Peace and Calm

Enkh Nomun means peace and calm and I am told it is as good as any hotel in Bayanhongor, a tough, scratchy provincial capital 550km to the west of Ulan Bator, the Mongolian capital. It is a red and blue four-storey house, one of the tallest buildings around, and looks out, upright, with bay windows, over about an acre of gravel and broken up stones that make up most of the surface of the town. Open the front door and a water pipe, four inches of the ground, threatens to trip you up even if you’re not drunk, which a lot of people are at the Enkh Nomun. My room is number 10, on the third floor, up the uneven staircase, and in a mad, unfathomable way, it is a suite. A kind of pimp’s purgatory. Room one, by the door, is empty except for two brown polyester armchairs slammed against the far wall, a broken coatstand and a dark stain in the middle of the floor. The main room is enormous: a double bed made up in pink and orange with a plastic coated headboard, studded with metal bits, and a chest of drawers that flips open upwards, like a desk, but broken, when you pull at the drawers. There is a bedside lamp with a 3-foot lead but the nearest and only socket in the place is about 18 feet away by the bay window whose floor is covered in flies and whole structure speaks of a flimsiness that makes me afraid to go near it. The bathroom is like a Mafiosi abattoir, the place where it ends. It has one of those set-ups where a shower head is attached to the tap like a hose and just hangs, nonchalantly, on a wall of tiles. You see it and you know the time will come when you abandon your pants in the next room, step over the raised lintel onto the cold, strangely moving tiles, and, naked as a prisoner, soap clutched in your free hand, you turn the tap and unloose a watery burst of hell and slipping that may just end with your mouth bloodied, knee banged, teeth missing into the brown maw of the exposed workings of a toilet built with only moderately good intentions in the days when Communism still seemed like it was going somewhere. In fact, the shower could barely dampen me, so it was humiliation I felt, not pain. “Fucking shower,” I said, daring it to break into life. Nothing.