A Year at River Mountain Read online

“Just to say hello.”

  “Well, then.”

  “There’s trouble this winter.”

  “There is.”

  “May I shake your hand?”

  “Of course.” He thrust out his arm.

  Through my fingers I felt the quick passage of life through his body. I set a finger on Back Ravine and his body undulated like a herringbone sky. Then I left him on his summit, and wound my way down the path to the spring. Splinters of ice surrounded the clear black water under the pine branches.

  As I passed the temple, the silver pond blinded me, ducks skating the surface.

  Frank is back in our world. He showed up in the storehouse, wild with talk, to register us with arched eyebrows and body tremors. He said the bell was no longer haunted. He had listened to the ghosts.

  This afternoon he visited my corner of the storehouse to speak about America. He stood wavering, his hand light on my arm, gazing off into the books, and told me about a horse he once worked with, its smell, its threadbare coat and low voice, the thud of its heart.

  “I am in love,” I said.

  He waved his hand. “What does the master know about the fighting?”

  “He hasn’t told us.”

  At the open door we listened to wind in the bamboo.

  “That old lame horse locked her legs in front of me and her breath was sweet and loud, and she just died.”

  I walked him outside and watched him pick his way carefully uphill, and a short time later I heard the bell and saw my son walking away down a grey street. I loved and lost him. Imogen. Song Wei. Her baby. Frank’s bells are a sonic support for all of this.

  GATE OF ABUNDANCE

  Another windstorm. Sporadic artillery at night. More boats. The valley a concoction of curving energies, the scorpion tail of spring, yang beating on yin, our fires guttering. Outside the storehouse door are epic clouds and on the bridge gulls, the first this winter, snow blowing in from the south. Last night I slept only a few hours, and woke amazed at the difference between my life now and my life then. My earliest adult memory is the one of being dropped off by my mother on the freeway, nothing in my pockets, sleeping in a ditch and waking at dawn covered in volcanic ash to birds and the quiet highway, believing the world dead, until the day’s first traffic proved me wrong.

  What is your earliest memory?

  Surely not driving a Fiat sedan across a ravine on a derelict rail trestle one summer in shrub country north of the desert, a kid in the back seat, bumping over square timbers, a blue lake far below?

  No. This was my small family. Before the real acting began, before you caught my eye, and before the raising of a child. Before debt and waiting and everything.

  FLOATING CLEFT

  Each day was a single fluid gesture. Then when I realised you were real, I lay curled up on the floor for hours at a time in long depression, until there came a kind of itch only you could scratch, and the succession of great roles. But I never arrived where I believed I was going; your fault, audience member, witness, reader, judge. I’m still not where I think I am and I’m still reaching out to you.

  My forebears shift uneasily among the valley ghosts and twisting storms, kicking stones in their panic. Where are we? This is water’s home, I tell them. And where is that? Water’s home is a warren of passages under the Milky Way. The Milky Way?

  Snow hisses through the open doorway, melting on the platform, but not on the cold packed earth. Hypnotic snowflakes, fat white bees, slow and change direction. Dark birds flash among the flakes, vanish in the trees.

  A child is missing. We must go out while the snow is still falling. Zhou Yiyuan came, half-crazy, to the storehouse, and said his sister was bleeding and she could not stand up and a child was lost, a girl, her footsteps before they were covered following the path beyond the temple.

  I have been through North Gate and a little way up the mountain. Wind screaming in the trees. Huge gusts flinging snow and branches in our faces. We found the girl, not quite dead, almost buried in snow, under the heavy branch of a tree. Snow had blown against her back. Her face, turned to the base of the tree, was a bruise in all that white. What I once would have called a miracle. I helped carry her down to the village, exhilaration pumping my blood, where Zhou Yiyuan pressed my hands and said all was well.

  Now the girl is sleeping and I can’t feel my feet. I am very cold. When I shut my eyes there’s an afterimage of swarming flakes. Song Wei is fine, the unborn baby too, although there was blood. So Zhou Yiyuan may be trusted. What a confluence of inexplicable things.

  Listen to them singing, these villagers I know nothing about, as little as I know about the river. They say once it has entered the sea it ascends in a Great Goodbye, turning back the way it came as a river of stars.

  OUTSIDE THE CROOK

  The countryside is still. Then a bird lifts from a branch and flies through a spray of snow, and I find a white feather buried quill up. Shooting pains in my fingers from hauling disks of ice from the water barrels.

  It must be beauty, what aches in my feet and hands. The pain is blood. Life coming slowly home. Another return. Stars in the sky, now through the trees, now starlight through the earth.

  MIDDLE OF THE CROOK

  The child has gone wild. After sleeping for a day, she vanished again, her tracks again leading through North Gate and up the mountain. The first rescue party had to return because this time she’d climbed quickly and had already gone beyond where we’d found her last. Monks with supplies and ropes were sent out but by late afternoon had not returned. The master gathered us above the temple as light faded, in the small cut between the bell mound and the gate. Footprints showed every monk’s passage, a crazy history. At our feet, the spring was frozen and the land outside the gate looked dark and frightening.

  “She is not lost,” he said. He coughed for a moment. “There are valleys so steep and dark that only hermit monks have seen them.” He waited, pale and silent, his robes flapping against his thin ankles. “These valleys can’t be found by those who seek them.”

  This evening a half-moon lit the snow and I sat with Song Wei by the fire in her brother’s shack, listening to distant guns, all guilt and fever because I did not join the searchers on the mountain; because I had not written to Imogen; because I had nothing to tell the master.

  Now they say there are three fronts to the conflict, though a ceasefire is being negotiated, underwritten by the arrival of international forces. I remember it was in Kitsilano looking over to the North Shore that I became aware that mountains would outlast the fever (call it loneliness, call it heartbreak, call it commerce) that drives humans to the snowline.

  ATTACHED BRANCH

  The terraces are frozen. My fingers can’t hold the pen. My left hand aches. It’s a wrinkled and spotted thing with grey skin pouched at the knuckles. Snow has not fallen since the day before yesterday and the temperature has risen enough to thaw the south-facing fronts of the temple and storehouse. The pine forest is loud with shouting crows. By day the sun shines and great icicles hang from the roofs.

  The party came home without the child. The village men are silent, the women praying. Two fresh monks have left to try to find her body before the next snowfall.

  DOOR OF THE CORPOREAL SOUL

  The master has retired to his room. All morning we worked outside, often glancing up toward Mountain Temple, expecting two exhausted figures, one burdened with the body of a child, then in the afternoon we began to catalogue the old records. Many are damaged by mice or by water. All the storehouse braziers were lit, despite the sun, and we luxuriated in the heat. My feet and hands at last felt warm.

  This evening old monks recounted the ancient war between the North and South, when the last armies of the South were hunted by a union of Northern chieftains to a remote valley near the end of the empire, where they rallied around a young prince who had been wounded in the foot. Almost no one survived the long final battle, which took place nearby, though the location is widely
contested.

  VITAL REGION SHU

  Warm wind howls all day, unnaturally steady. The master is sick. The girl is lost. We sense unbearable tension on the plains south. It is impossible to imagine spring. We have an unnameable debt to pay and warlords are parking their Jeeps on the far side of the bridge. Another chorus of slamming car doors.

  The mind’s complexity confounds me. Once, at a film festival in Italy, I walked out of a panel discussion, furious at the stupidity of the audience’s questions (not yours, no, though you were certainly there) and their aggressive fawning, and went to the little kiosk in the square to buy cigarettes. On this soft blue day the tobacco, rich and dark, was the best I had ever tasted. I abandoned myself to the beautiful light and walked uphill from the piazza into the old town where, on a cliff above the harbour, was an ancient buttressed church, the drop sheer from its pitted south wall. The church door, at the top of a flight of worn stone steps, was scarred and crisscrossed with iron, an immense dam: each surface detail worthy of a lifetime’s study. I stood, out of breath, finishing my third cigarette, festival organisers and fellow panellists in stuffy halls below me. What good is an assemblage of such moments, even if they fasten old habits to the present? What are these clues good for?

  Buds on whipping branches, birds wheeling everywhere, and the villagers leaving hourly offerings at the shrines. What? What are we unready for?

  SPIRIT HALL

  The snow is thinner. The world is blown to shreds. One cannot live in a state of wind. Wind-anxiety feeds fear, and fear goes into rage, into revenge, unless it is channelled toward ritual and order. Let me concentrate. The heart is heavy, therefore the girl must be dead. Therefore the baby . . . Let me check my conscience. Let me reach below it into tarry shame. The girl broke free of the home valley that keeps us safe. We have not done enough. The world without Song Wei is grey, and snow, already thinner, cannot survive this salty wind. The oceans it came from are ordered into ranks of fishes waiting to be caught.

  But then I see Song Wei on the path to East Shrine and know the girl will be recovered, the baby will live, and the white valley, smoke from our fires flying over the river, is only beautiful.

  YI XI

  Warm air melts the snow and flocks of birds swoop tree to tree, each trapezist precise as claws hit branch, snappy feet locking on. Then song. After the wind, another pair of monks went out to search for the wild child. I met Zhou Yiyuan this morning praying at Spring Shrine and joined my prayers to his.

  The master’s eyes were closed, his cheeks sunken. He was white and looked stern. The box Zhou had given him stood empty beside his bed. I sat with others watching his chest rise and fall, the light in the room altering, and wondered what the box contained. The air was thick with the scent of mushrooms and damp cloth and decay.

  When I stepped from the master’s room, I was weeping. Objects were indistinct — some kind of snow fog was slinking down the mountain from the high drifts. Song Wei called to me from the temple path. How ruddy her skin was! She touched both hands gently to her belly; the corners of her mouth twitched, and she bowed.

  There was no colour or substance to the world, only this small dusky woman, her whole history at her back, simply dressed in a coarse brown coat, black and white trousers, black slippers. Opaque air and tears obliterated everything but this.

  DIAPHRAGM PASS

  How will we approach the enterprise of riveting these flimsy remnants together? What role will be mine should war enter our valley? How will the world be safe again? What play is there between war and love? You have to play your part, you know. Fair is fair.

  All countries provide the raw material for war, yet when I left the town I was born in I didn’t know that every city’s coffers contained stolen cash. I didn’t know that the freedom implicit in love had been fought for by children. Can you tell me what ingredient is so precious or so dangerous it must be hidden generation after generation, swallowed if necessary?

  Frank has organized watches on the bridge to check the villagers leaving and returning. Our paths are the same paths, yet not. My large intestine is a glittering fish fat with roe. On the ground north of the bridge rain mixes with ice and mud. There is no traffic on the road. Each time I cross the bridge, I own the bridge. When I leave River Mountain the water flows into my right side and out my left, and when I return, robes flapping against my body, the mountain reeling me in, the river pours into my left side and exits my right.

  The south horizon beyond the open plain, so powerful and strange, is a gentle curve from on top of the mountain. My fingers on this page are real, just as the page is real, and something flickers outside, through the storehouse door, while I’m thinking of the place I was born, but I don’t know if what flickers is precious or dangerous.

  Imogen’s a brief light circle. Once we were supposed to appear in the same film — well, I had several lines over four scenes; she was the star — but the project fell through. Song Wei is Song Wei. You are you (can you tell what is happening from your vantage point?) and this is nothing but play.

  GATE OF THE ETHEREAL SOUL

  Every few years a child goes missing and is never found. This has happened since people first settled the valley. Frank tells me there is a mountain upriver beyond the farms and plum orchards, and inside the mountain is a country where the climate is gentle, skies always clear, where descendants of the lost lead peaceful lives and cultivate their wide valleys, and wait for new children to arrive.

  A few years ago the master told us we should act like boys. Our healing practice would only work, he told us, if we approached the gold pavilion (with a smile to the stranger at our side) as children.

  YANG’S PRINCIPLE

  Yesterday the monk who taught me the strange flows came to sit beside me. He waited until I finished writing and then, after a silence, began to talk about the master, then about himself, then about a sister he hadn’t seen for forty winters, the letter he watched his father write to the master, his mother’s hands fragrant with herbs, his uncle’s puppet-god waving goodbye, the beautiful things he saw on his journey to the valley, did I think they had all been destroyed? As he talked I kept falling asleep. I couldn’t stop my eyes from closing. His voice grew excited and then sad.

  I was wakened by another monk when I was missed for the evening ceremony.

  A tender-minded optimist cocooned in a dream. Adopted into the strange flow of the region’s past. So monks are beginning to speak to one another. Often the topic is the master’s health. Although the sun shines, warm on my face, there’s a fresh breeze from the melting snow and I want Song Wei. I close my eyes and follow each breath.

  WISHING HUT (PAPINI’S CORRIDOR)

  Zhou Yiyuan was shouting, his body contorted, feet sliding on the icy ground outside the temple, his tongue creeping from his mouth, his face black. He wrinkled his nose and roared: “Wake and get ready! Taste the dragon fruit! You must plan for summer battle!”

  STOMACH GRANARY

  When you look at the same view day after day, with the seasons slowly shifting light so the edges of things blur then sharpen, with animals trotting or fluttering or swimming in and out of the scene, the boundary between who you are and who you might be begins to wobble. The library in the storehouse contains all naming and relationship processes. The ulcer on the inside of my cheek won’t settle. A large explosion in the port has left many dead and wounded.

  Too much, if you ask me. The earth can’t swallow all this snow, then freezing rain, now blood. Even this library, normally the warmest corner of the storehouse, is bitter cold, and water has frozen in cracks across the floor.

  When you spend too long in one place, one position, permanent cricks are inevitable. My legs have gone to sleep. Mould patterns on the pages map each day’s imperceptible increase of light — is that the lost valley? the country in the mountain? If we could read desire we’d find the girl deep in the margin, where the binding’s come unstuck.

  It was wonderful to hold my son
for the first time: a claiming and a being claimed. Such a beauty! And now, here I am trying to bite off my own toenails, looking for some adversary and finding instead my old face in a dark window. Perhaps my courage will rise again once sun strikes through and illuminates this room.

  When I’m gone, when you are gone, when we’re asleep, when pain has mocked every boundary, sunlit fog will swirl through the quiet valley and desire once again step forward with its tiny flourish.

  VITALS GATE

  Zhou Yiyuan is a dwarf who carries power and a dream and treats silence as an obstacle, yet when I look into his eyes there’s tenderness loose in the chaos streaming up through his body. Because he believes himself thwarted, I don’t know what to say to him. Dangerous, crazy and selfish. But perhaps he is a prophet and, if acknowledged, would be helpful.

  ROOM OF AMBITION

  Twice the taste of metal, horrible and familiar, from gritting my teeth; unpredictable leg twitches and counter-twitches. Get up and do something! No energy. Imogen haunts me, my reply to her letter stuck in my throat.

  WOMB VITALS

  Better, after an hour at the bathhouse. Again, I couldn’t find my pen when I came to write. Frank, back at work on his own story, called me over and showed me his dry speckled closed fists; I tapped one and it opened to produce the pen angled on his palm. I was overjoyed.

  SEQUENCE EDGE

  Horrible whistling mortar and gunfire all night, awake, crawling across frozen snow to squat shivering over the dark hole trying to vomit.

  YANG CONFLUENCE

  Walked the valley today, along the river and back. This side. West again. Exhausted. No words. No story. No sign of combatants. Our master is truculent and speechless.

  SINEW SUPPORT

  Why are you still here? I mean I’m stuck with you, I mean I’ll keep it going as long as you’re with me, to find things out, to find the fracture. And we will work the fracture together, right, despite differences and tension and stuckness, both of us challenging whatever pops loose. Abstractions and universals. We’ll work them really hard, dig and drill deep with our inadequate tools — sorry, sorry, my inadequate tools — to analyze the bits and pieces.