Urnaa and Gunje

This was the third time I travelled to East Asia and back by rail. I’m probably one of the most enthusiastic passengers they’d ever find on board – Who would be so well-prepared as to carry a pile of notepads, a digital voice recorder, two cameras, two rechargers, two electricity converters, four guide and reference books, dozens of wet wipes, plus enough painkillers and sanitary towels to last three months?

I was eager for a conversation. But my new cabin-mate Urnaa was looking melancholic. She was thinking of the man she just said good-bye to, I’m sure. Urnaa called him “my best friend”. I tried to talk to her, but it was difficult in the first hour. Her mind still wandered in Moscow…

Gunje lied on her stomach, on her upper bunk bed, looking out of the window. What was she thinking of?

‘Did you live in Moscow?’ I hate silence. I had to ask the first question.

‘No. We live in Budapest, in Hungary,’ Gunje replied.

‘Budapest? I’ve always wanted to go there! What are you doing in Budapest?’

Gunje looked a little confused. She asked her sister in Mongolian. Urnaa answered me, without any spirit in her voice: ‘Work. We work in Budapest.’

To make our communication more difficult, the sisters never used past tense in their English.

‘We just stay in Moscow for two days. Visit places. We stay with our best friend…’ Urnaa said.

‘What work do you do in Budapest?’ I asked.

‘We work in…work in….’ Urnaa paused, not knowing the word to use. I passed her the Mongolian phrasebook that I’d prepared for this journey.

‘Ah! Mongolian phra…phrase…book!’ Urnaa was instantly cheered up.

‘It’s got Mongolian-English vocabulary at the back,’ I told her.

She looked through the phrasebook with great curiosity, like the six-year-old me when I saw a Chinese-English dictionary for the first time.

‘Mongolian…Mongolian…’ she repeated.

Did it surprise her that there might be people in this world who want to learn Mongolian language?

Then she giggled. ‘Look! This is wrong!’ She pointed to a sentence “Ta urgalsanuu?’ (meaning “Are you married?”)

‘It should be “ta gerlesenuu”!’ she said, grabbing the pen from me and crossing out the wrong sentence and writing down the correct one. Now she looked content.

‘So where did you say you work?’ I wanted to continue with our previous conversation.
‘Ah, I to find it,’ Urnaa took up the phrasebook again. ‘Yes, yes, I mean, we work in…gar..garment…factory...in Budapest.’

‘You are travelling home to Mongolia, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. We travel by train all the time,’ she said.

‘Why didn’t you take a plane?’ I’m always interested in other people’s reasons for not flying.

‘Because…cheaper to take train. We travel from Budapest for two days on the train to Moscow. Only two days. No problem for us. The Moscow-Ulaanbaatar return train tickets cost $1,000 for two persons – much cheaper than plane tickets, which cost $980 for one person.’

‘Where you buy your ticket?’ Gunje asked me.

‘I had to buy it in London, to be able to get a visa. It cost me £360 for a Moscow-Beijing one-way, second-class train ticket.’ I knew I should have bought the ticket in Moscow – it would have only cost me $300 [£xx]. But it might have taken a much longer time.

‘Have you been away from home for a long time?’ I stretched my arm to help her understand my meaning.

‘Too long, yes,’ Urnaa said. ‘I am in Hungary for seven years. I go there in 1999, and soon after my sister Gunje come to join me. We go back to Mongolia to see family in 2002.’

‘How was that? did you enjoy being back home?’

‘Yes. But very difficult to leave again. You know…’

‘You and Gunje weren’t alone in Budapest, were you?’

‘No. I am a lucky woman. My son work there, too. He live with me in the same flat. Many Mongolians are also working in Budapest. I think about 3,000 Mongolians are now in Budapest… They really work very hard. Many Mongolians choose Hungary, or Czech Republic, or…’

It was twenty minutes past midnight. Gunje was fast sleep up in her bed while Urnaa was lying down reading a bible and dozing to sleep.

‘You are a Christian then?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I don’t go to church often but I read bible to learn things.’

‘What things?’

‘Interesting things. Sometimes I find good and…clever sentences, and I try to remember them,’ she said, showing me the bible. Half the page was marked out in red.
‘You read this a lot, don’t you?’ I said.

‘Yes. But not for belief. It’s for ideas. Good ideas,’ she said confidently.

Then I remember Shatar, a Mongolian student-trader we met on our very first rail trip. When helping him to sell his scarfs along the Siberian stations, he told me he had begun to like reading Marx’ Capital, which is a redundant reading material in Mongolia.

Urnaa isn’t unusual being a converted Christian from this currently largely Buddhist country. In fact, a growing number of churches have been built in the middle of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.

I’ve always found it hard to get to sleep on the first night on a train. We were now stopping at Vladimir, one of the Golden Ring towns and one of the oldest in Russia. We were about 178 kilometers east of Moscow – the train hadn’t really left for that long. Vladimir felt more like a town on the northeast outskirt of Moscow, like all the other Golden Ring towns - Suzdal, Kostroma, Yaroslavl, Rostov Velikiy, Pereslavl-Zalesskiy, and Sergiev Posad. I remember seeing Vladimir’s golden spires and domes of the Assumption Cathedral, and that train trip to Sergiev Posad, where we admired ancient architecture of the Russian Orthodox churches and mostly, the tranquility of the place. Like Sergiev Posad, Vladimir is a monument of centuries of religious construction.