We Should Look Upon All This as a Bubble

Now Saran sits in the back with Uncle. Her hair no longer finds its way into my mouth. The great mystery is solved, the reason why Saran floats above the earth, a dreamy smile playing across her face. Saran is in love! She is in love with neither me nor my twin. The man is a novice back at Gandan Tegchenling Monastery. Like Little Bat, he is also from Amdo Province in Tibet. This man is the reason Saran speaks Tibetan. The Abbot of Gandan Tegchenling sends her with us in the hopes of breaking up the happy couple. But after a few hours of sitting next to Uncle in the back seat, Saran confesses her secret. The old monk pats her hand kindly and tells her all is well. My favorite poet claims a lover has four streams inside, Uncle says, of water, wine, honey, and milk. Find them in yourself and pay no attention to so-and-so about such-and-such. There is so much kindness in his voice. Even in this moment of darkest dark.

Outside the landscape depresses. All day we are driving in Ikh Khorig, the Great Taboo. All day among the things the Russian army casts off decades ago. Shells of rusted-out trucks. Piles of empty crates, furniture, antiquated electronics. What from a distance looks like an ovoo is only a heap of boots. The earth is ugly, scarred, the trees cleared, the land as if mined for minerals, blasted by the artillery ranges we see every few minutes.

A hundred kilometers back we pass a herd of takhi, also known as Przewalski’s horses. Twenty years ago takhi are all but extinct in the wild and found only in zoos and animal reserves, but recently scientists are reintroducing them to Mongolia. In other countries there are herds of horses that roam free, like the mustang in the American West, but such herds are feral horses that escape from domesticated stock. The takhi is the last true wild horse in existence—it is never domesticated.

The animals are short-legged and stout, most with brown heads and backs that gradually taper to a soft gray color on their underbellies the way color slowly changes on a fish. Their manes are short and bristly, like shorn grass. As we drive past, one raises its head from where it is feeding to stare at us. To descend from a lineage of pure freedom, to never know the bit in the mouth, the saddle. The image of this small herd stays with me even when it is well behind us. Perhaps someday a thousand years from now these horses may once again claim the land. A colt nuzzles its mother’s belly. I think of the red horse that is born during the first zud of my youth. The Buddha says we should look upon all this as a bubble, that the visible world is only a dream. Species thrive and wither, thrive again. Universes are born and fall dead. We drive on.