A Fortune-Teller Told Me (53 page)

“According to where one is born, one believes in different gods. But you, though born elsewhere, have your life here. Buddhism will help you more than any other religion. Your vital sign is very strong, and if you follow the path of Buddha for which you are made, that sign will become even stronger. The paths of the future are open to you.”
He threw another handful of
arz
onto the fire.

“Do you see no obstacles in the time ahead of me?” I asked.

Slowly the lama took up the bone again, whispered, prayed, again scrutinized the veinings made by the fire, and said:
“There are no mountains to cross, there are no precipices to conquer, only a level road.”
(What a bore!)
“You must only be careful in traveling by ship, especially if the voyage has to last for some days.”

I thought of my plan to return from Europe to Asia by sea, and asked what I could do to protect myself.

“I will give you a mantra which is excellent for you and which you will recite whenever you feel in danger. Here it is. Write:

The session went on for some time longer, with other questions and other answers of little import. The whole ceremony had left me cold and disappointed. Not for a moment had I felt the mystery which had so fascinated Ossendowski, and me too as I read his book. Perhaps it was because his was a time of great events, when people lived and died more dramatically; but whatever the reason, that rite performed for me in a
yurt
in Ulan Bator had lost all the meaning it had had for him in the old city of Urga. The procedure, the gestures, formulae and invocations were probably the same. What I missed was all the rest: the collective consciousness of a people, its fear, its faith in the occult, its hope for some kind of salvation. My
dalchin
lacked the spirit of the time.

The Mongolia of 1921 was a different country from that of 1993, and in the interval the Mongols had become a different race. There, as in
Tibet, the previous government was an oligarchy of monks, headed by Hutuktu, who was at once god and king, priest and feudal lord. The lamas had all the power: they were the administrators, the doctors, the fortune-tellers, the generals, the magicians and the judges. Life was pervaded by great uncertainty, death was a constant companion. For the Mongols, legends and myths were as true and real as the rising of the sun. A lama could send hundreds of ill-equipped soldiers into battle simply by conjuring before their eyes, with a wave of his hand, a glorious vision of the future: opulent
yurts
, fields with huge flocks, women dressed in silk and covered with jewels. The soldiers believed it all, and really saw that world for which they went to their death.

Nature was animate. Every mountain was the refuge of a god, every ford the lair of a demon. The whole immense land was a realm of mystery, strewn with the bones of ancestral shepherds and conquerors and the ruins of ancient cities like Karakorum, swallowed up by the sand. From that land salvation would come. The Mongols in 1921 lived in the certainty that even if the whole world were doomed to destruction, beneath their feet the Underworld would survive. It was populated by an ancient tribe which had vanished sixty thousand years before, ruled by the King of the World who had meanwhile penetrated all the secrets of nature. In that Underground Kingdom there was no more evil; there science had developed not to destroy but to create; there men and women were the possessors of all that was knowable; there the destiny of all humanity was written. When Ossendowski arrived in Mongolia he was told that barely thirty years before, the King of the World had made a brief visit to a monastery near Urga. When he arrived all the altar candles had lit spontaneously, all the braziers had begun burning incense; and he, the mythical King of Agharti, described for centuries in the sacred texts, had sat on his throne before an assembly of the most important lamas of the time and forecast the future of the world. He began with the words: “More and more shall men forget their souls, and care only for their bodies …”

The Mongols of 1921 believed all this and lived by it. In Ossendowski’s Urga—a place of mystery and horror, but also of great fascination—incredible things could happen. Now, no more. Modernity has swept away that universe of faith. It has “liberated” the Mongols from the slavery of their legends and their lamas, but at the
same time it has emptied their temples, destroyed all the meaning of their ceremonies, and in so doing impoverished their lives. The prophecy of the King of Agharti has been amply borne out: men no longer think of anything but their bellies, and in their world there is no more room for poetry.

Before leaving I asked the lama how he read the answers in the bone. It all depended, he said, on the veining brought out by the fire. The bone has two sides, of which one is held facing the person performing the
dalchin
and the other toward the person inquiring about his future. If the veins appear on the outer face the answer is positive, if inside it is negative. The other criterion is the direction of the veins: the best are those that radiate from the center of the bone to the edge. Veins that go up are a sign of good changes, those that go down are bad.

“The answer is always there,”
said the lama.
“The problem is to see it in the bone. That’s where the difficulty lies.”
In case of doubt one could take the bone, hide it under one’s arm, and approach some people who are talking: the answer will be indicated in the first words one hears. Rather like deciding to do or not do something according to whether the first person you see on leaving the house in the morning is a man or a woman.

I paid for the sheep, distributed some gifts which the vet had advised me to bring, and took the small packets of
arz
which the lama gave me for protection against various ills. The vet was enthusiastic: he felt that he had seen something wonderful. On the way back we passed many beggars: grimy children standing on pieces of plastic in the middle of the pavement, women with cards explaining how they had been widowed, or had been victims of fires or other misfortunes. “Regress,” said the vet ironically: we had talked so much of the “progress” which in my view had not yet compensated the Mongols for all that was taken from them.

The scene in which Baron von Ungern hears for the second time that his days are numbered is described dramatically by Ossendowski. The fortune-teller, a sort of small witch, very thin and haggard, goes into a trance. She tears up her headcloth, makes grimaces of fear and pain, twists her body, and at last the words emerge, strained but precise, from her lips: “I see him … I see the God of War … His life is ending in a
horrible way … And then there is the shadow … black as night … Shadow … 130 steps remain … Beyond, darkness … Nothing … I see nothing … The God of War has disappeared.”

Ungern bowed his head. “I shall die, but that is not important. The fight has begun and it will not die. No one can put out the fire in the heart of the Mongols,” he said. Then, rising to his feet, he spoke of his vision of a great Asian Buddhist state that would soon extend from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and to the banks of the Volga, a state governed by a man more powerful than Genghis Khan and more merciful than the Sultan Baber, who would rule until, from his subterranean capital, the King of the World would come. “But first Russia must cleanse itself of the insult of the revolution, it must purify itself with blood and death. All those who have accepted Communism must perish, with their families, so that not one seed remains and there are no descendants,” said the bloody baron, departing toward his destiny.

The woman who read Ungern’s future in 1921 was a famous seer whose powers were said to have come from her mother, a Gypsy. According to the Mongol legends only a few human beings had visited the Underground Kingdom; among these were the Gypsies, who returned with the art of reading the future in cards, in grass, and in the palm of the hand.

For me, meeting the most famous seer of Ulan Bator, described to me as “a sort of witch, of strange origins,” was another step in my journey in Ossendowski’s footsteps. The appointment was made by the former Communist official who had become religious. She introduced herself by telling me she was the reincarnation of a lama, that on her left shoulder she had three black marks where her “predecessor” had thrown his tunic, and that in all the religious places she visited she was immediately recognized as a person who had already gone a long way toward enlightenment. Even the Dalai Lama, during a visit to Ulan Bator, had singled her out and had given her some of his very special pills for protection in case of danger.

“In what year were you born?” she asked as we drove to our appointment with the witch.

“Nineteen thirty-eight, the year of the tiger,” I replied.

“The tiger? So was I, but twelve years later. The 1938 tiger is the one with eight white spots. Your element is water. The tiger is generous, it
controls its territory. You are always seeking food for your family, and always on guard to protect it.”

The palmist in Singapore had told me similar things.

“In Buddhism,” the woman continued, “the tiger is the great enemy of demons; therefore in the lamaist rites there is always a tiger, and the tiger’s tail is often portrayed in the
tankas
. No animal is stronger than the tiger. The tiger can kill everybody, but it has one great enemy: man, because he is more intelligent. Between the tiger and man there is a relation of love and hate, of mutual attraction and fear. I have a difficult marriage because I married a man born in the year of the monkey, and the monkey is the animal closest to man. Like many tiger women, I have trouble having children. Tiger women are greatly feared. Therefore in Asia a woman who is a tiger never mentions it, otherwise she would not find a husband. The tiger always seeks quality, she wants the best, and this can be a great defect when the tiger insists on the best food, the best clothes, the best way of living. Then she must control herself.”

I listened to her with great pleasure, until it struck me that even tigers are an endangered species. How will the people of the future manage to orient themselves toward the character and personality of their neighbors when they no longer have animals to observe, when they no longer have nature from which to learn?

By now we were out of Ulan Bator, heading north. We passed a large cemetery on a hillside. The line of white wooden steles resembled an immense picket fence. “In the past the dead were left to nature, to feed the birds, but since the revolution we bury them,” said my companion. “If the body disappeared in three days it meant that the deceased was a good person. If it lasted longer it meant that not even the animals wanted him, and that was a bad omen for his reincarnation.” A remnant of that tradition can be seen in the fact that the Mongols consider ravens and vultures as sacred, and no one kills or eats them.

We passed a recently reopened temple with a beautiful pair of gilded beasts on its roof, and at last we arrived at a large colony of
yurts
, each ringed by the usual crooked wooden fence. Even the green doors, decorated with strange white dots and circles, were all awry. The home of the witch was in a cluttered courtyard with the usual
yurt
, and at the back a small white house. We entered through the kitchen, where women sat on the ground frying doughnuts in a big cauldron of oil.

The witch’s room was very tidy: a bed covered by a tapestry of horses, some suitcases, a chest with photos of her family and men in military uniform on top. Under socialism everything is regulated, even the occult: on the wall hung framed documents certifying that she was a member of the Traditional Medicine Association and the Mongolian Association of Persons with Special Powers, as well as various other honors and photographs of her with prominent people.

As soon as I saw this “witch” I realized that there was no better word to describe her: tiny and thin, with a wrinkled face, long greasy hair, very small eyes and a gold tooth. She wore a green floral dress, and over it a modest smock of a lighter green. She told me she had once worked as a bus driver in Ulan Bator, but her powers had made it impossible to continue. Driving along the street she would constantly feel the good or evil qualities of places and people, and this made her very nervous. If a thief or murderer got on the bus she immediately felt it and could no longer drive. She said she was fifty-eight years old, and was born in a region of the north near the Gobi Desert. Of Gypsy parents? She did not know. They were very poor, but her birth had brought them good fortune.

The first time she realized that she had powers was when she was nine years old. Her father had sent her to guard some sheep, and she saw that the wolves and dogs were afraid of her and did not approach the flock. Even then she felt that her mission was to help people. If she saw that someone was near death, she had the ability to prolong his life for three or four years. Not more, she added modestly.