Datsan

Kalmykia is the only Buddhist republic in Europe. It’s an oddity you can reach by bus, even as a schoolkid from Stavropol.

In eighth grade school had nothing to do with it: we’d formed a little gang of friends, somebody got hold of an intercity bus timetable, we lied to our parents about some sort of dacha and rode to Elista on our own. Three hundred kilometres of steppe to Elista. In winter the steppe works by subtraction: it subtracts everything from the horizon and leaves only the horizon itself — and the bus driving across whatever remains.

By morning we arrived in Elista. The town sits in the middle of the steppe, and inside it stands a district called City-Chess: pastel cottages with chess pieces in their courtyards, a giant board on the main square. Ilyumzhinov built all this for the ’98 Olympiad, and at that point the entire district stuck out of the steppe like a stage set forgotten after the shoot. Kalmyks played chess on benches in their courtyards, drank tea with milk and salt, and spoke a language closer to Mongolian than to Russian. The result was a small Asia in the middle of the steppe: a bronze Buddha in lotus posture stood on every corner, without any Orthodox underlay.

The old datsan — Geden Sheddup Choikorling — was brand new back then, modest and wooden, — no gilding yet, no choral singing, none of the tourist genre. (The Great Khurul, “The Golden Abode of Buddha Shakyamuni,” wouldn’t be built for another seven years.) Inside sat yellow-faced lamas in burgundy robes, and the air smelled of lamp oil, of some kind of herb, and of something else — warm, dry, unfamiliar.

An eighth-grader from Stavropol stood in that datsan without knowing he was looking at programmers. What he did know for certain was one thing: going back to the Orthodoxy in which he had never even been baptised was, after that morning, not on the cards under any scenario. Whatever was going on in this small steppe Asia, it was being done more carefully and without melodrama. On the bus back I settled it with myself: I am a Buddhist, — just like that, without initiations, certificates, or books. That decision, made in eighth grade on the back seat, turned out to be one of the most stable in my biography.