The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (19 page)

Mongolian wrestling is admirably simple. The unmasked luchadors approach, grapple, and spend most of their time trying to trip each other. Whoever hits the ground first loses. A handful of judges in robes and hats, looking like nickelodeon versions of Catholic bishops, milled and hovered and declared winners. The victors then performed a slow-motion, high-stepping victory dance, turning to face all 360 degrees of the crowd with hands
held high. It had the lumbering grace and pathos of a dancing elephant in the center ring.

The bench seats of the stadium were packed, and there was an ugly tension in the crowd. We had already seen a man on the ground being kicked in the face and a cop sprinting by, and it wasn't even sundown. Maria and I sat in what had obviously been designated as the foreigners' section, squeezed between two French boys and a Canadian lady. It was while shifting from cheek to cheek to keep my ass from falling asleep that I almost missed the kid walking by in a full Nazi stormtrooper uniform.

He and his skinhead buddy were making a determined circuit of the whole stadium, glowering straight ahead and daring someone to object. He was in perfect blackshirt drag, cargo pants tucked into boots, red, white, and black swastika armband and all. His friend was a standard-issue boots-and-braces skinhead: red suspenders, white T-shirt, rolled blue jeans, Doc Marten boots.

“Did you see that?” said Maria.

Our neighbors stared straight ahead and ignored them.

Tania Branigan reported in
The Guardian
on the rise of Mongolian neo-Nazis in 2010, noting that “with their high cheekbones, dark eyes and brown skin, they are hardly the Third Reich's Aryan ideal. . . . It is, by any standards, an extraordinary choice. Under Hitler, Soviet prisoners of war who appeared Mongolian were singled out for execution. More recently, far-right groups in Europe have attacked Mongolian migrants.” The article described a group of nationalists obsessed with defending the racial and sexual purity of the Mongols, particularly against the “imperialistic, evil” Chinese: “Some believe Beijing
has a secret policy of encouraging men to have sex with Mongolian women,” and transgender Mongolians have also been a target.

Jay, a gay European, managed an expat bar in Ulaanbaatar with the unlikely name of Satchmo's. It was there we played our one Mongolian show. (I'd gotten no response when I tried to book local pubs via e-mail and telephone, so I posted on the numerous expat forums until somebody put me in touch with somebody else who led me to Jay.) The bar was owned by two mining executives, an Australian and a New Zealander. Most of the bars in UB were expat bars.

“They're pubbing up around here for sure,” said the Australian, a ruddy, sunburned man in an open shirt who had bought the place six months ago partly as an investment, mostly for something to do. “A lot of them [are] empty whenever you walk by and you wonder, what's going on? Then you realize, with all the money-laundering . . .” He gave me a meaningful look. “There have been a lot of changes over the last few years, for the better. It's not so dangerous, the corruption . . . is still there, but they're trying to keep a lid on it. Anyway, none of that here—we're trying to have a nice place, where you can bring your family. Here, take my card . . .”

His business partner had left New Zealand when he was “twenty-two, never been back. . . . Been here fifteen [years]. It was better before. The politics are so . . . sensitive.”

Maria pointed out later that the nationalists may have a point about outsiders coming in and exploiting the country, but that they're wasting time being paranoid about the Chinese—it's these Western mining corporations that are tearing open the mountains, flooding the political system with money, and filling
the Irish pubs that had opened just so politicians could launder their bribes.

Jay was a barrel-chested loudmouth of a kind of mongrel origin: “Bottom line is I'm Belgian. . . . Hey amigo!” he greeted a Mongolian busboy. He was born in Belgium but is part French, part Native American, part a long list of other things too. “I had a consulting job in Belgium making 12,000 euro a month, with a 7,000 [euro] expense account. I would walk into restaurants and the waiters would say, ‘Oh, welcome, let me get you some champagne!' But [the firm] was bought by a company with ten thousand employees, and I thought, ‘Who needs it!' I was working for British Telecom, vice president, flying to London for meetings. The first few times was great, like a movie! But then I thought, ‘What a waste of money.' My father couldn't believe it” when he quit.

He met his current partner twelve years ago, a Mongolian from the Gobi Desert who moved to UB at eleven, became a ballet dancer at the State Theatre, and met Jay while on tour in Belgium.

“And then you decided to move here?” I asked.

“God, no! I hated it. You couldn't get good wine, you couldn't get toothpaste, you couldn't get Dove soap. People were always asking me, ‘Can you bring soap?' . . . It was amazing for me, [coming] from Belgium, a country with 450 people to the square kilometer, to come here, which is completely deserted. I take these trips to the country, it is beautiful, sure, but five hours later it is the same mountain and the same valley! A huge country and it all looks the same. So the mining”—a boom that began in 2006—“they take two mountains, who cares! I say, we could have driven an hour and it would look the same.”

Jay's second job was teaching English. “They've been taught by the Russian system: read this grammar, copy down everything, the teacher is up here like a god. I said, ‘Put away your notebooks. We will talk.' They said nothing. So I provoked them: I said, ‘Mongolians are corrupt.' They said, ‘No!' I said, ‘Oh yeah? Raise your hand if in the past four years you never gave your teacher a bottle of vodka for a grade.' And they got so mad—that got them talking! Ten minutes later I said, ‘Listen to yourselves, you are talking English!'”

His partner, a slim, quiet waiter at Satchmo's—he had quit dancing after a knee injury—glided up and deposited our food: cheeseburgers with fries, a salad with blue cheese and cheddar. After a week of mutton and
airag
, American comfort food was more appealing than usual.

“Well, the
airag
,” said Jay, ordering more vodka for the table. “You have to understand how it's done here. You are in a tent all winter, eating nothing but horsemeat, and it blocks you up. Then when the warm weather comes, you have nothing but
airag
for seven days, ten days . . . it cleans you out.

“It is very difficult to live my lifestyle here. Even the staff doesn't know. Two ultra-nationalists followed me into the office last week, they said, ‘It is against nature, the way you live, if you stay here we will beat the shit out of you.' My friend, a Filipino who manages [a pizza place], he dates a Mongolian girl. They kidnapped him in a car and beat him up, stole his ATM card and PIN number. Another friend got a note pinned to his door saying, ‘The elections are over, now it's time for foreigners to leave the country.' I come to work every day with a bodyguard—I don't need to be beat up and be in the hospital two weeks!”

He leapt up to supervise a table setting. His T-shirt said “I ♥ BJ” in giant letters.

Two weeks later, after a couple of shows in China, I flew from Beijing to London for the last leg of what had become a six-month worldwide tour. Maria continued east, to the Pacific Northwest, to teach accordion at a folk music camp. There were no newsstands in the Beijing airport. On my LOT flight via Warsaw, you could buy alcohol from the crotchety, elderly Polish staff only in złoty or dollars, not renminbi or pounds. I retraced in nine hours by air what had taken two months by land: northwest from Beijing over Mongolia, across Irkutsk and Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and Moscow, to Warsaw. The slow pace of land travel is frustrating or relaxing or simply literal, time to be passed. It has the smoky flavor of nostalgia. The train journeys were always over too soon—I always had another chapter to read, another chapter to write, another hour I wanted to sleep. The flight, though, felt endless. If the faster you travel, the slower time passes, perhaps the slower you move, the faster you find your way to the end of the line.

PART II

I.

Drunk Nihilists Make a Good Audience
(Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia)

I
spent my thirtieth birthday on a bus with the Russian national rugby team. The band I was in at the time, the Hold Steady, was on an overnight drive across the mountainous border between Slovenia and Croatia, and we wound up passing a bottle of duty-free Jameson's between ourselves while the athletes harassed a trio of unfortunate Russian girls. We should have been on a flight from London to Zagreb, but it was delayed so long that the Zagreb airport was closed by the time we left. The airline, a suspect budget option out of Hungary called W!zzAir (exclamation point and purple-and-fuchsia logo
sic
), flew us to Ljubljana—in Slovenia, an entirely different country—and loaded us onto cross-border buses. In the twelve-hour interregnum, it being my birthday and all, I'd had the chance to get
drunk on Bloody Marys and sober up twice over. A couple of the Russians hadn't quite competed the cycle. Two of them, in fact, didn't make it on the plane at all. One was so drunk that his coach, a short but tough-looking man in his fifties, held him by the throat against the terminal wall, slapping him across the face and cursing.

“You're not letting him on the plane, are you?” I asked the stewardess as we boarded.

“Don't worry about that,” she said. “Not a chance.” An unlucky teammate drew a short straw and had to stay behind to babysit. He planted himself next to his slumped friend, plotting grim retribution.

Five years later, I left Padova, Italy, in the pouring rain and headed east again to Zagreb, on the way to shows in Serbia. It was early spring of 2013, and I was three weeks into a seven-week European tour.

Maria was pregnant, and I was ambivalent and worried. I don't think I ever affirmatively said I wanted children, but I had stopped saying I didn't, and I knew that it was a precondition for the future of our relationship. But I liked our life the way it was, and I didn't want it to change. It was insecure and unpredictable, sure, but I was my own boss, and I could travel wherever I wanted and get paid to do it. Maria had finished her PhD, and we were living an unsettled life, following her through a series of postdoctoral appointments or sojourns in Boston, New York, Toronto, Virginia. I was touring frantically—maybe I thought I needed to prove my earning power as we tried to figure out the shape of the rest of our lives, maybe I just wanted to get in as much travel as I could before the baby came and I'd be off the road, for all I knew, forever. So six weeks after I'd returned from
our six-month tour, I was on the road again, for a disheartening monthlong circuit of the United States. Then, three months later, I headed back to Europe for seven weeks.

The tour started well. I was making money in Poland and Germany, and the weather was crisp and bright. I was playing French shows outside Paris for the first time, mostly successfully. I would head east after my French week, then south into Romania and Bulgaria for the first time.

Then the snow came, a series of spring storms that would chase me eastbound all the way to Serbia. I was about an hour from Paris on day three of the storm when the traffic stopped. The snow had begun to pile up against the guardrails, but at least the center lane was clear. I'm not surprised that there's been an accident, I thought. But they should have this cleared pretty quickly—an hour at most. Both lanes of traffic pulled to the side and a cop car and an ambulance made their way through the center.

An hour passed, then another. People got out, stretched, pissed in the snowbanks. Three hours passed. I hadn't had breakfast, but luckily I had bought groceries in Heidelberg. A man walked back with news: the big trucks were barred from driving, but there weren't police to organize them so that we smaller cars could pass. So, it seemed, we could be here all night, or at least until someone took charge.

My phone buzzed. “Are you on your way to Orleans?—Fabien.”

“On my way,” I texted.

“OK—the bar is open until midnight, so whenever you get here is fine.”

Four hours had passed by the time the line of traffic finally began to crawl forward. Exhilarated, I took the first exit—it was
westbound, toward Calais, but at least I was moving, and I could cut south shortly. It was cutting it close, though; the Orleans show was supposed to be from seven to nine, and my estimated arrival now was nine thirty and creeping toward ten. I texted Fabien.

“The bar says no one will stay after ten,” he replied. “You can come here, but I think it is better if we cancel and you stay in Paris. Do you know someone there?”

I didn't, really. I called Maria. “Can you do me a favor? Can you book me a hotel in Paris and text me the address?”

In the meantime, I'd found another southbound highway. This would all be fine—I'd get to Paris in ninety minutes and have a nice night off. Maria texted back with a hotel: “It looks crappy, but I think it's the best bet.”

When I saw the traffic begin to slow, then the red emergency lights start to blink ahead of me, and then realized that we were once again stopped and trapped, the despair set in. I cursed myself for changing highways. I cursed the French highway department for their incompetence. I cursed myself for my life choices and swore I would never do another tour, I would learn a trade and fly right. I read every publication on my phone and every scrap of paper in the car. I listened to five hours of the
History of England
podcast, from Alfred the Great through the Norman Conquest, and tried to identify the irony, if there were any, of being stranded so close to the Norman heartland. I heard a beep as my phone battery died and opened my laptop to find that it had too. I ate my provisions: five bananas, two yogurts, a package of Wasa sesame wafers, a whole packet of sliced herbed cheese, and a liter of multivitamin juice. I turned the car off and let the heat drain away, then turned it on full blast. A couple of cars
went rogue, forming a third lane in the deeper snow, and I joined them for a glorious third of a mile or so. I pulled out my pillow, curled up, and decided to give up and sleep, but every time I did the line would move forward a hundred yards for no obvious reason.

It was nearly twelve thirty a.m. when the movement started in a sustained manner. I'd been trapped for seven hours, plus the four hours on the other highway. And I was still almost ninety miles from Paris.

We wove, single file, between and around the miles of hulking, cold trucks, which formed perfect bulwarks for banks of windblown snow. It took nearly an hour just to creep along the mile or so of trucks before we got to the open highway and rose to a cruising speed of thirty—or, when we were lucky, forty—miles an hour. I was looking at arriving in Paris at, optimistically, three—more than two more hours of white-knuckle driving. Neither plows nor highway patrol were anywhere to be found. The rest stops had Ibis hotels, but half the entrances were blocked by trucks or by snow; at the others the hotels were booked full of truckers. On one exit, even the off-ramp from the highway was closed and rerouted to an empty highway patrol building.

By this point I was nearly the only person on the highway. It was pushing three, and I was on my third bottle of Club-Mate soda, shivering with cold and caffeine in equal measure.

It was after four when I finally pulled into an arctic Belleville. The hotel, on a cobbled side street, was locked. I pounded on the door until a middle-aged Arab shuffled over and opened the door with a malevolent glare.

“Do you speak English?” I said, hopefully.

“
Non
.”

I handed him my passport, wordlessly, and he checked me in.

Not wanting to get up in five hours to check out, I asked, “
Deux nuits
?”

He shook his head. “Tomorrow,” he said, indicating I should come and deal with that in the morning.

I'd logged onto the Wi-Fi while he was checking me in and ran back downstairs to quickly Skype Maria and let her know I was OK. He gave me a look as I passed the check-in desk. I logged onto Skype, hit call—and the Wi-Fi signal disappeared. I ran upstairs and grabbed my laptop. He saw me and said, “
Internet, n'est pas
.”

“What the hell? I saw it! I got my e-mail just now!”

“
Internet, n'est pas
.”

Motherfucker had turned it off so I'd leave his lobby.

I took a Xanax and waited for the nerves and the caffeine to let me sleep.

Then, at the legendary Miroiterie squat, I was robbed. My bag with my passport, laptop with all my new writing, my Rebecca West book, and all my tour cash (somewhere north of two thousand euros), was stolen from the backstage room. The soundman said he'd seen the tall, drunken guy who had been heckling the show—whose hand I'd even shaken from the stage—walk off with a black leather shoulder bag. But everyone else had already left, and he gave me the French equivalent of “Shit, sorry bro” and disappeared as well. I raced around the blocks, looking for the drunk, looking for my empty bag in the trash, looking for anything in the snowbound, deserted streets. The expat New Yorker with whom I was staying was kind to me while I cursed, cried, swigged from his bottle of Jack Daniel's, and vowed to head straight home and never tour again.

Touring musicians, of course, are vulnerable targets. We are usually carrying a significant amount of cash, sometimes have a language issue, and almost always have to be hundreds of miles away the next day. So this sort of thing is a kind of occupational hazard.

The next day was a throbbing mess of rage, despair, generosity, and clenched, shivering anxiety at the U.S. consulate, a locked-up La Miroiterie, and the local police station (where I managed, pointlessly, to file a report despite the lack of a common language with any of the officers), followed by a self-flagellating drive to the provincial town of Le Mans.

I called Maria. Having put some physical distance between myself and Paris, I was feeling a little less broken and violated. Maria, four thousand miles away, pregnant and staying with her mother in Virginia, was not. Why, she raged, was I even on tour? I wouldn't even be coming back with any money now. All the well-paying shows were behind me in Germany and Poland.

I wanted to come home too. I felt defeated. I loved touring, I truly did, but it wasn't like I was playing for rapturous crowds every night or making enough money to justify grinding it out. The idea of four more weeks alone in a car felt impossible. But if I quit now, I'd be returning with no money, still on the hook for the plane ticket, rental car, and merchandise. I had to keep going. The snow chased me through the Mont Blanc tunnel, down the serpentine roads of the Italian Alps and east to Zagreb.

The terrain was dull and flat until just before the Slovenian border, when it roughened and rose and lost the marks of cultivation. In Slovenia the rain turned inevitably back to snow, and the rural country was all white hills and powdered pine, its few villages dark and deserted.

Once in Croatia, the old capital glowed like a fairy tale. The snow had stopped, but it was too cold for it to start dripping, and the streetlights had the hazy amber aura of a Rembrandt. I parked my car in an underground lot. It wore an armor of ice scales, whipped backward and frozen by the wind.

But people were still out on this Sunday night. It wasn't too cold to visit the pubs, though the plastic outdoor chairs were stacked and stowed. The city was a layer cake, if not a soft-serve swirl, of histories. The wide central square and tram stop had the vastness and aggressive branding of a post-Soviet capital, but in the center stood a statue of Count Jelačić, a mustachioed horseman, that celebrates the Hapsburg defeat of the Hungarians, with whom the Croats had an uneasy relationship, not to say rivalry, from their twelfth-century union through the post-1867 dual monarchy, in which Croatia was placed under Hungarian authority by Maria Theresa. The statue was erected in 1866, controversially, by the Austrians, removed in 1947 by the Communists, and returned in the nationalist 1990s. The monumental buildings of the central square are not Communist; in Rebecca West's words, “those vast, toast-colored buildings, barracks, and law courts, and municipal offices . . . are an invariable sign of past occupancy by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” It was against the Hungarian national hero Kossuth that Count Jelačić rode.

Another layer, though, was not political but cultural. It was a distinctly Mediterranean place, though Zagreb is 160 kilometers from the sea. It was a town of cobblestones and cafés (which advertise, in bold letters, that smoking is permitted), steamy low bars, and pizzeria after pizzeria, offering a kind of uncut bowl of a pizza that manages to be both soupy on top and crusty beneath. Zagreb almost seemed more Italian, in its own relaxed
way, than the raucous, frivolous Italians. This was a city built not for grandeur but for low-slung charm: “It has no grand river, it is built up to no climax,” West wrote of Zagreb. It “marks from its featureless handsomeness something that pleases like a Schubert song, a delight that begins quietly and never definitely ends.”