Country Driving [44]
Periodically other employees walked past, along with groups of drunken cadres, and everybody grinned when they saw us together. The woman didn’t seem to mind. “When I first started giving tours,” she said, “people complained because I talked about the Mongols—the Mongol leader, the Mongol victories, the Mongol empire. They wanted me to say it was all Chinese. So the leaders criticized me and now I have to say that it’s Chinese, but I don’t believe it. Even so, the way that I tell the stories isn’t the same as other tour guides. People tell me it’s different. I don’t know exactly how, but it’s different in some way.”
“Maybe it’s different because you say the museum is all garbage,” I said, and she laughed.
“It’s different because I’m different from other people,” she said. “I talk with strangers, and women aren’t supposed to do that. My boyfriend doesn’t like that.”
On the bench she had edged closer, and now I could feel her leg against my thigh. Her breath came strong—the sickly-sweet smell of baijiu.
“Actually,” she said, “I don’t like my boyfriend very much.”
It seemed like a good time to change the subject, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. She studied my face closely, looking into my eyes, and finally she spoke. “Are you a spy?” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m a writer. I told you, I write articles and books.”
She pressed closer. “If you’re a spy, you can tell me,” she said in a low voice. “I promise I won’t tell anybody.”
“Honest, I’m not.”
“Come on!” Her tone was pleading. “You’re here alone, you speak Chinese, you’re in Inner Mongolia, you drove your own car. Of course you’re a spy! Can’t you just tell me the truth?”
“I am telling you the truth,” I said. “I’m not a spy. Anyway, why would a spy go to Genghis Khan’s mausoleum?”
She pondered this and looked crestfallen. “I’ve always wanted to meet a spy,” she said in a small voice. “I wish you really were one.”
The woman seemed less drunk now and she asked to write her name and phone number in my notebook, in case I ever returned. She wrote the words carefully, in both Chinese and Mongolian, and then she sketched a picture. It was the sun—childlike rays around a ball of flame.
FOR THREE HUNDRED MILES I followed small roads through the southern borderlands of the Ordos. Usually the Great Wall was nearby, marked on my Sinomaps, but from the roads it was rarely visible. Sometimes I drove for an hour without seeing another car; when I turned on the radio, all I heard was Mongolian. Occasionally the wind picked up and a small sandstorm swept across the blacktop, the grit moving in waves like it was liquid. Near the Shaanxi border I saw two hitchhikers petting the invisible dog. One of them was an old man, and he shouted when I pulled over: “How much to Jingbian?”
I told him I was heading in that direction anyway. Jingbian is a small city near the Great Wall; the name means “Pacify the Border.”
“No money?” the man said in surprise. He asked where I had come from, and I said Beijing. He seemed slightly deaf—he leaned forward and shouted every time he spoke. “Can we bring these bags?” he yelled.
“Of course,” I said. “What’s in them?”
“Salt! It’s from my daughter’s farm!”
I opened the back of the City Special and helped the man lift the bags—they were fifty pounds each. That was the only major food group I had been missing; now the Jeep was fully stocked with Coke, Gatorade, Oreos, Dove bars, and Ordos salt. The old man planned to sell the salt in Jingbian. The moment he got inside the vehicle he shouted another question. “Do you know Han Heliu?”
“Who?”
“Han Heliu!