Standing on the wide brick steps of the State Department Store, I scanned the crowd for Khaidavyn Chilaajav, director of the Union of Mongolian Writers, who I was to meet for dinner. Its plaza crowded with taxis and pedestrians, the store is still the hub of downtown, though no longer Ulaanbaatar’s only retail center as it was during Mongolia’s seventy years of Communism. Small children spun in circles on a miniature fair ride, while bigger ones bounced on a four-leaf clover of trampolines. Men and women in tattered jeans or silk deels, the traditional ankle-length robe, sat docilely near white phones, where a call could be made for one hundred togrog (about ten cents). Along a boulevard lined with teenagers whispering intimately on benches, the cerulean dome of the State Circus shone brightly against the dry, brown Southern mountains.
Kaidavyn arrived, suited and brusque, and we joined the throngs of cars headed into the city’s sprawling neighborhoods of crumbling Soviet-era apartments. Inside his flat, he disappeared momentarily while I removed my shoes and settled on the couch. He reemerged in pajama pants and a polo shirt, his demeanor softened, and flipped on the TV. He teased his young daughters and was eminently patient with my imperfect Mongolian. Despite his prestigious post organizing and promoting Mongolia’s writers, Kaidavyn is a relatively young man of around forty, short and portly, who trained as a veterinarian in Russia. Enthusiastic about poetry, he showed me his extensive library and gave me two books of his poems, a rich gift in a country where authors pay for their own publishing and fifteen years ago the stores didn’t have food to sell.
Chilaajav’s wife, Oyunchimeg, brought in tea and a plate of cucumbers and khyam (a cross between pâté and Spam). When I stopped her to introduce myself, she smiled widely, her brown eyes bright and warm; she spoke quickly and then hurried back to the kitchen. She was busy during the whole meal, refilling teacups, handing out napkins, and serving khushuur (fried meat dumplings) and then buuz (steamed meat dumplings). We drank sweet wine made from a regional berry and shots of Chinggis vodka. We looked at family photos and paged through a coffee-table book of landscapes called Under the Everlasting Mongolian Sky. I told them that it was Mongolia’s marvelously huge sky and open grasslands that brought me to this country. And, after a brief exchange, we found ourselves putting on our shoes and heading off to search for just these marvels.
In five minutes the family was ready: Kaidavyn handed out sweaters, the two girls grabbed toys, and Oyunchimeg packed a backpack with food and filled a thermos with tea. Not long after piling into their small SUV, there we were, surrounded by dry, treeless hills and a few ramshackle houses and yurts. Loose pink clouds dissipated as the sun set behind a line of dark, distant mountains. Kaidavyn said to me, laughing, “That’s the sky.”
We followed a dirt track to a hilltop. The ground was faintly green with young grass and dotted with rotting bones and piles of horse manure. Oyunchimeg arranged the blankets and food. Kaidavyn and his eldest daughter played badminton, their birdie barely a speck against the great dusky sky and sweeping plains. We heard a quiet lowing and Oyunchimeg said it was the sound of a cow before I pointed out it was coming from her bag. A round of giggling ensued as she answered her vibrating cell phone. To talk to his older daughter, who had walked over the rise, Kaidavyn used his phone to call hers, which, it turned out, had been left in the car. In place of a ring, a pop song played into Kaidavyn’s ear, loud and tinny in the empty night. The younger girl snatched her father’s phone and began dancing to the music, spinning in circles and shaking her hips, her grinning face lit by the screen’s blue glow. Her sister eventually returned, perhaps following the sound of Kaidavyn’s boisterous singing. We drank more vodka and tea, and ate fruit. We watched the first star rise as Oyunchimeg told us about naming her daughters after stars. The air grew cold and so we moved toward the car, talking of coming back later with tents and a grill.
We drove through the clouds of smoke that blanketed the lightless road. We swerved around pedestrians and a man conveying a boy on the handlebars of a bicycle. Cars coming from the city flashed their brights as they approached and dimmed them after they passed. The first factories appeared, followed by churches and shopping centers, and then the endless blocks of apartments. To me, weary and smiling and lulled by Kaidavyn’s singing, the city seemed tentative and insignificant, an itinerant camp in that vast landscape, enveloped by everlasting sky.