two and four you could aim below--the long drop.

There was no long drop near the ger so I was told to just go anywhere behind it. Indeed I noticed on the trip out that Mongolians, men and woman alike, unabashedly pee wherever it is convenient. We saw busses pulled over by the side of the road, its passengers peeing on the open plain in full view of the road, and nobody said anything.

Our ger had a solid foundation and a painted red wooden door you had to crouch to pass through. But the interior, viewed by the light of two candles, was surprisingly spacious. tons of headroom everywhere. In the center was a small rectangular box woodstove just like the one at Grandmother's, its metal stovepipe chimney rising through the open air peak that revealed the starry sky. It was pumping out lots of wood heat, from tree stumps like the ones piled in a bucket next to it waiting to go in. "It's very warm now," Amanda said. "But when the stove stops, the ger gets cold fast. So be prepared. There are many blankets."

There were two single beds and one marriage bed, a few of those square painted stools that we deployed as nighttables--a washing area, and a sitting area of two upholstered chairs around the wooden table holding those two candles. With absolutely no ado, Amanda, her brother, her brother's wife and I all got ready for bed. It was midnight with a half moon. The doctor blew out the candles.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

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