Someone will emerge from beyond the dark mountains to the southeast — I wonder who. Every time the door opens and closes, my gaze drifts toward those dark peaks. People whose clothes have faded under the harsh sun, faces darkened and bronzed by the elements. Cross that mountain and you can see the district centre. Most often they are kinspeople whom I know. I can tell who they are by the sound and colour of their motorcycles. Among the relatives, ours is the family living closest to the centre. Those coming from that direction usually make their way to us. To shield their faces from the sun and wind, they fashion masks from their children’s outgrown clothes. People who have ridden for hours over uneven ground, their bodies shaken to the bone, arrive at our door. They pull off their masks and come inside spreading smiles. They always bring gifts — dried curds, yogurt, milk — as if paying for their lodging with whatever they have. And yet the countryside, the home of my kinspeople, is richer and more abundant than the town, where we live.
Many people come. Only my father passes by the doorway of our home without stopping, his engine roaring. He had long ago found another household to stay with. When we would run into each other at the district centre he would often be drunk, which was difficult. In the countryside, a father is best when he is simply a father, the way mine should have been. When mother was away, father would come home drunk. He would coo and fuss, then pull me close and try to kiss me with his foul-smelling lips. As he hugged me and rubbed my back, he would slip his hands beneath my clothes and run them along my spine and stomach. Out of sheer disgust I would clench my fist and swing it like a ball. At such times, a visiting relative — an older brother of sorts — would make him stop. When my father was sober, no one in this world was as poor as he was when you asked for money. But when it came to buying alcohol, he was the richest man alive.
One day father took me with him to a relative’s home to ask for money. “I would sooner give you bones than money,” the man replied. “Get out of here.” And we were chased away together. It was in that moment that I felt shame sink into my very flesh and bones for the first time. After that when word got out that father had money, people came looking to beg from him. I once spotted him not far from our home, outside a yard with a single tree, sitting inside a car with complete strangers. I opened the car door and there was my father, wearing the face of someone who didn’t know me.
“Father, I need money.”
“I don’t have any.”
An unfamiliar older man seated beside him said, “Your father has money. Ask him properly.”
“I don’t have any. Go home.”
“If this is how you were going to raise me, why did you bring me into this world?”
I slammed the car door shut with all the force of a threat and walked home wiping my tears. I was eleven or twelve years old at the time. It was then that I made a silent vow to myself, tears as my witness: I will never again entangle myself with this person and lose my dignity. Without expectation, there is no wound. Shortly after, our family prepared to move to the provincial capital. We packed up the home, bundling everything together. Father had been at a neighbour’s since the previous day. When we were tying up the last of the load he appeared, barefoot and without warning. He helped fasten the bundles, said goodbye, and watched us go.
Years passed, each of us chasing our own lives. It was the winter break of my second year at university and I had come home to our apartment in the provincial capital. Through fragments of conversation between my mother, older brother and sister, I pieced it together: father had gotten drunk, fallen asleep in his car out in the countryside, and frostbitten his feet. He was now at the provincial hospital. Mother said, almost as an aside, “Won’t you children go and visit him just once?” On my siblings’ orders, I bought new clothes, a mobile phone, and a few other necessities, then went to the hospital.
I hadn’t seen him in years. He had aged considerably. He could no longer walk properly. He shuffled now, like a penguin. I looked in on father every now and again until it was time to return to university. We exchanged phone numbers and he began calling. Sometimes I answered. Mostly, I let it ring. I was alone in my dormitory one evening when my phone rang. It was his number. I almost didn’t answer, but it was late and worry got the better of me.
“Hello, my daughter.”
“Hello. Are you well?”
“Fine, fine. The court has been calling me. Apparently I haven’t paid your support in a long time. They say they’ll put me in prison if I don’t pay. You tell your mother to make that business go away. I’ll give you twenty goats. Raise them yourself.”
He called back and then hurled words against mother, insult after insult. Did he also despise me? Because my roommates were there, I stepped outside and listened carefully to every unnecessary word he said. When he finished I came back to the room, climbed straight up to the top bunk and sobbed until I gasped for air. The words themselves weren’t devastating enough to justify tears yet I cried for a very long time. Embarrassingly long. The next morning my friends saw my swollen eyes and asked, “Do your kidneys hurt?”
That spring I went to the countryside to collect the twenty goats. He was nowhere to be found. Later, a relative, Baadai, went in my place. Father gave him only fifteen. The following summer when I went to the countryside, Baadai said he would take me to see father, and we set off early one morning.
We arrived at father’s place. The walls of the ger (the traditional felt tent he lived in) were completely black. I had never seen walls so black. He was alone, bustling about making tea for guests. He paid me no mind. Then he looked at me and it became clear: he had thought I was Baadai’s daughter. He hadn’t recognized me. Had I changed so much? Had his eyesight failed? Neither of us recognized the other.
After that day years passed without me going to the countryside. The wool from the fifteen goats brought in a little money each spring. In my last year at university, father fell ill and had a stroke. Again my siblings were running back and forth between hospitals. Being the youngest, there was little I could do.
Father had come to the city for a medical appointment and was staying at my older sister’s place for a few days. My work brought me there too and we came face to face. I was getting dressed to leave when I heard father and my cousin’s young child doing lessons together. Father read out a sentence and the child wrote it down. His was the voice of a man who had been ill. When he spoke it sounded as though his mouth were full of water. The child, barely in first grade, listened, understood and wrote without error. But what astonished me most was learning that father could read. This man, who had been reckless for as long as I could remember, now sat patiently helping my cousin’s little daughter with her homework. The sight unsettled something deep inside me. So he knows his letters, I thought, genuinely amazed. Since then, his health has neither improved nor worsened. But the wildness that once made him prowl like a steppe wolf has slowly diminished. He spoke occasionally with my siblings, but never with me. Whatever I knew of father I heard through them.
As Tsagaan Sar (the Mongolian Lunar New Year) approached, mother and I grew busier. Mother is a seamstress of Mongolian deel (the traditional robe). Without telling anyone, father had sent a package through a middleman and word came that he “knows what’s needed.” I heard this only from my brother. Inside the package was fabric from an old deel, material to make a new one for the holiday. The lining and trim were missing. I felt like pulling it out and throwing it against the wall rather than sewing it. I cannot sew a deel, only mother can. She had many deels to make, and now she had another one to complete from this worthless bundle of old fabric.
I have never held a grudge against anyone, but I remember the words people have said to me. Once, mother told me, “When your father came courting me as a young man, he would say, ‘What kind of beggar are you? What do you have?’” Hearing that, I felt a pain I had never felt before, as if a sharp blade were slowly slicing through my flesh. Every time it comes to mind the pain returns anew. How does one cage and imprison one’s own thoughts? They arrive without warning. And every time they do I want to pull out that package and hurl it away.
At last, through gritted teeth, I finished father’s deel. An unfamiliar number called: “I’ve come to pick up your father’s deel. I’m at a nearby home. Come and bring it.” The woman’s voice was familiar.
“I can’t. I’m busy. Come and get it yourself,” I said and hung up.
She could not come to our home. She would need to send someone else because the woman coming to collect father’s deel was my mother’s cousin, the woman father had left us for. The threshold of our home was too high for her to cross.
Tsagaan Sar came and my brother had a proposal for me. “I have some free time this year,” he began. “I’m going to the countryside to see father, to go back to where we grew up. Will you come?”
That same unchanging countryside that I had no particular fondness for. Would I go or not? After thinking it over carefully I decided to go. We rode across the open steppe and arrived at father’s place. This time he sat there like a sober man. But his health had worsened. His mouth drooped to one side and his voice was raspy. He still walked like a penguin. I let those lips — long unmet, still smelling of spirits — kiss me in greeting. We sat and talked of near and distant things. And then father’s wife said, “Look at the state your father is in. Something has to be done. He needs to be seen to.” Her words, blunt and plain, rang in my ears.
We left them and visited an elderly grandmother. It would be the last time. We stayed the night at another home and in the morning set out toward the land where we had grown up. I drove father’s battered car. Father called out directions. Suddenly the car died. He climbed out cursing and with trembling hands managed somehow to fix whatever needed fixing. But soon the car died once more. Our journey had no great silences but no great conversations either. From the fragments of talk one thing stayed with me: I learned that September 14th was father’s birthday.
We were travelling through low rolling hills when he suddenly said “Stop here” and I braked in surprise. The place was where my brother and I had been headed all along, the land where we had grown up. For my part, I remembered nothing of it. Ten years ago, when I had last come, it had seemed somehow different. Now it appeared emptied, abandoned, nothing but livestock dung and brown hillsides, solitary and sorrowful.
And yet it was here that my sister, my brother, my mother and my father had laughed with full hearts and been carefree and loving. And now I had come back, out of envy, wondering whether I might be able to reclaim the memories, the family, this land. We climbed to the top of the hill, burned juniper, offered milk to the sky and stood for a long time staring into the distance. I spoke my clan name aloud and cried inwardly: I have come.
I stared and stared until my eyes had taken their fill of the now-unfamiliar brown hills and yellow mountains I could see but could not feel in my heart. I may never come here again. And even if I do I will not have the longing for it that I had this time.
Father sat at the bottom of the the hill. Because he could no longer walk he had fallen behind. What does he think about, sitting there, the poor man?
We descended from the yellowed, rounded mountains and moved on. I held a pebble in the palm of my hand and took a clod of earth from the emptied, abandoned Shireegiin buuts (the ruins of our ancestral homestead), wearing its sadness like a cloak.
We travelled on and arrived at father’s sister’s home. Familiar faces, all somehow empty. The day before a button had come loose from the shoulder seam of father’s deel. I borrowed a needle and thread from the lady of the house, sewed it back on firmly, and we moved on toward Baadai’s home. At every home we visited father greedily drank down the offered spirits and grew tipsy along the way. Since Baadai and the rest of us were heading back to the provincial capital, we agreed to part and go our separate ways. Father shuffled his penguin walk to the side of his battered car and said, “Well then, my children, travel safely,” and turned toward home.
This Tsagaan Sar I had come with one purpose in my heart: to remember the mountains of Shireeg and to let those lips smelling of spirits kiss me once more.
Shirin Abedinirad, Babel Tower, 2015. Interactive installation, Tehran, Iran. Reimagining the spiritual architecture of the Tower of Babel through mirrors, light, and movement, the work draws on the story of a time when humanity shared “just one language and just one place to live freely without boundaries.” Responsive to both audience interaction and changing weather, the installation gathers fragmented views of city, nature, and sky into a shifting meditation on division, connection, and the enduring desire for unity. Artwork courtesy of featured artist Shirin Abedinirad.
