On Saturday night the Tengis kids are making money. The theater is showing the movie “Chinggis Khan,” a Japanese-produced epic about the 13th century founder of the Mongol empire. Liberty Square is overflowing with cars. The children haggle with drivers for money to watch their vehicles. Essentially, they are being paid not to steal. If the owner pays them, the car is left alone. If not, there might not be any side-view mirrors or hubcaps left when he returns.
The movie begins and the crowd disappears into the theater. The kids want to play billiards so we head to the old communist museum. Inside, an enormous Lenin head, 6 feet across, stares down from a pedestal. Communist slogans written in Cyrillic adorn a wall behind it. A dozen dimly lit pool tables sit on the floor below.
The kids are happy, flush with a bit of money. Battulga is playing against Munkhdul, a teenage boy who splits his time between the theater holes and others nearby. As he rolls up his sleeves to break, I see what looks like a giant zipper running up his right forearm. The zipper is actually a series of scars from self-inflicted cuts, arranged in neat rows like hatch marks. There are dozens of them. They commemorate fights, old girlfriends and bad days. Most of the older boys have them.
