The End of the World

by Tina Marie Serra Joaquim (Germany)

A leap into the unknown Mongolia

November 2014. Foreigners come to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, to flirt with the end of the world, but the truly stupid get work visas and then go past it. Forty hours past it, to be precise, nonstop, in a bus packed with car parts and sheep herders and the occasional sheep. The paved road gives out in Bayankhongor, twelve hours in, and from there it’s 28 more eyeball-rattling hours to Khovd, the so-called “Capital of the West.” Whoever first took to calling Khovd the capital of anything had either never been there or was prepared to use the term extremely loosely in a town where cows regularly blocked traffic on one of the two paved roads. As expats, our lives were a study in confused hilarity, especially when it came to domesticated livestock. Suburban petting zoos had not prepared us for the goats wandering into the delguur corner stores while we shopped or the cows that upended our dumpsters and combed through the rotting contents for vegetable peelings. It was the kind of place where people rode horses to the market and our coworkers killed sheep with a nonchalance we found alarming—partly because they did it in front of us, partly because the Mongolian method of choice involves making a slit in the abdomen, sticking an arm in, and cutting off circulation to the heart. The head was blowtorched and given to a neighbor; the amputated legs were thrown to the dogs. Western Mongolia was not a great place to be edible meat. So I wasn’t particularly surprised one afternoon to receive a phone call. “Hey, we’ve got him. Can we kill him at yours?” The “him” in question was the second-largest turkey in Erdenbüren soum, a small village an hour away, and he was at that moment lying in the back of a truck with his wings and legs duct-taped while Ben, one of the Khovd Peace Corps contingent, navigated the trilingual language divide and tried to give the Kazakh driver directions. We’d Googled this moment, and by the time Ben came up the stairs with turkey in arm and shadowed by several curious Mongol children, the borrowed knives were already lined up on the table, sharp enough to do the job—we assumed. We’d also acquired a stun gun from one of our own (peace of mind for her parents, mercy for the turkey), and a handle of vodka (to pass the time). Outside the temperature had plummeted into the -20s, so the turkey was placed, for lack of a better holding pen, in the shower. There, he hysterically gobbled at anyone who needed the bathroom…for the next six hours, until the running water came back on and we could boil enough in which to soak a dead turkey and pluck it. The slaughter was performed by several drunk Americans crammed into my tiny bathroom, bumping into each other and the washing machine and the toilet but still carving just enough space in the air with their elbows to hack off a turkey head and underscore their white, suburban masculinity with fowl death in Central Asia. It was bloody, feathery, and successful; we did in the end have a dead turkey, and only a few of the more enthusiastic vodka drinkers had managed to shock themselves with the stun gun. The turkey’s neck was cauterized with an iron pan heated on the stove top; we took turns plucking out the feathers and stuffing them into plastic bags, destined to be later upended and scattered by the dumpster-diving cows. The second-largest turkey in Erdenbüren soum’s world ended rather unceremoniously, headless and upside-down, bleeding onto conveniently pink tiles, his body cooked and eaten with mashed potatoes and apple pie in the most Mongolian of American Thanksgivings. Still, he marked us with more than just his flesh and his murder; he left my bathroom tinged with an animal musk that persisted for months, despite numerous deep cleanings.