His Energy Giving Strength to Others

After declaring our grandfather released, Bazar now sleeps out in the third ger that we use for storage. Mun and I are left alone to sleep with the body. This is the first night Bazar does not sit with the corpse and burn candles and small herbs in a bowl, intoning words we cannot understand. Now that the consciousness is gone from the flesh, there is no need for such acts. Bazar asks our father for a felt blanket, and uses it to wrap Övöö up tight.

I cannot sleep. My mind is full of images of my grandfather. The idea that he is now nothing more than a pile of meat is discomfiting. There is no pain like the burden of attachment. I get up and walk over to where he lies. I lay my head on his chest. It is hard as stone. Eventually I fall asleep.

In the morning, Father and Bazar heft the body up onto the back of a horse. Our father eyes us as we mount our own horses, but Bazar nods and we are allowed to come.

I think of all the things our grandfather teaches us, about the cycles of nature and the way the spirit navigates the world, but most of all about Chinggis Khaan and the world the great Khaan inhabits, the world he creates in his own image.

After an hour on the grasslands, we ride down into a shallow valley. The grass here is short, stunted, not the tall lush grasses that grow closer to sources of water. The sky is gray, the wind icy. Aav and Bazar lay the body on the ground. Then Bazar pulls a plastic bag filled with raw meat left over from yesterday’s dinner from his deel. He sprinkles the meat with herbs, and sets it directly on the ground beside the body of our grandfather. My father takes a seat behind him. We sit behind our father.

How long do we sit? Days? Weeks? Years? Minutes?

I see the first one circling on the thermals. The way it funnels down out of the sky, as if reeling us in. After it lands, I watch it study Bazar, the man and the bird as if silently communicating. Something in the way they face each other makes me think this is not their first meeting. Then Bazar speaks in the unknown language that sounds older than the world. The animal lumbers over to where the raw meat sits beside my grandfather. It scoops the meat up in its beak and throws back its head.

Bazar opens the strangely shaped fur bag he carries with him at all times. He pulls out a small hatchet and a hammer. The hatchet is silver and looks ancient, pieces of turquoise and coral embedded in the handle. He turns toward our father and presents it to him.

Aav takes a deep breath and accepts the hatchet. Somehow I know what is going to happen, but when it happens, I am still surprised. Perhaps this is the first time such a thing ever happens in the land of the eternal blue sky. Father approaches the body of his father and unwraps the blanket. Övöö lies stiff and gray and naked. Bazar points to a spot and motions for what needs to be done. Aav lifts Övöö’s head. The blade winks in the sun as he works to remove the skin of Övöö’s scalp. There is a ripping sound not dissimilar to when we flay the skin from a slaughtered sheep. Eventually it comes away in his hand. There is hardly any blood. Later, what blood there is is black and thick, unflowing.

It’s done, he says.

He hands the hatchet to Bazar and sits back down. And so together we watch as this stranger proceeds to butcher the corpse of our grandfather, the skill evident in Bazar’s cuts until our grandfather is just meat, his bones then pounded into a coarse powder that is sprinkled on the offering. Overhead the sky filling with vultures, the great ashy creatures massing, a vast storm. When he finishes preparing the body, Bazar begins to toss chunks of flesh up into the air at the feathered horde, the birds tornadoing in a frenzy.

I do not close my eyes. I watch the whole thing as does my brother. Soon Övöö is gone. Later, Bazar tells us this is what Buddhists in Tibet call a sky burial. Though this act is not practiced in Mongolia, my twin and I are not shocked. We are accustomed to the many faces of nature, the cycles of birth and death. Rather there is only a fierce beauty as the dead are allowed swift passage back into the elements and the natural world from which we come. Years from now in Tibet, Chinese tourists begin to flock to watch such proceedings, to gawk at the sight of human flesh. But isn’t human burial the more barbarous ritual? The act of preserving the flesh, dressing it up in its best clothes, embalming the organs, then burying the dead in the earth for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Perhaps this way of leaving the world might catch on here in the land of the eternal blue sky. Maybe someday Mun might lift the knife and make the first ceremonial cut on our father’s body. Maybe then it is my job to disassemble the corpse and feed it to the beasts of the air so that for a while at least our father may live on in them, his energy giving strength to others and then in turn these beings one day giving strength to countless others in a perfect circle that has no end.