209 Part II

(Part II of The Poem That Still Speaks: An Essay on the Poetics of Political Exile)

In spite of last Saturday's snow this May is warmer than last May in Ulaanbaatar, regularly in the 70s and 80s. The exchange rate has gone from roughly 1,200 Mongolian tugriks per dollar to 1,600, so now the "all boots for 5000t" booth near the Central Post Office on Sukhbaatar Square reads "all boots 6000-8000t". Some things are the same. Across from the Flower Center is the 24 hour (Lies! They mean midnight! This I learned the hard way when it was very cold) mini store with a front room still filled with pastel-colored teddy bears.
A year ago, Tumen would text regularly. I am cleaning my clothes! He'd say. His Mongolian was from Inner Mongolia, so the sounds were different. I've cleaned my house today, he'd text.

A year ago Tumen insisted on buying me a train ticket to Hohhot, the capital city of China's Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia, to visit his wife and see the home he could never return to.

That son grew to manhood among phantoms,
And side by side with a ghost, puddled his clear spirit,
Then leaped into the void between saturn and the fixed stars--
That silence wherein more deep than starlight this home is foundered

One revolution round the sun ago, a windy day in early May. Tumen took me to the railway station and bought my ticket. I, for mysterious and totally awesome reasons, was outfitted with not only a Mongolian visa for my Luce year but a Chinese visa--a year long, multi-entry visa. Gold! And it was easy: just buy a train ticket, get on a train, go to China, and do there what would almost certainly have barred me from ever acquiring a visa had the Chinese authorities known what I was using it for: to visit the home and family of an exiled Chinese dissident.

Behold him, part wakened, fallen among field flowers shallow
But undisclosed, withdraw. Time had stopped there and then for the seed
And nothing had happened in time since, not even him.
He caused the inside of the cave to be infinite.
Or is it that in starry places we see things we long to see?

Tumen was waiting in a suit to walk me to his young lawyer friend's car.
His wife was strip-searched at the border.
No, wrong order.
He gave me toothpaste and wine for her.

Let me die by inches.

As with every time we met on any business, we went to eat after he bought me the ticket. I ordered borscht and Tumen ordered us both tall yellow beers. He was haggard and hungover and missed his wife and child. He meant to leave Ulaanbaatar. He meant to go write somewhere where he could live with his family, out from the reach of the Chinese government. I just want to be together with them; it's not right to be apart, he said. And I want to leave here, leave anywhere near China. China, where he lived before the police raided his house and office because of the books he'd written about Chinese government and its corrosion of Inner Mongolian cultural heritage and rights. Where his wife still lives, and, he says, is eager to have me.

The sword was suspended above our heads by a single thread which was about to snap.
Lift her head from the depths, the red waves of death
As though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape.
I have wept through nights, you must know that,
Groping laboring over many paths of thought.

Tumen always noticed when I did not have make up on and said it looked good. He always noticed my face; when I returned from Hohhot with a rash from some wetwipe tissue from the train he asked about it and whether I had medicine.
A year ago Tumen had a bare apartment. He'd just moved into it. He'd get beer especially for me. He knew I did not like the usual vodka. The (Outer) Mongolian writer B would later say matter-of-factly that what Tumen spent hours emotionally telling me about how Inner Mongolians are misunderstood by Outer Mongolians (and both Tumen and Yoshimodo have said this about Buryat Mongolians as well as Inner Mongolians) is not true. B admits he is no history expert, but he is very sure of this.

The water is brilliant and nervy,
Breaking up by her entrance
the fiery mosaic I had been piecing together.
Lest the Phantasm-prove the Mistake--that you can fully appreciate all the circumstances of our ruin
I must elucidate its cause:
A furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings.

Tumen said his daughter was one of the 10,000 out of 200,000 students to test into the best university in China, so she does not want to leave if he is resettled; will she be able to study somewhere good if he gets a teaching post in the western world?
Into my milky tea Tumen put barley. Which made sense to me, it was like breakfast cereal. The mutton dumplings in his milky tea looked a little like brains. What to do with questions of politics, a system (symptom?) of organization for which brains are responsible, when politics makes off with a body, or forces its flight? The body politic and the bodies therein, shunted and kept apart.
That day Tumen said, I don't like to eat alone. There's no point to making food if you're alone, no fun in it.

That called body is a portion of soul
Which cast the metals into the expanse
To gaze at anagrams of`light.

The day of my departure to China: an unbelievable rose globe looming above the pregnant building on Sukhbaatar Square.
An incomparable globe.
Those things never happened.

The imaginary whistle blows
Out on this stony planet that we farm

In the land of never happened, on the train to China, I shared a train compartment with three men in jackets. One of them brought a crate of beer. The other two didn't know each other either. The first two talked across from each other when I entered the compartment with Tumen's friend, the young lawyer who loosened his tie in traffic on the way here and who wanted to be sure I got my seat. The third one held my book-heavy pack upright while the last passenger lay down, hands braided like praying.

making the familiar faces of men appear strange, and every One unbared a Nerve: the wondrous fivewindowed nerve and core. The fat gold fly who sang and botched against a bright pane within.


Amerik okhin! he said. So we have an American girl on board with us. The lights shut off, shut back on, then dimmed. The grime came off my hands as I adjusted my curtains, curled them in on themselves to see the hanging rose globe.

She opens the grass.
There’s no lack of void.
I don’t know who we thought we were.
The sweetness of your face is just another threat.

The backpack helping praying one, the first to bed, barefoot, is the one to peer at my page. Boroo gar, meaning left-handed, apparently, sounds like rain hand, mistake hand, or both.
The train yawned along, looping like two people taking it slow. "Treat yourself gently," came a text message from a friend. Dusky marsh, trees up geometric land formations.

But did that ever happen to us?