A Year at River Mountain Page 10

  Old women spoke at the meeting, almost singing, like children before they need the world, garbling words due to lack of teeth and the intense cold. Short leathery old sages with round lined faces. The cold grey air hung in thin light from the storehouse windows; toward the rafters smoke gathered in a brown pall. An old woman danced foot to foot, crazy as a pot, and yet the music in her voice turned every face in her direction.

  The old monks nodded their heads and she really began to wail, her hands flying about her ears.

  JUEYIN SHU

  I crossed the bridge, walked the river west. (Do you feel anything? Nothing? A sick feeling? Here we fucking go again?) Song Wei’s skin, flashlights, the boys and men. (Is it here where the reeds along the curved bank are blood red in winter?) Probably upstream was the wrong direction. Back at the bridge ice sheets were shattering against the pilings.

  Zhou Yiyuan joined me and we teetered on crusted snow slowly east toward the gorge, dainty steps. After about ten minutes huge flakes began to fall. “We have something to unravel together,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You know,” he said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Oh yes.” He pranced like a madman, black hair swinging, upturned face all angles and disgust. He pushed me hard and I almost toppled into the purling water.

  I regained my feet and looked down. Beneath his wet black hair his forehead was pale and vulnerable. “Do you want me to see your sister?”

  HEART SHU

  The memory of someone’s death is enough; the day need not include anything else. The day of your death is already filled with itself. Weather heavy. Landscape muffled. Figures distant.

  GOVERNOR SHU

  I’m imagining what it will be like. Let me see if I have your death right. That winter after the friends visit. Brandy and milk in the microwave oven. Stain in the clawfoot tub. Your wildcraft remedy. The big house where you keep your things. I only want what might slip through your fingers when you cross that line. A clue, I think, that would serve me now.

  I ran into the freezing dawn and found an intact nest!

  DIAPHRAGM SHU

  So I visited Zhou Yiyuan and his sister. We sat on old carpets over the dirt floor beside a pile of dried mud and they showed me a small tree they had decorated with cloth stars, in my honour, for Christmas, for crissakes. I chanted with Zhou and his sister and some villagers round the fire in their room and in the dim light I could not tell if she was really pregnant. She seemed thin, her face gaunt.

  Whisky flowed the winter of my wife’s death. In Vancouver, I sat with best friends in front of their natural-gas fire while they held a throwaway lighter to their mortgage and, slightly nervous as they glanced at me, laughed about their success and my redundant divorce.

  These villagers own next to nothing. More crowded in, smiling to see the tree. Zhou retreated to the shadows, anger threatening to erupt. Shivering children gathered outside the shack and stared in at us, their eyes quick and hungry, as we sipped tea, clutching our bowls. Then I walked uphill through the smoke from village fires and turned to look at the river, black gulf in the snowscape, and saw my own breath rising into night.

  LIVER SHU

  I fell into one of the seasonal streams that run this time of year down the north-facing hillside below an old battle site. Drawn again, you notice, to the wicked south paths, to the bend in the river where the rape took place. It was dark, early morning, and I wasn’t properly awake, but stood in the reeds and stared a long time at the log Song Wei had been draped over, black bile in my throat, and then turned and slipped. I was no sooner in the shallow icy water than I was out, cursing the stars, recrossing the bridge to change my robe before climbing the hill to calm myself at the storehouse fire, and then trudging to the temple where I was late and bruised for silken movements.

  GALL BLADDER SHU

  The rest of the day was so: emotional hesitancy; look no one in the eye; curse myself and winter; do nothing but stare through the storehouse windows. I know why I fell. The valley point has to do with family and home and sex, and in that wheeling constellation I got lost. Must I have a plainer statement for you or for the master? What would you have me do? (Quit your whining, do I hear?)

  Outside, the sky puffs up grey around the tall bamboo. Ice discs lie on the snow, one for each barrel under the storehouse roof; a small wave from a drop radiates to the barrel lip. Close my eyes, all I see is Imogen’s body: once when I worked on her I fell into the plane of her belly between navel and pubic bone, at Ren-4, Gate of Origin, yin fire, the fire closest to heart’s minister . . .

  SPLEEN SHU

  Here’s mine. Family at the end of the universe, we sat together on the bed of our East Van house and watched Star Wars: laugh-track robots and idiot humans, incomparable adventure, pure noise and bombast. One becomes Four; Two becomes Five; Three becomes Six. What would they think of next? The father saves the son. The son saves the father. The son burns the father. In Vancouver before we separated we were a family of three at the end of the short December day, solstice tree in the corner hung with white lights. Popcorn passed from lap to lap. Once upon a time. Mandarin oranges peeled and divided. Tu Fu’s translated poems on the floor. Meanwhile, in Ch’eng-tu, beyond the Ch’in Ling Mountains, Tu Fu found his thatch hut. The year 766 — Western count — Tibet about to invade again. What are we concocting? Homunculus from a retort or binary Yoda? Remember it always, I will. My father’s ashes drifting off Striding Edge in the Lake District. Now that valley. Now this valley. Now the bell. Now my son. Now yours?

  STOMACH SHU

  It’s Christmas Eve. I see my life stretched behind me, each summer a vector, a blade, path to a place not home but like home: a facsimile of home, and ahead there’s Imogen in river light, in a white dress, hair a curtain, a tall white swan with folded wings stopped on the edge of the bridge. Somewhere, even now, you breathe air. You go to sleep. Make a call. Mark your place in the book before putting it down. Perhaps. Although I’m closer I still can’t find words to tell that I witnessed a brutal act and did nothing. Can the place of rape be the valley point? The tether between human and nature? Unimaginable, another person’s life. Mine included. Fathoms deep.

  SANJIAO SHU

  It’s good to be alive, close to the bamboo and river, in the warm storehouse library, studying this formal life represented in woodblock prints. Black ink, white page. Stillness dozing inside paper. The new shoots. The old. The new shoots the old. Once Upon a Time in the West. The old West is the new East. Elsewhere Christ’s birth.

  KIDNEY SHU

  A thousand birds come down to the river, to the streams and frozen ditches; flocks sing in the forest, gulls mutter on top of the storehouse roof and a songbird calls from the warrior tree; bird tracks maze every white expanse. Imagine taking scissors and cutting the grey clouds to make a roof — and it isn’t guesswork, clockwork or binary work, but a strict emphatic statement. A swift act to do with time, the absence of space. A pulse. Outgrowth of the human pulse. This feather as physical song. Invisible embrace in place of buildings.

  SEA OF QI SHU

  Eating the first meal today I broke a tooth. Wind and subzero temperatures, the exposed fallen grasses white and the bamboo whistling. Terrible, the end of teeth. When teeth start rotting and crumbling there’s not much time left and every look from every person, if annoying, is a wondrous event. The achy path leads downhill, bump bump bump, rocks jagged and the climate wetter and colder, till I’m toothless, beyond pain, on a frosty skerry beach, my fingers numb, my lungs flapping like dead leaves.

  LARGE INTESTINE SHU

  All morning I collected fallen branches and broke them into pieces to burn, even the smallest twig, so the snow was free of leaves and bits of wood. From down here I watched Frank’s distant figure strike the bell and slowly make his way back to his hut. Today’s the finest, sunniest, coldest we’ve had in weeks. My tooth pain is gone. Villagers and monks came out to greet one another and stood
blinking together, the men in ceremonial clothes and the women and children dancing from noon till now, till it’s quiet. The blinding sun skips along the south hills, the pines bristling copper, and the combined smoke from our fires slinks east and the Northern Dipper, origin of yin and yang, faces half a moon and a sheer universe.

  GATE OF ORIGIN SHU

  Life has shape, shape and form, schedule. The rape point is blue, spiralling with energy. If I name it I implicate myself. Family is open to what will sprout. Other shapes, including who I was in the past, who you are, randomly drawn, unfinished, are the work of an amateur. What we do alone is useless. What we do alone is without form.

  SMALL INTESTINE SHU

  But answers seem less relevant than fresh snow on the mountain. Our roof is a long cloud blowing off the peak. This morning the bell rang and the monks chanted and the deficiencies and excesses arm-wrestled and the tea was cold and what did I care whether Frank greeted me or not? These healing places are warrens of disintegrating efficiency with too many patients, too few nurses, with diseases more and more specific and the hunt for causes ridiculous. This drug will target the toothless poet raving in the distance, five fields away. That trial. I am pregnant because I raped myself. That syndrome.

  BLADDER SHU

  Bottom of the Shu ladder, just beginning the buttock hill climb. Fucking bell. Fucking monks. Fucking valley and river. Fucking tree. Fucking bamboo. What I wouldn’t give for a coffee. Fucking snow.

  JANUARY

  MID-SPINE SHU

  TODAY THE SAME AS YESTERDAY, WITH FREEZING RAIN, now a small storm passing over, with small winds. Except I’m in love and we are at war. A monk I don’t know well said he thought our life here was complete, but that he wanted something more. A disturbing thing to say, and shocking that he should speak at all. There are four factions involved in border disputes and government forces are on the move. Mist veils the other side of the valley. The trees are like ghost armies. One moment there, the next gone. The sleet crackles with expectancy. We’re chanting because penguins and polar bears have abandoned their centuries-old tracks and extinction is contagious and the edges of Wall Street are crumbling and billionaires can’t help rolling on. A dead soldier in blue-and-white winter uniform rides the river ice. We pray for balance. The valley is apprehensive: rogue winds, some warm, some cold, run above the wild streams. It’s hard to concentrate. My broken tooth does not hurt, but its jagged edge has torn my cheek. We chant the things lost or given up. We do not wait for anything. Even on a day like this, sodden and without colour, birds fly sideways down to the bridge timbers, perch, then fly off and out of sight, and children run along the paths and go quiet near shrines and the temple.

  WHITE ESSENCE, JADE RING SHU

  Jewels on every branch when the rain briefly stops. We pray for long ceasefires. Let this be the end of wars, not the end of the world. Don’t let all we love pass away. The fourth movement, sehr langsam, of Mahler’s Fifth. Why did earth move from its place in the centre of the square formed by water, fire, metal and wood, to its present location between fire and metal? Did it happen when we understood that the centre was empty? That God was fishing another pond? The five-element diagram that looked like two integrated sand timers now resembles a star trapped in a house. The jig is up! We have been cosy and bored. As a father I wanted everything the mother had. Everything except pain and occupation. Water in my mouth tingles and shimmers. The broken tooth calls less often to the tongue. All over the valley the sound of water.

  UPPER CREVICE

  I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Service, I suppose. Not work. This moment, between sweeping the shrines and silken movements, is borrowed from a day of physical praise. Sun on the water. Amazing light through the clouds, and a boat, a boat pushing upstream, against the flow. Water, wind, reeds and chanting going east, while this boat steams west. Deep clouds, sun in shifting patches on distant snowy fields. Somewhere in these images is Einstein behind a desk, writing equations with his legs crossed. I’m tired and it’s beginning to rain. Service is what we have called work, service to state, nation or God. A duty, a birthright, a horror of laziness? I don’t have a name for work now.

  Smoke puffs from the little crooked stack, and the boat rocks gently, grey weathered hull and plywood housing rattling with the chug of the motor, propeller surging the full river, ice on the margins, wind vexing prayer flags.

  SECOND CREVICE

  The boat struggling upstream carried a father and three daughters, the middle sister beautiful, the family escaping skirmishes in the East province, the mother killed. With just a little fuel left, they had to come ashore. We fed them in the shabby camp below the monastery, didn’t want them in the grounds, and Frank came down from his perch to bring them sufficient fuel to continue.

  When they cast off I watched the father ease forward the throttle. The girls huddled in the lee of the wheelhouse and looked around at the flooding river, our buildings on the hillside, the mountain masked in thunderheads. Wrapped in their layers of clothes, hair flapping, they seemed a bright guarantee of life’s flow.

  Settlement children on the bank chased the boat as it swung away from shore into the centre channel, the daughters craning their necks as the father steered the next bend.

  MIDDLE CREVICE

  Snow. Sleet. Wind. Snow.

  LOWER CREVICE

  No dawn, only an extension of night, an overall milkiness several hours long waning into another night.

  YANG MEETING

  Brigands invade the valley and one of them cuts me open, guts me like a fish. The mountain explodes. Mountain Temple has been pierced on its east side by a huge uprooted tree and Spring Shrine has vanished.

  In the storehouse a monk is eating alone, one who has never been friendly to me. When I speak to him, he shrugs and continues eating.

  In my former life dreams didn’t interest me and the large stories only mattered as backdrop against which we wrestled with our shaky existences. After the seals, the ferry, weeks of fog, I was escorted by Jake over the Iron Workers’ Memorial Bridge, then flew across the ocean. That rift in my life so dark; I still can’t assess what was seal, what was sea.

  When I left the storehouse, I saw Song Wei near the river and hurried down through the gates and caught up to her on the bridge and followed her across and east into the steppeland of scrubby leafless brambles, tracking her wild leaps in the undisturbed snow till both of us were scrambling. “Wait!”

  She stopped and faced me, her mouth open and hair blown loose, her breath rich with metal.

  “Are you sick?”

  “No. I am well.”

  “You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.”

  With a quick gathering of clothes, she crouched to piss. Thin young bamboo poked through the snow, the leaves trembling. She stood, her belly a round taut curve. She turned to show me, to let me know, then refastened her clothes and laughed.

  “Fine?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “I am in love with you.”

  Let me sit still and concentrate. A war is without significance unless it comes ashore. The boat was slow, sailing upstream. Probably, it had a well-caulked hull, and supplies for a while. The family had lost everything, but soon they’d be safe.

  HOLD AND SUPPORT

  The child was playing on the bridge deck with a wooden top while the father leaned, smoking, on the railing, the river charging and swirling just beneath their feet. They did not look at me.

  I still don’t know who this man is. He seems unconnected to the other villagers. He and his son arrived a month ago and we see them only occasionally. They keep to themselves, though I’ve seen the women give them food. I don’t know where they sleep. This sighting comes the morning of my own son’s birthday.

  I woke up buoyed by joy — Song Wei’s face, her eyes shining — then remembered the turmoil. And then I came upon the boy with his top, his narrow shoulders shifting as he made it spin and spin. Nothing can disturb the tu
rning point if all else is fair, and if all is not fair disturbance will produce a wobble.

  How can I blast out of the grand personal and live like a monk, each moment enough, despite mouth pain and the pull of Song Wei’s eyes and the galloping signs of every imaginable disorder?

  Stop the lens down and here’s what you get: a darker world with sharper edges. I hated seeing myself in old footage — those boasting skinny nervous roles — so I avoided my early TV and movie work until I turned fifty. Then I watched each film, studied myself carefully to find the source of such youthful confidence and bravado.

  Add time to the exposure and things are brighter and less stable: ghosts appear and buildings are less solid. Uphill the temple, surrounded by snow, snow thick on its roof, seems hefty and beautiful against the white mountain.

  Frank’s hands were shaking when he turned from releasing the timber to sound the midmorning bell, the tremor touching his whole frame before the echo reached the two of us on the mound above the spring. The noise prevented him from hearing my presence, but he was smiling as he shuffled over the trampled snow. I shouldn’t have been there since no one must witness the bell struck, but I hadn’t spoken to him in weeks. It was clamorous on the stone hill, the waves tolling back and forth across the valley, the yellow sky curdled. Below us, beyond the temple and storehouse, people were industrious, their lives visible just ahead of their bladelike bodies. How slowly they advanced in the pure land. How certainly.

  “Frank.”

  “It’s you. How was your trip?”

  “The master is pleased.”

  “Good.”

  “How are you?”

  “Good for an old guy. What d’you want?”