Ghostwritten

Mongolia

The grasslands rose and fell past the train, years upon years of them.

Sometimes the train passed settlements of the round tents that Caspar’s guide book called gers. Horses grazed, old men squatted on their haunches, smoking pipes. Vicious-looking dogs barked at the train, and children watched as we passed. They never returned Caspar’s wave, they just looked on, like their grandfathers. Telegraph poles lined the track, forking off to vanish over the restless horizon. The large sky made Caspar think of the land where he had grown up, somewhere called Zetland. Caspar was feeling lonely and homesick. I felt no anticipation, just endlessness.

The Great Wall was many hours behind us now.

A far-flung, trackless country in which to hunt myself.

Sharing our compartment was a pair of giant belchers from Austria who drank vodka by the pint, told flatulent jokes to one another in German, a language I had learned from Caspar two weeks before. They were betting sheaves of Mongolian currency — togrugs — on a card game called cribbage one of them had learned from a Welshman in Shanghai, and swearing multicoloured oaths. In the top bunk sat an Australian girl called Sherry, immersed in War and Peace. Caspar had been an agronomist at university before dropping out and had never read any Tolstoy. I caught him wishing he had, though not for literary reasons. A Swede from the next compartment invited himself in from time to time to regale Caspar with stories of being ripped off in China. He bored us both, and even Caspar’s sympathies were with the Chinese. Also in the Swede’s compartment was a middle-aged Irish woman who either gazed out of the window or wrote numbers in a black notebook. In the other neighbouring compartment were a team of four Israelis — two girlfriends and their boyfriends. Other than chatting politely with Caspar about hostel prices in Xi’an and Beijing, and the new bursts of violence in Palestine, they kept themselves to themselves.

Night stole over the land again, dissolving it in shadows and blue. Every ten or twenty miles tongues of campfire licked the darkness.

Caspar’s mental clock was several hours out, so he decided to turn in. I could have adjusted it for him, but I decided to let him sleep. He went to the toilet, splashed water over his face, and cleaned his teeth with water he disinfected in a bottle with iodine. Sherry was outside our compartment when he came back, her face pressed against the glass. Caspar thought, ‘How beautiful.’ ‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello.’ Sherry’s eyes turned towards my host.

‘How’s the War and Peace? I have to admit, I’ve never read any Russians.’

‘Long.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Why things happen the way they do.’

‘And why do things happen the way they do?’

‘I don’t know, yet. It’s very long.’ She watched her breath mist up the window. ‘Look at it. All this space, and almost no people in it. It almost reminds me of home.’

Caspar joined her at the window. After a mile had passed: ‘Why are you here?’

She thought for a while. ‘It’s the last place, y’know? Lost in the middle of Asia, not in the east, not in the west. Lost as Mongolia, it could be an expression. How about you?’

Some drunk Russians up the corridor groaned with laughter.

‘I don’t really know. I was on my way to Laos, when this impulse just came over me. I told myself there was nothing here, but I couldn’t fight it. Mongolia! I’ve never even thought about the place. Maybe I smoked too much pot at Lake Dal.’

A half-naked Chinese toddler ran up the corridor, making a zun-zun noise which may have been a helicopter, or maybe a horse.

‘How long have you been travelling?’ asked Caspar, not wanting the conversation to lag.

‘Ten months. You?’

‘Three years, this May.’

‘Three years! Oath, you are a terminal case!’ Sherry’s face turned into a huge yawn. ‘Sorry, I’m bushed. Being cooped up doing nothing is exhausting work. Do you think our Austrian friends have shut up the casino for the night?’

‘I only hope they have shut up the joke factory. You don’t know how lucky you are, not speaking German.’

Back in their compartment, the Austrians were snoring in stereo. Sherry bolted the door. The gentle sway of the train lulled Caspar towards sleep. He was thinking about Sherry.

Sherry peered over the bunk above him. ‘Do you know a good bedtime story?’

Caspar was not a natural storyteller, so I stepped in. ‘I know one story. It’s a Mongolian story. Well, not so much a story as a sort of legend.’

‘I’d love to hear it,’ Sherry smiled, and Caspar’s heart missed a gear.

There are three who think about the fate of the world.

First there is the crane. See how lightly he treads, picking his way between the rocks in the river? Tossing, and tilting back his head. The crane believes that if he takes just one heavy step, the mountains will collapse and the ground will quiver and trees that have stood for a thousand years will tumble.

Second, the locust. All day the locust sits on a pebble, thinking that one day the flood will come and deluge the world, and all living things will be lost in the churn and the froth and black waves. That is why the locust keeps such a watchful eye on the high peaks, and the rainclouds that might be gathering there.

Third, the bat. The bat believes that the sky may fall and shatter, and all living things die. Thus the bat dangles from a high place, fluttering up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again, checking that all is well.

That was the story, way back at the beginning.

Sherry had fallen asleep, and Caspar wondered for a moment where this story had come from. I closed his mind and nudged it towards sleep. I watched his dreams come and go for a little while. There was a dream about defending a gothic palace built on sand flats with pool cues, and one about his sister and niece. His father entered the dream, pushing a motorbike down the corridor of the Trans-Siberian express with a sidecar full of money that kept blowing away. Drunk and demanding as ever, he asked Caspar what the devil he thought he was playing at, and insisting that Caspar still had some very important videotapes. Caspar had become a half-naked little boy and knew nothing about them.

My own infancy was spent at the foot of the Holy Mountain. There was a dimness, which I later learned lasted many years. It took me that long to learn how to remember. I imagine a bird beginning as an ‘I’. Slowly, the bird understands that it is a thing different from the ‘It’ of its shell. The bird perceives its containment, and as its sensory organs begin to function it becomes aware of light and dark, cold and heat. As sensation sharpens, it seeks to break out. Then one day, it starts to struggle against the gluey gel and brittle walls, and cannot stop until it is out and alone in the vertiginous world, made of wonder, and fear, and colours, made of unknown things.

But even back then, I was wondering: Why am I alone?

The sun woke Caspar. He had dried tears in his eyes and his mouth tasted of watch-straps. He badly wished he had some fresh fruit to eat. And the Austrians had already beaten him to the bathroom. He slid out of bed, and we saw Sherry was meditating. Caspar pulled on his jeans and tried to slip out of the compartment without disturbing her.

‘Good morning, and welcome to Sunny Mongolia,’ Sherry murmured. ‘We get there in three hours.’

‘Sorry I disturbed you,’ said Caspar.

‘You didn’t. And if you look in that plastic bag hanging off the coat hook, you should find some pears. Have one for breakfast.’

‘So,’ said Sherry, four hours later. ‘Grand Central Station, Ulan Bator.’

‘Strange,’ said Caspar, wanting to express himself in Danish.

The whitewash was bright in the pristine noon sun. The never-silent wind blew on over the plains, into the vanishing point where the rails led. The signs were in the Cyrillic alphabet, which neither Caspar nor any of my previous hosts knew. Chinese hawkers barged off the train, heaving bags of goods to sell, shouting to one another in familiar Mandarin. A couple of listless young Mongolians on military service fingered their rifles, thinking of where they would rather be. A group of steely old women were waiting to get on the train, bound for Irkutsk. Their families had come to see them off. Two figures hovered in the wings, in black suits and sunglasses. Some youths sat on a wall, looking at the girls.

‘I feel like I’ve climbed out of a dark box into a carnival of aliens,’ said Sherry.

‘Sherry, I know, erm, as a young lady, you have to be careful of who you trust when you’re travelling, but, I was wondering—’

‘Stop sounding like a Pom. Yes, sure. I won’t jump you if you don’t jump me. Now. Your Lonely Planet says there’s a halfway decent hotel in the Sansar district, at the eastern end of Sambuu Street... Follow me...’

I let Sherry take care of my host. One less thing for me to worry about. The Austrians said goodbye and headed off to the Kublai Khan Holiday Inn, no longer laughing. The Israeli team nodded at us and marched off in another direction. Caspar had already forgotten about the Swede.

Backpackers are strange. I have a lot in common with them. We live nowhere, and we are strangers everywhere. We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for. We are both parasites: I live in my hosts’ minds, and sift through his or her memories to understand the world. Caspar’s breed live in a host country that is never their own, and use its culture and landscape to learn, or stave off boredom. To the world at large we are both immaterial and invisible. We chew the secretions of solitude. My incredulous Chinese hosts who saw the first backpackers regarded them as quite alien entities. Which is exactly how humans would regard me.

All minds pulse in a unique way, just as every lighthouse in the world has a unique signature. Some minds pulse consistently, some erratically. Some are lukewarm, some are hot. Some flare out, some are very nearly not there. Some stay on the fringe, like quasars. For me, a roomful of animals and humans is like a roomful of suns, of differing magnitudes and colours, and gravities.

Caspar, too, has come to regard most people as blips on a radar. Caspar is as lonely as me.

‘Did I blink?’ remarked Sherry. ‘Where’s the city? Beijing was a city, Shanghai was a city. This is a ghost town.’

‘It’s like East Germany in the Iron Curtain days.’

Ranks and files of faceless apartment blocks, with cracks in the walls and boards for windows. A large pipeline mounted on concrete stilts. Cratered roads, with only a few dilapidated cars trundling up and down. Goats eating weeds in a city square. Silent factories. Statues of horses and little toy tanks. A woman with a basket of eggs stepping carefully between the broken flagstones and smashed bottles and wobbling drunks. Streetlights, ready to topple. A once-mighty power station spewing out a black cloud over the city. On the far side of the city was a gigantic fairground wheel that Caspar and I doubted would ever turn again. Three westerners in black suits walked by. Caspar thought they were in the wrong place and time.

Ulan Bator was much bigger than the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain, but the people we saw here lacked any sense of purpose. They just seemed to be waiting. Waiting for something to open, for the end of the day, for their city to be switched on, or just waiting to be fed.

Caspar readjusted the straps on his backpack. ‘My Secret History of Genghis Khan did not prepare me for this.’

That night Caspar dug into his mutton and onion stew with relish. He and Sherry were the only diners in the hotel, which was actually the sixth and seventh floors of a crumbling apartment building.

The woman who had brought the food from the kitchen looked at him blankly. Caspar pointed at it, gave her a thumbs up sign, smiled and grunted approvingly.

The woman looked at Caspar as though he were a madman, and left.

Sherry snorted. ‘She’s about as welcoming as the customs woman at the border.’

‘One of the things that my years of wandering has taught me is, the more impotent the country, the more dangerous its customs officials.’

‘When she showed us the room she gave me a look like I’d run over her baby with a bulldozer.’

Caspar picked out a bit of fleece from a meatball. ‘Service-sector communism. It’s quite a legacy. She’s stuck here, remember. We can get out whenever we want.’

He had some instant lemon tea from Beijing. There was a flask of hot water on the sideboard, so he made a cup for himself and Sherry, and they watched the waxy moon rise over the suburb of gers and campfires. ‘So,’ began Caspar. ‘Tell me more about that Hong Kong pub you worked in. What was the name? Mad Dogs?’

‘I’d rather hear more stories of the weirdos you met during your jewellery-selling days in Okinawa. Go on, Vikingman, it’s your turn.’

So many times in a lifetime do my hosts feel the beginnings of friendship. All I can do is watch.

As my infancy progressed, I became aware of another presence in ‘my’ body. Stringy mists of colour and emotion condensed into droplets of understanding. I saw, and slowly came to recognise, gardens, paths, barking dogs, rice fields, sunlit washing drying in warm town breezes. I had no idea why these images came when they did. Like being plugged into a plotless movie. Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path.

Something was happening on my side of the screen of perception, too. Like a radio slowly being turned up, so slowly that at first you cannot be sure of it being there. Slowly, I felt an entity that was not me generating sensations, which only later could I label loyalty, love, anger, ill-will. I watched this other clarify, and pull into focus. I began to be afraid. I thought it was the intruder! I thought the mind of my first host was the cuckoo’s egg, that would hatch and drive me out. So one night, while my host was asleep, I tried to penetrate this other presence.

My host tried to scream but I would not let him wake. Instinctively, his mind made itself rigid and tight. I prised my way through, clumsily, not knowing how strong I had become, ripping my way through memories and neural control, gouging out great chunks. Fear of losing the fight made me more violent than I ever intended. I had sought to subdue, not to lay waste.

When the morning brought the doctor he found my first host unresponsive to any form of stimulus. Naturally, the doctor could find no injury on the patient’s body, but he knew a coma when he saw one. In south-west China in the 1950s there were no facilities for people with comas. My host died a few weeks later, taking any clues of my origin that may have been buried in his memories with him. They were hellish weeks. I discovered my mistake — I had been the intruder. I tried to undo some of the damage, and piece back together some of the vital functions and memories, but it is so much easier to destroy than it is to re-create, and back then I knew nothing. I learned that my victim had fought as a brigand in bad times or a soldier in good ones in northern China. I found fragments of spoken languages which I would later know as Mongolian and Korean, but he had been illiterate. That was all. I couldn’t ascertain how long I had been embryonic.

I assumed that if my host died, I would share his death. I turned all my energies to learning how to perform what I now call transmigration. Two days before he died, I succeeded. My second host was the doctor of my first. I looked back at the soldier. A middle-aged man lay on his soiled bed, stretched out on his frame of bones. I felt guilt, relief, and I felt power.

I stayed in the doctor for two years, learning about humans and inhumanity. I learned how to read my hosts’ memories, to erase them, and replace them. I learned how to control my hosts. Humanity was my toy. But I also learned caution. One day I announced to my host that a disembodied entity had been living in his mind for two years, and would he like to ask me anything?

The poor man went quite mad, and I had to transmigrate again. The human mind is so fragile a toy. So puny!

Three nights later the waitress slammed a bowl of mutton down in front of Caspar. She had turned and gone before he had a chance to groan.

‘Mutton fat for dinner,’ beamed Sherry. ‘There’s a surprise.’

The waitress cleared the other tables. Caspar was experimenting at using mind control to make his mutton taste like turkey. I resisted the temptation to help him succeed. Sherry was reading. ‘Get this for Soviet doublespeak. From the nineteen forties, during Choilbalsan’s presidency. It says, “In the final analysis, life demonstrated the expediency of using the Russian alphabet.” What the author says this means, is that if you used Mongolian they shot you. Oath, how did people live under a master race like that, and why—’

The next moment all the lights in the building died.

Dim light came from the window of smoke stars, and a glowing red sign in Cyrillic beyond the wasteland. We had wondered what the sign meant, and we did again now.

Sherry chuckled and lit a cigarette. Her eyes reflected little flames. ‘I suppose you paid the power station ten dollars to stage this black-out, just to get me alone in a dark room with the manly smell of mutton.’

Caspar smiled in the darkness and I recognised love. It forms like a weather pattern. ‘Sherry, let’s hire the jeep from tomorrow. We’ve seen the temple, seen the old palace. I’m feeling like a moody tourist. I hate feeling like a moody tourist. The Fräulein at the German embassy reckoned there would be a delivery of gas in the morning.’

‘Why the rush?’

‘The place is going backwards in time. I feel the end of the world is waiting in those mountains, somewhere... We should get out before the nineteenth century comes around again.’

‘That’s a part of U.B.’s charm. Its ramshackleness.’

‘I don’t know what ramshackleness means, but there is nothing charming about this place. Ulan Bator proves that Mongolians cannot do cities. You could set a movie about a doomed colony of germ-warfare survivors here. Let’s get out. I don’t even know why I’m here. I don’t think the people who live here know either.’

The waitress walked in and put a candle on our table. Caspar thanked her in Mongolian. She walked out. ‘Come the revolution, darling...’ thought Caspar.

Sherry started shuffling a pack of cards. ‘You mean Mongolians are designed for arduous lifetimes of flock-tending, child-bearing, frostbite, illiteracy, Giardia lamblia, and ger-dwelling?’

‘I don’t want to argue. I want to drive to the Khangai mountains, climb mountains, ride horses, bathe naked in lakes and discover what I am doing on Earth.’

‘Okay, Vikingman, we’ll move on tomorrow. Let’s play cribbage. I believe I’m winning, thirty-seven games to nine.’

I would need to move on soon, too. Hosted by a Mongolian, my quest in this country was formidable. Hosted by a foreigner, my quest was plainly impossible.

I was here to find the source of the story that was already there, right at the beginning of ‘I’, sixty years ago. The story began, There are three who think about the fate of the world...

Once or twice I’ve tried to describe transmigration to the more imaginative of my human hosts. It’s impossible. I know eleven languages, but there are some tunes that language cannot play.

When another human touches my host, I can transmigrate. The ease of the transfer depends on the mind I am transmigrating into, and whether negative emotions are blocking me. The fact that touch is a requisite provides a clue that I exist on some physical plane, however sub-cellular or bio-electrical. There are limits. For example, I cannot transmigrate into animals, even primates: if I try the animal dies. It is like an adult’s inability to climb into children’s clothes. I’ve never tried a whale.

But how it feels, this transmigration, how to describe that! Imagine a trapeze artist in a circus, spinning in emptiness. Or a snooker ball lurching around the table. Arriving in a strange town after a journey through turbid weather.

Sometimes language can’t even read the music of meaning.

The morning wind blew cold from the mountains. Gunga stooped through the door of her ger, slapping the chilly morning air into her neck and face. The hillside of gers was slowly coming to life. In the city an ambulance siren rose and fell. The River Tuul glowed grey the colour of lead. The big red neon sign flicked off: Let’s Make Our City A Great Socialist Community.

‘Camelshit,’ thought Gunga. ‘When are they going to dismantle that?’

Gunga wondered where her daughter had got to. She had her suspicions.

A neighbour nodded to her, wishing her good morning. Gunga nodded back. Her eyes were becoming weaker, rheumatism had begun to gnaw at her hips, and a poorly set broken femur from three winters ago ached. Gunga’s dog padded over to be scratched behind the ears. Something else was wrong, too, today.

She ducked back into the warmth of the ger.

‘Shut the bloody door!’ bawled her husband.

It was good to transmigrate out of a westernised head. However much I learn from the non-stop highways of minds like Caspar’s, they make me giddy. It would be the euro’s exchange rate one minute, a film he’d once seen about art thieves in Petersburg the next, a memory of fishing with his uncle between islets the next, some pop song or a friend’s internet home page the next. No stopping.

Gunga’s mind patrols a more intimate neighbourhood. She constantly thinks about getting enough food and money. She worries about her daughter, and ailing relatives. Most of the days of her life have been very much alike. The assured dreariness of the Soviet days, the struggle for survival since independence. Gunga’s mind is a lot harder for me to hide in than Caspar’s, however. It’s like trying to make yourself invisible in a prying village as opposed to a sprawling conurbation. Some hosts are more perceptive about movements in their own mental landscape than others, and Gunga was very perceptive indeed. While she had been sleeping I acquired her language, but her dreams kept trying to smoke me out.

Gunga set about lighting the stove. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said, to herself, looking around the ger, half-expecting something to be missing. The beds, the table, the cabinet, the family tableware, the rugs, the silver teapot that she had refused to sell, even when times were at their hardest.

‘Not your mysterious sixth sense again?’ Buyant stirred under his pile of blankets. Gunga’s cataracts and the gloom of the ger made it difficult to see. Buyant coughed a smoker’s cough. ‘What is it this time? A message from your bladder, we’re going to inherit a camel? Your earwax telling you a giant leech is going to come and molest your innocence?’

‘A giant leech did that years ago. It was called Buyant.’

‘Very funny. What’s for breakfast?’

I may as well start somewhere. ‘Husband, do you know anything about the three who think about the fate of the world?’

A long pause in which I thought he hadn’t heard me. ‘What the devil are you talking about now?’

At that moment Oyuun, Gunga’s daughter, came in. Her cheeks were flushed red and you could see her breath. ‘The shop had some bread! And I found some onions, too.’

‘Good girl!’ Gunga embraced her. ‘You were gone early. You didn’t wake me.’

‘Shut the bloody door!’ bawled Buyant.

‘I knew you had to work late at the hotel, so I didn’t want to wake you.’ Gunga suspected Oyuun wasn’t telling the whole truth. ‘Was the hotel busy last night, Mum?’ Oyuun was an adept subject-changer.

‘No. Just the two blondies.’

‘I found Australia in the atlas at school. But I couldn’t find — what was it? Danemark, or somewhere?’

‘Who cares?’ Buyant rolled out of bed, wearing a blanket as a shawl. He would have been handsome once, and he still thought he was. ‘It’s not as if you’ll ever be going there.’

Gunga bit her tongue, and Oyuun didn’t look up.

‘The blondies are checking out today, and I’ll be glad to see the back of them. I just can’t understand it, her mother letting her daughter wander off like that. I’m sure they’re not married, but they’re in the same bed! No ring, or anything. And there’s something weird about him, too.’ Gunga was looking at Oyuun, but Oyuun was looking away.

‘’Course there is, they’re foreigners.’ Buyant burped and slurped his tea.

‘What do you mean, Mum?’ Oyuun started chopping the onions.

‘Well, for one thing, he smells of yoghurt. But there’s something else too... it’s in his eyes... it’s like they’re not his own.’

‘They can’t be as weird as those Hungarian trade unionists who used to come. The ones they flew in the orchids from Vietnam for.’

Gunga knew how to blot out her husband’s presence. ‘That Danemark man, he tips all the time, and he keeps smiling like he’s touched in the head. But last night, he touched my hand.’

Buyant spat. ‘If he touches you again I’ll twist his head off and ram it up his arsehole. You tell him that from me.’

Gunga shook her head. ‘No, it was like a kid playing tag. He just touched my hand with his thumb, and was gone, out of the kitchen. Or like he was casting a spell. And please don’t spit inside the ger.’

Buyant ripped off a gobbet of bread. ‘A spell, ah yes, that must be it! He was probably trying to bewitch you. Woman, sometimes I feel it was your grandmother I married, not you!’

The women carried on preparing food in silence.

Buyant scratched his groin. ‘Speaking of marriage, Old Gombo’s eldest boy came round asking for Oyuun last night.’

Oyuun stared steadily into the noodles she was stirring. ‘Oh?’

‘Yep. Brought me a bottle of vodka. Good stuff. Old Gombo’s a buffoon horseman who can’t hold his drink, but his brother-in-law has a good government job, and the younger son is turning into quite a wrestler, they say. He was the champion two years running at school. That’s not to be sniffed at.’

Gunga chopped, and the onions made her nostrils sting. Oyuun said nothing.

‘It’s a thought, isn’t it? The older son is obviously quite taken with Oyuun... if she gets Old Gombo’s grandson in the oven it’ll show she can deliver the goods and force Old Gombo’s hand... I can think of worse matches.’

‘I can think of better ones,’ said Gunga, stirring some noodles into the mutton soup. A memory passed through of Buyant visiting her in her parents’ ger, through a flap in the roof, just a few feet away from where her parents were sleeping. ‘Someone she loves, for example. Anyway, we’ve already agreed. Oyuun will finish school and, fate willing, get into the university. We want Oyuun to do well in the world. Maybe she’ll get a car. Or at least a motorbike, from China.’

‘I don’t see the point. It’s not like there are any jobs waiting afterwards, especially not for girls. The Russians took all the jobs with them when they left. And the ones that they left the Chinese grabbed. Another way foreigners rip us Mongolians off.’

‘Camelshit! The vodka took all the jobs. The vodka rips us off.’

Buyant glared. ‘Women don’t understand politics.’

Gunga glared back. ‘And I suppose men do? The economy would die of a common cold if it were healthy enough to catch one.’

‘I tell you, it’s the Russians—’

‘Nothing’s ever going to get better until we stop blaming the Russians and start blaming ourselves! The Chinese are able to make money here. Why can’t we?’ Some fat in a pan began to hiss. Gunga caught a glimpse of her reflection in her cup of milk, frowning. Her hand trembled minutely, and the image rippled away. ‘Today is all wrong. I’m going to see the shaman.’

Buyant thumped the table. ‘I’m not having you throwing away our togrugs on—’

Gunga snapped back at him. ‘I’ll throw my togrugs anywhere I please, you soak!’

Buyant backed down from this fight he couldn’t win. He didn’t want the neighbours overhearing, and saying he couldn’t control his woman.

Why am I the way I am? I have no genetic blueprint. I have had no parents to teach me right from wrong. I have had no teachers. I had no nurture, and I possess no nature. But I am discreet and conscientious, a non-human humanist.

I wasn’t always this way. After the doctor went mad, I transmigrated around the villagers, I was their lord. I knew their secrets, the bends of the village’s streams and the names of its dogs. I knew their rare pleasures that burned out as quickly as they flared up, and of the memories that kept them from freezing. I studied extremes. I would drive my hosts almost to destruction in pursuit of the pleasure which fizzed their neural bridges. I inflicted pain on those unlucky enough to cross my path, just to understand pain. I amused myself by implanting memories from one host into another, or by incessantly singing to them. I’d coerce monks to rob, devoted lovers to be unfaithful, misers to spend. The only thing I can say for myself is that after my first host I never killed again. I cannot say I did this out of love for humanity. I have only one fear: to be inhabiting a human at the moment of death. I still don’t know what would happen.

I have no story of a blinding conversion to humanism. It just didn’t happen that way. During the Cultural Revolution, and when I transmigrated into hosts in Tibet, Vietnam, in Korea, in El Salvador, I experienced humans fighting, usually from the safety of the general’s office. In the Falkland Islands I watched them fight over rocks. ‘Two bald men fighting over a comb,’ an ex-host commented. In Rio I saw a tourist killed for a watch. Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous. That is why I no longer harm my hosts. There’s already too much of this poison.

Gunga spent the morning at the hotel, sweeping and boiling some water to wash sheets. Seeing Caspar and Sherry again from the outside was like revisiting an old house with a new tenant. They paid and waited until their rented jeep turned up. I bade Caspar goodbye in Danish as he slung his backpack in, but he just assumed Gunga was saying something in Mongolian.

As Gunga made the beds, she imagined Caspar and Sherry lying here, and then thought about Oyuun, and Gombo’s youngest son. She thought about the rumours of child prostitution spreading through the city, and how the police were being paid off in foreign money. Mrs Enchbat, the widow who owned the hotel, stopped by to do some bookkeeping. Mrs Enchbat was in a good mood — Caspar had paid in dollars, and Mrs Enchbat needed to raise a dowry. While Gunga was boiling water for washing they sat down and shared some salty tea.

‘Now Gunga, you know that I’m not a one for gossip,’ began Mrs Enchbat, a little woman with a mouth wise as a lizard’s, ‘but our Sonjoodoi saw your Oyuun walking out with Old Gombo’s youngest again yesterday evening. People’s tongues will start wagging. They were seen at the Naadam festival together. Sonjoodoi also said Gombo’s eldest has got a crush on her.’

Gunga chose counter-attack. ‘Is it true your Sonjoodoi’s become a Christian?’

Mrs Enchbat considered her reply coolly. ‘He’s been seen going to the American missionary’s apartment once or twice.’

‘What does his grandmother have to say about that?’

‘Only that it proves what suckers Americans are. They think they’re making converts to their weird cult, they’re just making converts to powdered milk — whatever’s the matter, Gunga?’

A riot of doubt had broken out in my host. Gunga knew I was here. Quickly, I tried to calm her. ‘No. Something’s wrong. I’m going to see the shaman.’

The bus was crowded and stuck in first gear. At the end of the line was a derelict factory from the Soviet days. Gunga had already forgotten what it had once manufactured. I had to look in her unconscious: bullets. Wildflowers were capitalising on the brief summer, and wild dogs picked at the body of something. The afternoon was weak and thin. People from the bus trudged their way past where the road ran out to a hillside of gers. Gunga walked with them. The giant pipe ran along on its stilts. It had been a part of a public-heating system, but the boilers needed Russian coal. Mongolian coal burned at temperatures too cool to make it work. Most of the locals had gone back to burning dung.

Gunga’s cousin had gone to this shaman when she couldn’t get pregnant. Nine months later she gave birth to boy twins, born with cauls, an omen of great fortune. The shaman was an adviser to the President, and he had a reputation as a horse-healer. It was said he had lived for twenty years as a hermit on the slopes of Tavanbogd in the far-west province of Bayan Olgii. During the Soviet occupation, the local officials had tried to arrest him for vagrancy, but anyone who went to get him returned empty-handed and empty-headed. He was two centuries old.

I was looking forward to meeting the shaman.

I have my gifts: I am apparently immune to age and forgetfulness. I possess freedom beyond any human understanding of the world. But my cage is all my own, too. I am trapped in one waking state of consciousness. I have never found any way to sleep, or dream. And the knowledge I most desire eludes me: I have never found the source of the story I was born with, and I have never discovered whether others of my kind exist.

When I finally left the village at the foot of the Holy Mountain I travelled all over south-east Asia, searching the attics and cellars of old people’s minds for other minds without bodies. I found legends of beings who might be my kindred, but of tangible knowledge — I found not one footprint. I crossed the Pacific in the 1960s.

Remembering my insane doctor, I mostly maintained a vow of silence. I had no wish to leave behind me a trail of mystics, lunatics and writers. On the other hand, if I came across a mystic, lunatic or writer I would sometimes talk with them. One writer in Buenos Aires even suggested a name for what I am: noncorpum, and noncorpa, if ever the day dawns when the singular becomes a plural. I spent a pleasant few months debating metaphysics with him, and we wrote some stories together. But the ‘I’ never became a ‘We’. During the 1970s I placed an advertisement in the National Enquirer. The USA is even crazier than the rest of humanity. I followed up each of the nineteen replies I received: mystics, lunatics, or writers, every one. I even looked for clues in The Pentagon. I found a lot of things that surprised even me, but nothing related to noncorpa. I never went to Europe. It seemed a dead place, cold in the shadows of nuclear missiles.

I returned to my Holy Mountain, possessing knowledge from over a hundred hosts, but still knowing nothing about my origins. I had tired of wandering. The Holy Mountain was the only place on Earth I felt any tie to. For a decade I inhabited the monks who lived on its mountainsides. I led a tranquil enough life. I found companionship with an old woman who lived in a tea shack and believed I was a speaking tree. That was the last time I spoke with a human.

‘Come in, daughter,’ said the shaman’s voice from inside the ger.

Sun-bleached jawbones hung over the door. Gunga looked over her shoulder, suddenly afraid. A boy was playing with a red ball. He threw it high into the hazy blue, and watched it, and caught it when it fell. There was an Ovoo, a holy pile of stones and bones. Gunga asked for its blessing and entered the smoky darkness.

‘Come in, daughter.’ The shaman was meditating on a mat. A lamp hung from the roof frame. A tallow candle spluttered in a copper dish. The rear of the ger was walled off by hanging animal skins. The air was grainy with incense.

There was a carved box by the entrance. Gunga opened it, and put in most of the togrugs that Caspar had tipped her the day before. She slipped off her shoes, and knelt in front of the shaman, on the right-hand side of the ger, the female half. A wrinkled face, impossible to guess the age of. Grey, matted hair, and closed eyes that suddenly opened wide. He indicated a cracked teapot on a low table.

Gunga poured the dark, odourless liquid into a cup of bone.

‘Drink, Gunga,’ said the shaman.

My host drank, and began to speak — the shaman halted her with his hand.

‘You have come because a spirit is living within you.’

‘Yes,’ both Gunga and I answered. Gunga felt me again, and dropped the cup. The stain of the undrunk liquid spread through the rug.

‘Then we must find out what it wants,’ said the shaman.

Gunga’s heart pounded like a boxed bat. Gently, I shut down her consciousness.

The shaman saw the change. He picked up a feather and drew a symbol in the air.

‘To whom am I speaking?’ asked the shaman. ‘An ancestor of this woman?’

‘I don’t know who I am.’ My words, Gunga’s voice, dry and croaky. ‘I want to discover who I am.’ Strange, to be uttering the word ‘I’ once again.

The shaman was calm. ‘What is your name, spirit?’

‘I’ve never needed a name.’

‘Are you an ancestor of this woman’s?’

‘You already asked that. I’m not. Not as far as I know.’

The shaman struck a bone against another bone, muttering words in a language I didn’t know. He sprang to his feet and flexed his fingers like claws.

‘In the name of Khukdei Mergen Khan art thou cast hence from the body of this woman!’

Human males. ‘And then what do you suggest?’

The shaman shouted. ‘Be gone! In the name of Erkhii Mergen who divided night from day, I command it!’ The shaman shook a rattling sack over Gunga. He blew some incense smoke over my host, and sprinkled some water in her face.

The shaman gazed at my host, waiting for a reaction. ‘Shaman, I’d hoped for something more intelligent. This is my first proper conversation for a very long time. And you’d be doing Gunga more good if you used that water to wash her. She believes that the Mongolian body doesn’t sweat, so she doesn’t wash and she has lice.’

The shaman frowned, and looked into Gunga’s eyes, searching for something that wasn’t Gunga. ‘Your words are perplexing, spirit, and your magic is strong. Do you wish this woman ill? Are you evil?’

‘Well, I’ve had my moments, but I wouldn’t describe myself as evil. Would you?’

‘What do you want of this woman? What ails you?’

‘One memory. And the lack of all others.’

The shaman sat back down and resumed his initial repose. ‘Who were your people when you walked as a living body?’

‘Why do you think I was once human?’

‘What else would you have been?’

‘That’s a fair question.’

The shaman frowned. ‘You are a strange one, even for one of your kind. You speak like a child, not one waiting to pass over.’

‘What do you mean, “my kind”?’

‘I am a shaman. It is my calling to communicate with spirits. As it was with my master, and his master before him.’

‘Let me explore your mind. I need to see what you have seen.’

‘The spirits do not commune with one another?’

‘Not with me, they don’t. Please. Let me in. It’s safer for you if you don’t resist.’

‘If I allow you to possess me for a short time, you will leave this woman?’

‘Shaman, we have a deal. If you touch Gunga, I will leave her now.’

I experience memories like a network of tunnels. Some are serviced and brightly lit, others are catacombs. Some are guarded, yet others are bricked up. Tunnels lead to tunnels, deeper down. So it is with memories.

But access to memories does not guarantee access to truth. Many minds redirect memories along revised maps. In the tunnels of the shaman’s memory I met what may have been spirits of the dead, or delusions on the part of either the shaman or his customers or both. Or noncorpa! Maybe there were many footprints, or maybe there were none. Or maybe evidence was there in forms I couldn’t recognise. I deepened my search.

I found this story, told twenty summers earlier on a firelit desert night.

Many years ago, the red plague stalked the land. Thousands of people died. The healthy fled in its face, leaving behind the infected, saying simply, ‘Fate will sift the living from the dead.’ Among the abandoned in the land of birds was Tarvaa, a fifteen-year-old boy. His spirit left his body and walked south between the dunes of the dead.

When he appeared in the ger of the Khan of Hell, the Khan was surprised. ‘Why have you left your body behind while it is still breathing?’

Tarvaa replied, ‘My Lord, the living considered my body gone. I came here without delay to pledge my allegiance.’

The Khan of Hell was impressed with the obedience shown by Tarvaa. ‘I decree that your time has not yet come. You may take my fastest horse and return to your master in the land of birds. But before you go you may choose one thing from my ger to take with you. Behold! Here you may find wealth, good fortune, comeliness, ecstasy, grief and woe, wisdom, lust and gratification... come now, what will you have?’

‘My Lord,’ spoke Tarvaa, ‘I choose the stories.’

Tarvaa put the stories in his leather pouch, mounted the fastest horse of the Khan of Hell, and returned to the land of birds in the south. When he got there, a crow had already pecked out Tarvaa’s body’s eyes. But Tarvaa dared not return to the dunes of the dead, fearing that to do so would be ungracious to the Khan. So Tarvaa took possession of his body, and rose up, and though he was blind he lived for a hundred years, travelling Mongolia on the Khan of Hell’s horse, from the Altai Mountains in the far west, to the Gobi desert in the south, to the rivers of Hentii Nuruu, telling stories and foreseeing the future, and teaching the tribesmen the legends of the making of their land. And from that time, the Mongols have told each other tales.

I decided to go south, like Tarvaa. If I lacked clues in reality, I would have to find them in legends.

Jargal Chinzoreg is as strong as a camel. He trusts only his family and his truck. As a boy, Jargal longed to be a pilot for the Mongolian Air Force, but his family lacked the bribes to get him into the Party school in the capital, so he became a truck driver. This was probably lucky, in the long run: nobody knows what would happen if the handful of rusting aeroplanes that constitutes the Mongolian Air Force were started up again. There’s talk in the parliament of scrapping the Air Force altogether, given Mongolia’s glaring inability to defend itself against any of its neighbours, even lowly Kazakhstan. Since the economic collapse, Jargal has worked for whoever has access to fuel: the black marketeers, the theoretically privatised iron works, timber companies, meat merchants. Jargal will do anything to make his wife laugh, even put socks up his nose and chase her around the ger making a noise like a horny yak.

The road we are travelling, from Ulan Bator to Dalanzagad, is the least worst in the country. It’s usually passable, even in rainy weather. The road is 293 kilometres long, and Jargal knows its every pothole, bend, ditch, checkpoint, and checkpoint guard. He knows which petrol pumps are likely to have petrol when, how much life is left in each of the parts of his thirty-year-old Russian truck, and possible sources for spares.

The horizon widens, the mountains toss and turn and then lie down until the grasslands begin. There’s a lonely tree. A signpost. A dusty café which hasn’t been open since 1990. A barracks where the Soviet Army once did manoeuvres, desolate now with the plumbing and wiring ripped out.

The sun changes position. A cloud shaped like a marmot. Jargal wipes the sweat from his eyes, and lights a Chinese cigarette. He remembers a Marlboro a Canadian hitchhiker gave him last year.

A chestnut horse stands on a ridge, looking down at the road. There’s a settlement beyond those rocks. The great sky marmot has become a cylinder valve. There’s a rock shaped like a giant’s head seventy kilometres outside of Dalanzagad. Many years ago a wrestler used it to crush the head of a monstrous serpent. The sky turns clear jade in the evening cold. Jargal lights another cigarette. Five years ago, around here — just off this incline — a truck rolled over with its cargo of propane gas. They say you can still see the burning driver running towards the road screaming for help that will for ever be too late. Jargal knows him. They used to drink together at the truckers’ hotels.

Jargal sees the town lights in the distance, and he thinks of his wife on the day their first son was born. He thinks about the toy goat that his aunt, Mrs Enchbat, made for his baby daughter out of old scraps of cloth and string. She is still too young to talk well, but already she rides as if she were born in the saddle.

Pride is something I have never felt.

‘You’ve never been interested in the old stories before.’ The wizened man in an army jacket frowned. ‘They were prohibited when the Russians were here. All we had was goatshit about the heroes of the revolution. I was a teacher then. Did I ever tell you about the time Horloyn Choibalsan came to our school? The President himself?’

‘About fifteen minutes ago, you senile fart,’ muttered a greasy listener. A radio in the bar playing pop songs in Japanese and English. Three or four men were playing chess, but had become too drunk to remember the rules.

‘If I told any of the old stories in the classroom,’ the old man continued, ‘I’d have been a candidate for “re-education”. Even Gingghis Khan, the Russians said he was a feudal character. Now every bunch of gers with a covered pisspool is rushing to prove Gingghis was born by their bend in the river...’

‘That’s very interesting,’ I said. Jargal was bored. It was uphill work for me to keep him here, polite. ‘Do you know one about the three animals who think about the fate of the world?’

‘I could tell you a few stories of my own, though. Did I ever tell you about the time Horloyn Choibalsan came to my school? In a big black car. A black Zil. I want another dumpling. How come you’re so interested in the old stories all of a sudden anyway?’

‘I’ll get you another dumpling. Look, a nice big one... lots of lard. It’s my son. He complains if I tell the same one twice. You know what kids are like, always demanding new things... I remember when I was a kid, about three animals who think about the fate of the world...’

The wizened man burped. ‘There’s no future in stories... Stories are things of the past, things for museums. No place for stories in these market-democracy days.’

Suddenly a shouting-match broke out. Chessmen whistled past. A window cracked. ‘He came in a big, black car. There were bodyguards and advisers and KGB men. Trained in Moscow.’ The drunk was standing on a table, shouting down into the foray. A man with a birthmark like a mask was smashing the board down on his rival’s head. I gave up and let Jargal get us out of here.

The man in the museum looked at Jargal and me in astonishment. ‘Stories?’

‘Yes,’ I began,

He started laughing, and I had to stop Jargal taking a swipe at him. ‘Why would anyone be interested in stories about Mongolia?’

‘Because they are our culture,’ I suggested. ‘And I don’t want you to tell me stories. I want information about the origin of the stories.’

Silence. I noticed the wall-clock had stopped.

‘Jargal Chinzoreg,’ said the curator, ‘you are spending too long in your truck, or with your family. You always were a weird one, but now you’re sounding like a crazy old man, or a tourist...’

A man wearing the smartest suit in Mongolia walked out of an office. The director was laughing the laugh of a man of no importance. The suit was carrying a briefcase, and chewing gum.

‘We’ve got our stuffed birds,’ continued the curator, ‘our Mongolian-Russian eternal friendship display. Our dinosaur bones, our scrolls and the Zanabazar bronzes we could hide from the departing Russians. But if it’s information you want, you’ve got no business here. I ask you!’

The suit drew level. Even though it was a dull day, he had already slipped on a pair of sunglasses. ‘You know,’ he said, suddenly addressing us, ‘what’s-his-face down in Dalanzagad is putting together an anthology of Mongolian folk stories. It’s a quaint idea. He’s hoping to get it translated into English and flog them to tourists. He put a proposal to the state printing press last year. It was turned down — no paper. But he’s been doing some lobbying, and at the next meeting he might pull it off.’

The suit went. I thanked him.

‘Now, Jargal Chinzoreg,’ said the curator, ‘will you please get lost? It’s lunchtime.’

The manager shut his office door with a loud sigh of relief. Jargal looked at the curator’s watch. ‘But it’s only ten-thirty.’

‘Exactly. We’ll reopen at about three.’

The moon was in the morning sky, a globe of cobweb.

‘Sir!’ Jargal ran across the empty road in front of the museum. The suit was getting into a Japanese-made four-wheel drive. Jargal was nervous: the owner of such a car must be a powerful man. ‘Sir!’

The suit turned, his hand twitching inside his jacket. ‘What?’

‘I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but would you try to remember the name of the gentleman you just mentioned? The folklorist? It might be very important to me.’

The suit’s guard went up. I used the wrong register of speech for a truck driver. The suit touched his forehead, and dropped his keys. Jargal picked them up and handed them to him. I make sure they touch, and I transmigrate. Like Gunga’s, it was a hard mind to penetrate. Unusually viscous, like jumping through a wall of cold butter.

I didn’t need to scan my new host’s memory for long. ‘His name is Bodoo.’

Some passers-by were staring at the immobile government man. My new host regained control. ‘Now, you’ll excuse me, I have important business that won’t wait.’

Oh yes it will. Here’s a picture. Bodoo is a short, balding man with glasses, sideburns, and a tufty moustache. We are going to meet, you and I, Bodoo. You are going to direct me to my birthright.

I watched Jargal walk away, a man awakening from a strange dream.

My new host was Punsalmaagiyn Suhbataar, a senior agent of the Mongolian KGB with a disdain of vulnerable things. We sped south, his four-wheel drive spewing up clouds of dust. He chewed gum. The grass grew sparser, the camels scraggier, the air drier. The road to Dalanzagad wasn’t signposted, but there was no other road. The checkpoint guards saluted.

I would feel guilty for using my host so selfishly, but as I read Suhbataar’s past I feel vindicated. During his career he has killed over twenty times, and supervised the mutilation or torture of ten times that number of prisoners. He has accrued a medium-sized fortune in a vault in Geneva at the expense of his old overlords in Moscow, and his new ones in Petersburg. Even I can’t see into the hole where his conscience should be. Outside this hole, his mind is cold, clear and cruel.

As night fell I let Suhbataar stop to stretch his legs and drink some coffee. It was good to see the stars again, the whole deep lake of them. Humans thicken the skies above their cities into a broth. But Suhbataar is not a man given to astral contemplation. For the fiftieth time he wondered what he was doing there, and I had to snuff out the thought. We spent the night at a truck drivers’ boarding house, scarcely bothering to talk to the owner whom Suhbataar didn’t intend to pay. I made enquiries about Bodoo the folklorist curator of Dalanzagad museum, but nobody knew him. While my host slept I broadened the Russian I acquired from Gunga.

The following day the hills flattened to a gravel plain, and the Gobi desert began. I was getting weary of it all. Another day of horses and clouds and mountains nobody names. Suhbataar’s mind didn’t help. Most humans are constantly writing in their heads, editing conversations and mixing images and telling themselves jokes or replaying music. But not Suhbataar. I may as well have transmigrated into a cyborg.

Suhbataar drove over the body of a dog and into the dusty regional capital of Dalanzagad. An unpainted place that dropped from nowhere onto a flat plot of dust-devils. Doomed strips of turfless park where women in headscarves sold eggs and dried goods. A few three-or four-floor buildings, with suburbs spilling around the edges. A dirt-strip runway, a flyblown hospital, a corrupt post office, a derelict department store. Beyond stories of black-market dinosaur eggs fetching $500 and snow-leopard pelts from the Gov’-Altai Mountains to the south fetching up to $20,000, Suhbataar knew less about the southernmost province of Mongolia than he cared about it.

There’s a police office he could go and scare, but I took Suhbataar straight to the museum to enquire after Bodoo. The door was locked, but Suhbataar can open any door in Mongolia. Inside was similar to the last museum, booming with silence. Suhbataar found the curator’s office empty. A large, stuffed buzzard incorrectly labelled as a condor hung down from the ceiling. One of its glass eyes had dropped out and rolled away somewhere.

There was a middle-aged woman knitting in the empty bookshop. She didn’t seem surprised to see a visitor in the locked-up musuem. I doubted she had been surprised by anything for years.

‘I’m looking for a “Bodoo”,’ Suhbataar announced.

She didn’t bother looking up. ‘He didn’t come in yesterday. He didn’t come in today. I don’t know if he’ll come in tomorrow.’

Suhbataar’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘And may I ask where the esteemed curator is vacationing?’

‘You can ask, but I dunno if I’ll remember.’

For the first time since I transmigrated into Suhbataar, he felt pleasure. He slipped his gun onto the counter, and clicked off the safety catch. He aimed at the hook suspending the buzzard.

BANG!

The thing crashed to the floor, disintegrating on impact into a cloud of plaster, powder and feathers. The noise of the gunshot chased its own tail through all the empty rooms.

The woman threw her knitting high into the air. As her mouth hung open I saw how bad her teeth were.

Suhbataar whispered. ‘Look, you tapeworm-infested dungpuddle peasant bitch — with bad teeth — here is how our little interview works. I ask the questions: and then you answer them. If I feel you are being just the least bit evasive, you will spend the next ten years in a shit-smeared prison, in a distant part of our glorious Motherland. Do you understand?’

The woman blanched and tried to swallow.

Suhbataar admired his gun. ‘I don’t believe I heard you.’

She whimpered yes.

‘Good. Where is Bodoo?’

‘He heard that the KGB man was coming. He did a runner. I swear, he didn’t say where. Sir, I didn’t know you were the KGB man. I swear, I didn’t.’

‘And where does Bodoo reside in your fine township?’

The woman hesitated.

Suhbataar sighed, and from his jacket pocket pulled out a gold lighter. He set fire to the card No-Smoking sign on the counter. The quivering woman, Suhbataar and I watch it shrivel and burn up into a flapping black flap. ‘Maybe you want to be locked up and maimed in prison? Maybe you want me to castrate your husband? Maybe you want your children to be taken into care by a Muslim-run orphanage in Bayan Olgii with a nasty reputation for child abuse?’

Beads of sweat sprang up through her mascara. Idly, Suhbataar considered ramming her head through the glass counter, but I interceded. She scribbled an address on the margin of her newspaper and handed it over. ‘He lives there with his daughter, sir.’

‘Thank you.’ Suhbataar yanked the phone line out of the wall. ‘Have a nice day.’

Suhbataar circled the house. A prefabricated little place on the edge of town with only one door. There was a barrel for rainwater, which falls ten times in a good year, and an optimistic herb garden. The wind was loud and dusty. My host pulled out his gun and knocked. I clicked the safety catch on without Suhbataar noticing.

The door was opened by Bodoo’s daughter. A boyish-looking girl in her late teens. We noted that my host was expected. Suhbataar guessed that she was alone in the house.

‘Let’s keep this painless,’ said Suhbataar. ‘You know who I am and what I want. Where is your father?’

This girl had attitude. ‘You don’t really expect me just to turn in my own father? We don’t even know the charge?’

Suhbataar smiled. Something in the dark hole was humming. His eyes ran over the girl’s body, and imagined slashing it. He stepped forward, gripping her forearm.

But for once Suhbataar was not going to get what he wanted.

I implanted an overwhelming desire to drive to Copenhagen via Baghdad into Suhbataar’s mind, and made him throw his wallet containing several hundred dollars at Bodoo’s daughter’s feet. I transmigrated through the young woman’s forearm. It was difficult — the girl’s defences were high and thick, and she was about to scream.

I was in. I clamped the scream shut. We watched the dreaded KGB agent throw money at her feet, spring into his Toyota and drive west at breakneck speed. My order might not get Suhbataar quite as far as Caspar’s flowerbeds, but it should take him well clear of Dalanzagad, and into a displeased border patrol in a volatile country where nobody spoke Russian or Mongolian.

My new host watched Suhbataar’s car disappear. The screeching tyres flung ribbons of dust to the desert wind.

I saw her name, Baljin. A dead mother. There! The three who think about the fate of the world. A different version, but the same story. Her mother is weaving by firelight, on the far side of the room. Baljin is safe and warm. The loom clanks.

Now all I had to do was find out where the story is from. I overrode Baljin’s relief and took us into her father’s study, which was also his bedroom and the dining room. Baljin was her father’s amanuensis, and accompanied him on fieldwork. The notes for his book were in the drawer. Not good! Bodoo had taken them with him when he fled.

I laid Baljin down on the bed and closed down her consciousness while I searched her memory for information on the origin of the tale. In what town is it still known and told? I spent half the afternoon searching, even for after-memories, but Baljin’s only certainty is that her father knows.

So where was Bodoo? Yesterday he left for his brother’s ger, two hours’ ride west of Dalanzagad. Unless he received an all-clear message from Baljin by noon that day he would depart for Bayanhongoor, five hundred kilometres north-west across the desert. I woke Baljin, and looked at her watch. It was already three. I assured her the danger had passed, that the KGB do not want to question her father about anything, and that he can be contacted safely and told to come home. I waited for Baljin to choose the next logical step.

We needed to borrow a horse, or maybe a motorbike.

Two hours later we were thirty kilometres west of Dalanzagad in a sketchy village known only in the local dialect as ‘The bend in the river’. Baljin found her uncle, Bodoo’s brother, repairing his jeep. I had missed Bodoo by five hours. He left before noon, believing that the KGB must have reopened the file on his part in the democracy demonstrations. Baljin told her uncle about the wallet thrown at her feet. I had erased the memories of Suhbataar’s aggression. Bodoo’s brother, a tough herder who can wrestle rams to the ground and slit their throats in ten seconds, laughed. He stopped laughing when Baljin gave him half the money. This would feed his family for a year.

We could go after his brother in the jeep, if we could get it working. I transmigrated, and with Jargal Chinzoreg’s automotive knowledge started reassembling the engine.

Evening came before I got the engine working. My host considered it dangerous to leave after nightfall, so we decided to wait until dawn of the following day. Baljin brought her uncle a cup of airag. In the cold river children were swimming and women were washing clothes. The river flowed from springs at the feet of Gov’-Altai mountains, born of winter snow. The sunset smelt of cooking. Baljin’s niece was practising the shudraga, a long-necked lute. An old man was summoning goats. How I envy these humans their sense of belonging.

Men arrived on horseback from the town, hungry for news. They had learned of Suhbataar’s visit two days ago from the truck drivers’ grapevine. They sat around the fire as Baljin told the story yet again, and an impromptu party got going. The younger men showed off their horsemanship to Baljin. Baljin was respected as one of the finest archers in all Dalanzagad, male or female, and she was unbetrothed, and the daughter of a government employee. Baljin’s aunt made some fresh airag, stirring mare’s milk into fermented milk. The mares were grazed on the previous autumn’s taana grass, which makes the best airag. It grew dark, and fires were lit.

‘Tell us a story, Aunt Baljin,’ says my host’s eight year-old. ‘You know the best ones.’

‘How come?’ says a little snotty boy.

‘Because of Grandpa Bodoo’s book, stupid. My Aunt Baljin helped him write it, didn’t you, Aunt Baljin?’

‘What book?’ says Snotty.

‘The book of stories, stupid.’

‘What stories?’

‘You are so facile!’ The girl exhibits her recent acquisition. ‘Aunt Baljin, tell us The Camel and the Deer.’

Baljin smiles. She has a lovely smile.

Now; long, long ago, the camel had antlers. Beautiful twelve-pronged antlers. And not only antlers! The camel also had a long, thick, tail, lustrous as your hair, my darling.

[‘What’s “lustous”?’ asked Snotty.]

[‘Shut up, stupid, or Aunt Baljin will stop, won’t you, Aunt Baljin?’]

At that time the deer had no antlers. It was bald, and to be truthful rather ugly. And as for the horse, the horse had no lovely tail, either. Just a short little stumpy thing.

One day the camel went to drink at the lake. He was charmed by the beauty of his reflection. ‘How magnificent!’ thought the camel. ‘What a gorgeous beast am I!’

Just then, who should come wandering out of the forest, but the deer? The deer was sighing.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ asked the camel. ‘You’ve got a face on you like a wet sun.’

‘I was invited to the animals’ feast, as the guest of honour.’

‘You can’t beat a free nosh-up,’ said the camel.

‘How can I go with a forehead as bare and ugly as mine? The tiger will be there, with her beautiful coat. And the eagle, with her swanky feathers. Please, camel, just for two or three hours, lend me your antlers. I promise I’ll give them back. First thing tomorrow morning.’

‘Well,’ said the camel, magnanimously. ‘You do look pretty dreadful the way you are, I agree. I’ll take pity on you. Here you are.’ And the camel took off the antlers, and gave them to the deer, who pranced off. ‘And mind you don’t spill any, er, berry juice on them or whatever it is you forest animals drink at these dos.’

The deer met the horse.

‘Hey,’ said the horse. ‘Nice antlers.’

‘Yes, they are, aren’t they?’ replied the deer. ‘The camel gave them to me.’

‘Mmmn,’ mused the horse. ‘Maybe the camel will give me something, too, if I ask nicely.’

The camel was still at the lake, drinking, and looking at the desert moon.

‘Good evening, my dear camel. I was wondering, would you swap your beautiful tail with me for the evening? I’m going to see this finely built young filly I know, and she’s long been an admirer of yours. I know she’d simply melt if I turned up in her paddock wearing your tail.’

The camel was flattered. ‘Really? An admirer? Very well, let’s swap tails. But be sure to bring it back first thing tomorrow morning. And be sure you don’t spill any, erm, never mind, just look after it all right? It’s the most beautiful tail in the whole world, you know.’

Since then many days and years have passed, but the deer still hasn’t given back the camel’s antlers, and you can see for yourself that the horse still gallops over the plains with the camel’s tail streaming in the wind. And some people say, when the camel comes to drink at the lake he sees his bare, ugly reflection, and snorts, and forgets his thirst. And have you noticed how the camel stretches his neck and gazes into the distance, to a far-off sand dune or a distant mountain top? That’s when he’s thinking, ‘When is the horse going to give me back my tail?’ And that is why he is always so sad.

Dust-devils bounced off the shell of the jeep like kangaroos. Nothing amongst these rocks but scorpions and mirages, for the length and breadth of the morning.

Bodoo’s brother stopped in an isolated ger. A camel was tethered outside, but there was no one around. As Gobi etiquette permits, my host entered the ger, prepared some food, and drank some water. The owner’s camel snorted like a human. A warning flared up from my host’s unconcious, but it went before I could locate its source. The wind was strong but the world was silent. There was nothing to blow against, or in, or through.

We got back in the jeep. Gazelles darted through the distance, flocks of them turning like minnows in a river. Bodoo’s brother drove down the Valley of the Vulture’s Mouth, where we stopped at a store for enough provisions and petrol to get us to Bayanhongoor. Bodoo had passed through early that morning. We were catching him up.

Hawks circled high. One of the last Gobi bears shambled along the fringe of forest. There are less than a hundred left. Bodoo’s brother slept in the jeep, under several blankets. It gets cold at night, even in summer. Dreams came, of bones and stones with holes.

The next day, the dunes, the longest running for eighty miles, swelling and rolling, grain by grain. Bodoo’s brother sang songs that lasted for miles, with no beginning and no end. The dunes of the dead. There were bones, and stones with holes.

There was a stationary jeep in the shimmering distance. Bodoo’s brother pulled up to it, and cut his engine. A figure was asleep under a makeshift canopy in the back.

‘Are you all right, stranger? Are you in need of any help? Any water?’

‘Yes,’ said the figure, suddenly sitting up and showing his face, chewing gum. ‘I need your jeep. Mine seems to have broken down.’ At point blank range Punsalmaagiyn Suhbataar fired his handgun twice, a bullet for each of my host’s eyes.

Nobody replies. Firelight without colour. Outside must be night, if there is an outside. I am hostless and naked. The faces all stare in the same direction, all of them all of their ages. One of them coughs. It is Bodoo’s brother, his eye wounds already healed. I try to transmigrate into him, but I cannot inhabit a shadow. I’ve never known silence so deep. By being what I am, I thought I understood almost everything. But I understand almost nothing.

A figure rises, and leaves the ger through a curtain. So simple? I follow the figure. ‘I’m sorry, I’m afraid you can’t come through here,’ says a girl I hadn’t noticed, no older than eight, delicate and tiny as an ancient woman.

‘Will you stop me?’

‘No. If there is a door for you, you are free to pass through.’ Wrens flutter.

I touch the wall. There is no door. ‘Where is it?’

She shrugs, biting her lip.

‘Then what shall I do?’

A swan inspects the ground. She shrugs.

Tallow candles spit and hiss. These few guests are many multitudes. Thousands of angels swim in a thimble. From time to time one of the guests stands up, and walks through the way out that is not there. The wall of the ger yields, and re-seals behind them, like a wall of water. I try to leave with them, but for me it never even bends.

The monk in a saffron robe sighs. He wears a yellow hat that arcs forward. ‘I’m having some problems with my teeth.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I say. The little girl talks to her twitchy marmot.

Horses galloping by, or thunder? The swan spreads its wings and flies up through the roof. Bodoo’s brother has gone through the door.

‘But why can’t I pass through? The others have.’

The little girl is playing cat’s cradle with a length of twine, knitting her brow. ‘You chose not to!’

‘I chose nothing.’

‘All your tribe leave your body while it still breathes.’

‘What do you mean, my tribe?’

The monk with the yellow hat is here, humming through his broken mouth. He whispers in her ear, she stares at me distrustfully. ‘Very well,’ she concurs. ‘The circumstances are uncommon. But what can I do?’

The monk turns to me. ‘I’m sorry — my teeth.’ A prophet’s nod. ‘Time has gone around, the years are cold and far away... I kept my promise.’ And he, too, passes through the wall of the ger.

Last to leave is the little girl, carrying her marmot. She feels sorry for me, and I don’t want her to go. I’m all alone.

I was in a human host again, and the walls of the ger were living, pulsing with viscera and worry and nearby voices. I explored the higher rooms, but found nothing! No memories, no experiences. Not even a name. Barely an ‘I’. Where were those voices coming from? I looked deeper. There were whispers, and a suffusion of purposeful well-being. I tried to open my host’s eyes to see where I was, but the eyes would not open. I checked that there were eyes — yes, but my host had never learned to open them, and couldn’t respond. I was in a place unlike any other, yet my host didn’t know where. Or rather, my host didn’t know anywhere else. A blind mute? The mind was pure. So very pure, that I was afraid for it.

The well-being transformed into palpitating fear. Had I been detected? A knot of pain was being pulled tight. Panic, such panic I had never known since I butchered the mind of my first host. The curtain was ripped, and my host emerged into the world between her mother’s legs, screaming indignantly at this rude wrenching. The cold air flooded in! The light, even through my eyelids, made my host’s tender brain chime.

I transferred into my host’s mother along the umbilical cord, and the depth of emotion is sheer and giddy. I forgot to insulate and I was swept away by joy, and relief, and loss, and gain, and emptiness, and fulfilment, a memory of swimming, and the claw-sharp, bloodied love, and the conviction that she would never again put herself through this agony.

But I have work to do.

Another ger. Firelight, warmth, and the shadows of antlers. I searched for our location. Well. Good news and bad. My new host was a Mongolian in Mongolia. But I was far to the north of where Bodoo was last heading, not far from the Russian border. I was in the province of Renchinhumbe, near the lake of Tsagaan Nuur, and the town of Zoolon. It was September now and the snows would be coming soon. The midwife was the grandmother of the baby I just left, she was smiling down at her daughter, anaesthetising the umbilical cord with a lump of ice. Her hair cobwebby, her face round like the moon. An aunt bustled about in the background with pans of warm water and squares of cloth and fur, chanting. This flat and quiet song is the only sound.

It is the early hours of the morning. The mother’s labour was long and hard. I dulled her pain, put her into a deep sleep, and set about helping her unstitched body repair itself. As my host slept I had time to wonder where I had been since Suhbataar shot my previous host. Had I hallucinated the strange ger? But how could I have? I am my mind — do I have a mind I don’t know about within my mind, like humans? And how was I reborn in Mongolia? Why, and by whom? Who was the monk in the yellow hat?

How do I know that there aren’t noncorpi living within me, controlling my actions? Like a virus within a bacteria? Surely I would know.

But that’s exactly what humans think.

The door opened and an autumn sunrise came in, with the baby’s father, grandparents, cousins and friends and aunts and uncles. They had slept in a neighbouring ger and now crowd into their home, excited and eager to welcome their newest relative. When they speak I have great difficulty understanding — I have a new dialect of Mongolian to learn. The mother is glowing with tired happiness. The baby bawls, and the elders look on.

I left the mother, and transmigrated into her husband, as they kissed. His tribe was known to Baljin as the reindeer people. Reindeer are their food, currency and clothing. They are semi-nomadic. A few of the men visit Zoolon several times a year to exchange meat and hides for supplies, and to sell powdered reindeer antler to Chinese merchants who market it in their country as an aphrodisiac. Other than this there is little contact with the rest of the world. When the Russians were busy making a proletariat in this non-industrial country to justify a socialist revolution, the reindeer people had proved impossible even to conduct a census among. They had survived when the local Buddhist clergy was being liquidated.

My host is only twenty, and his heart is brimming over with pride. I’m rarely envious of humans, but I am now. I am, and always shall be, wholly sterile. I have no genes to pass on. For my new host, the birth of his offspring is the last bridge into true manhood, and will increase his status with his peers and his ancestors. A son would have been preferable, but there will be other births.

I notice his name, Beebee. He lights a cigarette, and leaves the ger. I envy the simplicity of his expectations. He knows how to ride reindeers, and how to skin them, and which of their organs, eaten raw, assist which aspect of human physiology. Beebee knows many legends, but not three who think about the fate of the world.

The night ebbed away, the dawn dripped into a pool of light, and the shadows in the pine trees around the village murmured with grey. An early riser’s footfalls crunched in the heavy frost. His head was hooded, and his teeth shone. A shooting star crossed the sky.

Well, what now?

Nothing about my quest had changed. Bodoo was still the only lead I had. I had to get back south, to the town of Bayanhongoor. If I can access the museum network, it should be fairly easy to track him down. Three months had passed since he had fled Suhbataar. This setback would cost me time, but immortals don’t lack time.

I told Beebee’s grandmother-midwife that Beebee had some business in town that day. I hated to separate the young father from his baby daughter, but the grandmother gladly shooed us away. Men get in the way.

Beebee and his eldest brother rode through forests, between hewn mountains, along narrow lakes. Fishing boats, willows, and wild geese flying up and down the morning. An ibex stands on a hill-crest. I learn from Beebee about the moose, elk, and lynx, about the argali sheep, wolves and how to trap wild boars. We see a bear fishing in a river thrashing with salmon. Sharp rainbows, misty sunshine. There are no roads here, but the cold weather has firmed the mud and so the going is easy.

Beebee and his brother discuss the new baby, and how she should be named. I wonder about kinship. For all my Mongolian hosts, the family is the ger, to be protected in, to be healed in, to be born in, to make love in, and to die in. A parasite, I could experience all of these, second-hand, but I could never be of these.

Unless, perhaps... This hope kept me going.

Zoolon was another decrepit town of wooden buildings, concrete blocks, and dead lorries rusting in shallow pools where dogs drank. A power station churned smoke into the perfect sky. Another ghost factory with saplings growing from the chimney stack. A few squat apartment blocks. A crowd gathered around the small corrugated shack that served as the town’s only restaurant. Beebee usually drank there after seeing the owner of the tannery.

‘Some foreigners in town,’ a bearded hunter told Beebee. ‘Roundeyes.’

‘Russians from over the border? Anything new to trade?’

‘Nah. Others.’

Beebee walked into the restaurant, and I saw Caspar poking at something on his plate with a fork, and Sherry poring over a map with a compass.

‘It’s good to see you!’ I speak before I think. Townsmen in the restaurant stare, amazed. Nobody knew this nomadic herder could speak any language other than a reindeer-flavoured dialect of Mongolian.

‘Gday,’ replies Sherry, looking up. Caspar’s eyes are more guarded.

‘How are you enjoying their country?’ This is very indulgent. I have to dampen and then erase Beebee’s shock at hearing himself speak in a language he’s never learned.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Caspar and Sherry say at exactly the same time.

‘Full of surprises. Anyway. Enjoy the rest of your stay. But I’d advise you to get somewhere warmer before winter sets in... Somewhere nearer the ocean. Vietnam can be beautiful in November, up in the hill country, at least it was...’

Beebee sat down, and ordered a plate of food while waiting for his brother. His tribe exchanges reindeer meat for credit with the restaurant owner. I picked up the three-week-old newspaper from Ulan Bator. Beebee was illiterate: his dialect has no written form, and his tribe has no schools. There was little news, much whitewashing, and a belated report on the national-day festival. None of it meant much to Beebee, who rarely left his tribe, never left the province, and never wished to.

I was turning past the obituary page when an article caught my eye: Double Tragedy for Mongolian Culture.

Bodoo was dead.

I rarely feel despair, I forget how it gouges.

Both brothers had died in the same week of a heart attack, which I knew from Suhbataar was one of the Mongolian KGB’s favourite ways to dispose of political liabilities.

‘This tragedy was made all the more poignant by the imminent publication of the late professor’s life-work, a comprehensive anthology of Mongolian folk stories. Out of deference to this anthropological giant, we include one story below, retold by the late professor.’

I should have sent Suhbataar over a cliff. Damn him. And damn me.

A hand slapped down on Beebee’s shoulder. My host’s hand slid to the hilt of his hunting knife. The drunk man swayed. His breath made Beebee flinch. ‘What are you pretending to read the newspaper for, Reindeer Man? And what’s this about you speaking arsey foreign languages? Where were you when I was fighting for democracy? That’s what I want to know.’ His pupils were huge, and his eyelids red. ‘You can’t read Cyrillic. You can’t read Mongolian. And it sure ain’t written in reindeer. Where were you when I was fighting for Communism? That’s what I want to know. Go on, read for me, then, antler-head.’ Then he bellowed. ‘Oy! Bring me some frigging vodka! It’s story-time...’

I was back to where I had started. I was frustrated enough to transmigrate into this wino and hurl him through the wall, but what would be the point? I read the story. I owed it to Bodoo.

In a lost spring of the Buriat nation, Khori Tumed, a young hunter, was roaming the southernmost shore of Lake Baikal. Winter was melting from the silver birches, drip by drip, and Khori Tumed gazed at the turquoise mountains beyond the lake.

As he rested, the hunter saw nine swans flying from the north-east, low over the water. Khori Tumed grew uneasy — they flew in a circle, and silently. Fearing enchantment he hid in the hollow of a gnarled willow. And sure enough, as the swans alighted on the strand, each transformed into a beautiful girl, each with pale skin, slender limbs, and jet-black hair, and each more radiant than the last. The swan-girls disrobed and draped their garments on the very willow tree that concealed Khori Tumed. The hunter’s limbs grew heavy — not from fear, but desire and love. Very carefully, when the girls were swimming a little way from the shore, he stole one of the robes.

The swan-girls returned from their bathing to the willow tree. One by one they slipped into their robes, and rose as silent swans, circling out and away over Lake Baikal. The ninth swan-girl — and the most beautiful — searched frantically for her missing robe, and called out to her sisters, but the swans were already vanishing towards the north-east.

With a thump, Khori Tumed jumped down from the tree, gripping her robe.

‘Please! Give me back my dress! I must follow my sisters!’

‘Marry me,’ said Khori Tumed. ‘I will dress you in emerald silk when the summer comes, and the fur of black bears will keep you warm when the snows fall.’

‘Let’s talk about it — but please give me back my robe for now.’

The hunter smiled gently. ‘That I will not do.’

The swan-girl watched her sisters disappear from sight. She knew that she had no choice — either accept the stranger’s hand in marriage, or freeze to death that very night. ‘Then I must go with you, mortal, but be warned — when our sons are born I shall not name them. And without names, never shall they cross the threshold into manhood.’

So the swan-girl returned to Khori Tumed’s ger and became a woman of his tribe. In time, she even learned to love the precocious young hunter, and they lived in happiness together. Eleven fine sons were born to them, but the swan-girl was bound by her oath, and Khori Tumed’s sons were never blessed with names. And in the evening, she looked longingly to the north-east, and Khori Tumed knew she was thinking of her homeland beyond the winter dawn.

Years arrived, years saddled up and rode away.

One day at the end of autumn when the forests were dancing and dying, Khori Tumed was gutting a ewe, while his wife sat embroidering a quilt. Their eleven sons were away, hunting.

‘Husband, do you still have my swan’s robe?’

‘You know I do,’ replied Khori Tumed, carving the sheep’s midriff.

‘I would so like to see if I can still fit into it.’

He smiled. ‘What do you take me for? Some kind of marmot brain?’

‘My love, if I wanted to leave you now, I could use the door.’ The swan-girl got up and kissed his neck. ‘Let me.’

Khori Tumed’s resolve melted. ‘Very well, but I’m going to bolt the door.’ He washed his hands, unlocked his iron-bound chest, and gave the robe to his wife. He sat in the bed, watching her undress and wrap herself in the magical garment.

A wild beating of wings filled the ger, and the swan flew up through the gap in the roof, the chimney-flap which Khori Tumed had forgotten to seal! In despair Khori Tumed lunged upwards at the swan with a ladle, and just managed to hook the swan’s foot with its handle. ‘Please! My wife! Don’t leave me here without you!’

‘My time here is over, mortal. Love you I always shall, but my sisters are calling for me now, and I must obey their call!’

‘Then at least tell me the names of our sons, so that they may become men of the tribe!’

And the swan-girl named their sons, as she hovered above the tent: Caragana, Bodonguud, Sharaid, Tsagaan, Gushid, Khudai, Batnai, Khalbin, Khuaitsai, Galzut, Khovduud. And the swan-girl circled the encampment of gers three times to bless all who lived there. And it is said that the tribe of Khori Tumed were such people, and that the eleven sons became eleven fathers.

The drunk’s eyes had closed, and his face had drooped into his plate of lukewarm meatballs. Everyone in the place was silent. Three young children sat on the other side of the table, entranced by the story. Beebee remembered his new daughter. I looked at Bodoo’s picture in the newspaper, and wondered who he really had been, this man I had only known through the memories of others.

The restaurant was emptying out, and the conversation reverted to recent wrestling matches. The sight of two roundeyes eating was only gossipworthy for so long. I watched the way Sherry whispered something to Caspar, and I watched the smile spread over Caspar’s face, and I knew they were lovers.

This venture was futile. To look for the source of a story is to look for a needle in a sea. I should transmigrate into Sherry or Caspar, and resume my search for noncorpa in other lands.

The bearded hunter walked in with his gun. The memory of being shot flashed back, but the hunter leaned the rifle against the wall, and sat down next to Beebee. He started dismantling it, and cleaning the parts one by one with an oily rag.

‘Beebee, right? Of the Reindeer Tribe of Lake Tsagaan Nuur?’

‘Yes.’

‘With a new baby daughter?’

‘Arrived last night.’

‘You’d better return to your tribe,’ said the hunter. ‘I met your sister at the market just now. She’s looking for you, with your brother. Your wife’s hysterical and your daughter’s dying.’

Beebee cursed himself for coming to town. I wanted to beg his forgiveness. I thought about transmigrating into the hunter, and from him back into Caspar or Sherry, but my guilt made me stay. Maybe I could help with his baby’s illness if we got back in time.

I’ve often thought about that moment. Had I transmigrated at that time, everything would have been different. But I stayed, and Beebee ran to the market-place.

Dusk was sluggish with cold when we reached Beebee’s encampment. The breath of the yaks hung white in the twilight. From far up the valley we heard the wind. It sounded to me like a wolf, but all reindeer people know the difference.

Beebee’s ger was full of dark shapes, lamps, steam and worry. A bitter oil was burning in a silver dish. The grandmother was preparing a ritual. Beebee’s wife was pale in her bed, cradling the baby, both with wide unblinking eyes. She looked at Beebee. ‘Our baby hasn’t spoken.’

The grandmother spoke in hushed tones. ‘Your daughter’s soul has gone. It was born loose. Unless I can summon it back she will be dead by midnight.’

‘At the hospital back in Zoolon, there’s a doctor there, trained in East Germany in the old days—’

‘Don’t be a fool, Beebee! I’ve seen it happen too often before. You and that mumbo jumbo medicine. It’s not a matter of medicine! Her soul’s been untethered. It’s a matter of magic!’

He looked at his limp daughter, and began to despair. ‘What do you intend to do?’

‘I shall perform the rites. Hold this dish. I need your blood.’

The grandmother pulled out a curved hunting knife. Beebee was not afraid of knives or blood. As the grandmother washed his palm I transmigrated into the old woman, intending to transfer into the baby to see the problem for myself.

I got no further.

I found something I had never seen in any human mind: a canyon of another’s memories, running across her mind. I saw it straight away, like a satellite passing over. I entered it, and as I did so I entered my own past.

There are three, says the monk in the yellow hat, who think about the fate of the world. I am a boy aged eight. I have my own body! We are in a prison cell, smaller than a wardrobe, lit by light from a tiny grille in one corner, the size of a hand. Even though my height is not yet four feet, I cannot stand up. I’ve been in here a week and I haven’t eaten for two days. I have become used to the stink of our own excrement. A man in a nearby box has lost his mind and wails through a broken throat. The only thing I can see through the grille is another grille in a neighbouring coffin.

It is 1937. Comrade Choibalsan’s social engineering policies, a carbon copy of Josef Stalin’s in distant Moscow, are in full swing. There are show trials staged every week in Ulan Bator. Several thousand agents of the impending Japanese invasion from Manchuria have been executed. Nobody is safe. The Minister for Transport has been sentenced to death for conspiring to cause traffic accidents. The dismantling of the monasteries is well under way. First the taxes were sent skywards, and then began ‘re-education’. I and my master have been found guilty of Feudal Indoctrination. We were told this yesterday by the hand that brought us some water. I think it was yesterday. The lids of nearby coffin-cells have been prised off and their helpless occupants hauled off.

‘I’m afraid, master,’ I say.

‘Then I shall tell you a story,’ says the monk.

‘Will they shoot us?’

‘Yes.’ It hurts my master to speak. His teeth were rifle-butted into spiky fragments.

‘I don’t want to die.’ I think of my mother and father. I can see their faces. My mother and father! Lowly herders, who worked their knuckles to the bone to bribe their son’s way into a monastery: Five years later their ambition signed his death warrant.

‘You won’t die. I promised your father you wouldn’t die, and you won’t.’

‘But they killed the others.’

‘They won’t kill you. Now listen! There are three who think about the fate of the world...’

The sky is thick with crows. Their noise is deafening. Stones are being broken. I, my master, and about forty other monks and their novices are taken over a field littered with naked corpses. The ground is blotched with crimson. Those who cannot walk are dragged. Beside a copse of trees the firing squad is waiting. The soldiers are a roughshod band: this is not the regular Red Army. Many of them are brigands from the Chinese border, who become soldiers when times are lean. There are some children, brought here to dig mass graves, and to watch the executions of us counter-revolutionaries as part of their socialist education. My own brothers and sisters have already been dispersed all over Mongolia.

Wild dogs look on from a pile of rocks.

We wait while the Soviet officer walks over to the mercenaries who will do the killing. They discuss the logistics of the execution as though they are talking about planting a field. They actually laugh.

The master is intoning a mantra. I wish he would stop. I am numb with fear.

There is a girl standing in the mouth of a ger, making tea. Domesticity, here and now, is dreamlike. My master abruptly breaks off his mantra and summons her over. She hesitates, but she comes. No one is looking. Her eyes are big, and her face is round. My master touches me with his left hand, and touches her with his right hand, and I feel my memories drawn away on the current.

My master knew how to transmigrate me! My mind is untethered and begins to follow my memories — but at that moment a soldier slams my master’s arm away from the girl, and the connection is broken, and the girl kicked away.

This girl’s own memories piece together my last minute of life. We watch the boy — myself — we watch the master chanting. Even as the barrels of the guns are levelled—

Everything moves so slowly. The air thickens, and sets, hard. Every gleam is polished. An order is given in Russian. The rifles go off like firecrackers. The row of men and boys folds and topples.

There is one more thing. This the girl cannot see, but I know how to look. The boy’s body is in the mud, too, its small cranium shattered, but with an unmoored mind. I can see it! Adrift, pulsing. One of the mercenaries strolls over to the pile of bodies, lifting the bodies on top with his foot to ensure the ones underneath are dead. He touches the boy, and in that instant my soul pulses into its new home.

Many years before it would stir, unable to identify itself, long after the mercenary had returned to his native corner of China, at the foot of the Holy Mountain.

That is the end.

The present. The grandmother is motionless. I would like to read her life, how she was sent away to another corner of her country, how she was married into a tribe of strangers. But there is no time.

‘I am here.’

‘Well, I didn’t think it was Leonid Brezhnev poking around in there,’ says the grandmother. ‘It’s about time! I saw the comet.’

‘You know about me?’

‘Of course I know about you! I’ve been carrying your early memories around with me for all these decades! Rumours about the Sect of the Yellow Hat were common currency in my tribe. When your master linked us on your execution day, I knew what he was doing... I’ve been waiting.’

‘It was a long journey. The only clues were in my memories, and you had those.’

‘My body should have ground to a halt winters ago. I’ve tried to die several times, but I was never allowed through...’

I looked down at the baby. ‘Is she going to die?’

‘That depends on you.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘My granddaughter’s body is your body. She was born with you as her soul and mind. She is a shell. Her body will be dead within three hours if you don’t return to her. If you want her to survive, you have to choose to be shackled by flesh and bones once more.’

I considered my future as a noncorpum. Nowhere in the world would be closed to me. I could try to seek out other noncorpa, the company of immortals. I could transmigrate into presidents, astronauts, messiahs. I could plant a garden on a mountainside under camphor trees. I would never grow old, get sick, fear death, die.

I looked down at the feeble day-old body in front of me, her metabolism dimming, minute by minute. Life expectancy in Central Asia is forty-three, and falling.

‘Touch her.’

Outside, bats dangle from the high places, fluttering up to the sky, and down to the ground, and up to the sky again, checking that all was well. Inside, my wail, screamed from the hollows of my eighteen-hour-old lungs, fills the ger.