There in the distance you walk my horizon, just as I walk yours. 

—Kim Jungil, “Horizon” 

They were up to tae now. They’d already discussed taedo, taedong, taeran, and taeman, and next was taemyeong. The Korean researchers immediately ruled out as obsolete the first definition for taemyeong (台命), meaning “orders given by high-ranking officials,” and had begun talking about the second taemyeong (胎名), or “nicknames given to fetuses.” Nergüi flipped back and forth between two different Mongolian dictionaries. 

“We do not name babies in the womb,” he declared, adding that there was no equivalent noun in the Mongolian language for taemyeong.

Nergüi was a visiting researcher at the university, sent there to help compile a Korean-Mongolian dictionary. He and the three Korean researchers had spent the last six months choosing which words would go into the dictionary, and now they were nearly at the end. They’d chosen forty-thousand entries already and were planning to add about five thousand more from among words beginning with ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅎ. 

It was nearly lunchtime, their debate over taemyeong dragging on into that ambiguous hour of the day when it would become harder and harder for them to tell whether they were actually debating anything or merely devolving into idle chit-chat. Most of the Korean researchers were young and had had fetal nicknames like Puppy Poo, Lucky Duck, and Dorothy. Professor Park, the most senior among them and heavily pregnant, had named her fetus Janggeumi. She said she’d taken the name from the TV show Jewel in the Palace because her pregnancy had her craving all kinds of old-fashioned royal cuisine, like tarakjuk milk porridge or bamboo shoots with persimmon dressing. All Nergüi ever thought of when he heard the name Dae Jang Geum was a Korean restaurant in downtown Ulaanbaatar. 

“Naming a fetus is frowned upon in Mongolia,” he said. 

The bemused looks on the Koreans’ faces said, ‘Another taboo?’ It wasn’t too far-fetched to call Mongolia the Land of Taboos. Nergüi had explained that the countless do’s and don’ts were the nomads’ way of living in harmony with nature. He still observed the Mongolian superstition about not passing in front of a pregnant person by making sure to get behind Professor Park whenever they were in an elevator or a similar space together. Not that Nergüi was hung up on superstition. He’d gone a long way toward adapting his thoughts and behavior to Korean culture, but it didn’t change the fact that he’d grown up a nomad in the Gobi Desert. Some habits were too deeply ingrained. 

Take migratory birds, for instance. Nergüi told the others that it was taboo on the steppes to count migratory birds. 

“Counting kills birds,” he said. 

Professor Kim, who’d disappointed his parents by being born a boy despite being nicknamed Dorothy in the womb, said, “Uh oh. I used to fall asleep counting wild geese all the time when I was in the Gobi.” 

“But isn’t that only natural?” Professor Park said. “Nergüi, isn’t there a way to release Professor Kim from his curse? From what I remember, taboos are like safes: they can both be unlocked.”

Everyone laughed, including Nergüi. 

Nergüi mimicked a teacher scolding a student. 

“You better not look up at the sky the first time it snows!” 

Professor Kim delightedly agreed. 

“All I have to do is not look up? That’s easy,” he said. 

“Something tells me it won’t be as easy as you think,” Professor Park said. She looked at the clock on the wall and asked Nergüi, “Can you tell us any other funny taboos?” 

That was a clear sign that it was time to break for lunch. Nergüi pondered what else he could share with them, then laughed out loud. 

“Raindrops,” he said. “You must never catch them in your hand.” 

He spread open his palm and pretended to catch the rain. 

“When you do that, the rain clings to you and becomes yours, and in a land where water is precious, that endangers all life. We also do not sew new clothes for babies in the womb. Even though they’re bound for this world, you’re not supposed to do anything for the not-yet born. You have to be very careful. As careful as you are about not saying the name of the sacred Bogd Mountain when you’re in its presence.” 

“You’re supposed to call it Big Mountain instead, right?” 

The Korean researchers recalled Nergüi’s funny way of addressing Professor Park’s pregnancy by asking her, “How is our new person doing?” They’d thought at first that he was being cute, but now they could see how his words carried a deep sense of care. 

“Not that we Koreans are ones to talk about superstition. After all, we’re supposed to give fetuses ugly nicknames to avoid bad luck.” 

“That’s not strictly the case anymore. You see a lot more cutesy nicknames nowadays, along with jokey ones. I met this one woman who named her fetus ‘BTS.’” 

Now the Koreans were having fun with it. 

“And it’s not just fetal names. Ages ago, when infant mortality was really high, people used to have separate amyeong just for childhood. You know, those goofy names parents gave children to trick Death from coming for them? Emperor Gojong and Councilor Hwang Hui had some really good ones, like, Dog Shit and Piggy.” 

“Those weren’t just nicknames?” 

“Nope, those were their actual names when they were children.” 

Nergüi opened the file on his laptop that contained all of the dictionary entries they’d compiled so far and searched for amyeong. Surely they’d gone over it already, but he felt as if he were hearing this noun for the first time. He saw that it had been struck from the list. Their criteria had been to eliminate words that were either fully obsolete or rarely used in daily life, and it seemed that “childhood name” had been ruled out before they could even begin to discuss whether there was an equivalent for it in the Mongolian language. Though Mongolians used plenty of nicknames and terms of endearment, they did not create separate names just for one’s childhood. 

“But you know, we’re just as cautious as Koreans when it comes to naming children. We too choose names to prevent the spirits from messing with them. Take my name, for example. Nergüi means Nameless. My grandfather named me that to prevent misfortune from finding me.” 

“Oh wow, I had no idea that’s what your name means.” 

“Traditionally, there are a lot of names like mine. The name Terbish means Not That One. Khemedekh means Who Knows? There’s another misleading name like that, which translates to No One Knows. Some parents even name their child Khenbish.” 

“Khenbish? Khen . . . bish . . . Nobody? Is that really what it means?” 

“Yes,” Nergüi said with a nod. 

“That’s funny. Dog Shit and Piggy are nothing compared to those.” 

For reasons he couldn’t explain, Nergüi suddenly found himself overcome with longing. He ached with the melancholy of one who’d traveled a long way. His Korean colleagues, and this work of matching up vocabulary words, often had this effect on his mood. He felt himself traveling toward a place that was somehow both strange and welcoming. But naming a baby while it was still in the womb? That struck him as terribly impatient. 

Every time Nergüi spoke, fumbling through explanations, his Korean colleagues listened as intently as if they’d been transported to the Gobi itself. The expressions on their faces said that these encounters with the inner life of the language gave them a much deeper understanding of the nomads’ world than a single night spent in a ger could, and that the whole world seemed to have more commonalities than differences. 

These conversations would end when they suddenly reached one of those life mysteries that couldn’t be resolved by language, and their heads would tilt up as if under some other power, their eyes turning to some distant place. Alas, their voices seemed to sigh. 

“But Nergüi, I bet you’ve caught rainwater in your hand before, haven’t you?” 

“Of course. I’d be crazy to miss out on something that good. When it rains, your hand opens on its own.” 

“That’s right . . . The same way your head lifts when it snows.” 

But even those riddles were not as fascinating as Nergüi’s tale of the tin cans. His colleagues all agreed on this. It was no exaggeration to say that cans were what had made Nergüi the man he was now. Last December, they’d discussed the dictionary entry for can, ggangtong in Korean and лааз for Mongolian. Just like today, his colleagues had spent half the day lost in Nergüi’s story. 

Nergüi had grown up in the southern Gobi Desert, in a distant corner of the steppes whose name meant “many small birch trees.” In actuality, there were few birch trees to be seen. Only sparse patches of hardy grass in a parched wilderness of sand and rock. 

His parents had left to find work in South Korea when Nergüi was four, leaving him in the care of his grandfather. Grandfather Enebish was an elderly camel and sheep herder in his eighties. 

The boy’s parents had told the old man that they would work in Korea for three years and return before Nergüi started school. They sent gifts from abroad that fit right into the grandfather and grandson’s simple life in the ger. There were household goods—a plastic cutting board, a frying pan, a thermos, a trunk—and clothes and toys for Nergüi. The plastic model airplane they’d sent him back then was currently sitting on the desk in Nergüi’s lodgings. 

The gifts took at least a season, sometimes over half a year, to reach them. The nearest city, which had a post office, bank, and school, was a day’s horseback ride away. Grandfather Enebish had grown far too old to make the trip. Fortunately, his younger brother was an elder monk in the city’s temple and always forwarded Nergüi’s parents’ packages to them. He sent them via the temple trucks that made their rounds to purchase wool and camel fur or else tasked younger lamas with hand-delivering them. 

From some point on, grandfather and grandson had become preoccupied with waiting for others. His grandfather would sit for hours on a chair in front of their ger. His line of sight was broken only by the far-off southern horizon, and every now and then, when the normally poker-faced landscape was stirred by columns of dust swirling skyward, he would peer through his old Soviet binoculars. Nergüi, too, would pause in his playing and watch as the cloud of dust slowly moved from east to west, sometimes west to east. Surely it was a passing car, but few travelers ever found reason to enter their valley. 

As Nergüi learned the lay of the land, he came to know that somewhere beyond the southern horizon were his parents, past the northern horizon were the school and city, and to the west was the dinosaur graveyard. 

At five, Nergüi saddled his first horse and took to racing as far as his gaze could reach. The more he raced toward the horizon, the more it retreated, faint and distant. This taught him despair, but also kindled his longing. He felt he was trapped in some very deep place, like where he imagined the night sky must end. He stacked small stones at his heart’s horizons before returning home. The cairns gave him the courage to go further with each ride. 

One day, way out to the east, he came across a jeep carrying travelers, a married couple from Korea, accompanied by a local guide. They followed Nergüi back to his ger. His grandfather always welcomed guests, but he was even more delighted to learn they were Korean. He set out tea and cheese. The man and woman stayed for an hour and boiled instant ramyeon noodles for lunch. 

Grandfather Enebish showed the Koreans the letters and photos the boy’s parents had sent. They told him in turn about the city where the parents worked in a furniture factory. The city had a big lake, they said. They looked at the photo that Nergüi’s parents had taken in front of a fountain and said that it was indeed the same musical fountain found at that lake. They told Nergüi all about the delightful fountain. 

In a voice heavy with emotion, his grandfather said, “It looks like a nice place to live. Your parents are clearly doing well. That’s good.” 

Before the travelers left, they gave them an armful of drinks and snacks. It would be years before Nergüi learned that the gifts they’d given him were Choco Pies and Coca-Cola. Grandfather Enebish treasured the box of Choco Pies and the five cans of Coke as if they’d come from his own son and daughter-in-law. That first taste of Coke etched itself permanently into Nergüi’s memory. His grandfather had the first gulp then sat straight up and let out a rattling belch. Nergüi was terrified by his grandfather’s reaction to the beverage and took a cautious sip. His mouth and throat burned, and he felt like all the air was being sucked out of his body. Unlike the sweetness he was used to, the kind that lingered while barely even registering as sweet, this was a loud burst of sugar that vanished as quickly as it had come. 

The two shared amused looks as they passed the can back and forth. 

“Such an odd flavor,” his grandfather said. “It could shock a dying man back to life.” 

His grandfather set the can down. 

“We’ve been gifted something really precious. Better make it last.” 

Nergüi did as his grandfather suggested and resisted opening a second can for an entire day. The next day, he cracked one open and drank half. He placed the rest in the cupboard. That evening, when he came back in from herding the sheep, he took another sip and found that the flavor had changed. It tasted like nothing more than lukewarm sugar water. He realized that once you opened a can, you had to see it through to the end. 

It was no easy task for a child his age to keep from drinking all five at once. They didn’t last even three days. He displayed the five empty cans along the head of his bed. Each time he looked at them, he was overcome by an unbearable thirst. He even tried filling one with tarag and drinking it that way. Nergüi returned from the outhouse in the middle of the night and wept like a child waking from a nightmare. His grandfather sat up in bed. The boy was holding an empty can. The grandfather understood the enormity of the child’s suffering, and how dreadful a thing this was. 

When Grandfather Enebish was around Nergüi’s age, the socialist government had come in, and some summer after that, a European named Jan and his family became neighbors. 

Jan and his wife were anthropologists. They’d come from some place called Oslo. They said they would be staying for two years to record life in the Gobi. They set up their tent near a well in the summer camp just one hill over, a mere stone’s throw from Enebish’s ger. He’d encountered foreigners before, when Soviet troops had come to conduct surveys, but it was his first time having them as neighbors. 

With Enebish’s family helping Jan’s family out, they all grew close. When the nomads packed up to move from the summer to winter camp, Jan’s family decamped with them. They joined the nomads for every holiday and special event. 

“Jan had a little boy who was the same age as me, named Anders. We were as inseparable as two puppies.” 

The time soon came for the foreign couple to finish up their research and return home. 

The day before they left, Enebish went with his father to help them pack their belongings into their truck. He’d grown so fond of them and missed them so much already. 

“I gave Anders a bow that I’d spent a month making. He gave me these Soviet binoculars.” 

Before returning home, Enebish’s father grabbed the horse’s reins and asked Jan, “Friend, can your home be reached on horseback?” 

Jan smiled at this and nodded. He raised his long arm and gestured like he was tapping his hand against the western sky. 

“The city where I live is out there, where this land and that sky end. We walk the same earth and carry the same sky.” 

He spread his arms wide and embraced Enebish’s father, then gave Enebish a peck on the cheek. 

Enebish wiped away tears the whole ride home. His father consoled him. 

“Just as you have more than one finger on your hand, so people have more than one path. There’s no point in crying over their leaving.” 

The next morning, before the sun had even risen, his mother woke him. 

“Get up, little one. We’re leaving, too. Your father and I talked about it all night. Bring in the camels. Last I saw, the animals were by the black bog.” 

Though he knew it was time for them to move to the summer camp, they didn’t usually leave so abruptly. His father had taken the horses and was already gone. Confused, Enebish went to look for the camels. By the time he’d returned with all twelve, the ger had been dismantled and packed on the cart, and the sheep were being readied. His father had returned and kept hurrying them along. His mother sat in the horse cart while Enebish and his father drove the livestock. 

Enebish was beside himself. He’d promised Anders he would come say goodbye in the morning. But as luck would have it, their path took them over the hill to where Anders and his family were still camped. It seemed that Enebish’s father had had the same idea of saying goodbye on the way. 

Jan and his family had finished breakfast and were packing up. Jan was startled to see them appear with all of their livestock. 

“Are you decamping?” he asked. 

Enebish’s father nodded. With a determined look, he said, “Our family is too sad to see you go. So we’re going with you instead.” 

Looking deeply touched, Jan held his hand out to Enebish’s father. 

“That is the best goodbye I have ever received.” 

Enebish’s father took his hand and said, “We can’t travel as fast as your Swift Horse (and here, he meant Jan’s truck), but we’ll do our best. How many days will it take?” 

At last, Jan realized that the herder’s words had not been in jest. 

“Ah, that’s not possible.” He gazed off to the west and shook his head. “It’s much too far.” 

“No distance is too far as long as horses can go there.” 

“You sound just like Genghis Khan.” 

“Do you mean that you plan to spend the summer on the road?” 

“The road isn’t the problem. It’s the border. Borders are harder to cross than oceans.” 

Enebish’s father didn’t understand. Neither did Enebish nor his mother. 

“Our Mongolian horses can go anywhere. They can fly up to the sky and swim any sea.” 

Jan went to his wife, and they spoke together for a long time. Then he came back and told Enebish’s parents, “She says there’s no grass for your sheep to eat where we live.” 

“You mean there’s even less grass there than in the Gobi?” 

“That’s correct.” 

Enebish’s father’s shoulders sagged. In a disappointed voice, he said, “We cannot go where there is no grass. Friend, please understand that I cannot leave my sheep behind.”

And just like that, Nergüi’s great-grandfather’s dream of migration came to nothing. 

This story always reminded Nergüi of where he had come from and the true Gobi that he’d left so far behind. But how far away was it? It seemed even farther than over the horizon. 

The six years that Nergüi spent in the Gobi with his grandfather were no different. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the introduction of a market economy, the world had changed, and yet Nergüi and his grandfather were oblivious to it all. They’d continued to revere Comrade Lenin and follow the People’s Revolutionary Party. The more he looked back, the sadder he felt to know that a whole life could just fade to nothing. 

The next day, Nergüi’s grandfather pointed at his collection of Coca-Cola cans and asked, “What do you think about throwing those out?” 

Nergüi shook his head. 

“You’ve refused to even look at tarag or camel milk for five days now. If I could sell the sheep to buy you more of that stuff, I would. But there’s nowhere to buy it out here. Our guests only gifted you suffering.” 

His grandfather set a woven leather basket in front of him. 

“Shall I throw them away for you?” 

Nergüi shook his head again and placed the cans in the basket himself. 

He rode his horse to the horizon where he disposed of the cans at a stone tower he’d built and went home. 

When his seventh year was on the verge of ending, a school bag arrived from Korea. It contained a thermos, ten notebooks, a set of twelve crayons, and a pencil case stuffed with pencils and erasers. There was no news of whether his parents were returning. 

Nergüi’s grandfather told him, “This means it’s time for you to go to school.” 

“Even if my parents aren’t back yet?” 

His grandfather looked like he didn’t know how to respond. 

“As Comrade Lenin said, all children should attend school by the time they turn eight. The children of the Gobi are no exception. However, I’ll speak to the authorities. If I tell them that you’ll start when you turn nine instead, they’ll understand. Because your case is special. You can go to school next year when your parents return. It’ll be good for you to go to school in the big city.” 

The school was very far from the Gobi, and the children who went there had to live in dormitories. He could come home during school breaks, but the problem was, who would take the sheep to pasture in the morning and bring them in again at night, and who would check that the camels hadn’t wandered off, if he wasn’t there to do it? Who would fetch water for his grandfather? Who would open the ceiling flap in the morning? 

That was around the time when they learned that Nergüi’s parents had broken up. His grandfather couldn’t hide this tragedy from him. 

Not only would the two of them not be returning home together, but there was no way of knowing whether his mother or his father would ever come to get him. 

“You’re here, so of course someone, either your mother or your father, will come for you. Don’t be too heartbroken over it.” 

But his grandfather was the first to break. First his cough worsened that August, then he spent the autumn confined to bed. A zud struck, starting in early winter, taking many of their sheep with it. His grandfather knew he no longer had the strength to survive as a herder and sold off their remaining livestock. All that was left were two horses to serve as their feet and one elderly dog. 

His grandfather told young Nergüi, 

“Child, grow like the summer sun until you’re big enough to herd again.” 

The year Nergüi turned nine, he spent most of the summer in the dinosaur graveyard to the west. It was a tourist site. Foreign tourists came in droves, and locals made money giving them horse and camel rides. Children Nergüi’s age made pocket money leading the animals around by their reins. Nergüi joined them. The work was fun. The travelers were generous with tips and offered him items from their backpacks that made for nice souvenirs. 

Having sold off their livestock, Nergüi and his grandfather stayed put in the winter camp year-round. They got by on the money sent to them from Korea. 

One day, Nergüi returned to their ger to find his grandfather waiting for him with a gloomy look on his face. There were obvious signs that someone had been to see them. He spotted a sack of salt and some foodstuffs, which told him that it had been the errand runner from his great-uncle’s temple. 

His grandfather set the supper table and waited in silence until Nergüi was done eating. Then he fetched an old, worn-out sack from next to the stove and poured the contents onto the floor. It was the empty cans. Mixed in with the ones that Nergüi had left at the stone cairn was a very old-looking tin can marred with rust. Its khaki color had faded, but it hadn’t lost its shape. Nergüi didn’t understand why his grandfather had brought the cans back and spilled them all over the floor. 

“They haven’t rotted at all.” 

Nergüi listened to his grandfather’s words without responding. 

“Animal bones fall apart. In the Gobi, even rocks decompose, but these laaz do not. It has taken me seventy years to remember their name: лааз. I wish for you to take them far away from here.” 

Nergüi had never heard the word for cans before, and he would never forget that moment of meeting the word for the first time. 

“Where do you want me to throw them away?” Nergüi asked. He thought about the horizons he’d visited. 

“Somewhere far. Very, very far.” 

“Dalanzadgad?” 

“They won’t have a place for disposing of these. You need to go somewhere bigger.” 

“Ulaanbaatar?” 

His grandfather nodded. 

Nergüi was shocked. Ulaanbaatar was five hundred kilometers to the north, a tremendous distance. And his grandfather was telling him to go there alone. Nergüi looked worriedly at him, wondering if his grandfather was joking, or maybe he’d grown so feeble that he’d stopped talking sense. 

“Look at this.” 

His grandfather plucked from among the Coke cans the khaki-colored can that had piqued Nergüi’s curiosity. Dark red sand spilled out. 

“This was a can of ham that your father received from some Soviet troops when he was twelve. I discarded it on a red sand dune, and it has frightened me my entire life to see that it never rots. That has always bothered me. It’s far too dangerous to bury something in the earth that refuses to rot. I think that if you leave these unrotting things here, you too will suffer your whole life.” 

Nergüi could hear the desperation in his grandfather’s voice. There was no other way about it, he had to take this voyage. 

“But Ulaanbaatar is too far. I can’t make it.” 

“Why do you say you can’t make it? Am I telling you to take a hundred sheep with you? All you have to do is take this little sack, so what are you afraid of? If you don’t go, then I’ll have no choice but to go myself.” 

And so Nergüi set out on the road. Before leaving, Nergüi fetched enough water from the well to fill each water jug to brimming. He gathered plenty of well-dried dung for the fire and stacked it next to the ger. 

He placed the cans in his schoolbag. His grandfather lashed a supply of food and water to the saddle, then pulled some cash from his shirt. 

“Go to Dalanzadgad first and look for the monk. He’ll tell you how to find your way from there.” 

Nergüi wept. He’d never left home before. His grandfather gripped the right rein and led Nergüi around the ger three times. 

“I’ll get rid of these and come right back,” Nergüi said. “Please take care until I can return.” 

Nergüi left. 

He rode to the east, passing three stone cairns he’d built. 

After a day of riding, he reached the outskirts of Dalanzadgad. As evening fell, one end of the earth glittered as if the stars had fallen from the sky. He slowly rode into the center of that light. Houses huddled together with fences between them, and large trees stood in rows. There were more cars than horses. Standing beside his horse on the asphalt, Nergüi felt himself shrink. He instinctively avoided the large roads where cars traveled and kept to the alleys. The smell of food and the smoke of cooking fires filled his lungs. 

The temple was not within the city but was instead out past a hill where a monument stood. It was a small temple. Next to the yard with its white stupa was a single poplar tree. A flock of ravens clung to its branches like overripe fruit. He tethered the horse and entered the temple. 

The evening was still and quiet. The thick scent of incense hung in the air. Three lamas of different ages came out to greet him. Nergüi recognized the youngest as the errand runner who’d frequented their ger. 

“Nergüi, what are you doing here?” he asked, clasping Nergüi’s hands. The young lama explained that the elder monk, his grandfather’s younger brother, had left for a pilgrimage to Tibet. 

“He’s been gone three years already. But I can help you in his place with whatever it is you need.” 

The young lama gave him dinner and a bed for the night. 

“Did you know I delivered a letter to your grandfather three days ago? But I wasn’t able to stay long enough to see you.” 

Nergüi nodded. 

“Who was the letter from?” he asked, remembering that the lama always read letters to his grandfather, who couldn’t read himself. 

“The letter was sent from Korea.” 

“From my father or my mother?” 

“Well . . . I can tell you it was your father.” 

The look on the lama’s face said that it was difficult for him to say anything more. When Nergüi explained that he was on his way to dispose of the metal cans, the lama patted his head. 

“Your grandfather must have a lot on his mind. I’ll help you. I’ll find you a ride to Ulaanbaatar. We’ll have to leave early, so you’d better get some rest.” 

At dawn, the lama took Nergüi to a wool collection yard downtown. Nergüi climbed into the passenger seat of a wool truck. 

The driver was kind. He played music loudly the whole day for Nergüi. The Soviet truck was big and old and bounced slowly over the unpaved highway across the steppe. It stopped in at collection points both large and small in the Gobi to load up wool. When night fell, they covered the top of the truck with a canvas tarp and slept on the steppe. 

They were three days out of Dalanzadgad. That afternoon, the driver shook Nergüi awake. 

“Look at that, Country Boy.” 

Nergüi gaped at the enormous smokestacks and the city so tightly packed with houses that none of it looked real. 

“Welcome to Ulaanbaatar,” the driver said with a laugh. 

Nergüi watched an airplane ascend into the western sky. The truck seemed to be headed straight for the smokestacks downtown. Just then, he spotted a towering pile of something by the side of the road. To his shock, it was all metal. An actual mountain of metal. But what really made his heart jump were the familiar looking cans in that mountain. 

“Here!” he shouted at the driver. 

The driver pulled over. 

“This is the place you’re looking for?” 

  “I think so. But, mister? What do they do with all of that?” Nergüi asked, pointing at the cans. 

“They send it to China. China buys it from us.” 

Nergüi jumped down from the truck and said goodbye to the driver. 

“Good luck, kid. If you want a lift back home after, then head to the place I told you about.” 

Nergüi walked into the open-air junkyard. There wasn’t even a gate or door. Inside were brown mountains of broken-down cars, harnesses, factory parts, cables, signboards. Nergüi reached yet another mountain of metal cans and took off his backpack. He added his cans to the pile. Like rain drops falling into a stream, his were soon unrecognizable from the other cans. He couldn’t believe how easy it was to get rid of them. Now, he was terribly eager to get back to his grandfather. He walked out of the junkyard, glancing back as he went. 

This was where Nergüi’s story of the cans ended. 

If the boy had his version of the story, then the grown-ups had theirs. On his way out of the junkyard, Nergüi ran into a youngish woman. The woman was holding a baby. She studied Nergüi. The woman looked very familiar to him. She spoke first. 

“Nergüi? Is that you?” 

The woman came running and threw her arms around him. 

“Baby, let me get a look at you.” 

She stroked his face as tears ran down her own. Nergüi couldn’t believe what was happening to him. 

“Mama, I came to throw away some cans,” he mumbled. 

“Yes, baby. Yes, you did . . . Well done. I see that your grandfather sent you.” 

Nergüi’s story did not end with the dramatic reunion with his mother. His mother had returned from Korea several years earlier and remarried. The junkyard was her home. 

Several days later, Nergüi accompanied his mother to the airport to retrieve her ex-husband’s ashes. She had Nergüi go ahead of her. 

“Your father has been waiting for you here for five months, because you and your grandfather are the only ones who can claim him. But now it’s done.” 

Nergüi never returned to the Gobi to Grandfather Enebish. The way the grown-ups told it, packing up the cans and sending Nergüi on that long trip was his grandfather’s way of saying that he was taking his own final journey. That was the way of the Gobi, was what Nergüi told his fellow researchers.