Mongolian Grandma
Okay, better late than never the story of Grandma, the unnamed, sharp-eyed, 73-year-old woman who lives alone in the Mongolian countryside. When she greeted me at sunset on Saturday night, 9:15PM, she was wearing a royal blue silk deel, the traditional Mongolian dress, and black riding boots--the same outfit she was wearing when I left the next day at noon. Both times the gray hair around her weathered face was severely pulled back in a bun. Earrings dangled.
She pointed me toward one of the little painted stools arranged around a table in the middle of the room. These typical Mongolian chairs are only about 15" high and 15" square, which means you are basically squatting when you lower yourself onto one. When she saw everyone was seated, she thrust a bowl of candies on the table, then a bowl of small packaged cakes. Then one by one the milk tea arrived. Grandma didn't say much at all and while we ate and drank, she sat stationed on a regular chair about two feet away--between us and the cooking area--so she could keep an eye on the hospitality's choreography.
About an hour into the animated conversation, all in Mongolian and thus not comprehensible to me, I found out how we had come to be there with her that night--and at the same time learned a little about Mongolian social life. Grandma, it seemed, had two sons. The younger one had died in adulthood. The older was an artist now living in the Czech Republic. Thus she had come to be alone in the world.
But it turned out that artist son had once been married to my friend Narmandakh's sister-in law. It was that sister-in-law and Narmandakh's brother who had driven us here, at Narmandakh's request because she wanted me to see the real Mongolia and the real Mongolia is a ger in the countryside. It also turned out that the artist and Narmandakh's sister-in-law had a daughter, Grandma's only grandchild. The daughter was grown now, had studied in Paris and was back in Mongolia working lucratively as a translator for a French company. The person she most adored in the world and went to visit at every opportunity was Grandma. The ex-daughter-in-law, Narmandakh's sister-in-law, who was very close to her daughter, also called the old woman that, which is why I was told we were "going to Grandma's."
Grandma herself said very little that first evening, but the next day after breakfast, she brought out a bunch of photo albums, piled them on the table and began reminiscing. Grandma at 20 was a stunner! With her high cheekbones, almond eyes and bow-shaped lips, she could've been a double for Greta Garbo. Those high high cheekbones, that narrow little chin, the hair pulled discretely back...she was a beauty.
But she was simply a seamstress. And the wife of a Mongolian Communist Party official. They lived in a house in Ulan Baator. She worked for the Soviets in a big sewing factory, rising higher and higher in the ranks because of her focus and skills. "I am the one who sewed that special suit for the first Russian in space." She pointed to a picture of herself seated at a machine. My mind lit up like switchboard. Was this bizarre or just the way the world is if you are out and about in it? I was sitting in a shack in the Mongolian countryside with the woman who had gone to Moscow to sew the spacesuit for Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and the man who in 1961 first shook America senseless when it realized it was running behind. Grandma had unknowingly affected my life as a schoolkid, because Yuri Gagarin set off the space race and the forced teaching of math to idiots like me.
Now I knew why there was a full table model Singer Sewing Machine in that shack. But there was also a small altar with photos of Chenrezig and Vajrapani, a remnant of the pre-Communist days when Grandma's parents had been Buddhist.
More photos of her son the artist and her son who was lost, photos of Narmandakh's sister-in-law sitting next to me know gasping at how thin and young she looked. Photos of Grandma and her husband being honored for something in Moscow. "She was really quite sophisticated for her time," Narmandakh whispered to me. "But after her husband died, she didn't want to stay in the city. She said the countryside was 'home' and she wanted to go back to it. So here she is."
Here was the shack I described earlier in my post from Mongolia. Grandma didn't have herds anymore to tend; her son in the Czech Republic, her French speaking granddaughter and her neighbors in the ger all felt she was too frail now to tend them. They worried. So she just had two mangy and fierce looking mongrels tied up on the far side of her yard where she'd planted scallions and potatoes and had hoed the spot for the tomatoes she'd started indoors. "They want me to go back to the city," she said looking at me, "but who will feed my dogs. No, I have to stay here, that's all."
Here, I discovered when we took a short walk after the photo ops, was about 100 yards from a beautiful river where Grandma pulled her water from. She had a bicycle she rode infrequently now 10 miles to a mining town where there were markets and banks. She had a pension from the Mongolian government and felt quite comfortable, not wanting for anything.
When we got up to leave, she disappeared into her bedroom and came out balancing a pile of packages. She gave slippers to Narmandakh, her brother and her ex daughter-in-law. She gave me a pair of merino wool gloves. I had no idea why she was being so generous, especially to me a total stranger. "It's a Mongolian custom," Narmandakh explained, "that the elderly always give departing company a gift. That way, if they die before the next visit, they leave on good terms."
~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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Labels: Mongolia
posted by Sandy Garson @ 2:36 PM
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